The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Compare the following dream of a twelve-year-old boy: “One night I dreamt of a foot. I thought it was lying down on the floor and I, not expecting such a thing, fell over it. It seemed to be the same shape as my own foot. The foot suddenly jumped up and started running after me; I thought I jumped right through the window, ran round the yard out into the street, running along as fast as my legs would carry me. I thought I ran to Woolwich, and then it suddenly caught me and shook me, and then I woke up. I have dreamt about this foot several times.”

The boy had heard a report that his father, who was a sailor, had recently had an accident at sea in which he had broken his ankle (C.W. Kimmins, Children’s Dreams, An Unexplored Land, London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1937, p. 107).

“The foot,” writes Dr. Freud, “is an age-old sexual symbol which occurs even in mythology” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 155). The name Oedipus, it should be noted, means “the swollen footed.”

[37] Compare V. J. Mansikka, in Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. IV, p. 628; article “Demons and Spirits (Slavic).” The cluster of articles by a number of authorities, gathered together in this volume under the general heading “Demons and Spirits” (treating severally of the African, Oceanic, Assyro-Babylonian, Buddhist, Celtic, Chinese, Christian, Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Indian, Jain, Japanese, Jewish, Moslem, Persian, Roman, Slavic, Teutonic, and Tibetan varieties), is an excellent introduction to the subject.

[38] Ibid., p. 629. Compare the Lorelei. Mansikka’s discussion of the Slavic forest-, field-, and water-spirits is based on Hanus Máchal’s comprehensive Nákres slovanského bájeslovi (Prague, 1891), an English abridgment of which will be found in Máchal’s Slavic Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. III, Boston, 1918).

[39] Wilhelm Stekel, Fortschritte und Technik der Traumdeutung (Vienna-Leipzig-Bern: Verlag für Medizin, Weidmann und Cie., 1935), p. 37.

[40] A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 175–77.

[41] R.H. Codrington, The Melanesians, Their Anthropology and Folklore (Oxford University Press, 1891), p. 189.

[42] Jataka, 1:1. Abridged from translation by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Buddhist Parables (Yale University Press, 1922), pp. 32–34. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

[43] Coomaraswamy, Journal of American Folklore 57, 1944, p. 129.

[44] Jataka, 55:1, 272–75. Adapted, with slight abridgment, from the translation of Eugene Watson Burlingame, op cit., pp. 41–44. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press, publishers.

[45] Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei, 9, 11; cited by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “On the One and Only Transmigrant” (Supplement to the Journal of the American Oriental Society, April–June, 1944), p. 25.

[46] Ovid, Metamorphoses, VII, p. 62; XV, p. 338.

[47] See Figure 14 ("The Rocks That Crush, The Reeds That Cut") and the associated story.

[48] Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, VIII. The adventures ascribed by Longfellow to the Iroquois chieftain Hiawatha belong properly to the Algonquin culture hero Manabozho. Hiawatha was an actual historical personage of the sixteenth century. See below.

[49] Leo Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes (Berlin, 1904), p. 85.

[50] Henry Callaway, Nursery Tales and Traditions of the Zulus (London: Trübner, 1868), p. 331.

[51] Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Akimcanna: Self-Naughting” (New Indian Antiquary, vol. III, Bombay, 1940), p. 6, note 14, citing and discussing Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, p. 63, 3.

[52] Sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (one-volume edition), pp. 347–49. Copyright 1922 by the Macmillan Company and used with their permission.

[53] Ibid., p. 280.

[54] Duarte Barbosa, A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1866), p. 172; cited by Frazer, op cit., pp. 274–75. Reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Company, publishers.

Figure 21. The Temptation of St. Anthony (copperplate engraving, Germany, c. a.d. 1470)

CHAPTER IIInitiation1. The Road of Trials