The Hero with a Thousand Faces

CHAPTER I Emanations 1. From Psychology to Metaphysics

It is not difficult for the modern intellectual to concede that the symbolism of mythology has a psychological significance. Particularly after the work of the psychoanalysts, there can be little doubt, either that myths are of the nature of dream, or that dreams are symptomatic of the dynamics of the psyche. Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Géza Róheim, and many others have within the past few decades developed a vastly documented modern lore of dream and myth interpretation; and though the doctors differ among themselves, they are united into one great modern movement by a considerable body of common principles. With their discovery that the patterns and logic of fairy tale and myth correspond to those of dream, the long discredited chimeras of archaic man have returned dramatically to the foreground of modern consciousness.

According to this view it appears that through the wonder tales — which pretend to describe the lives of the legendary heroes, the powers of the divinities of nature, the spirits of the dead, and the totem ancestors of the group — symbolic expression is given to the unconscious desires, fears, and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behavior. Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology. The modern psychologist can translate it back to its proper denotations and thus rescue for the contemporary world a rich and eloquent document of the profoundest depths of human character. Exhibited here, as in a fluoroscope, stand revealed the hidden processes of the enigma Homo sapiens — Occidental and Oriental, primitive and civilized, contemporary and archaic. The entire spectacle is before us. We have only to read it, study its constant patterns, analyze its variations, and therewith come to an understanding of the deep forces that have shaped man’s destiny and must continue to determine both our private and our public lives.

But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources — the unconscious wells of fan­tasy — and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary, their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as a powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom. This is true already of the so-called primitive folk mythologies. The trance-susceptible shaman and the initiated antelope-priest are not unsophisticated in the wisdom of the world, nor unskilled in the principles of communication by analogy. The metaphors by which they live, and through which they operate, have been brooded upon, searched, and discussed for centuries — even millennia; they have served whole societies, furthermore, as the mainstays of thought and life. The culture patterns have been shaped to them. The youth have been educated, and the aged rendered wise, through the study, experience, and understanding of their effective initiatory forms. For they actually touch and bring into play the vital energies of the whole human psyche. They link the unconscious to the fields of practical action, not irrationally, in the manner of a neurotic projection, but in such fashion as to permit a mature and sobering, practical comprehension of the fact-world to play back, as a stern control, into the realms of infantile wish and fear. And if this be true of the comparatively simple folk mythologies (the systems of myth and ritual by which the primitive hunting and fishing tribes support themselves), what may we say of such magnificent cosmic metaphors as those reflected in the great Homeric epics, the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Book of Genesis, and the timeless temples of the Orient? Until the most recent decades, these were the support of all human life and the inspiration of philosophy, poetry, and the arts. Where the inherited symbols have been touched by a Lao Tze, Buddha, Zoroaster, Christ, or Mohammed — employed by a consummate master of the spirit as a vehicle of the profoundest moral and metaphysical instruction — obviously we are in the presence rather of immense consciousness than of darkness.

And so, to grasp the full value of the mythological figures that have come down to us, we must understand that they are not only symptoms of the unconscious (as indeed are all human thoughts and acts) but also controlled and intended statements of certain spiritual principles, which have remained as constant throughout the course of human history as the form and nervous structure of the human physique itself. Briefly formulated, the universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world — all things and beings — are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as wakonda, the Hindus as Śakti, and the Christians as the power of God. Its manifestation in the psyche is termed, by the psychoanalysts, libido.^[1] And its manifestation in the cosmos is the structure and flux of the universe itself.

The recognition of the secondary nature of the personality of whatever deity is worshiped is characteristic of most of the traditions of the world (see, for example, p. 155, note 154). In Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, however, the personality of the divinity is taught to be final — which makes it comparatively difficult for the members of these communions to understand how one may go beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a general obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a god-ridden bigotry such as is unmatched elsewhere in the history of religion. For a discussion of the possible origin of this aberration, see Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.^[3]

The apprehension of the source of this undifferentiated yet everywhere particularized substratum of being is rendered frustrate by the very organs through which the apprehension must be accomplished. The forms of sensibility and the categories of human thought,^[2] which are themselves manifestations of this power,* so confine the mind that it is normally impossible not only to see, but even to conceive, beyond the colorful, fluid, infinitely various and bewildering phenomenal spectacle. The function of ritual and myth is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump—by analogy. Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond. And then, the conditions for meditation having been provided, the individual is left alone. Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness— that void, or being, beyond the categories which are themselves manifestations of this power,* — into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means — themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves.

Heaven, hell, the mythological age, Olympus and all the other habitations of the gods are interpreted by psychoanalysis as symbols of the unconscious. The key to the modern systems of psychological interpretation therefore is this: the metaphysical realm = the unconscious. Correspondingly, the key to open the door the other way is the same equation in reverse: the unconscious = the metaphysical realm. “For,” as Jesus states it, “behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”^[4] Indeed, the lapse of superconsciousness into the state of unconsciousness is precisely the meaning of the biblical image of the Fall. The constriction of consciousness, to which we owe the fact that we see not the source of the universal power but only the phenomenal forms reflected from that power, turns superconsciousness into unconsciousness and, at the same instant and by the same token, creates the world. Redemption consists in the return to superconsciousness and therewith the dissolution of the world. This is the great theme and formula of the cosmogonic cycle, the mythical image of the world’s coming to manifestation and subsequent return into the nonmanifest condition. Equally, the birth, life, and death of the individual may be regarded as a descent into unconsciousness and return. The hero is the one who, while still alive, knows and represents the claims of the superconsciousness which throughout creation is more or less unconscious. The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination — the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death.

And so it is that the cosmic symbols are presented in a spirit of thought-bewildering sublime paradox. The kingdom of God is within, yet without, also; God, however, is but a convenient means to wake the sleeping princess, the soul. Life is her sleep, death the awakening. The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution. God, the waker of the soul, is therewith his own immediate death.

Perhaps the most eloquent possible symbol of this mystery is that of the god crucified, the god offered, “himself to himself.”^[5] Read in one direction, the meaning is the passage of the phenomenal hero into superconsciousness: the body with its five senses — like that of Prince Five-weapons stuck to Sticky-hair — is left hanging to the cross of the knowledge of life and death, pinned in five places (the two hands, the two feet, and the head crowned with thorns).^[6] But also, God has descended voluntarily and taken upon himself this phenomenal agony. God assumes the life of man and man releases the God within himself at the mid-point of the cross-arms of the same “coincidence of opposites,”^[7] the same sun door through which God descends and Man ascends — each as the other’s food.^[8]

The modern student may, of course, study these symbols as he will, either as a symptom of others’ ignorance, or as a sign to him of his own, either in terms of a reduction of metaphysics to psychology, or vice versa. The traditional way was to meditate on the symbols in both senses. In any case, they are telling metaphors of the destiny of man, man’s hope, man’s faith, and man’s dark mystery. 2. The Universal Round

As the consciousness of the individual rests on a sea of night into which it descends in slumber and out of which it mysteriously wakes, so, in the imagery of myth, the universe is precipitated out of, and reposes upon, a timelessness back into which it again dissolves. And as the mental and physical health of the individual depends on an orderly flow of vital forces into the field of waking day from the unconscious dark, so again in myth, the continuance of the cosmic order is assured only by a controlled flow of power from the source. The gods are symbolic personifications of the laws governing this flow. The gods come into existence with the dawn of the world and dissolve with the twilight. They are not eternal in the sense that the night is eternal. Only from the shorter span of human existence does the round of a cosmogonic eon seem to endure.

