CHAPTER III Transformations of the Hero 1. The Primordial Hero and the Human
We have come two stages: first, from the immediate emanations of the Uncreated Creating to the fluid yet timeless personages of the mythological age; second, from these Created Creating Ones to the sphere of human history. The emanations have condensed, the field of consciousness constricted. Where formerly causal bodies were visible, now only their secondary effects come to focus in the little hard-fact pupil of the human eye. The cosmogonic cycle is now to be carried forward, therefore, not by the gods, who have become invisible, but by the heroes, more or less human in character, through whom the world destiny is realized. This is the line where creation myths begin to give place to legend — as in the Book of Genesis, following the expulsion from the garden. Metaphysics yields to prehistory, which is dim and vague at first, but becomes gradually precise in detail. The heroes become less and less fabulous, until at last, in the final stages of the various local traditions, legend opens into the common daylight of recorded time.
Mwuetsi, the Moon Man, was cut loose, like a fouled anchor; the community of the children floated free into the day-world of waking consciousness. But we are told that there existed among them direct sons of the now submarine father, who, like the children of his first begetting, had grown from infancy to manhood in a single day. These special carriers of cosmic power constituted a spiritual and social aristocracy. Filled with a double charge of the creative energy, they were themselves sources of revelation. Such figures appear on the dawn stage of every legendary past. They are the culture heroes, the city founders.
The Chinese chronicles record that when the earth had solidified and the peoples were settling in the riverlands, Fu Hsi, the “Heavenly Emperor” (2953–2838 b.c.), governed among them. He taught his tribes how to fish with nets, to hunt and to rear domestic animals, divided the people into clans, and instituted matrimony. From a supernatural tablet entrusted to him by a horse-shaped scaly monster out of the waters of the river Meng, he deduced the Eight Diagrams, which remain to this day the fundamental symbols of traditional Chinese thought. He had been born of a miraculous conception, after a gestation of twelve years; his body being that of a serpent, with human arms and the head of an ox.[1]
Shen Nung, his successor, the “Earthly Emperor” (r. 2838–2698 b.c.), was eight feet seven inches tall, with a human body but the head of a bull. He had been miraculously conceived through the influence of a dragon. The embarrassed mother had exposed her infant on a mountainside, but the wild beasts protected and nourished it, and when she learned of this she fetched him home. Shen Nung discovered in one day seventy poisonous plants and their antidotes: through a glass covering to his stomach he could observe the digestion of each herb. Then he composed a pharmacopoeia that is still in use. He was the inventor of the plough and a system of barter; he is worshiped by the Chinese peasant as the “prince of cereals.” At the age of one hundred and sixty-eight he was joined to the immortals.[2]
Such serpent kings and minotaurs tell of a past when the emperor was the carrier of a special world-creating, world-sustaining power, very much greater than that represented in the normal human physique. In those times was accomplished the heavy titan-work, the massive establishment of the foundations of our human civilization. But with the progress of the cycle, a period came when the work to be done was no longer proto- or superhuman; it was the labor specifically of man — control of the passions, exploration of the arts, elaboration of the economic and cultural institutions of the state. Now is required no incarnation of the Moon Bull, no Serpent Wisdom of the Eight Diagrams of Destiny, but a perfect human spirit alert to the needs and hopes of the heart. Accordingly, the cosmogonic cycle yields an emperor in human form who shall stand for all generations to come as the model of man the king.
Huang Ti, the “Yellow Emperor” (r. 2697–2597 b.c.), was the third of the august Three. His mother, a concubine of the prince of the province of Chao-tien, conceived him when she one night beheld a golden dazzling light around the constellation of the Great Bear. The child could talk when he was seventy days old and at the age of eleven years suceeded to the throne. His distinguishing endowment was his power to dream: in sleep he could visit the remotest regions and consort with immortals in the supernatural realm. Shortly following his elevation to the throne, Huang Ti fell into a dream that lasted three entire months, during which time he learned the lesson of the control of the heart. After a second dream of comparable length, he returned with the power to teach the people. He instructed them in the control of the forces of nature in their own hearts.
This wonderful man governed China for one hundred years, and during his reign the people enjoyed a veritable golden age. He gathered six great ministers around him, with whose help he composed a calendar, inaugurated mathematical calculations, and taught the making of utensils of wood, pottery, and metal, the building of boats and carriages, the use of money, and the construction of musical instruments of bamboo. He appointed public places for the worship of God. He instituted the bounds and laws of private property. His queen discovered the art of weaving silk. He planted one hundred varieties of grain, vegetables, and trees; favored the development of birds, quadrupeds, reptiles, and insects; taught the uses of water, fire, wood, and earth; and regulated the movements of the tides. Before his death at the age of one hundred and eleven, the phoenix and the unicorn appeared in the gardens of the Empire, in attestation to the perfection of his reign.[3]
Figure 70. Pharaoh’s Daughter Finding Moses (detail; oil on canvas, England, a.d. 1886) 2. Childhood of the Human Hero
The earlier culture hero of the snake body and bull head carried within him from birth the spontaneous creative power of the natural world. That was the meaning of his form. The man hero, on the other hand, must “descend” to re-establish connection with the infrahuman. This is the sense, as we have seen, of the adventure of the hero.
But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world’s great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned with such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found. On the contrary, the tendency has always been to endow the hero with extraordinary powers from the moment of birth, or even the moment of conception. The whole hero-life is shown to have been a pageant of marvels with the great central adventure as its culmination.
This accords with the view that herohood is predestined, rather than simply achieved, and opens the problem of the relationship of biography to character. Jesus, for example, can be regarded as a man who by dint of austerities and meditation attained wisdom; or on the other hand, one may believe that a god descended and took upon himself the enactment of a human career. The first view would lead one to imitate the master literally, in order to break through, in the same way as he, to the transcendent, redemptive experience. But the second states that the hero is rather a symbol to be contemplated than an example to be literally followed. The divine being is a revelation of the omnipotent Self, which dwells within us all. The contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one’s own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to precise imitation, the lesson being, not “Do thus and be good,” but “Know this and be God.”
This formula is, of course, not precisely that of the common Christian teaching, where, though Jesus is reported to have declared that “the kingdom of God is within,” the churches maintain that, since man is created only “in the image” of God, the distinction between the soul and its creator is absolute — thus retaining, as the final reach of their wisdom, the dualistic distinction between man’s “eternal soul” and the divinity. The transcending of this pair of opposites is not encouraged (indeed, is rejected as “pantheism” and has sometimes been rewarded with the stake); nevertheless, the prayers and diaries of the Christian mystics abound in ecstatic descriptions of the unitive, soul-shattering experience, while Dante’s vision at the conclusion of the Divine Comedy certainly goes beyond the orthodox, dualistic, concretistic dogma of the finality of the personalities of the Trinity. Where this dogma is not transcended the myth of Going to the Father is taken literally, as describing man’s final goal.
As for the problem of imitating Jesus as a human model, or meditating upon Him as a god, the history of the Christian attitude may be roughly summarized, as follows: (1) a period of literally following the master, Jesus, by renouncing the world as he did (Primitive Christianity); (2) a period of meditating on Christ Crucified as the divinity within the heart, meanwhile leading one’s life in the world as the servant of this god (Early and Medieval Christianity); (3) a rejection of most of the instruments supporting meditation, meanwhile, however, continuing to lead one’s life in the world as the servant or vehicle of the god whom one has ceased to visualize (Protestant Christianity); (4) an attempt to interpret Jesus as a model human being, but without accepting his ascetic path (Liberal Christianity).
In Part I, “The Adventure of the Hero,” we regarded the redemptive deed from the first standpoint, which may be called the psychological. We now must describe it from the second, where it becomes a symbol of the same metaphysical mystery that it was the deed of the hero himself to rediscover and bring to view. In the present chapter, therefore, we shall consider first the miraculous childhood, by which it is shown that a special manifestation of the immanent di-vine principle has become incarnate in the world, and then, in succession, the various life roles through which the hero may enact his work of destiny. These vary in magnitude, according to the needs of the time.
Stated in the terms already formulated, the hero’s first task is to experience consciously the antecedent stages of the cosmogonic cycle; to break back through the epochs of emanation. His second, then, is to return from that abyss to the plane of contemporary life, there to serve as a human transformer of demiurgic potentials. Huang Ti had the power to dream: this was his road of descent and return. Väinämöinen’s second or water birth threw him back to an experience of the elemental. In the Tonga tale of the clam wife, the retreat began with the birth of the mother: the brother heroes sprang from an infrahuman womb.
The deeds of the hero in the second part of his personal cycle will be proportionate to the depth of his descent during the first. The sons of the clam wife came up from the animal level; their physical beauty was superlative. Väinämöinen was reborn from the elemental waters and winds; his endowment was to rouse or quell with bardic song the elements of nature and of the human body. Huang Ti sojourned in the kingdom of the spirit; he taught the harmony of the heart. The Buddha broke past even the zone of the creative gods and came back from the void; he announced salvation from the cosmogonic round.
If the deeds of an actual historical figure proclaim him to have been a hero, the builders of his legend will invent for him appropriate adventures in depth. These will be pictured as journeys into miraculous realms, and are to be interpreted as symbolic, on the one hand, of descents into the night-sea of the psyche, and on the other, of the realms or aspects of man’s destiny that are made manifest in the respective lives.
King Sargon of Akkad (c. 2550 b.c.) was born of a lowly mother. His father was unknown. Set adrift in a basket of bulrushes on the waters of the Euphrates, he was discovered by Akki the husbandman, whom he was brought up to serve as gardener. The goddess Ishtar favored the youth. Thus he became, at last, king and emperor, renowned as the living god.
Candragupta (fourth century b.c.), the founder of the Hindu Maurya dynasty, was abandoned in an earthen jar at the threshold of a cowshed. A herdsman discovered and fostered the infant. One day when he was playing with his companions a game of High King in the Judgment Seat, little Candragupta commanded that the worst of the offenders should have their hands and feet cut off; then, at his word, the amputated members immediately returned to place. A passing prince, beholding the miraculous game, bought the child for a thousand harshapanas and at home discovered by physical signs that he was a Maurya.
