The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Figure 52. The Cosmic Lion Goddess, Holding the Sun (single-leaf manuscript, India, eighteenth century a.d.)

An identical initiation might have been effected by means of the equally valid image of the Cosmic Horse, the Cosmic Eagle, the Cosmic Tree, or the Cosmic Praying Mantis.

Om. The head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn, its eye the sun, its vital force the air, its open mouth the fire called Vaishvanara, and the body of the sacrificial horse is the year. Its back is heaven, its belly the sky, its hoof the earth, its sides the four quarters, its ribs the intermediate quarters, its members the seasons, its joints the months and fortnights, its feet the days and nights, its bones the stars and its flesh the clouds. Its half-digested food is the sand, its blood-vessels the rivers, its liver and spleen the mountains, its hairs the herbs and trees. Its forepart is the ascending sun, its hind part the descending sun, its yawning is lightning, its shaking the body is thundering, its urinating is raining, and its neighing is voice.^[31]

...........................the archetype

Body of life a beaked carnivorous desire

Self-upheld on storm-broad wings: but the eyes

Were spouts of blood; the eyes were gashed out; dark blood

Ran from the ruinous eye-pits to the hook of the beak

And rained on the waste spaces of empty heaven.

Yet the great Life continued, yet the great Life

Was beautiful, and she drank her defeat, and devoured

Her famine for food.^[32]

The Cosmic Tree is a well known mythological figure (viz., Yggdrasil, the World Ash, of the Eddas). The Mantis plays a major role in the mythology of the Bushmen of South Africa.

Furthermore, the revelation recorded in “The Song of the Lord” was made in terms befitting Arjuna’s caste and race: The Cosmic Man whom he beheld was an aristocrat, like himself, and a Hindu. Correspondingly, in Palestine the Cosmic Man appeared as a Jew, in ancient Germany as a German; among the Basuto he is a Negro, in Japan Japanese. The race and stature of the figure symbolizing the immanent and transcendent Universal is of historical, not semantic, moment; so also the sex: the Cosmic Woman, who appears in the iconography of the Jains,* is as eloquent a symbol as the Cosmic Man.

Symbols are only the vehicles of communication; they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding. Hence the personality or personalities of God — whether represented in trinitarian, dualistic, or unitarian terms, in polytheistic, monotheistic, or henotheistic terms, pictorially or verbally, as documented fact or as apocalyptic vision — no one should attempt to read or interpret as the final thing. The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey. “For then alone do we know God truly,” writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, “when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God.”^[33] And in the Kena Upaniṣad, in the same spirit: “To know is not to know; not to know is to know.”^[34] Mistaking a vehicle for its tenor may lead to the spilling not only of valueless ink, but of valuable blood.

The next thing to observe is that the transfiguration of Jesus was witnessed by devotees who had extinguished their personal wills, men who had long since liquidated “life,” “personal fate,” “destiny,” by complete self-abnegation in the Master. “Neither by the Vedas, nor by penances, nor by alms-giving, nor yet by sacrifice, am I to be seen in the form in which you have just now beheld Me,” Kṛṣṇa declared, after he had resumed his familiar shape; “but only by devotion to Me may I be known in this form, realized truly, and entered into. He who does My work and regards Me as the Supreme Goal, who is devoted to Me and without hatred for any creature — he comes to me.”^[35] A corresponding formulation by Jesus makes the point more succinctly: “Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”^[36]