The cosmogonic cycle is normally represented as repeating itself, world without end. During each great round, lesser dissolutions are commonly included, as the cycle of sleep and waking revolves throughout a lifetime. According to an Aztec version, each of the four elements — water, earth, air, and fire — terminates a period of the world: the eon of the waters ended in deluge, that of the earth with an earthquake, that of air with a wind, and the present eon will be destroyed by flame.^[9]

According to the Stoic doctrine of the cyclic conflagration, all souls are resolved into the world soul or primal fire. When this universal dissolution is concluded, the formation of a new universe begins (Cicero’s renovatio), and all things repeat themselves, every divinity, every person, playing again his former part. Seneca gave a description of this destruction in his “De Consolatione ad Marciam,” and appears to have looked forward to living again in the cycle to come.^[10]

A magnificent vision of the cosmogonic round is presented in the mythology of the Jains. The most recent prophet and savior of this very ancient Indian sect was Mahāvīra, a contemporary of the Buddha (sixth century b.c.). His parents were already followers of a much earlier Jaina savior-prophet, Pārśvanātha, who is represented with snakes springing from his shoulders and is reputed to have flourished 872–772 b.c. Centuries before Pārśvanātha, there lived and died the Jaina savior Neminātha, declared to have been a cousin of the beloved Hindu incarnation Kṛṣṇa. And before him, again, were exactly twenty-one others, going all the way back to Ṛṣabhanātha, who existed in an earlier age of the world, when men and women were always born in wedded couples, were two miles tall, and lived for a period of countless years. Ṛṣabhanātha instructed the people in the seventy-two sciences (writing, arithmetic, reading of omens, etc.), the sixty-four accomplishments of women (cooking, sewing, etc.), and the one hundred arts (pottery, weaving, painting, smithing, barbering, etc.); also, he introduced them to politics and established a kingdom.

Before his day, such innovations would have been superfluous; for the people of the preceding period — who were four miles tall, with one hundred and twenty-eight ribs, enjoying a life span of two periods of countless years — were supplied in all their needs by ten “wish-fulfilling trees” (kalpa-vṛkṣa), which gave sweet fruits, leaves that were shaped like pots and pans, leaves that sweetly sang, leaves that gave forth light at night, flowers delightful to see and to smell, food perfect both to sight and to taste, leaves that might serve as jewelry, and bark providing beautiful clothes. One of the trees was like a many-storied palace in which to live; another shed a gentle radiance, like that of many little lamps. The earth was sweet as sugar; the ocean as delicious as wine. And then again, before this happy age, there had been a period happier still — precisely twice as happy — when men and women had been eight miles tall, possessing each two hundred and fifty-six ribs. When those superlative people died, they passed directly to the world of the gods, without ever having heard of religion, for their natural virtue was as perfect as their beauty.

The Jains conceive of time as an endless round. Time is pictured as a wheel with twelve spokes, or ages, classified in two sets of six. The first set is called the “descending” series (avasarpinī), and begins with the age of the superlative giant-couples. That paradisiac period endures for ten millions of ten millions of one hundred millions of one hundred million periods of countless years, and then yields slowly to the only half as blissful period when men and women are only four miles tall. In the third period — that of Ṛṣabhanātha, first of the twenty-four world saviors — happiness is mixed with a little sorrow, and virtue with a little vice. At the conclusion of this period, men and women are no longer born together in couples to live together as man and wife.

During the fourth period, the gradual deterioration of the world and its inhabitants steadily continues. The life span and stature of man slowly diminish. Twenty-three world saviors are born; each restating the eternal doctrine of the Jains in terms appropriate to the conditions of his time. Three years, eight and one-half months after the death of the last of the saviors and prophets, Mahāvīra, this period comes to an end.

Our own age, the fifth of the descending series, began in 522 b.c. and will last for twenty-one thousand years. No Jaina savior will be born during this time, and the eternal religion of the Jains will gradually disappear. It is a period of unmitigated and gradually intensifying evil. The tallest human beings are only seven cubits tall, and the longest life span no more than one hundred and twenty-five years. People have only sixteen ribs. They are selfish, unjust, violent, lustful, proud, and avaricious.

But in the sixth of the descending ages, the state of man and his world will be still more horrible. The longest life will be only twenty years; one cubit will be the greatest stature and eight ribs the meager allotment. The days will be hot, the nights cold, disease will be rampant and chastity nonexistent. Tempests will sweep over the earth, and toward the conclusion of the period these will increase. In the end all life, human and animal, and all the vegetable seeds, will be forced to seek shelter in the Ganges, in miserable caves, and in the sea.

The descending series will terminate and the “ascending” series (utsarpinī) begin, when the tempest and desolation will have reached the point of the unendurable. For seven days then it will rain, and seven different kinds of rain will fall; the soil will be refreshed, and the seeds will begin to grow. Out of their caves the horrible dwarf-creatures of the arid, bitter earth will venture; and very very gradually there will be perceptible a slight improvement in their morals, health, beauty, and stature; until presently they will be living in a world such as the one we know today. And then a savior will be born, named Padmānātha, to announce again the eternal religion of the Jains; the stature of mankind will approach again the superlative, the beauty of man will surpass the splendor of the sun. At last, the earth will sweeten and the waters turn to wine, the wish-fulfilling trees will yield their bounty of delights to a blissful population of perfectly wedded twins; and the happiness of this community again will be doubled, and the wheel, through ten millions of ten millions of one hundred millions of one hundred million periods of countless years, will approach the point of beginning the downward revolution, which again will lead to the extinction of the eternal religion and the gradually increasing noise of unwholesome merrymaking, warfare, and pestilential winds.^[11]

This ever-revolving, twelve-spoked wheel of time of the Jains is a counterpart of the cycle of four ages of the Hindus: the first age a long period of perfect bliss, beauty, and perfection, lasting 4,800 divine years;* the second of somewhat lesser virtue, lasting 3,600 divine years; the third of equally intermingled virtue and vice, lasting 2,400 divine years; and the last, our own, of steadily increasing evil, lasting 1,200 divine years, or 432,000 years according to human calculation. But at the termination of the present period, instead of beginning again immediately to improve (as in the cycle described by the Jains), all is first to be annihilated in a cataclysm of fire and flood, and thereby reduced to the primordial state of the original, timeless ocean, to remain for a period equal to that of the whole length of the four ages. The world’s great ages then begin anew.

Figure 56. The Cosmic Woman of the Jains — Detail of Cosmic Wheel (gouache on cloth, India, eighteenth century a.d.)

A basic conception of Oriental philosophy is understood to be rendered in this picture-form. Whether the myth was originally an illustration of the philosophical formula, or the latter a distillation out of the myth, it is today impossible to say. Certainly the myth goes back to remote ages, but so too does philosophy. Who is to know what thoughts lay in the minds of the old sages who developed and treasured the myth and handed it on? Very often, during the analysis and penetration of the secrets of archaic symbol, one can only feel that our generally accepted notion of the history of philosophy is founded on a completely false assumption, namely that abstract and metaphysical thought begins where it first appears in our extant records.

The cosmogonic cycle is to be understood as the passage of universal consciousness from the deep sleep zone of the unmanifest, through dream, to the full day of waking; then back again through dream to the timeless dark. As in the actual experience of every living being, so in the grandiose figure of the living cosmos: in the abyss of sleep the energies are refreshed, in the work of the day they are exhausted; the life of the universe runs down and must be renewed.