Pope Gregory the Great (a.d. 540?–604) was born of noble twins who at the instigation of the devil had committed incest. His penitent mother set him to sea in a little casket. He was found and fostered by fishermen, and at the age of six was sent to a cloister to be educated as a priest. But he desired the life of a knightly warrior. Entering a boat, he was borne miraculously to the country of his parents, where he won the hand of the queen — who presently proved to be his mother. After discovery of this second incest, Gregory remained seventeen years in penance, chained to a rock in the middle of the sea. The keys to the chains were tossed to the waters, but when at the end of the long period they were discovered in the belly of a fish, this was taken to be a providential sign: the penitent was conducted to Rome, where in due course he was elected pope.[4]
Charlemagne (742–814) was persecuted as a child by his elder brothers, and took flight to Saracen Spain. There, under the name of Mainet, he rendered signal services to the king. He converted the king’s daughter to the Christian faith, and the two secretly arranged to marry. After further deeds, the royal youth returned to France, where he overthrew his former persecutors and triumphantly assumed the crown. Then he ruled a hundred years, surrounded by a zodiac of twelve peers. According to all reports, his beard and hair were very long and white. (Actually Charles the Great was beardless and bald.) One day, sitting under his judgment tree, he rendered justice to a snake, and in gratitude the reptile bestowed on him a charm that involved him in a love affair with a woman already dead. This amulet fell into a well at Aix: that is why Aix became the emperor’s favorite residence. After his long wars against the Saracens, Saxons, Slavs, and Northmen, the ageless emperor died; but he sleeps only, to awake in the hour of his country’s need. During the later Middle Ages, he once arose from the dead to participate in a crusade.[5]
Each of these biographies exhibits the variously rationalized theme of the infant exile and return. This is a prominent feature in all legend, folktale, and myth. Usually an effort is made to give it some semblance of physical plausibility. However, when the hero in question is a great patriarch, wizard, prophet, or incarnation, the wonders are permitted to develop beyond all bounds.
The popular Hebrew legend of the birth of father Abraham supplies an example of the frankly supernatural infant exile. The event of the birth had been read by Nimrod in the stars,
for this impious king was a cunning astrologer, and it was manifest to him that a man would be born in his day who would rise up against him and triumphantly give the lie to his religion. In his terror at the fate foretold him in the stars, he sent for his princes and governors, and asked them to advise him in the matter. They answered, and said: “Our unanimous advice is that thou shouldst build a great house, station a guard at the entrance thereof, and make known in the whole of thy realm that all pregnant women shall repair thither together with their midwives, who are to remain with them when they are delivered. When the days of a woman to be delivered are fulfilled, and the child is born, it shall be the duty of the midwife to kill it, if it be a boy. But if the child be a girl, it shall be kept alive, and the mother shall receive gifts and costly garments, and a herald shall proclaim, ‘Thus is done unto the woman who bears a daughter!’”
The king was pleased with this counsel, and he had a proclamation published throughout his whole kingdom, summoning all the architects to build a great house for him, sixty ells high and eighty wide. After it was completed, he issued a second proclamation, summoning all pregnant women thither, and there they were to remain until their confinement. Officers were appointed to take the women to the house, and guards were stationed in it and about it, to prevent the women from escaping thence. He furthermore sent midwives to the house, and commanded them to slay the men children at their mothers’ breasts. But if a woman bore a girl, she was to be arrayed in byssus, silk, and embroidered garments, and led forth from the house of detention amid great honors. No less than seventy thousand children were slaughtered thus. Then the angels appeared before God, and spoke, “Seest Thou not what he doth, yon sinner and blasphemer, Nimrod son of Canaan, who slays so many innocent babes that have done no harm?” God answered, and said: “Ye holy angels, I know it and I see it, for I neither slumber nor sleep. I behold and I know the secret things and the things that are revealed, and ye shall witness what I will do unto this sinner and blasphemer, for I will turn My hand against him to chastise him.”
It was about this time that Terah espoused the mother of Abraham and she was with child....When her time approached, she left the city in great terror and wandered toward the desert, walking along the edge of a valley, until she happened across a cave. She entered this refuge, and on the next day she was seized with the throes, and she gave birth to a son. The whole cave was filled with the light of the child’s countenance as with the splendor of the sun, and the mother rejoiced exceedingly. The babe she bore was our father Abraham.
His mother lamented, and said to her son: “Alas that I bore thee at a time when Nimrod is king. For thy sake seventy thousand men-children were slaughtered, and I am seized with terror on account of thee, that he hear of thy existence, and slay thee. Better thou shouldst perish here in this cave than my eye should behold thee dead at my breast.” She took the garment in which she was clothed, and wrapped it about the boy. Then she abandoned him in the cave, saying, “May the Lord be with thee, may He not fail thee nor forsake thee.”
Thus Abraham was deserted in the cave, without a nurse, and he began to wail. God sent Gabriel down to give him milk to drink, and the angel made it to flow from the little finger of the baby’s right hand, and he sucked it until he was ten days old. Then he arose and walked about, and he left the cave and went along the edge of the valley. When the sun sank, and the stars came forth, he said, “These are the gods!” But the dawn came, and the stars could be seen no longer, and then he said, “I will not pay worship to these, for they are no gods.” Thereupon the sun came forth, and he spoke, “This is my god, him will I extol.” But again the sun set and he said, “He is no god,” and beholding the moon, he called him his god to whom he would pay divine homage. Then the moon was obscured, and he cried out: “This, too, is no god! There is One who sets them all in motion.”[6]
The Blackfeet of Montana tell of a young monster-slayer, Kut-o-yis, who was discovered by his foster parents when the old man and woman put a clot of buffalo blood to boil in a pot.
Immediately there came from the pot a noise as of a child crying, as if it were being hurt, burnt, or scalded. They looked in the kettle, and saw there a little boy, and they quickly took it out of the water. They were very much surprised....Now on the fourth day the child spoke, and said, “Lash me in turn to each of these lodge poles, and when I get to the last one, I shall fall out of my lashing and be grown up.” The old woman did so, and as she lashed him to each lodge pole he could be seen to grow, and finally when they lashed him to the last pole, he was a man.[7]
The folktales commonly support or supplant this theme of the exile with that of the despised one, or the handicapped: the abused youngest son or daughter, the orphan, stepchild, ugly duckling, or the squire of low degree.
A young Pueblo woman, who was helping her mother mix clay for pottery with her foot, felt a splash of mud on her leg but thought no more of it.
After some days the girl felt something was moving in her belly, but she did not think anything about going to have a baby. She did not tell her mother. But it was growing and growing. One day in the morning she was very sick. In the afternoon she got the baby. Then her mother knew (for the first time) that her daughter was going to have a baby. The mother was very angry about it; but after she looked at the baby, she saw it was not like a baby, she saw it was a round thing with two things sticking out, it was a little jar. “Where did you get this?” said her mother. The girl was just crying. About that time the father came in. “Never mind, I am very glad she had a baby,” he said. “But it is not a baby,” said her mother. Then the father went to look at it and saw it was a little water jar. After that he was very fond of that little jar. “It is moving,” he said. Pretty soon that little water jar was growing. In twenty days it was big. It was able to go around with the children, and it could talk. “Grandfather, take me outdoors, so I can look around,” he said. So every morning the grandfather would take him out and he would look at the children, and they were very fond of him and they found out he was a boy, Water Jar Boy. They found out from his talking.[8]
In sum: the child of destiny has to face a long period of obscurity. This is a time of extreme danger, impediment, or disgrace. He is thrown inward to his own depths or outward to the unknown; either way, what he touches is a darkness unexplored. And this is a zone of unsuspected presences, benign as well as malignant: an angel appears, a helpful animal, a fisherman, a hunter, crone, or peasant. Fostered in the animal school, or, like Siegfried, below ground among the gnomes that nourish the roots of the tree of life, or again, alone in some little room (the story has been told a thousand ways), the young world-apprentice learns the lesson of the seed powers, which reside just beyond the sphere of the measured and the named.
The myths agree that an extraordinary capacity is required to face and survive such experience. The infancies abound in anecdotes of precocious strength, cleverness, and wisdom. Herakles strangled a serpent sent against his cradle by the goddess Hera. Maui of Polynesia snared and slowed the sun — to give his mother time to cook her meals. Abraham, as we have seen, arrived at the knowledge of the One God. Jesus confounded the wise men. The baby Buddha had been left one day beneath the shade of a tree; his nurses suddenly noted that the shadow had not moved all afternoon and that the child was sitting fixed in a yogic trance.
The feats of the beloved Hindu savior, Kṛṣṇa, during his infant exile among the cowherds of Gokula and Brindaban, constitute a lively cycle. A certain goblin named Pūtanā came in the shape of a beautiful woman, but with poison in her breasts. She entered the house of Yasoda, the foster mother of the child, and made herself very friendly, presently taking the baby in her lap to give it suck. But Kṛṣṇa drew so hard that he sucked away her life, and she fell dead, reassuming her huge and hideous form. When the foul corpse was cremated, however, it emitted a sweet fragrance; for the divine infant had given the demoness salvation when he had drunk her milk.
Kṛṣṇa was a mischievous little boy. He liked to spirit away the pots of curds when the milkmaids were asleep. He was forever climbing to eat and spill things placed out of his reach on the high shelves. The girls would call him Butter-thief and complain to Yasoda; but he could always invent a story. One afternoon when he was playing in the yard, his foster parent was warned that he was eating clay. She arrived with a switch, but he had wiped his lips, and denied all knowledge of the matter. She opened the dirty mouth to see, but when she peered inside beheld the whole universe, the “Three Worlds.” She thought: “How silly I am to imagine that my son could be the Lord of the Three Worlds.” Then all was veiled from her again, and the moment passed immediately from her mind. She fondled the little boy and took him home.
