The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The female water spiritually fructified with the male fire of the Holy Ghost is the Christian counterpart of the water of transformation known to all systems of mythological imagery. This rite is a variant of the sacred marriage, which is the source-moment that generates and regenerates the world and man, precisely the mystery symbolized by the Hindu liṅgam-yonī. To enter into this font is to plunge into the mythological realm; to break the surface is to cross the threshold into the night-sea. Symbolically, the infant makes the journey when the water is poured on its head; its guide and helpers are the priest and godparents. Its goal is a visit with the parents of its Eternal Self, the Spirit of God and the Womb of Grace.^[4] Then it is returned to the parents of the physical body.

Few of us have any inkling of the sense of the rite of baptism, which was our initiation into our Church. Nevertheless, it clearly appears in the words of Jesus: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him “How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”^[5]

The popular interpretation of baptism is that it “washes away original sin,” with emphasis rather on the cleansing than on the rebirth idea. This is a secondary interpretation. Or if the traditional birth image is remembered, nothing is said of an antecedent marriage. Mythological symbols, however, have to be followed through all their implications before they open out the full system of correspondences through which they represent, by analogy, the millennial adventure of the soul.

Footnotes

* Holy Saturday, the day between the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, who is in the belly of Hell. The moment of the renewal of the eon. Compare the motif of the fire sticks discussed above.

Endnotes

[1] For a discussion of this matter, see my Commentary to the Pantheon Books edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (New York, 1944), pp. 846–56. [This commentary is also available as part of Campbell’s collection of essays, The Flight of the Wild Gander, pp. 1–19. — Ed.]

[2] Psalm XLI, 2–4; Douay.

[3] See the Catholic Daily Missal under “Holy Saturday.” The above is abridged from the English translation by Dom Gaspar Lefebvre, O.S.B., published in this country by the E. M. Lohmann Co., Saint Paul, MN. [At the time of the original publication of this volume, of course, the Catholic Mass would have been entirely spoken and sung in Latin. — Ed.]

[4] In India the power (Śakti) of a god is personified in female form and represented as his consort; in the present ritual, grace is similarly symbolized.

[5] Gospel According to John, 3:3–5.

PART IIThe Cosmogonic Cycle

Figure 55. The Aztec Sun Stone (carved stone, Aztec, Mexico, a.d. 1479)

CHAPTER IEmanations1. From Psychology to Metaphysics

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