The philosophical formula illustrated by the cosmogonic cycle is that of the circulation of consciousness through the three planes of being. The first plane is that of waking experience: cognitive of the hard, gross facts of an outer universe, illuminated by the light of the sun, and common to all. The second plane is that of dream experience: cognitive of the fluid, subtle forms of a private interior world, self-luminous and of one substance with the dreamer. The third plane is that of deep sleep: dreamless, profoundly blissful. In the first are encountered the instructive experiences of life; in the second these are digested, assimilated to the inner forces of the dreamer; while in the third all is enjoyed and known unconsciously, in the “space within the heart,” the room of the inner controller, the source and end of all.^[12]

The cosmogonic cycle pulses forth into manifestation and back into nonmanifestation amidst a silence of the unknown. The Hindus represent this mystery in the holy syllable AUM. Here the sound A represents waking consciousness, U dream consciousness, M deep sleep. The silence surrounding the syllable is the unknown: it is called simply “The Fourth.”^[13]* The syllable itself is God as creator-preserver-destroyer, but the silence is God Eternal, absolutely uninvolved in all the opening-and-closings of the round.

It is unseen, unrelated, inconceivable,

uninferable, unimaginable, indescribable.

It is the essence of the one self-cognition

common to all states of consciousness.

All phenomena cease in it.

It is peace, it is bliss, it is nonduality.^[14]

Myth remains, necessarily, within the cycle, but represents this cycle as surrounded and permeated by the silence. Myth is the revelation of a plenum of silence within and around every atom of existence. Myth is a directing of the mind and heart, by means of profoundly informed figurations, to that ultimate mystery which fills and surrounds all existences. Even in the most comical and apparently frivolous of its moments, mythology is directing the mind to this unmanifest which is just beyond the eye.

“The Aged of the Aged, the Unknown of the Unknown, has a form and yet has no form,” we read in a kabbalistic text of the medieval Hebrews. “He has a form whereby the universe is preserved, and yet has no form, because he cannot be comprehended.”^[15] This Aged of the Aged is represented as a face in profile: always in profile, because the hidden side can never be known. This is called “The Great Face,” Makroprosopos; from the strands of its white beard the entire world proceeds.

That beard, the truth of all truths, proceedeth from the place of the ears, and descendeth around the mouth of the Holy One; and descendeth and ascendeth, covering the cheeks which are called the places of copious fragrance; it is white with ornament: and it descendeth in the equilibrium of balanced power, and furnisheth a covering even unto the midst of the breast. That is the beard of adornment, true and perfect, from which flow down thirteen fountains, scattering the most precious balm of splendor. This is disposed in thirteen forms....And certain dispositions are found in the universe, according to those thirteen dispositions which depend from that venerable beard, and they are opened out into the thirteen gates of mercies.^[16]

Figure 57. The Makroprosopos (engraving, Germany, a.d. 1684)

The text in which we learn of the Makroprosopos and the Mikroprosopos, the Zohar (zōhar, “light, splendor”), is a collection of esoteric Hebrew writing given to the world about 1305 by a learned Spanish Jew, Moses de Leon. It was claimed that the material had been drawn from secret originals, going back to the teachings of Simeon ben Yohai, a rabbi of Galilee in the second century a.d. Threatened with death by the Romans, Simeon had hidden for twelve years in a cave; ten centuries later his writings had been found there, and these were the sources of the books of the Zohar.

Simeon’s teachings were supposed to have been drawn from the hokmah nistarah or hidden wisdom of Moses, i.e., a body of esoteric lore first studied by Moses in Egypt, the land of his birth, then pondered by him during his forty years in the wilderness (where he received special instruction from an angel), and finally incorporated cryptically in the first four books of the Pentateuch, from which it can be extracted by a proper understanding and manipulation of the mystical number-values of the Hebrew alphabet. This lore and the techniques for rediscovering and utilizing it constitute the Kabbala.

It is said that the teachings of the Kabbala (qabbālāh, “received or traditional lore”) were first entrusted by God himself to a special group of angels in Paradise. After Man had been expelled from the Garden, some of these angels communicated the lessons to Adam, thinking to help him back to felicity thereby. From Adam the teaching passed to Noah, and from Noah to Abraham. Abraham let some of it slip from him while he was in Egypt, and that is why this sublime wisdom can now be found in reduced form in the myths and philosophies of the gentiles. Moses first studied it with the priests of Egypt, but the tradition was refreshed in him by the special instructions of his angels.

The white beard of Makroprosopos descends over another head, “The Little Face,” Mikroprosopos, represented full face and with a beard of black. And whereas the eye of The Great Face is without lid and never shuts, the eyes of The Little Face open and close in a slow rhythm of universal destiny. This is the opening and closing of the cosmogonic round. The Little Face is named “GOD,” the Great Face “I AM.”

Makroprosopos is the Uncreated Uncreating and Mikroprosopos the Uncreated Creating: respectively, the silence and the syllable AUM, the unmanifest and the presence immanent in the cosmogonic round. 3. Out of the Void — Space

Saint Thomas Aquinas declares: “The name of being wise is reserved to him alone whose consideration is about the end of the universe, which end is also the beginning of the universe.”^[17] The basic principle of all mythology is this of the beginning in the end. Creation myths are pervaded with a sense of the doom that is continually recalling all created shapes to the imperishable out of which they first emerged. The forms go forth powerfully, but inevitably reach their apogee, break, and return. Mythology, in this sense, is tragic in its view. But in the sense that it places our true being not in the forms that shatter but in the imperishable out of which they again immediately bubble forth, mythology is eminently untragical.^[18] Indeed, wherever the mythological mood prevails, tragedy is impossible. A quality rather of dream prevails. True being, meanwhile, is not in the shapes but in the dreamer.

As in dream, the images range from the sublime to the ridiculous. The mind is not permitted to rest with its normal evaluations, but is continually insulted and shocked out of the assurance that now, at last, it has understood. Mythology is defeated when the mind rests solemnly with its favorite or traditional images, defending them as though they themselves were the message that they communicate. These images are to be regarded as no more than shadows from the unfathomable reach beyond, where the eye goeth not, speech goeth not, nor the mind, nor even piety. Like the trivialities of dream, those of myth are big with meaning.

The first phase of the cosmogonic cycle describes the breaking of formlessness into form, as in the following creation chant of the Maoris of New Zealand:

Te Kore (The Void)

Te Kore-tua-tahi (The First Void)

Te Kore-tua-rua (The Second Void)

Te Kore-nui (The Vast Void)

Te Kore-roa (The Far-Extending Void)

Te Kore-para (The Sere Void)

Te Kore-whiwhia (The Unpossessing Void)

Te Kore-rawea (The Delightful Void)

Te Kore-te-tamaua (The Void Fast Bound)

Te Po (The Night)

Te Po-teki (The Hanging Night)

Te Po-terea (The Drifting Night)

Te Po-whawha (The Moaning Night)

Hine-make-moe (The Daughter of Troubled Sleep)

Te Ata (The Dawn)

Te Au-tu-roa (The Abiding Day)

Te Ao-marama (The Bright Day)

Whai-tua (Space)

In space were evolved two existences without shape:

Maku (Moisture [a male])

Mahora-nui-a-rangi (Great Expanse of Heaven [a female])

From these sprang:

Rangi-potiki (The Heavens [a male])

Papa (Earth [a female])

Rangi-potiki and Papa were the parents of the gods.^[19]

From the void beyond all voids unfold the world-sustaining emanations, plantlike, mysterious. The tenth of the above series is night; the eighteenth, space or ether, the frame of the visible world; the nineteenth is the male-female polarity; the twentieth is the universe we see. Such a series suggests the depth beyond depth of the mystery of being. The levels correspond to the profundities sounded by the hero in his world-fathoming adventure; they number the spiritual strata known to the mind introverted in meditation. They represent the bottomlessness of the dark night of the soul.*

The Hebrew Kabbala represents the process of creation as a series of emanations (Hebrew: sephiroth) out of the I AM of The Great Face. The first is the head itself, in profile, and from this proceed “nine splendid lights.” The emanations are represented also as the branches of a cosmic tree, which is upside down, rooted in “the inscrutable height.” The world that we see is the reverse image of that tree.

