The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The tyrant sent his troops to kill the brothers in the city. But the lads slew the soldiers and returned to their camp. They told the cowherds they had had an interesting tour, then ate their suppers, and went to bed.

Kans that night had ominous dreams. When he woke, he ordered the stadium prepared for the tournament and the trumpets blown for assembly. Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma arrived as jugglers, followed by the cowherds, their friends. When they entered the gate, there was a furious elephant ready to crush them, mighty as ten thousand common elephants. The driver rode it directly at Kṛṣṇa. Balarāma gave it such a blow with his fist that it halted, started back. The driver rode it again, but the two brothers struck it to the ground, and it was dead.

The youths walked onto the field. Everybody saw what his own nature revealed to him: the wrestlers thought Kṛṣṇa a wrestler, the women thought him the treasure of beauty, the gods knew him as their lord, and Kans thought he was Māra, Death himself. When he had undone every one of the wrestlers sent against him, slaying finally the strongest, he leapt to the royal dais, dragged the tyrant by the hair, and killed him. Men, gods, and saints were delighted, but the king’s wives came forth to mourn. Kṛṣṇa, seeing their grief, comforted them with his primal wisdom: “Mother,” he said, “do not grieve. No one can live and not die. To imagine oneself as possessing anything is to be mistaken; nobody is father, mother, or son. There is only the continuous round of birth and death.”^[23]

The legends of the redeemer describe the period of desolation as caused by a moral fault on the part of man (Adam in the garden, Jemshid on the throne). Yet from the standpoint of the cosmogonic cycle, a regular alternation of fair and foul is characteristic of the spectacle of time. Just as in the history of the universe, so also in that of nations: emanation leads to dissolution, youth to age, birth to death, form-creative vitality to the dead weight of inertia. Life ­surges, precipitating forms, and then ebbs, leaving jetsam behind. The golden age, the reign of the world emperor, alternates, in the pulse of every moment of life, with the waste land, the reign of the tyrant. The god who is the creator becomes the destroyer in the end.

From this point of view the tyrant ogre is no less representative of the father than the earlier world emperor whose position he usurped, or than the brilliant hero (the son) who is to supplant him. He is the representative of the set-fast, as the hero is the carrier of the changing. And since every moment of time bursts free from the fetters of the moment before, so this dragon, Holdfast, is pictured as of the generation immediately preceding that of the savior of the world.

Stated in direct terms: the work of the hero is to slay the tenacious aspect of the father (dragon, tester, ogre king) and release from its ban the vital energies that will feed the universe.

This can be done either in accordance with the Father’s will or against his will; he [the Father] may “choose death for his children’s sake,” or it may be that the Gods impose the passion upon him, making him their sacrificial victim. These are not contradictory doctrines, but different ways of telling one and the same story; in reality, Slayer and Dragon, sacrificer and victim, are of one mind behind the scenes, where there is no polarity of contraries, but mortal enemies on the stage, where the everlasting war of the Gods and the Titans is displayed. In any case, the Dragon-Father remains a Pleroma, no more diminished by what he exhales than he is increased by what he repossesses. He is the Death, on whom our life depends; and to the question “Is Death one, or many?” the answer is made that “He is one as he is there, but many as he is in his children here.”^[24]

The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.