The Hero with a Thousand Faces

His mother lamented, and said to her son: “Alas that I bore thee at a time when Nimrod is king. For thy sake seventy thousand men-children were slaughtered, and I am seized with terror on account of thee, that he hear of thy existence, and slay thee. Better thou shouldst perish here in this cave than my eye should behold thee dead at my breast.” She took the garment in which she was clothed, and wrapped it about the boy. Then she abandoned him in the cave, saying, “May the Lord be with thee, may He not fail thee nor forsake thee.”

Thus Abraham was deserted in the cave, without a nurse, and he began to wail. God sent Gabriel down to give him milk to drink, and the angel made it to flow from the little finger of the baby’s right hand, and he sucked it until he was ten days old. Then he arose and walked about, and he left the cave and went along the edge of the valley. When the sun sank, and the stars came forth, he said, “These are the gods!” But the dawn came, and the stars could be seen no longer, and then he said, “I will not pay worship to these, for they are no gods.” Thereupon the sun came forth, and he spoke, “This is my god, him will I extol.” But again the sun set and he said, “He is no god,” and beholding the moon, he called him his god to whom he would pay divine homage. Then the moon was obscured, and he cried out: “This, too, is no god! There is One who sets them all in motion.”^[6]

The Blackfeet of Montana tell of a young monster-slayer, Kut-o-yis, who was discovered by his foster parents when the old man and woman put a clot of buffalo blood to boil in a pot.

Immediately there came from the pot a noise as of a child crying, as if it were being hurt, burnt, or scalded. They looked in the kettle, and saw there a little boy, and they quickly took it out of the water. They were very much surprised....Now on the fourth day the child spoke, and said, “Lash me in turn to each of these lodge poles, and when I get to the last one, I shall fall out of my lashing and be grown up.” The old woman did so, and as she lashed him to each lodge pole he could be seen to grow, and finally when they lashed him to the last pole, he was a man.^[7]

The folktales commonly support or supplant this theme of the exile with that of the despised one, or the handicapped: the abused youngest son or daughter, the orphan, stepchild, ugly duckling, or the squire of low degree.

A young Pueblo woman, who was helping her mother mix clay for pottery with her foot, felt a splash of mud on her leg but thought no more of it.

After some days the girl felt something was moving in her belly, but she did not think anything about going to have a baby. She did not tell her mother. But it was growing and growing. One day in the morning she was very sick. In the afternoon she got the baby. Then her mother knew (for the first time) that her daughter was going to have a baby. The mother was very angry about it; but after she looked at the baby, she saw it was not like a baby, she saw it was a round thing with two things sticking out, it was a little jar. “Where did you get this?” said her mother. The girl was just crying. About that time the father came in. “Never mind, I am very glad she had a baby,” he said. “But it is not a baby,” said her mother. Then the father went to look at it and saw it was a little water jar. After that he was very fond of that little jar. “It is moving,” he said. Pretty soon that little water jar was growing. In twenty days it was big. It was able to go around with the children, and it could talk. “Grandfather, take me outdoors, so I can look around,” he said. So every morning the grandfather would take him out and he would look at the children, and they were very fond of him and they found out he was a boy, Water Jar Boy. They found out from his talking.^[8]

In sum: the child of destiny has to face a long period of obscurity. This is a time of extreme danger, impediment, or disgrace. He is thrown inward to his own depths or outward to the unknown; either way, what he touches is a darkness unexplored. And this is a zone of unsuspected presences, benign as well as malignant: an angel appears, a helpful animal, a fisherman, a hunter, crone, or peasant. Fostered in the animal school, or, like Siegfried, below ground among the gnomes that nourish the roots of the tree of life, or again, alone in some little room (the story has been told a thousand ways), the young world-apprentice learns the lesson of the seed powers, which reside just beyond the sphere of the measured and the named.