According to the Indian Samkhya philosophers of the eighth century b.c., the void condenses into the element ether or space. From this air is precipitated. From air comes fire, from fire water, and from water the element earth. With each element evolves a sense-function capable of perceiving it: hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell respectively.^[20]

An amusing Chinese myth personifies these emanating elements as five venerable sages, who come stepping out of a ball of chaos, suspended in the void:

Before heaven and earth had become separated from each other, everything was a great ball of mist, called chaos. At that time, the spirits of the five elements took shape, and then developed into five ancients. The first was called the Yellow Ancient, and he was the master of earth. The second was called the Red Ancient, and he was the master of fire. The third was called the Dark Ancient, and he was the master of water. The fourth was called the Wood Prince, and he was the master of wood. The fifth was called the Metal Mother, and she was the mistress of metals.*

Now each of these five ancients set in motion the primordial spirit from which he had proceeded, so that water and earth sank downward; the heavens soared aloft and the earth became fast in the depths. Then the water gathered into rivers and lakes, and the mountains and plains appeared. The heavens cleared and the earth divided; then there were sun, moon, and all the stars, sand, clouds, rain, and dew. The Yellow Ancient gave play to the purest power of the earth, and to this were added the operations of fire and water. Then there sprang into being the grasses and trees, birds and animals, and the generations of the snakes and insects, and fishes and turtles. The Wood Prince and the Metal Mother brought light and darkness together and thereby created the human race, as man and woman. Thus gradually appeared the world....^[21]

Figure 58. Tangaroaā, Producing Gods and Men (carved wood, Rurutu Island, early eighteenth century a.d.) 4. Within Space — Life

The first effect of the cosmogonic emanations is the framing of the world stage of space; the second is the production of life within the frame: life polarized for self-reproduction under the dual form of the male and female. It is possible to represent the entire process in sexual terms, as a pregnancy and birth. This idea is superbly rendered in another metaphysical genealogy of the Maoris:

From the conception the increase,

From the increase the thought,

From the thought the remembrance,

From the remembrance the consciousness,

From the consciousness the desire.

The word became fruitful;

It dwelt with the feeble glimmering;

It brought forth night:

The great night, the long night,

The lowest night, the loftiest night,

The thick night, to be felt,

The night to be touched,

The night not to be seen,

The night ending in death.

From the nothing the begetting,

From the nothing the increase,

From the nothing the abundance,

The power of increasing,

The living breath.

It dwelt with the empty space, and produced

the atmosphere which is above us.

The atmosphere which floats above the earth,

The great firmament above us,

dwelt with the early dawn,

And the moon sprang forth;

The atmosphere above us,

dwelt with the glowing sky,

And thence proceeded the sun;

Moon and sun were thrown up above,

as the chief eyes of heaven:

Then the Heavens became light:

the early dawn, the early day,

The mid-day: the blaze of day from the sky.

The sky above dwelt with Hawaiki,

and produced land.^[22]

Figure 59. Tuamotuan Creation Chart — Below: The Cosmic Egg. Above: The People Appear, and Shape the Universe (Tuamotua, nineteenth century a.d.)

About the middle of the nineteenth century, Paiore, a high chieftain of the Polynesian island of Anaa, drew a picture of the beginnings of creation. The first detail of this illustration was a little circle containing two elements, Te Tumu, “The Foundation” (a male), and Te Papa, “The Stratum Rock” (a female).^[23]

The universe [said Paiore] was like an egg, which contained Te Tumu and Te Papa. It at last burst and produced three layers superposed — one layer below supporting two above. On the lowest layer remained Te Tumu and Te Papa, who created man, animals, and plants.

The first man was Matata, produced without arms; he died shortly after he had come into being. The second man was Aitu, who came with one arm but without legs; and he died like his elder brother. Finally, the third man was Hoatea (Sky-space), and he was perfectly formed. After this came a woman named Hoatu (Fruitfulness of Earth). She became the wife of Hoatea and from them descended the human race.

When the lowest layer of earth became filled with creation, the people made an opening in the middle of the layer above, so that they could get upon it also, and there they established themselves, taking with them plants and animals from below. Then they raised the third layer (so that it should form a ceiling to the second)... and ultimately established themselves up there also, so that human beings had three abodes.

Above the earth were the skies, also superposed, reaching down and supported by their respective horizons, some being attached to those of the earth; and the people continued to work, expanding one sky above another in the same manner, until all were set in order.^[24]

The main portion of Paiore’s illustration shows the people spreading out the world, standing on each other’s shoulders to elevate the skies. On the lowest stratum of this world appear the two original elements, Te Tumu and Te Papa. To the left of them are the plants and animals of their begetting. Over to the right are to be seen the first man, malformed, and the first successful men and women. In the upper sky appears a fire surrounded by four figures, representing an early event in the history of the world: “The creation of the universe was scarcely terminated when Tangaroaā, who delighted in doing evil, set fire to the highest heaven, seeking thus to destroy everything. But fortunately the fire was seen spreading by Tamatua, Oru, and Ruanuku, who quickly ascended from the earth and extinguished the flames.”^[25]

The image of the cosmic egg is known to many mythologies; it appears in the Greek Orphic, Egyptian, Finnish, Buddhistic, and Japanese. “In the beginning this world was merely nonbeing,” we read in a sacred work of the Hindus;

It was existent. It developed. It turned into an egg. It lay for the period of a year. It was split asunder. One of the two eggshell parts became silver, one gold. That which was of silver is the earth. That which was of gold is the sky. What was the outer membrane is the mountains. What was the inner membrane is cloud and mist. What were the veins are the rivers. What was the fluid within is the ocean. Now, what was born therefrom is yonder sun.^[26]

The shell of the cosmic egg is the world frame of space, while the fertile seed-power within typifies the inexhaustible life dynamism of nature.

“Space is boundless by re-entrant form, not by great extension. That which is is a shell floating in the infinitude of that which is not.” This succinct formulation by a modern physicist, illustrating the world picture as he saw it in 1928,^[27] gives precisely the sense of the mythological cosmic egg. Furthermore, the evolution of life, described by our modern science of biology, is the theme of the early stages of the cosmogonic cycle. Finally, the world destruction, which the physicists tell us must come with the exhaustion of our sun and ultimate running down of the whole cosmos,^[28] stands presaged in the scar left by the fire of Tangaroaā: the world-destructive effects of the creator-destroyer will increase gradually until, at last, in the second course of the cosmogonic cycle, all will devolve into the sea of bliss.

Not uncommonly the cosmic egg bursts to disclose, swelling from within, an awesome figure in human form. This is the anthropomorphic personification of the power of generation, the Mighty Living One, as it is called in the Kabbala. “Mighty Ta’aroa whose curse was death, he is the creator of the world.” Thus we hear from Tahiti, another of the South Sea Isles.*“He was alone. He had no father nor indeed a mother. Ta’aroa simply lived in the void. There was no land, nor sky, nor sea. Land was nebulous: there was no foundation. Ta’aroa then said:

O space for land, O space for sky,

Useless world below existing in nebulous state,

Continuing and continuing from time immemorial,

Useless world below, extend!

