The Hero with a Thousand Faces

“On his laborious journey,” reports another observer,

the shaman has to encounter and master a number of differing obstacles (pudak) which are not always easily overcome. After he has wandered through dark forests and over massive ranges of mountains, where he occasionally comes across the bones of other shamans and their animal mounts who have died along the way, he reaches an opening in the ground. The most difficult stages of the adventure now begin, when the depths of the underworld with their remarkable manifestations open before him....After he has appeased the watchers of the kingdom of the dead and made his way past the numerous perils, he comes at last to the Lord of the Underworld, Erlik himself. And the latter rushes against him, horribly bellowing; but if the shaman is sufficiently skillful he can soothe the monster back again with promises of luxurious offerings. This moment of the dialogue with Erlik is the crisis of the ceremonial. The shaman passes into an ecstasy.^[4]

“In every primitive tribe,” writes Dr. Géza Róheim, “we find the medicine man in the center of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man is either a neurotic or a psychotic or at least that his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or a psychosis. Human groups are actuated by their group ideals, and these are always based on the infantile situation.”^[5] “The infancy situation is modified or inverted by the process of maturation, again modified by the necessary adjustment to reality, yet it is there and supplies those unseen libidinal ties without which no human groups could exist.”^[6] The medicine men, therefore, are simply making both visible and public the systems of symbolic fantasy that are present in the psyche of every adult member of their society. “They are the leaders in this infantile game and the lightning conductors of common anxiety. They fight the demons so that others can hunt the prey and in general fight reality.”^[7]

Figure 22. Psyche and Charon (oil on canvas, England, c. a.d. 1873)

And so it happens that if anyone — in whatever society — undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures (any one of which may swallow him) which is no less marvelous than the wild Siberian world of the pudak and sacred mountains. In the vocabulary of the mystics this is the second stage of the Way, that of the “purification of the self,” when the senses are “cleansed and humbled,” and the energies and interests “concen­trated upon transcendental things”;^[8] or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past. In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved.

“I stood before a dark cave, wanting to go in,” was the dream of a patient at the beginning of his analysis; “and I shuddered at the thought that I might not be able to find my way back.”^[9] “I saw one beast after another,” Emanuel Swedenborg recorded in his dream book, for the night of October 19–20, 1744, “and they spread their wings, and were dragons. I was flying over them, but one of them was supporting me.”^[10]* And the dramatist Friedrich Hebbel recorded, a century later (April 13, 1844): “In my dream I was being drawn with great force through the sea; there were terrifying abysses, with here and there a rock to which it was possible to hold.”^[11] Themistocles dreamed that a snake wound itself around his body, then crept up to his neck and when it touched his face became an eagle that took him in its talons and, carrying him upward, bore him a long distance, and set him down on a golden herald’s staff that suddenly appeared, so safely that he was all at once relieved of his great anxiety and fear.^[12]

The specific psychological difficulties of the dreamer frequently are revealed with touching simplicity and force:

“I had to climb a mountain. There were all kinds of obstacles in the way. I had now to jump over a ditch, now to get over a hedge, and finally to stand still because I had lost my breath.” This was the dream of a stutterer.^[13]

“I stood beside a lake that appeared to be completely still. A storm came up abruptly and high waves arose, so that my whole face was splashed”; the dream of a girl afraid of blushing (ereuthophobia), whose face, when she blushed, would become wet with perspiration.^[14]