The herding folk were accustomed to pay worship to the god Indra, the Hindu counterpart of Zeus, king of heaven and lord of rain. One day when they had made their offering, the lad Kṛṣṇa said to them: “Indra is no supreme deity, though he be king in heaven; he is afraid of the titans. Furthermore, the rain and prosperity for which you are praying depend on the sun, which draws up the waters and makes them fall again. What can Indra do? Whatever comes to pass is determined by the laws of nature and the spirit.” Then he turned their attention to the nearby woods, streams, and hills, and especially to Mount Govardhan, as more worthy of their honor than the remote master of the air. And so they offered flowers and fruits and sweetmeats to the mountain.
Kṛṣṇa himself assumed a second form: he took the form of a mountain god and received the offerings of the people, meanwhile remaining in his earlier shape among them, paying worship to the mountain king. The god received the offerings and ate them up.
Figure 71. Kṛṣṇa Holding Mount Govardhan (color on paper, India, c. a.d. 1790)
The sense of Kṛṣṇa’s advice to do worship to the mountain rather than the king of the gods, which to the Western reader may seem strange, is that the Way of Devotion (bhakti mārga) must begin with things known and loved by the devotee, not remote, unimaginable conceptions. Since the Godhead is immanent in all, He will make Himself known through any object profoundly regarded. Furthermore, it is the Godhead within the devotee that makes it possible for him to discover Godhead in the world without. This mystery is illustrated in Kṛṣṇa’s double presence during the act of worship.
Indra was enraged, and sent for the king of the clouds, whom he commanded to pour rain over the people until all should be swept away. A flight of storm clouds drew over the district and began to discharge a deluge; it seemed the end of the world was at hand. But the lad Kṛṣṇa filled Mount Govardhan with the heat of his inexhaustible energy, lifted it with his little finger, and bid the people take shelter beneath. The rain struck the mountain, hissed, and evaporated. The torrent fell seven days, but not a drop touched the community of herdsmen.
Then the god realized that the opponent must be an incarnation of the Primal Being. When Kṛṣṇa went out next day to graze the cows, playing music on his flute, the King of Heaven came down on his great white elephant, Airāvata, fell on his face at the feet of the smiling lad, and made submission.[9]
The conclusion of the childhood cycle is the return or recognition of the hero, when, after the long period of obscurity, his true character is revealed. This event may precipitate a considerable crisis; for it amounts to an emergence of powers hitherto excluded from human life. Earlier patterns break to fragments or dissolve; disaster greets the eye. Yet after a moment of apparent havoc, the creative value of the new factor comes to view, and the world takes shape again in unsuspected glory. This theme of crucifixion-resurrection can be illustrated either on the body of the hero himself, or in his effects upon his world. The first alternative we find in the Pueblo story of the water jar.
The men were going out to hunt rabbits, and Water Jar Boy wanted to go. “Grandfather, could you take me down to the foot of the mesa, I want to hunt rabbits.” “Poor grandson, you can’t hunt rabbits, you have no legs or arms,” said the grandfather. But Water Jar Boy was very anxious to go. “Take me anyway. You are too old and you can’t do anything.” His mother was crying because her boy had no legs or arms or eyes. But they used to feed him, in his mouth, in the mouth of the jar. So next morning his grandfather took him down to the south on the flat. Then he rolled along, and pretty soon he saw a rabbit track and he followed the track. Pretty soon the rabbit ran out, and he began to chase it. Just before he got to the marsh there was a rock, and he hit himself against it and broke, and a boy jumped up. He was very glad his skin had been broken and that he was a boy, a big boy. He was wearing lots of beads around his neck and turquoise earrings, and a dance kilt and moccasins, and a buckskin shirt.
Catching a number of rabbits, he returned and presented them to his grandfather, who brought him triumphantly home.[10]
The legendary cycles of medieval Ireland include: (1) The Mythological Cycle, which describes the migrations to the island of prehistoric peoples, their battles, and in particular the deeds of the race of gods known as the Tuatha De Danaan, “Children of the Great Mother, Dana”; (2) The Annals of the Milesians, or semi-historical chronicles of the last arriving race, the sons of Milesius, founders of the Celtic dynasties that survived until the arrival of the Anglo-Normans under Henry II in the twelfth century; (3) The Ulster Cycle of the Knights of the Red Branch, which treats primarily of the deeds of Cuchulainn (pronounced coohoolinn) at the court of his uncle Conchobar (pronounced conohoor): this cycle greatly influenced the development of the Arthurian tradition, in Wales, Brittany, and England — the court of Conchobar serving as model for that of King Arthur and the deeds of Cuchulainn for those of Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain (Gawain was the original hero of many of the adventures later assigned to Lancelot, Perceval, and Galahad); (4) The Cycle of the Fianna: the Fianna were a company of heroic fighters under the captaincy of Finn MacCool; the greatest tale of this cycle being that of the love triangle of Finn, Grianni his bride, and Diarmaid his nephew, many episodes of which come down to us in the celebrated tale of Tristan and Iseult; (5) Legends of the Irish Saints.
The “little people” of the popular fairy lore of Christian Ireland are reductions of the earlier pagan divinities, the Tuatha De Danaan.
The cosmic energies burning within the vivid Irish warrior Cuchulainn — chief hero of the medieval Ulster Cycle, the so-called Cycle of the Knights of the Red Branch — would suddenly burst like an eruption, both overwhelming himself and smashing everything around.
When he was four years old — so the story goes — he set out to test the “boy corps” of his uncle, King Conchobar, at their own sports. Carrying his hurly of brass, ball of silver, throwing javelin, and toy spear, he proceeded to the court city of Emania, where, without so much as a word of permission, he dived right in among the boys — “thrice fifty in number, who were hurling on the green and practicing martial exercises with Conchobar’s son, Follamain, at their head.” The whole field let fly at him. With his fists, forearms, palms, and little shield, he parried the hurlies, balls, and spears that came simultaneously from all directions. Then for the first time in his life he was seized with his battle-frenzy (a bizarre, characteristic transformation later to be known as his “paroxysm” or “distortion”) and before anyone could grasp what was coming to pass, he had laid low fifty of the best. Five more of the boy corps went scuttling past the king, where he sat playing chess with Fergus the Eloquent. Conchobar arose and took a hand in the confusion. But Cuchulainn would not lighten his hand until all the youngsters had been placed under his protection and guarantee.[11]
Cuchulainn’s first day under arms was the occasion of his full self-manifestation. There was nothing serenely controlled about this performance, nothing of the playful irony that we feel in the deeds of the Hindu Kṛṣṇa. Rather, the abundance of Cuchulainn’s power was becoming known for the first time to himself, as well as to everybody else. It broke out of the depths of his being, and then had to be dealt with, impromptu and fast.
The happening was again at the court of King Conchobar, the day Cathbad the Druid declared in prophecy of any stripling who that day should assume arms and armature that “the name of such an one would transcend those of all Ireland’s youths besides: his life however would be fleeting short.” Cuchulainn forthwith demanded fighting equipment. Seventeen sets of weapons given him he shattered with his strength, until Conchobar invested him with his own outfit. Then he reduced the chariots to fragments. Only that of the king was strong enough to support his trial.
Cuchulainn commanded Conchobar’s charioteer to drive him past the distant “Look-out Ford,” and they came presently to a remote fortress, the Dun of the Sons of Nechtan, where he cut off the heads of the defenders. He fastened the heads to the sides of the car. On the road back he jumped to the ground and “by sheer running and mere speed” captured two stags of the grandest bulk. With two stones he knocked out of the air two dozen flying swans. And with thongs and other gear he tethered all, both the beasts and the birds, to the chariot.
Levarchan the Prophetess beheld the pageant with alarm as it approached the city and castle of Emania. “The chariot is graced with bleeding heads of his enemies,” she declared, “beautiful white birds he has which in the chariot bear him company, and wild unbroken stags bound and tethered to the same.” “I know that chariot-fighter,” the king said: “even the little boy, my sister’s son, who this very day went to the marches. Surely he will have reddened his hand; and should his fury not be timely met, all Emania’s young men will perish by him.” Very quickly, a method had to be contrived to abate his heat; and one was found. One hundred and fifty women of the castle, and Scandlach their leader at the head of them, “reduced themselves critically to nature’s garb, and without subterfuge of any kind trooped out to meet him.” The little warrior, embarrassed or perhaps overwhelmed by such a display of womanhood, averted his eyes, at which moment he was seized by the men and soused into a vat of cold water. The staves and hoops of the vessel flew asunder. A second vat boiled. The third became only very hot. Thus Cuchulainn was subdued, and the city saved.[12]
A beautiful boy indeed was that: seven toes to each foot Cuchulainn had, and to either hand as many fingers; his eyes were bright with seven pupils apiece, each one of which glittered with seven gemlike sparkles. On either cheek he had four moles: a blue, a crimson, a green, and a yellow. Between one ear and the other he had fifty clear-yellow long tresses that were as the yellow wax of bees, or like unto a brooch of the white gold as it glints to the sun unobscured. He wore a green mantle silver-clasped upon his breast and a gold-thread shirt.[13]
But when he was taken by his paroxysm or distortion “he became a fearsome and multiform and wondrous and hitherto unknown being.” All over him, from his crown to the ground, his flesh and every limb and joint and point and articulation of him quivered. His feet, shins, and knees shifted themselves and were behind him. The frontal sinews of his head were dragged to the back of his neck, where they showed in lumps bigger than the head of a man-child aged one month.
