The Hero with a Thousand Faces

[39] Compare the Maori polarity of Mahora-nui-a-rangi and Maki, p. 232.

[40] S.N. Kramer, op cit., pp. 40–41.

[41] Prose Edda, “Gylfaginning,” IV–VIII (from the translation by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, 1916; by permission of the publishers). See also Poetic Edda, “Voluspa.”

[42] “The Epic of Creation,” Tablet IV, lines 35–143, adapted from the translation by L.W. King, Babylonian Religion and Mythology (London and New York: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd., 1899), pp. 72–78.

[43] See Dante, “Paradiso,” XXX–XXXII. This is the rose opened to mankind by the cross.

[44] Book of Genesis, 3:7.

[45] George Bird Grinnell, Blackfoot Lodge Tales (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892, 1916), pp. 137–38.

[46] J.S. Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders (London, 1840), vol. I, p. 17. To regard such a tale as a cosmogonic myth would be as inept as to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity with a paragraph from the nursery story “Marienkind” (Grimm's Fairy Tales, No. 3).

[47] Harva, op cit., p. 109, citing S. Krašeninnikov, Opisanie Zemli Kamčatki (St. Petersburg, 1819), vol. II, p. 101.

[48] Harva, op cit., p. 109, citing Potanin, op cit., vol. II, p. 153.

[49] P.J. Meier, Mythen und Erzählungen der Küstenbewohner der Gazelle-Halbinsel (Neu-Pommern) (Anthropos Bibliothek, Band I, Heft 1, Münster i. W., 1909), pp. 15–16.

[50] Ibid., pp. 59–61.

[51] “The universe does not on the whole act as though it were under efficient personal supervision and control. When I hear some hymns, sermons, and prayers taking for granted or asserting with naïve simplicity that this vast, ruthless cosmos, with all the monstrous accidents which it involves, is a neatly planned and personally conducted tour, I recall the more reasonable hypothesis of an East African tribe. ‘They say,’ reports an observer, ‘that although God is good and wishes good for everybody, unfortunately he has a half-witted brother who is always interfering with what he does.’ That, at least, bears some resemblance to the facts. God’s half-witted brother might explain some of life’s sickening and insane tragedies which the idea of an omnipotent individual of boundless good will toward every soul most certainly does not explain.” (Harry Emerson Fosdick, As I See Religion, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932, pp. 53–54.)

[52] Harva, op cit., pp. 114–15, quoting W. Radloff, Proben der Volksliteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Siberians (St. Petersburg, 1866–70), vol. I, p. 285.

Figure 65. Tlazolteotl Giving Birth (carved aplite with garnet inclusions, Aztec, Mexico, late fifteenth–early sixteenth century a.d.)

CHAPTER IIThe Virgin Birth1. Mother Universe

The world-generating spirit of the father passes into the manifold of earthly experience through a transforming medium — the mother of the world. She is a personification of the primal element named in the second verse of Genesis, where we read that “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” In the Hindu myth, she is the female figure through whom the Self begot all creatures. More abstractly understood, she is the world-bounding frame: “space, time, and causality” — the shell of the cosmic egg. More abstractly still, she is the lure that moved the Self-brooding Absolute to the act of creation.

Figure 66. Nut (the Sky) Gives Birth to the Sun; Its Rays Fall on Hathor in the Horizon (Love and Life) (carved stone, Ptolemaic, Egypt, c. first century b.c.)

In mythologies emphasizing the maternal rather than the paternal aspect of the creator, this original female fills the world stage in the beginning, playing the roles that are elsewhere assigned to males. And she is virgin, because her spouse is the Invisible Unknown.

The Kalevala (“The Land of Heroes”) in its present form is the work of Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884), a country physician and student of Finnish philology. Having collected a considerable body of folk poetry around the legendary heroes Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkainen, and Kullervo, he composed these in co-ordinated sequence and cast them in a uniform verse (1835, 1849). The work comes to some 23,000 lines.

A German translation of Lönnrot’s Kalevala came under the eyes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who thereupon both conceived the plan and chose the meter of his Song of Hiawatha.