“The face of Ta’aroa appeared outside. The shell of Ta’aroa fell away and became land. Ta’aroa looked: Land had come into existence, sea had come into existence, sky had come into existence. Ta’aroa lived god-like contemplating his work.”^[29]

An Egyptian myth reveals the demiurge creating the world by an act of masturbation.^[30] A Hindu myth displays him in yogic meditation, with the forms of his inner vision breaking forth from him (to his own astonishment) and standing then around him as a pantheon of brilliant gods.^[31] And in another account from India the all-father is represented as first splitting into male and female, then procreating all the creatures according to kind:

In the beginning, this universe was only the Self, in human form. He looked around and saw nothing but himself. Then, at the beginning, he cried out, “I am he.” Whence came the name, I. That is why, even today, when a person is addressed, he first declares, “It is I,” and then announces the other name that he goes by.

He was afraid. That is why people are afraid to be alone. He thought, “But what am I afraid of? There is nothing but myself.” Whereupon his fear was gone....

He was unhappy. That is why people are not happy when they are alone. He wanted a mate. He became as big as a woman and man embracing. He divided this body, which was himself, in two parts. From that there came husband and wife....Therefore this human body (before one marries a wife) is like one of the halves of a split pea....He united with her; and from that were born men.

She considered: “How can he unite with me after producing me from himself? Well then, let me hide myself.” She became a cow; but he became a bull and united with her; from that were born cattle. She became a mare, he a stallion; she became a she-ass, he a he-ass and united with her; from that were born the one-hoofed animals. She became a she-goat, he a he-goat; she became a ewe, he a ram and united with her; from that were born goats and sheep. Thus did he project everything that exists in pairs, down to the ants.

Then he knew: “Indeed I am myself the creation, for I have projected the entire world.” Whence he was called Creation....^[32]

The enduring substratum of the individual and of the progenitor of the universe are one and the same, according to these mythologies; that is why the demiurge in this myth is called the Self. The Oriental mystic discovers this deep-reposing, enduring presence in its original androgynous state when he plunges in meditation into his own interior.

Him on whom the sky, the earth, and the atmosphere

Are woven, and the mind, together with all the life-breaths,

Him alone know as the one Soul. Other

Words dismiss. He is the bridge to immortality.^[33]

Thus it appears that though these myths of creation narrate of the remotest past, they speak at the same time of the present origin of the individual. “Each soul and spirit,” we read in the Hebrew Zohar,

prior to its entering into this world, consists of a male and female united into one being. When it descends on this earth the two parts separate and animate two different bodies. At the time of marriage, the Holy One, blessed be He, who knows all souls and spirits, unites them again as they were before, and they again constitute one body and one soul, forming as it were the right and left of one individual....This union, however, is influenced by the deeds of the man and by the ways in which he walks. If the man is pure and his conduct is pleasing in the sight of God, he is united with that female part of his soul which was his component part prior to his birth.^[34]

This kabbalistic text is a commentary to the scene in Genesis where Adam gives forth Eve. A similar conception appears in Plato’s Symposium. According to this mysticism of sexual love, the ultimate experience of love is a realization that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwells identity: “each is both.” This realization can expand into a discovery that beneath the multitudinous individualities of the whole surrounding universe — human, animal, vegetable, even mineral — dwells identity; whereupon the love experience becomes cosmic, and the beloved who first opened the vision is magnified as the mirror of creation. The man or woman knowing this experience is possessed of what Schopenhauer called “the science of beauty everywhere.” He “goes up and down these worlds, eating what he desires, assuming what forms he desires,” and he sits singing the song of universal unity, which begins: “Oh, wonderful! Oh, wonderful! Oh, wonderful!”^[35] 5. The Breaking of the One into the Manifold

The forward roll of the cosmogonic round precipitates the One into the many. Herewith a great crisis, a rift, splits the created world into two apparently contradictory planes of being. In Paiore’s chart the people emerge from the lower darknesses and immediately go to work to elevate the sky.^[36] They are revealed as moving with an apparent independence. They hold councils, they decide, they plan; they take over the work of arranging the world. Yet we know that behind the scenes the Unmoved Mover is at work, like a puppetmaster.

In mythology, wherever the Unmoved Mover, the Mighty Living One, holds the center of attention, there is a miraculous spontaneity about the shaping of the universe. The elements condense and move into play of their own accord, or at the Creator’s slightest word; the portions of the self-shattering cosmic egg go to their stations without aid. But when the perspective shifts, to focus on living beings, when the panorama of space and nature is faced from the standpoint of the personages ordained to inhabit it, then a sudden transformation overshadows the cosmic scene. No longer do the forms of the world appear to move in the patterns of a living, growing, harmonious thing, but stand recalcitrant, or at best inert. The props of the universal stage have to be adjusted, even beaten into shape. The earth brings forth thorns and thistles; man eats bread in the sweat of his brow.

Two modes of myth therefore confront us. According to one, the demiurgic forces continue to operate of themselves; according to the other, they give up the initiative and even set themselves against the further progress of the cosmogonic round. The difficulties represented in this latter form of myth begin even as early as during the long darkness of the original, creature-begetting embrace of the cosmic parents. Let the Maoris introduce us to this terrible theme:

Rangi (the Sky) lay so close on the belly of Papa (Mother Earth) that the children could not break free from the womb.

They were in an unstable condition, floating about the world of darkness, and this was their appearance: some were crawling... some were upright with arms held up...some lying on their sides... some on their backs, some were stooping, some with their heads bent down, some with legs drawn up...some kneeling...some feeling about in the dark....They were all within the embrace of Rangi and Papa....

At last the beings who had been begotten by Heaven and Earth, worn out by the continued darkness, consulted among themselves, saying, “Let us now determine what we should do with Rangi and Papa, whether it would be better to slay them or to rend them apart.” Then spake Tu-matauenga, the fiercest of the children of Heaven and Earth, “It is well, let us slay them.”

Then spake Tane-mahuta, the father of the forests and of all things that inhabit them, or that are constructed from trees. “Nay, not so. It is better to rend them apart, and to let the heaven stand far above us, and the earth lie under our feet. Let the sky become a stranger to us, but the earth remain close to us as our nursing mother.”

Several of the brother gods vainly tried to rend apart the heavens and the earth. At last it was Tane-mahuta himself, the father of the forests and of all things that inhabit them, or that are constructed from trees, who succeeded in the titanic project.

His head is now firmly planted on his mother the earth, his feet he raises up and rests against his father the skies, he strains his back and limbs with mighty effort. Now are rent apart Rangi and Papa, and with cries and groans of woe they shriek aloud.

“Wherefore slay you thus your parents? Why commit you so dreadful a crime as to slay us, as to rend your parents apart?” But Tane-mahuta pauses not, he regards not their shrieks and cries; far, far beneath him he presses down the earth; far, far above him, he thrusts up the sky....^[37]

Figure 60. The Separation of Sky and Earth (Egypt, date uncertain)

As known to the Greeks, this story is rendered by Hesiod in his account of the separation of Ouranos (Father Heaven) from Gaia (Mother Earth). According to this variant, the Titan Kronos castrated his father with a sickle and pushed him up out of the way.^[38] In Egyptian iconography the position of the cosmic couple is inverted: the sky is the mother, the father is the vitality of the earth;^[39] but the pattern of the myth remains: the two were pushed asunder by their child, the air god Shu. Again the image comes to us from the ancient cuneiform texts of the Sumerians, dating from the third and fourth millennia b.c. First was the primeval ocean; the primeval ocean generated the cosmic mountain, which consisted of heaven and earth united; An (the Heaven Father) and Ki (the Earth Mother) produced Enlil (the Air God), who presently separated An from Ki and then himself united with his mother to beget mankind.^[40]

But if these deeds of the desperate children seem violent, they are as nothing compared with the total carving up of the parent power which we discover recorded in the Icelandic Eddas, and in the Babylonian Tablets of Creation. The final insult here is given in the characterization of the demiurgic presence of the abyss as “evil,” “dark,” “obscene.” The bright young warrior-sons, now disdaining the generative source, the personage of the seed-state of deep sleep, summarily slay it, hack it, slice it into lengths, and carpenter it into the structure of the world. This is the pattern for victory of all our later slayings of the dragon, the beginning of the age-long history of the deeds of the hero.