One eye became engulfed in his head so far that ’tis a question whether a wild heron could have got at it where it lay against his occiput, to drag it out upon the surface of his cheek; the other eye on the contrary protruded suddenly, and of itself so rested upon the cheek. His mouth was twisted awry till it met his ears...flakes of fire streamed from it. The sounding blows of the heart that pounded within him were as the howl of a ban-dog doing his office, or of a lion in the act of charging bears. Among the aërial clouds over his head were visable the virulent pouring showers and sparks of ruddy fire which the seething of his savage wrath caused to mount up above him. His hair became tangled about his head...over the which though a prime apple-tree had been shaken, yet may we surmise that never an apple of them would have reached the ground, but rather that all would have been held impaled each on an individual hair as it bristled on him for fury. His “hero’s paroxysm” projected itself out of his forehead, and showed longer as well as thicker than the whetstone of a first-rate man-at-arms. [And finally:] taller, thicker, more rigid, longer than the mast of a great ship was the perpendicular jet of dusky blood which out of his scalp’s very central point shot upwards and then was scattered to the four cardinal points; whereby was formed a magic mist of gloom resembling the smoky pall that drapes a regal dwelling, what time a king at night fall of a winter’s day draws near to it.[14] 3. The Hero as Warrior
The place of the hero’s birth, or the remote land of exile from which he returns to perform his adult deeds among men, is the mid-point or navel of the world. Just as ripples go out from an underwater spring, so the forms of the universe expand in circles from the source.
“Above the broad, unmoving depths, beneath the nine spheres and the seven floors of heaven, at the central point, the World Navel, the quietest place on earth, where eternal summer rules and the cuckoo everlasting calls, there the White Youth came to consciousness.” So begins a hero myth of the Yakuts of Siberia. The White Youth went forth to learn where he was and what his dwelling place was like. Eastward of him lay stretching a broad, fallow field, in the middle of which arose a mighty hill, and on the summit of the hill a gigantic tree. The resin of that tree was transparent and sweet scented, the bark never dried or cracked, the sap shone silver, the luxuriant leaves never wilted, and the catkins resembled a cluster of reversed cups. The summit of the tree rose over the seven heaven-floors and served as a tethering post for the High God, Yryn-ai-tojon; while the roots penetrated into the subterranean abysses, where they formed the pillars of the dwellings of the mythical creatures proper to that zone. The tree held conversation, through its foliage, with the beings of the sky.
When the White Youth turned to face south, he perceived in the midst of a green grassy plain the quiet Lake of Milk that no breath of wind ever stirs; and around the shores of the lake were swamps of curdle. To the north of him a somber forest stood with trees that rustled day and night; and therein was moving every kind of beast. Tall mountains were lifting beyond it, and appeared to be wearing caps of white rabbit fur; they leaned against the sky and protected this middle place from the northern wind. A thicket of scrub stretched out to the west, and beyond it stood a forest of tall firs; behind the forest gleamed a number of blunt-headed solitary peaks.
This was the manner, then, of the world in which the White Youth beheld the light of day. Presently tired, however, of being alone, he went over to the gigantic tree of life. “Honored High Mistress, Mother of my Tree and my Dwelling Place,” he prayed; “everything that lives exists in pairs and propagates descendants, but I am alone. I want now to travel and to seek a wife of my own kind; I wish to measure my strength against my kind; I want to become acquainted with men — to live according to the manner of men. Do not deny me thy blessing; I do humbly pray. I bow my head and bend my knee.”
Figure 72. Paleolithic Petroglyph (carved rock, Paleolithic, Algiers, date uncertain)
Then the leaves of the tree began murmuring, and a fine, milk-white rain descended from them upon the White Youth. A warm breath of wind could be felt. The tree began to groan, and out of its roots a female figure emerged to the waist: a woman of middle age, with earnest regard, hair flowing free, and bosom bare. The goddess offered her milk to the youth from a sumptuous breast, and after partaking of it he felt his strength increase a hundredfold. At the same time the goddess promised the youth every happiness and blessed him in such a way that neither water, nor fire, iron, nor anything else should ever do him harm.[15]
From the umbilical spot the hero departs to realize his destiny. His adult deeds pour creative power into the world.
Sang the aged Väinämöinen;
Lakes swelled up, and earth was shaken,
And the coppery mountains trembled,
And the mighty rocks resounded.
And the mountains clove asunder;
On the shore the stones were shattered.[16]
The stanza of the hero-bard resounds with the magic of the word of power; similarly, the sword edge of the hero-warrior flashes with the energy of the creative Source: before it fall the shells of the Outworn.
I am here keeping the distinction between the earlier semi-animal titan-hero (city founder, culture giver) and the later, fully human type. The deeds of the latter frequently include the slaying of the former, the Pythons and Minotaurs who were the boon-givers of the past. (A god outgrown becomes immediately a life-destroying demon. The form has to be broken and the energies released.) Not infrequently deeds that belong to the earlier stages of the cycle are assigned to the human hero, or one of the earlier heroes may be humanized and carried on into a later day; but such contaminations and variations do not alter the general formula.
For the mythological hero is the champion not of things become but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo: Holdfast, the keeper of the past. From obscurity the hero emerges, but the enemy is great and conspicuous in the seat of power; he is enemy, dragon, tyrant, because he turns to his own advantage the authority of his position. He is Holdfast not because he keeps the past but because he keeps.
The tyrant is proud, and therein resides his doom. He is proud because he thinks of his strength as his own; thus he is in the clown role, as a mistaker of shadow for substance; it is his destiny to be tricked. The mythological hero, reappearing from the darkness that is the source of the shapes of the day, brings a knowledge of the secret of the tyrant’s doom. With a gesture as simple as the pressing of a button, he annihilates the impressive configuration. The hero-deed is a continuous shattering of the crystallizations of the moment. The cycle rolls: mythology focuses on the growing-point. Transformation, fluidity, not stubborn ponderosity, is the characteristic of the living God. The great figure of the moment exists only to be broken, cut into chunks, and scattered abroad. Briefly: the ogre-tyrant is the champion of the prodigious fact, the hero the champion of creative life.
Figure 73. The Pharaoh Narmer Slays a Defeated Foe (carved schist, Old Kingdom, Egypt, c. 3100 b.c.)
The world period of the hero in human form begins only when villages and cities have expanded over the land. Many monsters remaining from primeval times still lurk in the outlying regions, and through malice or desperation these set themselves against the human community. They have to be cleared away. Furthermore, tyrants of human breed, usurping to themselves the goods of their neighbors, arise, and are the cause of widespread misery. These have to be suppressed. The elementary deeds of the hero are those of the clearing of the field.
Kut-o-yis, or “Blood Clot Boy,” when he had been taken from the pot and had grown to manhood in a day, slew the murderous son-in-law of his foster parents, then proceeded against the ogres of the countryside. He exterminated a tribe of cruel bears, with the exception of one female who was about to become a mother. “She pleaded so pitifully for her life, that he spared her. If he had not done this, there would have been no bears in the world.” Then he slaughtered a tribe of snakes, but again with the exception of one “who was about to become a mother.” Next he deliberately walked along a road which he had been told was dangerous.
As he was going along, a great windstorm struck him and at last carried him into the mouth of a great fish. This was a sucker-fish and the wind was its sucking. When he got into the stomach of the fish, he saw a great many people. Many of them were dead, but some were still alive. He said to the people, “Ah, there must be a heart somewhere here. We will have a dance.” So he painted his face white, his eyes and mouth with black circles, and tied a white rock knife on his head, so that the point stuck up. Some rattles made of hoofs were also brought. Then the people started in to dance. For a while Blood Clot sat making wing-motions with his hands, and singing songs. Then he stood up and danced, jumping up and down until the knife on his head struck the heart. Then he cut the heart down. Next he cut through between the ribs of the fish, and let all the people out.
Again Blood Clot said he must go on his travels. Before starting, the people warned him, saying that after a while he would see a woman who was always challenging people to wrestle with her, but that he must not speak to her. He gave no heed to what they said, and, after he had gone a little way, he saw a woman who called him to come over. “No,” said Blood Clot. “I am in a hurry.” However, at the fourth time the woman asked him to come over, he said, “Yes, but you must wait a little while, for I am tired. I wish to rest. When I have rested, I will come over and wrestle with you.” Now, while he was resting, he saw many large knives sticking up from the ground almost hidden by straw. Then he knew that the woman killed the people she wrestled with by throwing them down on the knives. When he was rested, he went on. The woman asked him to stand up in the place where he had seen the knives; but he said, “No, I am not quite ready. Let us play a little, before we begin.” So he began to play with the woman, but quickly caught hold of her, threw her upon the knives, and cut her in two.
Blood Clot took up his travels again, and after a while came to a camp where there were some old women. The old women told him that a little farther on he would come to a woman with a swing, but on no account must he ride with her. After a time he came to a place where he saw a swing on the bank of a swift stream. There was a woman swinging on it. He watched her a while, and saw that she killed people by swinging them out and dropping them into the water. When he found this out, he came up to the woman. “You have a swing here; let me see you swing,” he said. “No,” said the woman, “I want to see you swing.” “Well,” said Blood Clot, “but you must swing first.” “Well,” said the woman, “now I shall swing. Watch me. Then I shall see you do it.” So the woman swung out over the stream. As she did this, he saw how it worked. Then he said to the woman, “You swing again while I am getting ready”; but as the woman swung out this time, he cut the vine and let her drop into the water. This happened on Cut Bank Creek.[17]
We are familiar with such deeds from our Jack-the-Giant-Killer nursery tales and the classical accounts of the labors of such heroes as Herakles and Theseus. They abound also in the legends of the Christian saints, as in the following charming French tale of Saint Martha.
There was at that time on the banks of the Rhône, in a forest situated between Avignon and Arles, a dragon, half animal, half fish, larger than an ox, longer than a horse, with teeth as sharp as horns, and great wings at either side of its body; and this monster slew all the travelers and sank all the boats. It had arrived by sea from Galatia. Its parents were the Leviathan — a monster in the form of a serpent that dwelt in the sea — and the Onager — a terrible beast bred in Galatia, which burns with fire everything it touches.
Now Saint Martha, at the earnest request of the people, went against the dragon. Having found it in the forest, in the act of devouring a man, she sprinkled holy water on it and exhibited a crucifix. Immediately, the monster, vanquished, came like a lamb to the side of the saint, who passed her belt around its neck and conducted it to the neighboring village. There the populace slew it with stones and staffs.
