The Hero with a Thousand Faces

[4] These three legends appear in the excellent psychological study by Dr. Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Nervous and Mental Disease Monographs; New York, 1910). A variant of the third appears in the Gesta Romanorum, Tale LXXXI.

[5] The Charlemagne cycles are exhaustively discussed by Joseph Bédier, Les légendes épiques (3rd ed.; Paris, 1926).

[6] Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1911), vol. III, pp. 90–94.

[7] George Bird Grinnell, Blackfoot Lodge Tales (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892, 1916), pp. 31–32.

[8] Elsie Clews Parsons, Tewa Tales (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, XIX, 1926), p. 193.

[9] Adapted from Sister Nivedita and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1914), pp. 221–32.

[10] Parsons, op cit., p. 193.

[11] “Táin bó Cúalnge” (from the version in the Book of Leinster, 62 a–b): edited by Wh. Stokes and E. Windisch, Irische Texte (Extraband zu Serie I bis IV; Leipzig, 1905), pp. 106–17; English translation in Eleanor Hull’s The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature (London, 1898), pp. 135–37.

[12] Book of Leinster, 64b–67b (Stokes and Windisch, op cit., pp. 130–69); Hull, op cit., pp. 142–54.

[13] From Eleanor Hull, op cit., p. 154; translated from the Book of Leinster, 68a (Stokes and Windisch, op cit., pp. 168–71).

[14] Hull, op cit., pp. 174–76; from the Book of Leinster, 77 (Stokes and Windisch, op cit., pp. 368–77). Compare the transfiguration of Kṛṣṇa, pp. 198–201; see also Fig. 32.

[15] Uno Holmberg (Uno Harva), Der Baum des Lebens (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Ser. B, Tom. XVI, No. 3; Helsinki, 1923), pp. 57–59; from N. Gorochov, “Yryn Uolan” (Izvestia Vostočno-Siberskago Otdela I. Russkago Geografičeskago Obščestva, XV), pp. 43 ff.

[16] Kalevala, III, pp. 295–300.

[17] Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfeet Indians (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. II, Part I, New York, 1909), pp. 55–57. Quoted by Thompson, op cit., pp. 111–13.

[18] Jacobus de Voragine, op cit., CIV, “Saint Martha, Virgin.”

[19] The Wooing of Emer, abstracted from the translation by Kuno Meyer in E. Hull, op cit., pp. 57–84.

[20] Parsons, op cit., p. 194.

[21] Firdausi, Shah-Nameh, translation by James Atkinson (London and New York, 1886), p. 7.

[22] Opler, op cit., pp. 133–34.

[23] Adapted from Nivedita and Coomaraswamy, op cit., pp. 236–37.

[24] Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, pp. 6–7.

[25] Gospel According to Matthew, 10:34–37.

[26] Bhagavad Gītā, 18:51–53.

[27] Antiphons of the nuns, at their consecration as Brides of Christ; from The Roman Pontifical. Reprinted in The Soul Afire, pp. 289–92.

[28] Ginzberg, op cit., vol. I, pp. 305–6. By permission of the Jewish Publication Society of America.

[29] Wilhelm Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes, dream no. 421. Death here appears, observes Dr. Stekel, in four symbols: the Old Fiddler, the Squinting One, the Old Woman, and the Young Peasant (the Peasant is the Sower and the Reaper).

[30] Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (Mexico, 1829), Lib. III, Cap. xii–xiv (condensed). The work has been republished by Pedro Robredo (Mexico, 1938), vol. I, pp. 278–82.

[31] Thomas A. Joyce, Mexican Archaeology (London, 1914), p. 46.

[32] “Taín bó Regamna,” edited by Stokes and Windisch, Irische Texte (zweite Serie, Heft 2; Leipzig, 1887), pp. 241–54. The above is condensed from Hull, op cit., pp. 103–7.

[33] Parsons, op cit., pp. 194–95.

[34] Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series 3), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1896, pp. 95–110.

Compare the stages of cosmic emanation.

Figure 77. Autumn (Death Mask) (painted wood, Inuit, North America, date uncertain)

CHAPTER IVDissolutions1. End of the Microcosm