The Hero with a Thousand Faces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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