And since the dragon had been known to the people under the name of Tarasque, the town took the name of Tarascon, in remembrance. Up to then it had been called Nerluc, which is to say, Black Lake, on account of the somber forests which there bordered the stream.[18]
The warrior-kings of antiquity regarded their work in the spirit of the monster-slayer. This formula, indeed, of the shining hero going against the dragon has been the great device of self-justification for all crusades. Numberless memorial tablets have been composed with the grandiose complacency of the following cuneiform of Sargon of Akkad, destroyer of the ancient cities of the Sumerians, from whom his own people had derived their civilization.
Sargon, king of Akkad, viceregent of the goddess Ishtar, king of Kish, pashishu* of the god Anu, King of the Land, great ishakku* of of the god Enlil: the city of Uruk he smote and its wall he destroyed. With the people of Uruk, he battled and he captured him and in fetters led him through the gate of Enlil. Sargon, king of Akkad, battled with the man of Ur and vanquished him; his city he smote and its wall he destroyed. E-Ninmar he smote and its wall he destroyed, and its entire territory, from Lagash to the sea, he smote. His weapons he washed in the sea.... 4. The Hero as Lover
The hegemony wrested from the enemy, the freedom won from the malice of the monster, the life energy released from the toils of the tyrant Holdfast — is symbolized as a woman. She is the maiden of the innumerable dragon slayings, the bride abducted from the jealous father, the virgin rescued from the unholy lover. She is the “other portion” of the hero himself — for “each is both”: if his stature is that of world monarch she is the world, and if he is a warrior she is fame. She is the image of his destiny which he is to release from the prison of enveloping circumstance. But where he is ignorant of his destiny, or deluded by false considerations, no effort on his part will overcome the obstacles.*
The magnificent youth Cuchulainn, at the court of his uncle, Conchobar the king, aroused the anxiety of the barons for the virtue of their wives. They suggested that he should be found a wife of his own. Messengers of the king went out to every province of Ireland, but could find no one he would woo. Then Cuchulainn himself went to a maiden that he knew in Luglochta Loga, “the Gardens of Lugh.” And he found her on her playing field, with her foster-sisters around her, teaching them needlework and fine handiwork. Emer lifted up her lovely face and recognized Cuchulainn, and she said: “May you be safe from every harm!”
When the girl’s father, Forgall the Wily, was told that the couple had talked together, he contrived to send Cuchulainn off to learn battle skills from Donall the Soldierly in Alba, supposing the youth would never return. And Donall set him a further task, namely, to make the impossible journey to a certain warrior-woman, Scathach, and then compel her to give him instruction in her arts of supernatural valor. Cuchulainn’s hero-journey exhibits with extraordinary simplicity and clarity all the essential elements of the classic accomplishment of the impossible task.
The way was across a plain of ill luck: on the hither half of it the feet of men would stick fast; on the farther half the grass would rise and hold them fast on the points of its blades. But a fair youth appeared who presented to Cuchulainn a wheel and an apple. Across the first part of the plain the wheel would roll just ahead, and across the second the apple. Cuchulainn had only to keep to their thin guiding line, without a step to either side, and he would come across to the narrow and dangerous glen beyond.
The residence of Scathach was on an island, and this island was approached by a difficult bridge only: it had two low ends and the midspace high, and whenever anybody leaped on one end of it, the other head would lift itself up and throw him on his back. Cuchulainn was thrown three times. Then his distortion came upon him, and, gathering himself, he jumped on the head of the bridge, and made the hero’s salmon-leap, so that he landed on the middle of it; and the other head of the bridge had not fully raised itself up when he reached it, and threw himself from it, and was on the ground of the island.
The warrior-woman Scathach had a daughter — as the monster so often has — and this young maid in her isolation had never beheld anything approaching the beauty of the young man who came down from the mid-air into her mother’s fortress. When she had heard from the youth what his project was, she described to him the best manner of approach to persuade her mother to teach him the secrets of supernatural valor. He should go through his hero’s salmon-leap to the great yew tree where Scathach was giving instruction to her sons, set his sword between her breasts, and state his demand.
Cuchulainn, following instructions, won from the warrior-sorceress acquaintance with her feats, marriage to her daughter without payment of a bride-price, knowledge of his future, and sexual intercourse with herself. He remained a year, during which he assisted in a great battle against the Amazon Aife, on whom he begot a son. Finally, slaying a hag who disputed with him a narrow path along the edge of a cliff, he started home for Ireland.
One further adventure of battle and love, and Cuchulainn returned to find Forgall the Wily still against him. He simply carried the daughter off this time, and they were married at the court of the king. The adventure itself had given him the capacity to annihilate all opposition. The only annoyance was that uncle Conchobar, the king, exercised on the bride his royal prerogative before she passed officially to the groom.[19]
The motif of the difficult task as prerequisite to the bridal bed has spun the hero-deeds of all time and all the world. In stories of this pattern the parent is in the role of Holdfast; the hero’s artful solution of the task amounts to a slaying of the dragon. The tests imposed are difficult beyond measure. They seem to represent an absolute refusal, on the part of the parent ogre, to permit life to go its way; nevertheless, when a fit candidate appears, no task in the world is beyond his skill. Unpredicted helpers, miracles of time and space, further his project; destiny itself (the maiden) lends a hand and betrays a weak spot in the parental system. Barriers, fetters, chasms, fronts of every kind dissolve before the authoritative presence of the hero. The eye of the ordained victor immediately perceives the chink in every fortress of circumstance, and his blow can cleave it wide.
The most eloquent and deep-driving of the traits in this colorful adventure of Cuchulainn is that of the unique, invisible path, which was opened to the hero with the rolling of the wheel and the apple. This is to be read as symbolic and instructive of the miracle of destiny. To a man not led astray from himself by sentiments stemming from the surfaces of what he sees, but courageously responding to the dynamics of his own nature — to a man who is, as Nietzsche phrases it, “a wheel rolling of itself” — difficulties melt and the unpredictable highway opens as he goes. 5. The Hero as Emperor and as Tyrant
The hero of action is the agent of the cycle, continuing into the living moment the impulse that first moved the world. Because our eyes are closed to the paradox of the double focus, we regard the deed as accomplished amid danger and great pain by a vigorous arm, whereas from the other perspective it is, like the archetypal dragon-slaying of Tiamat by Marduk, only a bringing to pass of the inevitable.
The supreme hero, however, is not the one who merely continues the dynamics of the cosmogonic round, but he who reopens the eye — so that through all the comings and goings, delights and agonies of the world panorama, the One Presence will be seen again. This requires a deeper wisdom than the other, and results in a pattern not of action but of significant representation. The symbol of the first is the virtuous sword, of the second, the scepter of dominion, or the book of the law. The characteristic adventure of the first is the winning of the bride — the bride is life. The adventure of the second is the going to the father — the father is the invisible unknown.
Adventures of the second type fit directly into the patterns of religious iconography. Even in a simple folktale a depth is suddenly sounded when the son of the virgin one day asks of his mother: “Who is my father?” The question touches the problem of man and the invisible. The familiar myth-motifs of the atonement inevitably follow.
The Pueblo hero, Water Jar Boy, asked the question of his mother.
“Who is my father?” he said. “I don’t know,” she said. He asked her again, “Who is my father?” but she just kept on crying and did not answer. “Where is my father’s home?” he asked. She could not tell him. “Tomorrow I am going to find my father.” — “You cannot find your father,” she said. “I never go with any boy, so there is no place where you can look for your father.” But the boy said, “I have a father, I know where he is living, I am going to see him.” The mother did not want him to go, but he wanted to go. So early next morning she fixed a lunch for him, and he went off to the south-east where they called the spring Waiyu powidi, Horse mesa point. He was coming close to that spring, he saw somebody walking a little way from the spring. He went up to him. It was a man. He asked the boy, “Where are you going?” — “I am going to see my father,” he said. “Who is your father?” said the man. “Well, my father is living in this spring.” — “You will never find your father.” — “Well, I want to go into the spring, he is living inside it.” — “Who is your father?” said the man again, “Well, I think you are my father,” said the boy. “How do you know I am your father?” said the man. “Well, I know you are my father.” Then the man just looked at him, to scare him. The boy kept saying, “You are my father.” Pretty soon the man said, “Yes, I am your father. I came out of that spring to meet you,” and he put his arm around the boy’s neck. His father was very glad his boy had come, and he took him down inside the spring.[20]
Where the goal of the hero’s effort is the discovery of the unknown father, the basic symbolism remains that of the tests and the self-revealing way. In the above example the test is reduced to the persistent questions and a frightening look. In the earlier tale of the clam wife, the sons were tried with the bamboo knife. We have seen, in our review of the adventure of the hero, to what degrees the severity of the father can go. For the congregation of Jonathan Edwards he became a veritable ogre.
The hero blessed by the father returns to represent the father among men. As teacher (Moses) or as emperor (Huang Ti), his word is law. Since he is now centered in the source, he makes visible the repose and harmony of the central place. He is a reflection of the World Axis from which the concentric circles spread — the World Mountain, the World Tree — he is the perfect microcosmic mirror of the macrocosm. To see him is to perceive the meaning of existence. From his presence boons go out; his word is the wind of life.
But a deterioration may take place in the character of the representative of the father. Such a crisis is described in the Zoroastrian Persian legend of the Emperor of the Golden Age, Jemshid.
All looked upon the throne, and heard and saw
Nothing but Jemshid, he alone was King,
Absorbing every thought; and in their praise
And adoration of that mortal man,
Forgot the worship of the great Creator.
Then proudly he to his nobles spoke,
Intoxicated with their loud applause,
“I am unequalled, for to me the earth
Owes all its science, never did exist
A sovereignty like mine, beneficent
And glorious, driving from the populous land
Disease and want. Domestic joy and rest
Proceed from me, all that is good and great
Waits my behest; the universal voice
Declares the splendor of my government,
Beyond whatever human heart conceived,
And me the only monarch of the world.”
— Soon as these words had parted from his lips
Words impious, and insulting to high heaven,
His earthly grandeur faded — then all tongues
Grew clamorous and bold. The day of Jemshid
Passed into gloom, his brightness all obscured.
What said the Moralist? “When thou wert a king
Thy subjects were obedient, but whoever
Proudly neglects the worship of his God
Brings desolation on his house and home.”
