The Hero with a Thousand Faces

* An Ifrit (Ifritah) is a powerful Jinni (Jinniyah). The Marids are a particularly powerful and dangerous class of Jinn.

* In Alexandrian times Pan was identified with the ithyphallic Egyptian divinity Min, who was, among other things, the guardian of desert roads.

* Compare Dionysos, the great Thracian counterpart of Pan.

* The watchman symbolizes, according to Wilhelm Stekel, “consciousness, or, if one prefers, the aggregate of all the morality and restrictions present in consciousness. Freud,” continues Dr. Stekel, “would describe the watchman as the ‘superego.’ But he is really only an ‘interego.’ Consciousness prevents the breaking through of dangerous wishes and immoral actions. This is the sense in which watchmen, police officials and officers in dreams are in general to be interpreted” (Wilhelm Stekel, Fortschritte und Technik der Traumdeutung [Wien-Leipzig-Bern: Verlag für Medizin, Weidmann und Cie., 1935], pp. 37–38).

* An amphibious sea snake marked with bands of dark and light color, always more or less dreaded whenever it is seen.

* It has been pointed out that this adventure of Prince Five-weapons is the earliest known example of the celebrated and well-nigh universal tar-baby story of popular folklore. (See Aurelio M. Espinosa: “Notes on the Origin and History of the Tar-Baby Story,” Journal of American Folklore, 43 [1930]: 129–209; “A New Classification of the Fundamental Elements of the Tar-Baby Story on the Basis of Two Hundred and Sixty-Seven Versions,” Journal of American Folklore, 56 [1943]: 31–37; and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “A Note on the Stick Fast Motif,” Journal of American Folklore, 57 [1944]: 128–131.)

* The sarcophagus or casket is an alternative for the belly of the whale. Compare Moses in the bulrushes.

Endnotes

[1] Grimm’s Fairy Tales, No. 1, “The Frog King.”

[2] The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Standard Edition, VI; orig. 1901).

[3] Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1911), Part II, “The Mystic Way,” Chapter II, “The Awakening of the Self.”

[4] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (translated by James Strachey, Standard Edition, XVI; London: Hogarth Press, 1963), pp. 396–97 (orig. 1916–17).

[5] Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, I, p. xix. This pursuit of the hart and view of the “questyng beast” marks the beginning of the mysteries associated with the Quest of the Holy Grail.

[6] George A. Dorsey and Alfred L. Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho (Chicago: Field Columbia Museum, Publication 81, Anthropological Series, vol. V; 1903), p. 300. Reprinted in Stith Thompson’s Tales of the North American Indians (Cambridge, MA, 1929), p. 128.

[7] C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works, vol. 12; New York and London, 1953), pars. 71, 73. (Orig. 1935.)

[8] Wilhelm Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes (Wiesbaden: Verlag von J. F. Bergmann, 1911), p. 352. Dr. Stekel points out the relationship of the blood-red glow to the thought of the blood coughed up in consumption.

[9] Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series 3) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1896), pp. 56–57.

[10] Proverbs, 1:24–27, 32.

[11] “Spiritual books occasionally quote [this] Latin saying which has terrified more than one soul” (Ernest Dimnet, The Art of Thinking, New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1929, pp. 203–4).

[12] Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven (Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1908), opening lines.

[13] Ibid., conclusion.

[14] Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, ll. 504–553 (translation by Frank Justus Miller, the Loeb Classical Library).

[15] See above.

[16] Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 58, 62.

[17] Grimm’s Fairy Tales, No. 50.

[18] The Thousand Nights and One Night, Richard F. Burton translation (Bombay, 1885), vol. I, pp. 164–67.

[19] Genesis, 19:26.

[20] Werner Zirus, Ahasverus, der ewige Jude (Stoff- und Motivgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 6, Berlin and Leipzig, 1930), p. 1.

[21] See above.