The Hero with a Thousand Faces

[31] Robinson Jeffers, Roan Stallion (New York: Horace Liveright, 1925), p. 20.

[32] Euripides, Bacchae, p. 1017 (translated by Gilbert Murray).

[33] Euripides, The Cretans, frg. 475, ap. Porphyry, De abstinentia, IV, p. 19, trans. Gilbert Murray. See discussion of this verse by Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to a Study of Greek Religion (3rd edition, Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 478–500.

[34] Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, 165–67, 184–85 (translation by Frank Justus Miller, the Loeb Classical Library).

[35] Bhagavad Gītā, 2:18 (translation by Swami Nikhilananda, New York, 1944).

[36] The word monomyth is from James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, Inc., 1939), p. 581.

[37] Virgil, Aeneid, VI, p. 892.

[38] Greatly abridged from Jataka, Introduction, i, pp. 58–75 (translated by Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations [Harvard Oriental Series 3], [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1896], pp. 56–87), and the Lalitavistara as rendered by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), pp. 24–38.

[39] Exodus, 19:3–5.

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

[41] The present volume is not concerned with the historical discussion of this circumstance. That task is reserved for a work now under preparation. [The work mentioned would eventually become Campbell’s four-part opus, The Masks of God — Ed.] The present volume is a comparative, not genetic, study. Its purpose is to show that essential parallels exist in the myths themselves as well as in the interpretations and applications that the sages have announced for them.

[42] Translated by Dom Ansgar Nelson, O.S.B., in The Soul Afire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1944), p. 303.

[43] Quoted by Epiphanius, Adversus haereses, xxvi, 3.

[44] See "The Great Struggle of the Buddha".

[45] This is the serpent that protected the Buddha, the first week after his enlightenment. See "the King of Serpents."

[46] Alice C. Fletcher, The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony (Twenty-second Annual Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, part 2; Washington, DC, 1904), pp. 243–44.

“At the creation of the world,” a Pawnee high priest said to Miss Fletcher, in explanation of the divinities honored in the ceremony, “it was arranged that there should be lesser powers. Tirawa-atius, the mighty power, could not come near to man, could not be seen or felt by him, therefore lesser powers were permitted. They were to mediate between man and Tirawa” (ibid., p. 27).

[47] See Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Symbolism of the Dome,” The Indian Historical Quarterly, vol. XIV, No. 1 (March 1938).

[48] John, 6:55.

[49] Ibid., 10:9.

[50] Ibid., 6:56.

[51] Koran, 5:105.

[52] Heraclitus, fragment 102.

[53] Heraclitus, fragment 46.

[54] William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell.”

[55] Leo Frobenius, Und Afrika sprach (Berlin: Vita, Deutsches Verlagshaus, 1912), pp. 243–45. Compare the strikingly similar episode recounted of Othin (Wotan) in the Prose Edda, “Skáldskaparmál” I (“Scandinavian Classics,” vol. V, New York, 1929, p. 96). Compare also Jehovah’s command in Exodus, 32:27: “Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.”

PART IThe Adventure of the Hero

Figure 10. Psyche Entering Cupid’s Garden (oil on canvas, England, a.d. 1903)

CHAPTER IDeparture1. The Call to Adventure

Long long ago, when wishing still could lead to something, there lived a king whose daughters all were beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, who had seen so many things, simply marveled every time it shone on her face. Now close to the castle of this king was a great dark forest, and in the forest under an old lime tree a spring, and when the day was very hot, the king’s child would go out into the wood and sit on the edge of the cool spring. And to pass the time she would take a golden ball, toss it up and catch it; and this was her favorite plaything.