— And when he marked the insolence of his people,
He knew the wrath of heaven had been provoked,
And terror overcame him.[21]
Persian mythology is rooted in the common Indo-European system that was carried out of the Aral-Caspian steppes into India and Iran, as well as into Europe. The principal divinities of the earliest sacred writings (Avesta) of the Persians correspond very closely to those of the earliest Indian texts (Vedas). But the two branches came under greatly differing influences in their new homes, the Vedic tradition submitting gradually to Dravidian Indian forces, the Persian to Sumero-Babylonian.
Early in the first millennium b.c., Persian belief was reorganized by the prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster) according to a strict dualism of good and evil principles, light and dark, angels and devils. This crisis profoundly affected not only the Persian, but also the subject Hebrew beliefs, and thereby (centuries later) Christianity. It represents a radical departure from the more usual mythological interpretation of good and evil as effects proceeding from a unique source of being that transcends and reconciles all polarity.
Persia was overrun by the zealots of Mohammed, a.d. 642. Those not converted were put to the sword. A poor remnant took refuge in India, where they survive to this day as the Parsis (“Persians”) of Bombay. After a period of some three centuries, however, a Mohammedan-Persian literary “Restoration” took place. The great names are: Firdausi (940–1020?), Omar Khayyam (?–1123?), Nizami (1140–1203), Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–1273), Saadi (1184–1291), Hafiz (?–1389?), and Jami (1414–1492). Firdausi’s Shah Nameh (“Epic of Kings”) is a rehearsal in simple and stately narrative verse of the story of ancient Persia down to the Mohammedan conquest.
No longer referring the boons of his reign to their transcendent source, the emperor breaks the stereoptic vision which it is his role to sustain. He is no longer the mediator between the two worlds. Man’s perspective flattens to include only the human term of the equation, and the experience of a supernal power immediately fails. The upholding idea of the community is lost. Force is all that binds it. The emperor becomes the tyrant ogre (Herod-Nimrod), the usurper from whom the world is now to be saved.
Figure 74. Young Maize God (carved stone, Mayan, Honduras, c. a.d. 680–750) 6. The Hero as World Redeemer
Two degrees of initiation are to be distinguished in the mansion of the father. From the first the son returns as emissary, but from the second, with the knowledge that “I and the father are one.” Heroes of this second, highest illumination are the world redeemers, the so-called incarnations, in the highest sense. Their myths open out to cosmic proportions. Their words carry an authority beyond anything pronounced by the heroes of the scepter and the book.
“All of you watch me. Don’t look around,” said the hero of the Jicarilla Apache, Killer-of-Enemies;
Listen to what I say. The world is just as big as my body. The world is as large as my word. And the world is as large as my prayers. The sky is only as large as my words and prayers. The seasons are only as great as my body, my words, and my prayer. It is the same with the waters; my body, my words, my prayer are greater than the waters.
Whoever believes me, whoever listens to what I say, will have long life. One who doesn’t listen, who thinks in some evil way, will have a short life.
Don’t think I am in the east, south, west, or north. The earth is my body. I am there. I am all over. Don’t think I stay only under the earth or up in the sky, or only in the seasons, or on the other side of the waters. These are all my body. It is the truth that the underworld, the sky, the seasons, the waters, are all my body. I am all over.
I have already given you that with which you have to make an offering to me. You have two kinds of pipe and you have the mountain tobacco.[22]
The work of the incarnation is to refute by his presence the pretensions of the tyrant ogre. The latter has occluded the source of grace with the shadow of his limited personality; the incarnation, utterly free of such ego-consciousness, is a direct manifestation of the law. On a grandiose scale he enacts the hero-life — performs the hero-deeds, slays the monster — but it is all with the freedom of a work done only to make evident to the eye what might have been accomplished equally well with a mere thought.
Kans, the cruel uncle of Kṛṣṇa, usurper of his own father’s throne in the city of Mathurā, heard a voice one day that said to him: “Thy enemy is born, thy death is certain.” Kṛṣṇa and his elder brother Balarāma had been spirited to the cowherds from their mother’s womb to protect them from this Indian counterpart of Nimrod. And he had sent demons after them — Pūtanā of the poison milk was the first — but all had been undone. Now when his devices had failed, Kans determined to lure the youths to his city. A messenger was sent to invite the cowherds to a sacrifice and great tournament. The invitation was accepted. With the brothers among them, the cowherds came and camped outside the city wall.
Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma, his brother, went in to see the wonders of the town. There were great gardens, palaces, and groves. They encountered a washerman and asked him for some fine clothes; when he laughed and refused, they took the clothes by force and made themselves very gay. Then a hump-backed woman prayed Kṛṣṇa to let her rub sandal-paste on his body. He went up to her, placing his feet on hers, and with two fingers beneath her chin, lifted her up and made her straight and fair. And he said: “When I have slain Kans I shall come back and be with you.”
The brothers came to the empty stadium. There the bow of the god Śiva was set up, huge as three palm trees, great and heavy. Kṛṣṇa advanced to the bow, pulled it, and it broke with a mighty noise. Kans in his palace heard the sound and was appalled.
The tyrant sent his troops to kill the brothers in the city. But the lads slew the soldiers and returned to their camp. They told the cowherds they had had an interesting tour, then ate their suppers, and went to bed.
Kans that night had ominous dreams. When he woke, he ordered the stadium prepared for the tournament and the trumpets blown for assembly. Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma arrived as jugglers, followed by the cowherds, their friends. When they entered the gate, there was a furious elephant ready to crush them, mighty as ten thousand common elephants. The driver rode it directly at Kṛṣṇa. Balarāma gave it such a blow with his fist that it halted, started back. The driver rode it again, but the two brothers struck it to the ground, and it was dead.
The youths walked onto the field. Everybody saw what his own nature revealed to him: the wrestlers thought Kṛṣṇa a wrestler, the women thought him the treasure of beauty, the gods knew him as their lord, and Kans thought he was Māra, Death himself. When he had undone every one of the wrestlers sent against him, slaying finally the strongest, he leapt to the royal dais, dragged the tyrant by the hair, and killed him. Men, gods, and saints were delighted, but the king’s wives came forth to mourn. Kṛṣṇa, seeing their grief, comforted them with his primal wisdom: “Mother,” he said, “do not grieve. No one can live and not die. To imagine oneself as possessing anything is to be mistaken; nobody is father, mother, or son. There is only the continuous round of birth and death.”[23]
The legends of the redeemer describe the period of desolation as caused by a moral fault on the part of man (Adam in the garden, Jemshid on the throne). Yet from the standpoint of the cosmogonic cycle, a regular alternation of fair and foul is characteristic of the spectacle of time. Just as in the history of the universe, so also in that of nations: emanation leads to dissolution, youth to age, birth to death, form-creative vitality to the dead weight of inertia. Life surges, precipitating forms, and then ebbs, leaving jetsam behind. The golden age, the reign of the world emperor, alternates, in the pulse of every moment of life, with the waste land, the reign of the tyrant. The god who is the creator becomes the destroyer in the end.
From this point of view the tyrant ogre is no less representative of the father than the earlier world emperor whose position he usurped, or than the brilliant hero (the son) who is to supplant him. He is the representative of the set-fast, as the hero is the carrier of the changing. And since every moment of time bursts free from the fetters of the moment before, so this dragon, Holdfast, is pictured as of the generation immediately preceding that of the savior of the world.
Stated in direct terms: the work of the hero is to slay the tenacious aspect of the father (dragon, tester, ogre king) and release from its ban the vital energies that will feed the universe.
This can be done either in accordance with the Father’s will or against his will; he [the Father] may “choose death for his children’s sake,” or it may be that the Gods impose the passion upon him, making him their sacrificial victim. These are not contradictory doctrines, but different ways of telling one and the same story; in reality, Slayer and Dragon, sacrificer and victim, are of one mind behind the scenes, where there is no polarity of contraries, but mortal enemies on the stage, where the everlasting war of the Gods and the Titans is displayed. In any case, the Dragon-Father remains a Pleroma, no more diminished by what he exhales than he is increased by what he repossesses. He is the Death, on whom our life depends; and to the question “Is Death one, or many?” the answer is made that “He is one as he is there, but many as he is in his children here.”[24]
The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.
From the point of view of the present there is such a recklessness in this deliverance of the future that it appears to be nihilistic. The words of Kṛṣṇa, the world savior, to the wives of the dead Kans carry a frightening overtone; so do the words of Jesus: “I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”[25] To protect the unprepared, mythology veils such ultimate revelations under half-obscuring guises, while yet insisting on the gradually instructive form. The savior figure who eliminates the tyrant father and then himself assumes the crown is (like Oedipus) stepping into his sire’s stead. To soften the harsh patricide, the legend represents the father as some cruel uncle or usurping Nimrod. Nevertheless, the half-hidden fact remains. Once it is glimpsed, the entire spectacle buckles: the son slays the father, but the son and the father are one. The enigmatical figures dissolve back into the primal chaos. This is the wisdom of the end (and rebeginning) of the world. 7. The Hero as Saint
Before we proceed to the last episode of the life, one more hero-type remains to be mentioned: the saint or ascetic, the world-renouncer.
Endowed with a pure understanding, restraining the self with firmness, turning away from sound and other objects, and abandoning love and hatred; dwelling in solitude, eating but little, controlling the speech, body, and mind, ever engaged in meditation and concentration, and cultivating freedom from passion; forsaking conceit and power, pride and lust, wrath and possessions, tranquil in heart, and free from ego — he becomes worthy of becoming one with the imperishable.[26]
The pattern is that of going to the father, but to the unmanifest rather than the manifest aspect: taking the step that the Bodhisattva renounced: that from which there is no return. Not the paradox of the dual perspective, but the ultimate claim of the unseen is here intended. The ego is burnt out. Like a dead leaf in a breeze, the body continues to move about the earth, but the soul has dissolved already in the ocean of bliss.
