The Hero with a Thousand Faces

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

* Sanskrit: māyā-śakti.

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

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

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

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

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

* Ta’aroa (Tahitian dialect) is Tangaroaā.

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

Endnotes

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

[2] See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.