The Poetic Edda is a collection of thirty-four Old Norse poems treating of the pagan Germanic gods and heroes. The poems were composed by a number of singers and poets (scalds) in various parts of the Viking world (one, at least, in Greenland) during the period a.d. 900–1050. The collection was completed, apparently, in Iceland.

The Prose Edda is a handbook for young poets, written in Iceland by the Christian master-poet and chieftain, Snorri Sturluson (1178–1241). It summarizes the pagan Germanic myths and reviews the rules of scaldic rhetoric.

The mythology documented in these texts reveals an earlier, peasant stratum (associated with the thunderer, Thor), a later, aristocratic stratum (that of Wotan-Othin), and a third, distinctly phallic complex (Nyorth, Freya, and Frey). Bardic influences from Ireland mingle with Classical and Oriental themes in this profoundly brooded yet grotesquely humorous world of symbolic forms.

According to the Eddic account, after the “yawning gap”* had given forth in the north a mist-world of cold and in the south a region of fire, and after the heat from the south had played on the rivers of ice that crowded down from the north, a yeasty venom began to be exuded. From this a drizzle arose, which in turn congealed to rime. The rime melted and dripped; life was quickened from the drippings in the form of a torpid, gigantic, hermaphroditic, horizontal figure named Ymir. The giant slept, and as it slept it sweated; one of its feet begat with the other a son, while under its left hand germinated a man and wife.

The rime continually melted and dripped, and there condensed from it the cow, Audumla. From her udder flowed four streams of milk, which were drunk for nourishment by Ymir. But the cow, for her own nourishment, licked the iceblocks, which were salty. The evening of the first day she licked, a man’s hair came forth from the blocks; the second day a man’s head; the third, the entire man was there, and his name was Buri. Now Buri had a son (the mother is not known) named Borr, who married one of the giant daughters of the creatures that had sprung from Ymir. She gave birth to the trinity of Othin, Vili, and Ve, and these then slaughtered sleepful Ymir and carved the body into chunks.

Figure 61. The Murder of Ymir (lithograph, Denmark, a.d. 1845)

Of Ymir’s flesh the earth was fashioned,

And of his sweat the sea;

Crags of his bones, trees of his hair,

And of his skull the sky.

Then of his bones the blithe gods made

Midgard for sons of men;

And of his brain the bitter-mooded

Clouds were all created.^[41]

In the Babylonian version the hero is Marduk, the sun-god; the victim is Tiamat — terrifying, dragon-like, attended by swarms of demons — a female personification of the original abyss itself: chaos as the mother of the gods, but now the menace of the world. With bow and trident, club and net, and a convoy of battle-winds, the god mounted his chariot. The four horses, trained to trample underfoot, were flecked with foam.

...But Tiamat turned not her neck,

With lips that failed not she uttered rebellious words....

Then the lord raised the thunderbolt, his mighty weapon,

And against Tiamat, who was raging, thus he sent the word:

“Thou art become great, thou hast exalted thyself on high,

And thy heart hath prompted thee to call to battle....

And against the gods my fathers thou hast contrived thy wicked plan.

Let then thy host be equipped, let thy weapons be girded on!

Stand! I and thou, let us join battle!”

When Tiamat heard these words,

She was like one possessed, she lost her reason.

Tiamat uttered wild, piercing cries,

She trembled and shook to her very foundations.

She recited an incantation, she pronounced her spell.

And the gods of the battle cried out for their weapons.

Then advanced Tiamat and Marduk, the counselor of the gods;

To the fight they came on, to the battle they drew nigh.

The lord spread out his net and caught her.

And the evil wind that was behind him he let loose in her face.

The terrible winds filled her belly,

And her courage was taken from her, and her mouth she opened wide.

He seized the trident and burst her belly,

He severed her inward parts, he pierced her heart.

He overcame her and cut off her life;

He cast down her body and stood upon it.

Having then subdued the remainder of her swarming host, the god of Babylon returned to the mother of the world:

And the lord stood upon Tiamat’s hinder parts,

And with his merciless club he smashed her skull.

He cut through the channels of her blood,

And he made the north wind bear it away into secret places....

Then the lord rested, gazing upon her dead body,... and devised a cunning plan,

He split her up like a flat fish into two halves;

One half of her he established as a covering for heaven.

He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman,

And bade them not to let her waters come forth.

He passed through the heavens, he surveyed the regions thereof,

And over against the Deep he set the dwelling of Nudimmud.

And the Lord measured the structure of the Deep....^[42]

Marduk in this heroic manner pushed back with a ceiling the waters above, and with a floor the waters beneath. Then in the world between he created man.

Figure 62. Chaos Monster and Sun God (carved alabaster, Assyria, 885–860 b.c.)

The myths never tire of illustrating the point that conflict in the created world is not what it seems. Tiamat, though slain and dismembered, was not thereby undone. Had the battle been viewed from another angle, the chaos-monster would have been seen to shatter of her own accord, and her fragments move to their respective stations. Marduk and his whole generation of divinities were but particles of her substance. From the standpoint of those created forms all seemed accomplished as by a mighty arm, amid danger and pain. But from the center of the emanating presence, the flesh was yielded willingly, and the hand that carved it was ultimately no more than an agent of the will of the victim herself.

Herein lies the basic paradox of myth: the paradox of the dual focus. Just as at the opening of the cosmogonic cycle it was possible to say “God is not involved,” but at the same time “God is creator-preserver-destroyer,” so now at this critical juncture, where the One breaks into the many, destiny “happens,” but at the same time “is brought about.” From the perspective of the source, the world is a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding, and dissolving. But what the swiftly passing creatures experience is a terrible cacaphony of battle cries and pain. The myths do not deny this agony (the crucifixion); they reveal within, behind, and around it essential peace (the heavenly rose).^[43]

The shift of perspective from the repose of the central Cause to the turbulation of the peripheral effects is represented in the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They ate of the forbidden fruit, “And the eyes of them both were opened.”^[44] The bliss of Paradise was closed to them and they beheld the created field from the other side of a transforming veil. Henceforth they should experience the inevitable as the hard to gain. 6. Folk Stories of Creation

The simplicity of the origin stories of the undeveloped folk mythologies stands in contrast to the profoundly suggestive myths of the cosmogonic cycle. No long-sustained attempt to fathom the mysteries behind the veil of space makes itself apparent in these. Through the blank wall of timelessness there breaks and enters a shadowy creator-figure to shape the world of forms. His clay is dreamlike in its duration, fluidity, and ambient power. The earth has not yet hardened; much remains to be done to make it habitable for the future people.