Thomas Aquinas, as the result of a mystical experience while celebrating mass in Naples, put his pen and ink on the shelf and left the last chapters of his Summa Theologica to be completed by another hand. “My writing days,” he stated, “are over; for such things have been revealed to me that all I have written and taught seems of but small account to me, wherefore I hope in my God, that, even as the end has come to my teaching, so it may soon come in my life.” Shortly thereafter, in his forty-ninth year, he died.
Beyond life, these heroes are beyond the myth also. Neither do they treat of it anymore, nor can the myth properly treat of them. Their legends are rehearsed, but the pious sentiments and lessons of the biographies are necessarily inadequate; little better than bathos. They have stepped away from the realm of forms, into which the incarnation descends and in which the Bodhisattva remains, the realm of the manifest profile of The Great Face. Once the hidden profile has been discovered, myth is the penultimate, silence the ultimate, word. The moment the spirit passes to the hidden, silence alone remains.
Figure 75. Oedipus Plucking Out His Eyes (detail; carved stone, Roman, Italy, c. second–third century a.d.)
King Oedipus came to know that the woman he had married was his mother, the man he had slain his father; he plucked his eyes out and wandered in penance over the earth. The Freudians declare that each of us is slaying his father, marrying his mother, all the time — only unconsciously: the roundabout symbolic ways of doing this and the rationalizations of the consequent compulsive activity constitute our individual lives and common civilization. Should the feelings chance to become aware of the real import of the world’s acts and thoughts, one would know what Oedipus knew: the flesh would suddenly appear to be an ocean of self-violation. This is the sense of the legend of Pope Gregory the Great, born of incest, living in incest. Aghast, he flees to a rock in the sea, and there does penance for his very life.
The tree has now become the cross: the White Youth sucking milk has become the Crucified swallowing gall. Corruption crawls where before was the blossom of spring. Yet beyond this threshold of the cross — for the cross is a way (the sun door), not an end — is beatitude in God.
He has placed his seal upon me that I may prefer no love to Him.
The winter has passed; the turtle dove sings; the vineyards burst into blossom.
With His own ring my Lord Jesus Christ has wed me, and crowned me with a crown as His bride.
The robe with which the Lord has clothed me is a robe of splendor with gold interwove, and the necklace with which He had adorned me is beyond all price.[27] 8. Departure of the Hero
The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure. Here the whole sense of the life is epitomized. Needless to say, the hero would be no hero if death held for him any terror; the first condition is reconciliation with the grave.
While sitting under the oak of Mamre, Abraham perceived a flashing of light and a smell of sweet odor, and turning around he saw Death coming toward him in great glory and beauty. And Death said unto Abraham: “Think not, Abraham, that this beauty is mine, or that I come thus to every man. Nay, but if any one is righteous like thee, I thus take a crown and come to him, but if he is a sinner, I come in great corruption, and out of their sins I make a crown for my head, and I shake them with great fear, so that they are dismayed.” Abraham said to him, “And art thou, indeed, he that is called Death?” He answered, and said, “I am the bitter name,” but Abraham answered, “I will not go with thee.” And Abraham said to Death, “Show us thy corruption.” And Death revealed his corruption, showing two heads, the one had the face of a serpent, the other head was like a sword. All the servants of Abraham, looking at the fierce mien of Death, died, but Abraham prayed to the Lord, and he raised them up. As the looks of Death were not able to cause Abraham’s soul to depart from him, God removed the soul of Abraham as in a dream, and the archangel Michael took it up into heaven. After great praise and glory had been given to the Lord by the angels who brought Abraham’s soul, and after Abraham bowed down to worship, then came the voice of God, saying thus: “Take My friend Abraham into Paradise, where are the tabernacles of My righteous ones and the abodes of My saints Isaac and Jacob in his bosom, where there is no trouble, nor grief, nor sighing, but peace and rejoicing and life unending.”[28]
Compare the following dream:
I was on a bridge where I met a blind fiddler. Everyone was tossing coins into his hat. I came closer and perceived that the musician was not blind. He had a squint, and was looking at me with a crooked glance from the side. Suddenly, there was a little old woman sitting at the side of a road. It was dark and I was afraid. “Where does this road lead?” I thought. A young peasant came along the road and took me by the hand. “Do you want to come home,” he said, “and drink coffee?” “Let me go! You are holding too tight!” I cried, and awoke.[29]
The hero, who in his life represented the dual perspective, after his death is still a synthesizing image: like Charlemagne, he sleeps only and will arise in the hour of destiny, or he is among us under another form.
The Aztecs tell of the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, monarch of the ancient city of Tollan in the golden age of its prosperity. He was the teacher of the arts, originator of the calendar, and the giver of maize. He and his people were overcome, at the close of their time, by the stronger magic of an invading race, the Aztecs. Tezcatlipoca, the warrior-hero of the younger people and their era, broke the city of Tollan; and the feathered serpent, king of the golden age, burned his dwellings behind him, buried his treasures in the mountains, transformed his chocolate trees into mesquite, commanded the multi-colored birds, his servants, to fly before him, and departed in great sorrow. And he came to a city called Quauhtitlan, where there was a tree, very tall and large; and he went over to the tree, sat down beneath it, and gazed into a mirror that was brought to him. “I am old,” he said; and the place was named “The old Quauhtitlan.” Resting again at another place along the way, and looking back in the direction of his Tollan, he wept, and his tears went through a rock. He left in that place the mark of his sitting and the impress of his palms. He was met and challenged, further along, by a group of necromancers, who prohibited him from proceeding until he had left with them the knowledge of working silver, wood, and feathers, and the art of painting. As he crossed the mountains, all of his attendants, who were dwarfs and humpbacks, died of cold. At another place he encountered his antagonist, Tezcatlipoca, who defeated him at a game of ball. At still another he aimed with an arrow at a large póchotl tree; the arrow too was an entire póchotl tree; so that when he shot it through the first they formed a cross. And so he passed along, leaving many signs and place-names behind him, until, coming at last to the sea, he departed on a raft of serpents. It is not known how he arrived at his destination, Tlapállan, his original home.[30]
Or, according to another tradition, at the shore he immolated himself upon a funeral pyre, and birds with multi-colored feathers arose from his ashes. His soul became the Morning Star.[31]
The life-eager hero can resist death, and postpone his fate for a certain time. It is written that Cuchulainn in his sleep heard a cry, “so terrible and fearful, that he fell out of his bed upon the ground, like a sack, in the east wing of the house.” He rushed forth without weapons, followed by Emer, his wife, who carried his arms and garments. And he discovered a chariot harnessed with a chestnut horse that had but one leg, the pole passing through its body and out at the forehead. Within sat a woman, her eyebrows red, and a crimson mantel round her. A very big man walked along beside, also in a coat of crimson, carrying a forked staff of hazelwood and driving a cow.
Cuchulainn claimed the cow as his own, the woman challenged him, and Cuchulainn then demanded to know why she was speak-ing instead of the big man. She answered that the man was Uar-gaeth-sceo Luachair-sceo. “Well to be sure,” said Cuchulainn, “the length of the name is astonishing!” “The woman to whom you speak,” said the big man, “is called Faebor beg-beoil cuimdiuir folt sceub-gairit sceo uath.” “You are making a fool of me,” said Cuchulainn; and he made a leap into the chariot, put his two feet on her two shoulders, and his spear on the parting of her hair. “Do not play your sharp weapons on me!” she said. “Then tell me your true name,” said Cuchulainn. “Go further off from me then,” said she; “I am a female satirist, and I carry off this cow as a reward for a poem.” “Let us hear your poem,” said Cuchulainn. “Only move further off,” said the woman; “your shaking over my head will not influence me.”
Cuchulainn moved off until he was between the two wheels of the chariot. The woman sang at him a song of challenge and insult. He prepared to spring again, but, in an instant, horse, woman, chariot, man, and cow had disappeared, and on the branch of a tree was a black bird.
“A dangerous enchanted woman you are!” said Cuchulainn to the black bird; for he now realized that she was the battle goddess, Badb, or Morrigan. “If I had only known that it was you, we should not have parted thus.” “What you have done,” replied the bird, “will bring you ill luck.” “You cannot harm me,” said Cuchulainn. “Certainly I can,” said the woman; “I am guarding your deathbed, and I shall be guarding it henceforth.”
Then the enchantress told him that she was taking the cow from the fairy hill of Cruachan to be bred by the bull of the big man, who was Cuailgne; and when her calf was a year old Cuchulainn would die. She herself would come against him when he would be engaged at a certain ford with a man “as strong, as victorious, as dexterous, as terrible, as untiring, as noble, as brave, as great” as himself. “I will become an eel,” she said, “and I will throw a noose round thy feet in the ford.” Cuchulainn exchanged threats with her, and she disappeared into the ground. But the following year, at the foretold foray at the ford, he overcame her, and actually lived to die another day.[32]
A curious, perhaps playful, echo of the symbolism of salvation in a yonder world dimly sounds in the final passage of the Pueblo folktale of Water Jar Boy.
A lot of people were living down inside the spring, women and girls. They all ran to the boy and put their arms around him because they were glad their child had come to their house. Thus the boy found his father and his aunts, too. Well, the boy stayed there one night and next day he went back home and told his mother he had found his father. Then his mother got sick and died. Then the boy said to himself, “No use for me to live with these people.” So he left them and went to the spring. And there was his mother. That was the way he and his mother went to live with his father. His father was Avaiyo’ pi’i (water snake red). He said he could not live with them over at Sikyat’ki. That was the reason he made the boy’s mother sick so she died and “came over here to live with me,” said his father. “Now we will live here together,” said Avaiyo’ to his son. That’s the way that boy and his mother went to the spring to live there.[33]
This story, like that of the clam wife, repeats point for point the mythical narrative. The two stories are charming in their apparent innocence of their power. At the opposite extreme is the account of the death of the Buddha: humorous, like all great myth, but conscious to the last degree.
The Blessed One, accompanied by a large congregation of priests, drew near to the further bank of the Hirannavati river, and to the city of Kusinara and the sal-tree grove Upavattana of the Mallas; and having drawn near, he addressed the venerable Ananda:
“Be so good, Ananda, as to spread me a couch with its head to the north between twin sal-trees. I am weary, Ananda, and wish to lie down.”
