The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Huang Ti, the “Yellow Emperor” (r. 2697–2597 b.c.), was the third of the august Three. His mother, a concubine of the prince of the province of Chao-tien, conceived him when she one night beheld a golden dazzling light around the constellation of the Great Bear. The child could talk when he was seventy days old and at the age of eleven years suceeded to the throne. His distinguishing endowment was his power to dream: in sleep he could visit the remotest regions and consort with immortals in the supernatural realm. Shortly following his elevation to the throne, Huang Ti fell into a dream that lasted three entire months, during which time he learned the lesson of the control of the heart. After a second dream of comparable length, he returned with the power to teach the people. He instructed them in the control of the forces of nature in their own hearts.

This wonderful man governed China for one hundred years, and during his reign the people enjoyed a veritable golden age. He gathered six great ministers around him, with whose help he composed a calendar, inaugurated mathematical calculations, and taught the making of utensils of wood, pottery, and metal, the building of boats and carriages, the use of money, and the construction of musical instruments of bamboo. He appointed public places for the worship of God. He instituted the bounds and laws of private property. His queen discovered the art of weaving silk. He planted one hundred varieties of grain, vegetables, and trees; favored the development of birds, quadrupeds, reptiles, and insects; taught the uses of water, fire, wood, and earth; and regulated the movements of the tides. Before his death at the age of one hundred and eleven, the phoenix and the unicorn appeared in the gardens of the Empire, in attestation to the perfection of his reign.^[3]

Figure 70. Pharaoh’s Daughter Finding Moses (detail; oil on canvas, England, a.d. 1886)2. Childhood of the Human Hero

The earlier culture hero of the snake body and bull head carried within him from birth the spontaneous creative power of the natural world. That was the meaning of his form. The man hero, on the other hand, must “descend” to re-establish connection with the infrahuman. This is the sense, as we have seen, of the adventure of the hero.

But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world’s great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned with such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found. On the contrary, the tendency has always been to endow the hero with extraordinary powers from the moment of birth, or even the moment of conception. The whole hero-life is shown to have been a pageant of marvels with the great central adventure as its culmination.

This accords with the view that herohood is predestined, rather than simply achieved, and opens the problem of the relationship of biography to character. Jesus, for example, can be regarded as a man who by dint of austerities and meditation attained wisdom; or on the other hand, one may believe that a god descended and took upon himself the enactment of a human career. The first view would lead one to imitate the master literally, in order to break through, in the same way as he, to the transcendent, redemptive experience. But the second states that the hero is rather a symbol to be contemplated than an example to be literally followed. The divine being is a revelation of the omnipotent Self, which dwells within us all. The contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one’s own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to precise imitation, the lesson being, not “Do thus and be good,” but “Know this and be God.”

This formula is, of course, not precisely that of the common Christian teaching, where, though Jesus is reported to have declared that “the kingdom of God is within,” the churches maintain that, since man is created only “in the image” of God, the distinction between the soul and its creator is absolute — thus retaining, as the final reach of their wisdom, the dualistic distinction between man’s “eternal soul” and the divinity. The transcending of this pair of opposites is not encouraged (indeed, is rejected as “pantheism” and has sometimes been rewarded with the stake); nevertheless, the prayers and diaries of the Christian mystics abound in ecstatic descriptions of the unitive, soul-shattering experience, while Dante’s vision at the conclusion of the Divine Comedy certainly goes beyond the orthodox, dualistic, concretistic dogma of the finality of the personalities of the Trinity. Where this dogma is not transcended the myth of Going to the Father is taken literally, as describing man’s final goal.