A broad distinction can be made between the mythologies of the truly primitive (fishing, hunting, root-digging, and berry-picking) peoples and those of the civilizations that came into being following the development of the arts of agriculture, dairying, and herding, c. 6000 b.c. Most of what we call primitive, however, is actually colonial, i.e., diffused from some high culture center and adapted to the needs of a simpler society. It is in order to avoid the misleading term “primitive” that I am calling the undeveloped or degenerate traditions “folk mythologies.” The term is adequate for the purposes of the present elementary comparative study of the universal forms, though it would certainly not serve for a strict historical analysis.

Old Man was traveling about, declare the Blackfeet of Montana; he was making people and arranging things.

He came from the south, traveling north, making animals and birds as he passed along. He made the mountains, prairies, timber, and brush first. So he went along, traveling northward, making things as he went, putting rivers here and there, and falls on them, putting red paint here and there in the ground — fixing up the world as we see it today. He made the Milk River (the Teton) and crossed it, and, being tired, went up on a hill and lay down to rest. As he lay on his back, stretched out on the ground, with arms extended, he marked himself out with stones — the shape of his body, head, legs, arms, and everything. There you can see those rocks to-day. After he had rested, he went on northward, and stumbled over a knoll and fell down on his knees. Then he said, “You are a bad thing to be stumbling against”; so he raised up two large buttes there, and named them the Knees, and they are called so to this day. He went further north, and with some of the rocks he carried with him he built the Sweet Grass Hills....

One day Old Man determined that he would make a woman and a child; so he formed them both — the woman and the child, her son — of clay. After he had moulded the clay in human shape, he said to the clay, “You must be people,” and then he covered it up and left it, and went away. The next morning he went to the place and took the covering off, and saw that the clay shapes had changed a little. The second morning there was still more change, and the third still more. The fourth morning he went to the place, took the covering off, looked at the images, and told them to rise and walk; and they did so. They walked to the river with their Maker, and then he told them that his name was Na’pi, Old Man.

As they were standing by the river, the woman said to him, “How is it? Will we always live, will there be no end to it?” He said: “I have never thought of that. We will have to decide it. I will take this buffalo chip and throw it in the river. If it floats, when people die, in four days they will become alive again; they will die for only four days. But if it sinks, there will be an end to them.” He threw the chip in the river, and it floated. The woman turned and picked up a stone, and said: “No, I will throw this stone in the river; if it floats, we will always live, if it sinks people must die, that they may always be sorry for each other.” The woman threw the stone into the water, and it sank. “There,” said Old Man, “you have chosen. There will be an end to them.”^[45]

The arranging of the world, the creation of man, and the decision about death are typical themes from the tales of the primitive creator. It is difficult to know how seriously or in what sense these stories were believed. The mythological mode is one not so much of direct as of oblique reference: it is as if Old Man had done so-and-so. Many of the tales that appear in the collections under the category of origin stories were certainly regarded more as popular fairy tales than as a book of genesis. Such playful mythologizing is common in all civilizations, higher as well as lower. The simpler members of the populations may regard the resultant images with undue seriousness, but in the main they cannot be said to represent doctrine, or the local “myth.” The Maoris, for example, from whom we have some of our finest cosmogonies, have the story of an egg dropped by a bird into the primeval sea; it burst, and out came a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, a pig, a dog, and a canoe. All got into the canoe and drifted to New Zealand.^[46] This clearly is a burlesque of the cosmic egg. On the other hand, the Kamchatkans declare, apparently in all seriousness, that God inhabited heaven originally, but then descended to earth. When he traveled about on his snowshoes, the new ground yielded under him like thin and pliant ice. The land has been uneven ever since.^[47] Or again, according to the Central Asiatic Kirghiz, when two early people tending a great ox had been without drink for a very long time and were nearly dead of thirst, the animal got water for them by ripping open the ground with its big horns. That is how the lakes in the country of the Kirghiz were made.^[48]

Figure 63. Khnemu Shapes Pharaoh’s Son on a Potter’s Wheel While Thoth Marks Life Span (papyrus, Ptolemaic, Egypt, c. third–first century b.c.)

A clown figure working in continuous opposition to the wellwishing creator very often appears in myth and folktale, as accounting for the ills and difficulties of existence this side of the veil. The Melanesians of New Britain tell of an obscure being, “the one who was first there,” who drew two male figures on the ground, scratched open his own skin, and sprinkled the drawings with his blood. He plucked two large leaves and covered the figures, which became, after a while, two men. The names of the men were To Kabinana and To Karvuvu.

To Kabinana went off alone, climbed a coconut tree that had light yellow nuts, picked two that were still unripe, and threw them to the ground; they broke and became two handsome women. To Karvuvu admired the women and asked how his brother had come by them. “Climb a coconut tree,” To Kabinana said, “pick two unripe nuts, and throw them to the ground.” But To Karvuvu threw the nuts point downward, and the women who came from them had flat ugly noses.^[49]

One day To Kabinana carved a Thum-fish out of wood and let it swim off into the ocean, so that it should be a living fish forever after. Now this Thum-fish drove the Malivaran-fish to the shore, where To Kabinana simply gathered them up from the beach. To Karvuvu admired the Thum-fish and wanted to make one, but when he was taught how, he carved a shark instead. This shark ate the Malivaran-fish instead of driving them ashore. To Karvuvu, crying, went to his brother and said: “I wish I had not made that fish; he does nothing but eat up all the others.” “What sort of fish is it?” he was asked. “Well,” he answered, “I made a shark.” “You really are a disgusting fellow,” his brother said. “Now you have fixed it so that our mortal descendants shall suffer. That fish of yours will eat up all the others, and people too.”^[50]

Behind this foolishness, it is possible to see that the one cause (the obscure being who cut himself) yields within the frame of the world dual effects — good and evil. The story is not as naïve as it appears.^[51] Furthermore, the metaphysical pre-existence of the Platonic archetype of the shark is implied in the curious logic of the final dialogue. This is a conception inherent in every myth. Universal too is the casting of the antagonist, the representative of evil, in the role of the clown. Devils — both the lusty thickheads and the sharp, clever deceivers — are always clowns. Though they may triumph in the world of space and time, both they and their work simply disappear when the perspective shifts to the transcendental. They are the mistakers of shadow for substance: they symbolize the inevitable imperfections of the realm of shadow, and so long as we remain this side the veil cannot be done away.

Figure 64. Edshu the Trickster (carved wood, cowries, and leather; Yoruba; Nigeria; nineteenth–early twentieth century a.d.)

The Black Tatars of Siberia say that when the demiurge Pajana fashioned the first human beings, he found that he was unable to produce a life-giving spirit for them. So he had to go up to heaven and procure souls from Kudai, the High God, leaving meanwhile a naked dog to guard the figures of his manufacture. The devil, Erlik, arrived while he was away. And Erlik said to the dog: “Thou hast no hair. I will give thee golden hair if thou wilt give into my hands these soulless people.” The proposal pleased the dog, and he gave the people he was guarding to the tempter. Erlik defiled them with his spittle, but took flight the moment he saw God approaching to give them life. God saw what had been done, and so he turned the human bodies inside out. That is why we have spittle and impurity in our intestines.^[52]

The folk mythologies take up the story of creation only at the moment where the transcendental emanations break into spatial forms. Nevertheless, they do not differ from the great mythologies on any essential point in their evaluations of human circumstance. Their symbolic personages correspond in import — frequently also in trait and deed — to those of the higher iconographies, and the wonder world in which they move is precisely that of the greater revelations: the world and the age between deep sleep and waking consciousness, the zone where the One breaks into the manifold and the many are reconciled in the One.

Breaking free from cosmogonic associations, the negative, clown-devil aspect of the demiurgic power has become a particular favorite in the tales told for amusement. A vivid example is Coyote of the American plains. Reynard the Fox is a European incarnation of this figure.