“Yes, Reverend Sir,” said the venerable Ananda to The Blessed One in assent, and spread the couch with its head to the north between twin sal-trees. Then The Blessed One lay down on his right side after the manner of a lion, and placing foot on foot, remained mindful and conscious.
Now at that time the twin sal-trees had completely burst forth into bloom, though it was not the flowering season; and the blossoms scattered themselves over the body of The Tathāgata, and strewed and sprinkled themselves in worship of The Tathāgata.* Also heavenly sandal-wood powder fell from the sky; and this scattered itself over the body of The Tathāgata, and strewed and sprinkled itself in worship of The Tathāgata. And music sounded in the sky in worship of The Tathāgata, and heavenly choruses were heard to sing in worship of The Tathāgata.
During the conversations which then took place, as The Tathā-gata lay like a lion on his side, a large priest, the venerable Upavana, stood in front, fanning him. The Blessed One briefly ordered him to step aside; whereupon the body attendant of The Blessed One, Ananda, complained to The Blessed One. “Reverend Sir,” he said, “what, pray, was the reason, and what was the cause, that The Blessed One was harsh to the venerable Upavana, saying, ‘Step aside, O priest; stand not in front of me’?”
The Blessed One replied:
Ananda, almost all the deities throughout ten worlds have come together to behold The Tathāgata. For an extent, Ananda, of twelve leagues about the city Kusinara and the sal-tree grove Upavattana of the Mallas, there is not a spot of ground large enough to stick the point of a hair into, that is not pervaded by powerful deities. And these deities, Ananda, are angered, saying, “From afar have we come to behold The Tathāgata, for but seldom, and on rare occasions, does a Tathāgata, a saint, and Supreme Buddha arise in the world; and now, to-night, in the last watch, will The Tathāgata pass into Nirvana; but this powerful priest stands in front of The Blessed One, concealing him, and we have no chance to see The Tathāgata, although his last moments are near.” Thus Ananda, are these deities angered.
“What are the deities doing, Reverend Sir, whom The Blessed One perceives?”
“Some of the deities, Ananda, are in the air with their minds engrossed by earthly things, and they let fly their hair and cry aloud, and stretch out their arms and cry aloud, and fall headlong to the ground and roll to and fro, saying, ‘All too soon will The Blessed One pass into Nirvana; all too soon will The Light of The World vanish from sight!’ Some of the deities, Ananda, are on the earth with their minds engrossed by earthly things, and they let fly their hair and cry aloud, and stretch out their arms and cry aloud, and fall headlong on the ground and roll to and fro, saying, ‘All too soon will The Blessed One pass into Nirvana; all too soon will The Happy One pass into Nirvana; all too soon will The Light of The World vanish from sight.’ But those deities which are free from passion, mindful and conscious, bear it patiently, saying, ‘Transitory are all things. How is it possible that whatever has been born, has come into being, and is organized and perishable, should not perish? That condition is not possible.’”
The last conversations continued for some time, and during the course of them The Blessed One gave consolation to his priests. Then he addressed them:
“And now, O priests, I take my leave of you; all the constituents of being are transitory; work out your salvation with diligence.”
And this was the last word of The Tathāgata.
Figure 76. Death of the Buddha (carved stone, India, late fifth century a.d.)
Thereupon The Blessed One entered the first trance; and rising from the first trance, he entered the second trance; and rising from the second trance, he entered the third trance; and rising from the third trance, he entered the fourth trance; and rising from the fourth trance, he entered the realm of the infinity of space; and rising from the realm of the infinity of space, he entered the realm of the infinity of consciousness; and rising from the realm of the infinity of consciousness, he entered the realm of nothingness; and rising from the realm of nothingness, he entered the realm of neither perception nor yet non-perception; and rising from the realm of neither perception nor yet non-perception, he arrived at the cessation of perception and sensation.
Thereupon the venerable Ananda spoke to the venerable Anuruddha as follows:
“Reverend Anuruddha, The Blessed One has passed into nirvāṇa.”
“Nay, brother Ananda, The Blessed One has not yet passed into nirvāṇa; he has arrived at the cessation of perception and sensation.”
Thereupon The Blessed One rising from the cessation of his perception and sensation, entered the realm of neither perception nor yet non-perception; and rising from the realm of neither perception nor yet non-perception, he entered the realm of nothingness; and rising from the realm of nothingness, he entered the realm of infinity of consciousness; and rising from the realm of infinity of consciousness, he entered the realm of the infinity of space; and rising from the realm of the infinity of space, he entered the fourth trance; and rising from the fourth trance, he entered the third trance; and rising from the third trance, he entered the second trance; and rising from the second trance, he entered the first trance; and rising from the first trance, he entered the second trance; and rising from the second trance, he entered the third trance; and rising from the third trance, he entered the fourth trance; and rising from the fourth trance, immediately The Blessed One passed into nirvāṇa.[34]
Footnotes
* One of a class of priests entrusted with the preparation and application of the sacred ointments.
* Chief priest, governing as viceregent of the god.
* An amusing and instructive example of a great hero’s abject failure will be found in the Finnish Kalevala, Runos IV–VIII, where Väinämöinen fails in his wooing, first of Aino, and then of the “maid of Pohjola.” The story is much too long for the present context.
* Tathāgata: “arrived at or being in (gata) such a state or condition (tathā)”: i.e., an Enlightened One, a Buddha.
Endnotes
[1] Giles, op cit., pp. 233–34; Rev. J. MacGowan, The Imperial History of China (Shanghai, 1906), pp. 4–5; Friedrich Hirth, The Ancient History of China (Columbia University Press, 1908), pp. 8–9.
[2] Giles, op cit., p. 656; MacGowan, op cit., pp. 5–6; Hirth, op cit., pp. 10–12.
[3] Giles, op cit., p. 338; MacGowan, op cit., pp. 6–8; Edouard Chavannes, Les mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien (Paris, 1895–1905), vol. I, pp. 25–36. See also John C. Ferguson, Chinese Mythology (“The Mythology of All Races,” vol. VIII, Boston, 1928), pp. 27–28, 29–31.
[4] These three legends appear in the excellent psychological study by Dr. Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Nervous and Mental Disease Monographs; New York, 1910). A variant of the third appears in the Gesta Romanorum, Tale LXXXI.
[5] The Charlemagne cycles are exhaustively discussed by Joseph Bédier, Les légendes épiques (3rd ed.; Paris, 1926).
[6] Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1911), vol. III, pp. 90–94.
[7] George Bird Grinnell, Blackfoot Lodge Tales (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892, 1916), pp. 31–32.
[8] Elsie Clews Parsons, Tewa Tales (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, XIX, 1926), p. 193.
[9] Adapted from Sister Nivedita and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1914), pp. 221–32.
[10] Parsons, op cit., p. 193.
[11] “Táin bó Cúalnge” (from the version in the Book of Leinster, 62 a–b): edited by Wh. Stokes and E. Windisch, Irische Texte (Extraband zu Serie I bis IV; Leipzig, 1905), pp. 106–17; English translation in Eleanor Hull’s The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature (London, 1898), pp. 135–37.
[12] Book of Leinster, 64b–67b (Stokes and Windisch, op cit., pp. 130–69); Hull, op cit., pp. 142–54.
[13] From Eleanor Hull, op cit., p. 154; translated from the Book of Leinster, 68a (Stokes and Windisch, op cit., pp. 168–71).
[14] Hull, op cit., pp. 174–76; from the Book of Leinster, 77 (Stokes and Windisch, op cit., pp. 368–77). Compare the transfiguration of Kṛṣṇa, pp. 198–201; see also Fig. 32.
[15] Uno Holmberg (Uno Harva), Der Baum des Lebens (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Ser. B, Tom. XVI, No. 3; Helsinki, 1923), pp. 57–59; from N. Gorochov, “Yryn Uolan” (Izvestia Vostočno-Siberskago Otdela I. Russkago Geografičeskago Obščestva, XV), pp. 43 ff.
[16] Kalevala, III, pp. 295–300.
[17] Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfeet Indians (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. II, Part I, New York, 1909), pp. 55–57. Quoted by Thompson, op cit., pp. 111–13.
[18] Jacobus de Voragine, op cit., CIV, “Saint Martha, Virgin.”
[19] The Wooing of Emer, abstracted from the translation by Kuno Meyer in E. Hull, op cit., pp. 57–84.
[20] Parsons, op cit., p. 194.
[21] Firdausi, Shah-Nameh, translation by James Atkinson (London and New York, 1886), p. 7.
[22] Opler, op cit., pp. 133–34.
[23] Adapted from Nivedita and Coomaraswamy, op cit., pp. 236–37.
[24] Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, pp. 6–7.
[25] Gospel According to Matthew, 10:34–37.
[26] Bhagavad Gītā, 18:51–53.
[27] Antiphons of the nuns, at their consecration as Brides of Christ; from The Roman Pontifical. Reprinted in The Soul Afire, pp. 289–92.
[28] Ginzberg, op cit., vol. I, pp. 305–6. By permission of the Jewish Publication Society of America.
[29] Wilhelm Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes, dream no. 421. Death here appears, observes Dr. Stekel, in four symbols: the Old Fiddler, the Squinting One, the Old Woman, and the Young Peasant (the Peasant is the Sower and the Reaper).
[30] Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (Mexico, 1829), Lib. III, Cap. xii–xiv (condensed). The work has been republished by Pedro Robredo (Mexico, 1938), vol. I, pp. 278–82.
[31] Thomas A. Joyce, Mexican Archaeology (London, 1914), p. 46.
[32] “Taín bó Regamna,” edited by Stokes and Windisch, Irische Texte (zweite Serie, Heft 2; Leipzig, 1887), pp. 241–54. The above is condensed from Hull, op cit., pp. 103–7.
[33] Parsons, op cit., pp. 194–95.
[34] Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series 3), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1896, pp. 95–110.
Compare the stages of cosmic emanation.
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