The Hero with a Thousand Faces

[22] See Otto Rank, Art and Artist, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1943), pp. 40–41: “If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life....Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves. There is, however, this difference: that the neurotic, in this voluntary remaking of his ego, does not get beyond the destructive preliminary work and is therefore unable to detach the whole creative process from his own person and transfer it to an ideological abstraction. The productive artist also begins...with that re-creation of himself which results in an ideologically constructed ego; [but in his case] this ego is then in a position to shift the creative will-power from his own person to ideological representations of that person and thus render it objective. It must be admitted that this process is in a measure limited to within the individual himself, and that not only in its constructive, but also in its destructive aspects. This explains why hardly any productive work gets through without morbid crises of a ‘neurotic’ nature.”

[23] Abridged from Burton, op cit., vol. III, pp. 213–28.

[24] Bruno Gutmann, Volksbuch der Wadschagga (Leipzig, 1914), p. 144.

[25] Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, vol. V, New York, 1897), p. 109.

[For a discussion of the Navaho symbolism of the adventure of the hero, see Jeff King, Maud Oakes, and Joseph Campbell, Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial, Bollingen Series I, 2nd ed., (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 33–49; Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth as Metaphor and as Religion (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002), pp. 63–70; and Joseph Campbell, “The Spirit Land,” Mythos: The Shaping of Our Modern Tradition (Silver Spring, MD: Acorn Media, 2007) — Ed.]

[26] Dante, “Paradiso,” XXXIII, 12–21 (translation by Charles Eliot Norton, op cit., vol. III, p. 252; quoted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers).

[27] See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1926–28), vol. I, p. 144. “Supposing,” adds Spengler, “that Napoleon himself, as ‘empirical person,’ had fallen at Marengo — then that which he signified would have been actualized in some other form.” The hero, who in this sense and to this degree has become depersonalized, incarnates, during the period of his epochal action, the dynamism of the culture process; “between himself as a fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm” (ibid., p. 142). This corresponds to Thomas Carlyle’s idea of the Hero King, as “Ableman” (On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Lecture VI).

[28] During Hellenistic times an amalgamation of Hermes and Thoth was effected in the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, “Hermes Thrice Greatest,” who was regarded as the patron and teacher of all the arts, and especially of alchemy. The “hermetically” sealed retort, in which were placed the mystical metals, was regarded as a realm apart — a special region of heightened forces comparable to the mythological realm; and therein the metals underwent strange metamorphoses and transmutations, symbolical of the transfigurations of the soul under the tutelage of the supernatural. Hermes was the master of the ancient mysteries of initiation, and represented that coming-down of divine wisdom into the world which is represented also in the incarnations of divine saviors (see below). (See C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, part III, “Religious Ideas in Alchemy.” [Orig. 1936.] For the retort, see par. 338. For Hermes Trismegistus, see par. 173 and index, s.v.)

[29] Wilhelm Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes, pp. 70–71.

[30] Ibid., p. 71.

[31] Koran, 37:158.

[32] Adapted from Burton, op cit., vol. III, pp. 223–30.

[33] Compare the serpent of the dream.

[34] Leonhard S. Schultze, Aus Namaland und Kalahari (Jena, 1907), p. 392.

[35] Ibid., pp. 404, 448.

[36] David Clement Scott, A Cyclopaedic Dictionary of the Mang’anja Language Spoken in British Central Africa (Edinburgh, 1892), p. 97.