Footnotes

* Sanskrit: māyā-śakti.

* Beyond the categories, and therefore not defined by either of the pair of opposites called “void” and “being.” Such terms are only clues to the transcendency.

* A divine year is equal to 360 human years. See above.

* Since in Sanskrit A and U coalesce in O, the sacred syllable is pronounced and often written “OM.” See the prayers in Apotheosis and Arjuna's obeisance, above.

* In the sacred writings of Mahāyāna Buddhism, eighteen “voidnesses” or degrees of the void are enumerated and described. These are experienced by the yogi and by the soul as it passes into death. See Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrine, pp. 206, 239 f.

* The five elements according to the Chinese system are earth, fire, water, wood, and gold.

* Ta’aroa (Tahitian dialect) is Tangaroaā.

* Ginnungagap, the void, the abyss of chaos into which all devolves at the end of the cycle (“Twilight of the Gods”) and out of which then all appears again after a timeless age of reincubation.

Endnotes

[1] See C.G. Jung, “On Psychic Energy” (orig. 1928, Collected Works, vol. 8), entitled in its earliest draft “The Theory of the Libido.”

[2] See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

[3] Freud, Moses and Monotheism, translated by James Strachey (Standard Edition, XXIII, 1964). (Orig. 1939.)

[4] Gospel According to Luke, 17:21.

[5] See above.

[6] See above.

[7] See above.

[8] See above.

[9] Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Historia de la Nación Chichimeca (1608), Capítulo I (published in Lord Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico, London, 1830–48, vol. IX, p. 205; also by Alfredo Chavero, Obras Históricas de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Mexico, 1891–92, vol. II, pp. 21–22).

[10] Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. V, p. 375.

[11] See Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson, The Heart of Jainism (Oxford University Press, 1915), pp. 272–78.

[12] See Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, 3–6.

[13] Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, 8–12. [For Campbell’s further thoughts on the sacred syllable AUM, see Myths of Light, pp. 33–35. — Ed.]

[14] Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, 7.

[15] Ha idra zuta, Zohar, iii, 288a. Compare to the Tibetan lama, above.

[16] Ha idra rabba qadisha, xi, 212–14 and 233, translation by S.L. MacGregor Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Ltd., 1887), pp. 134–35 and 137.

[17] Summa contra Gentiles, I.i.

[18] See Tragedy & Comedy above.

[19] Johannes C. Anderson, Maori Life in Ao-tea (Christchurch [New Zealand], no date [1907?]), p. 127.

[20] See The Vedantasara of Sadananda, translated with Introduction, Sanskrit Text, and Comments, by Swami Nikhilananda (Mayavati, 1931).

[21] Translated from Richard Wilhelm, Chinesische Märchen (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1921), pp. 29–31.

[22] Rev. Richard Taylor, Te ika a Maui, or New Zealand and Its Inhabitants (London, 1855), pp. 14–15.

[23] The little circle underneath the main portion of Figure 59. Compare the Chinese Tao or yin-yang.

[24] Kenneth P. Emory, “The Tuamotuan Creation Charts by Paiore,” Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 48, no. 1 (March 1939), pp. 1–29.

[25] Ibid., p. 12.

[26] Chāndogya Upaniṣad, 3.19.1–3.

[27] A.S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, p. 83. Copyright 1928 by the Macmillan Company and used with their permission. [The mythic image of the Cosmic Egg also resonates with that theory known by modern physicists as the Big Bang, first propounded in 1927 by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest. — Ed.]

[28] “Entropy always increases.” (See Eddington, pp. 63 ff.) [This is a restatement of what is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, first formulated in 1824 by French scientist Sadi Carnot. — Ed.]

[29] Kenneth P. Emory, “The Tahitian Account of Creation by Mare,” Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 47, No. 2 (June 1938), pp. 53–54.

[30] E.A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (London, 1904), vol. I, pp. 282–92.

[31] Kalika Puraṇa, I (translated in Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse, edited by Joseph Campbell, The Bollingen Series XI, Pantheon Books, 1948, pp. 239 ff.).

[32] Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad, 1.4.1–5. Translated by Swami Madhavananda (Mayavati, 1934). Compare the folklore motif of the transformation flight, pp. 183–84. See also Cypria 8, where Nemesis “dislikes to lie in love with her father Zeus” and flies from him, assuming the forms of fish and animals (cited by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of Government, American Oriental Society, 1942, p. 361).

[33] Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad, 2.2.5.

[34] Zohar, i, 91 b. Quoted by C.G. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah: Its Doctrines, Development, and Literature (London, 1920), p. 116.

[35] Taittirīya Upaniṣad, 3.10.5.

[36] The mythologies of the American Southwest describe such an emergence in great detail, so also the creation stories of the Kabyl Berbers of Algiers. See Morris Edward Opler, Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, vol. XXXI, 1938); and Leo Frobenius and Douglas C. Fox, African Genesis (New York, 1927), pp. 49–50.

[37] George Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race, as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs (London, 1855), pp. 1–3.

[38] Theogony, 116 ff. In the Greek version, the mother is not reluctant; she herself supplies the sickle.

[39] Compare the Maori polarity of Mahora-nui-a-rangi and Maki, p. 232.

[40] S.N. Kramer, op cit., pp. 40–41.

[41] Prose Edda, “Gylfaginning,” IV–VIII (from the translation by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, 1916; by permission of the publishers). See also Poetic Edda, “Voluspa.”

[42] “The Epic of Creation,” Tablet IV, lines 35–143, adapted from the translation by L.W. King, Babylonian Religion and Mythology (London and New York: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd., 1899), pp. 72–78.

[43] See Dante, “Paradiso,” XXX–XXXII. This is the rose opened to mankind by the cross.

[44] Book of Genesis, 3:7.

[45] George Bird Grinnell, Blackfoot Lodge Tales (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892, 1916), pp. 137–38.

[46] J.S. Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders (London, 1840), vol. I, p. 17. To regard such a tale as a cosmogonic myth would be as inept as to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity with a paragraph from the nursery story “Marienkind” (Grimm's Fairy Tales, No. 3).

[47] Harva, op cit., p. 109, citing S. Krašeninnikov, Opisanie Zemli Kamčatki (St. Petersburg, 1819), vol. II, p. 101.

[48] Harva, op cit., p. 109, citing Potanin, op cit., vol. II, p. 153.

[49] P.J. Meier, Mythen und Erzählungen der Küstenbewohner der Gazelle-Halbinsel (Neu-Pommern) (Anthropos Bibliothek, Band I, Heft 1, Münster i. W., 1909), pp. 15–16.

[50] Ibid., pp. 59–61.

[51] “The universe does not on the whole act as though it were under efficient personal supervision and control. When I hear some hymns, sermons, and prayers taking for granted or asserting with naïve simplicity that this vast, ruthless cosmos, with all the monstrous accidents which it involves, is a neatly planned and personally conducted tour, I recall the more reasonable hypothesis of an East African tribe. ‘They say,’ reports an observer, ‘that although God is good and wishes good for everybody, unfortunately he has a half-witted brother who is always interfering with what he does.’ That, at least, bears some resemblance to the facts. God’s half-witted brother might explain some of life’s sickening and insane tragedies which the idea of an omnipotent individual of boundless good will toward every soul most certainly does not explain.” (Harry Emerson Fosdick, As I See Religion, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932, pp. 53–54.)

[52] Harva, op cit., pp. 114–15, quoting W. Radloff, Proben der Volksliteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Siberians (St. Petersburg, 1866–70), vol. I, p. 285.