The Hero with a Thousand Faces

[8] Kingsborough, op cit., vol. VIII, pp. 263–64.

[9] Kalidasa, Kumarasamibhavam (“The Birth of the War God Kumara”). There is an English translation by R. Griffith (2nd ed., London: Trübner and Company, 1897).

[10] E.E.V. Collocott, Tales and Poems of Tonga (Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin, No. 46, Honolulu, 1928), pp. 32–33.

Figure 69. The Chariot of the Moon (carved stone, Cambodia, c. a.d. 1113–1150)

CHAPTER IIITransformations of the Hero1. The Primordial Hero and the Human

We have come two stages: first, from the immediate emanations of the Uncreated Creating to the fluid yet timeless personages of the mythological age; second, from these Created Creating Ones to the sphere of human history. The emanations have condensed, the field of consciousness constricted. Where formerly causal bodies were visible, now only their secondary effects come to focus in the little hard-fact pupil of the human eye. The cosmogonic cycle is now to be carried forward, therefore, not by the gods, who have become invisible, but by the heroes, more or less human in character, through whom the world destiny is realized. This is the line where creation myths begin to give place to legend — as in the Book of Genesis, following the expulsion from the garden. Metaphysics yields to prehistory, which is dim and vague at first, but becomes gradually precise in detail. The heroes become less and less fabulous, until at last, in the final stages of the various local traditions, legend opens into the common daylight of recorded time.

Mwuetsi, the Moon Man, was cut loose, like a fouled anchor; the community of the children floated free into the day-world of waking consciousness. But we are told that there existed among them direct sons of the now submarine father, who, like the children of his first begetting, had grown from infancy to manhood in a single day. These special carriers of cosmic power constituted a spiritual and social aristocracy. Filled with a double charge of the creative energy, they were themselves sources of revelation. Such figures appear on the dawn stage of every legendary past. They are the culture heroes, the city founders.

The Chinese chronicles record that when the earth had solidified and the peoples were settling in the riverlands, Fu Hsi, the “Heavenly Emperor” (2953–2838 b.c.), governed among them. He taught his tribes how to fish with nets, to hunt and to rear domestic animals, divided the people into clans, and instituted matrimony. From a supernatural tablet entrusted to him by a horse-shaped scaly monster out of the waters of the river Meng, he deduced the Eight Diagrams, which remain to this day the fundamental symbols of traditional Chinese thought. He had been born of a miraculous conception, after a gestation of twelve years; his body being that of a serpent, with human arms and the head of an ox.^[1]

Shen Nung, his successor, the “Earthly Emperor” (r. 2838–2698 b.c.), was eight feet seven inches tall, with a human body but the head of a bull. He had been miraculously conceived through the influence of a dragon. The embarrassed mother had exposed her infant on a mountainside, but the wild beasts protected and nourished it, and when she learned of this she fetched him home. Shen Nung discovered in one day seventy poisonous plants and their antidotes: through a glass covering to his stomach he could observe the digestion of each herb. Then he composed a pharmacopoeia that is still in use. He was the inventor of the plough and a system of barter; he is worshiped by the Chinese peasant as the “prince of cereals.” At the age of one hundred and sixty-eight he was joined to the immortals.^[2]

Such serpent kings and minotaurs tell of a past when the emperor was the carrier of a special world-creating, world-sustaining power, very much greater than that represented in the normal human physique. In those times was accomplished the heavy titan-work, the massive establishment of the foundations of our human civilization. But with the progress of the cycle, a period came when the work to be done was no longer proto- or superhuman; it was the labor specifically of man — control of the passions, exploration of the arts, elaboration of the economic and cultural institutions of the state. Now is required no incarnation of the Moon Bull, no Serpent Wisdom of the Eight Diagrams of Destiny, but a perfect human spirit alert to the needs and hopes of the heart. Accordingly, the cosmogonic cycle yields an emperor in human form who shall stand for all generations to come as the model of man the king.