The Hero with a Thousand Faces

From the point of view of the present there is such a recklessness in this deliverance of the future that it appears to be nihilistic. The words of Kṛṣṇa, the world savior, to the wives of the dead Kans carry a frightening overtone; so do the words of Jesus: “I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”^[25] To protect the unprepared, mythology veils such ultimate revelations under half-obscuring guises, while yet insisting on the gradually instructive form. The savior figure who eliminates the tyrant father and then himself assumes the crown is (like Oedipus) stepping into his sire’s stead. To soften the harsh patricide, the legend represents the father as some cruel uncle or usurping Nimrod. Nevertheless, the half-hidden fact remains. Once it is glimpsed, the entire spectacle buckles: the son slays the father, but the son and the father are one. The enigmatical figures dissolve back into the primal chaos. This is the wisdom of the end (and rebeginning) of the world. 7. The Hero as Saint

Before we proceed to the last episode of the life, one more hero-type remains to be mentioned: the saint or ascetic, the world-renouncer.

Endowed with a pure understanding, restraining the self with firmness, turning away from sound and other objects, and abandoning love and hatred; dwelling in solitude, eating but little, controlling the speech, body, and mind, ever engaged in meditation and concentration, and cultivating freedom from passion; forsaking conceit and power, pride and lust, wrath and possessions, tranquil in heart, and free from ego — he becomes worthy of becoming one with the imperishable.^[26]

The pattern is that of going to the father, but to the unmanifest rather than the manifest aspect: taking the step that the Bodhisattva renounced: that from which there is no return. Not the paradox of the dual perspective, but the ultimate claim of the unseen is here intended. The ego is burnt out. Like a dead leaf in a breeze, the body continues to move about the earth, but the soul has dissolved already in the ocean of bliss.

Thomas Aquinas, as the result of a mystical experience while celebrating mass in Naples, put his pen and ink on the shelf and left the last chapters of his Summa Theologica to be completed by another hand. “My writing days,” he stated, “are over; for such things have been revealed to me that all I have written and taught seems of but small account to me, wherefore I hope in my God, that, even as the end has come to my teaching, so it may soon come in my life.” Shortly thereafter, in his forty-ninth year, he died.

Beyond life, these heroes are beyond the myth also. Neither do they treat of it anymore, nor can the myth properly treat of them. Their legends are rehearsed, but the pious sentiments and lessons of the biographies are necessarily inadequate; little better than bathos. They have stepped away from the realm of forms, into which the incarnation descends and in which the Bodhisattva remains, the realm of the manifest profile of The Great Face. Once the hidden profile has been discovered, myth is the penultimate, silence the ultimate, word. The moment the spirit passes to the hidden, silence alone remains.

Figure 75. Oedipus Plucking Out His Eyes (detail; carved stone, Roman, Italy, c. second–third century a.d.)

King Oedipus came to know that the woman he had married was his mother, the man he had slain his father; he plucked his eyes out and wandered in penance over the earth. The Freudians declare that each of us is slaying his father, marrying his mother, all the time — only unconsciously: the roundabout symbolic ways of doing this and the rationalizations of the consequent compulsive activity constitute our individual lives and common civilization. Should the feelings chance to become aware of the real import of the world’s acts and thoughts, one would know what Oedipus knew: the flesh would suddenly appear to be an ocean of self-violation. This is the sense of the legend of Pope Gregory the Great, born of incest, living in incest. Aghast, he flees to a rock in the sea, and there does penance for his very life.

The tree has now become the cross: the White Youth sucking milk has become the Crucified swallowing gall. Corruption crawls where before was the blossom of spring. Yet beyond this threshold of the cross — for the cross is a way (the sun door), not an end — is beatitude in God.

He has placed his seal upon me that I may prefer no love to Him.