The Hero with a Thousand Faces

“I was following a girl who was going ahead of me, along the dark street. I could see her from behind only and admired her beautiful figure. A mighty desire seized me, and I was running after her. Suddenly a beam, as though released from a spring, came across the street and blocked the way. I awoke with my heart pounding.” The patient was a homosexual; the transverse beam, a phallic symbol.^[15]

“I got into a car, but did not know how to drive. A man who sat behind me gave me instructions. Finally, things were going quite well and we came to a plaza, where there were a number of women standing. The mother of my fiancée received me with great joy.” The man was impotent, but had found an instructor in the psychoanalyst.^[16]

“A stone had broken my windshield. I was now open to the storm and rain. Tears came to my eyes. Could I ever reach my destination in this car?” The dreamer was a young woman who had lost her virginity and could not get over it.^[17]

“I saw half of a horse lying on the ground. It had only one wing and was trying to arise, but was unable to do so.” The patient was a poet, who had to earn his daily bread by working as a journalist.^[18]

“I was bitten by an infant.” The dreamer was suffering from a psychosexual infantilism.^[19]

“I am locked with my brother in a dark room. He has a large knife in his hand. I am afraid of him. ‘You will drive me crazy and bring me to the madhouse,’ I tell him. He laughs with malicious pleasure, replying: ‘You will always be caught with me. A chain is wrapped around the two of us.’ I glanced at my legs and noticed for the first time the thick iron chain that bound together my brother and myself.” The brother, comments Dr. Stekel, was the patient’s illness.^[20]

“I am going over a narrow bridge,” dreams a sixteen-year-old girl. “Suddenly it breaks under me and I plunge into the water. An officer dives in after me, and brings me, with his strong arms, to the bank. Suddenly it seems to me then that I am a dead body. The officer too looks very pale, like a corpse.”^[21]*

“The dreamer is absolutely abandoned and alone in a deep hole of a cellar. The walls of his room keep getting narrower and narrower, so that he cannot stir.” In this image are combined the ideas of mother womb, imprisonment, cell, and grave.^[22]

“I am dreaming that I have to go through endless corridors. Then I remain for a long time in a little room that looks like the bathing pool in the public baths. They compel me to leave the pool, and I have to pass again through a moist, slippery shaft, until I come through a little latticed door into the open. I feel like one newly born, and I think: ‘This means a spiritual rebirth for me, through my analysis.’”^[23]

There can be no question: the psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best, with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, “enlightened” individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.* Nevertheless, in the multitude of myths and legends that have been preserved to us, or collected from the ends of the earth, we may yet see delineated something of our still human course. To hear and profit, however, one may have to submit somehow to purgation and surrender. And that is part of our problem: just how to do that. “Or do ye think that ye shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed away before you?”^[24]

The oldest recorded account of the passage through the gates of metamorphosis is the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna’s descent to the nether world.

From the “great above” she set her mind toward the “great below,”

The goddess, from the “great above” she set her mind toward the “great below,”

Inanna, from the “great above” she set her mind toward the “great below.”

My lady abandoned heaven, abandoned earth,

To the nether world she descended,

Inanna abandoned heaven, abandoned earth,

To the nether world she descended,

Abandoned lordship, abandoned ladyship,

To the nether world she descended.