The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The mythological figure of the Universal Mother imputes to the cosmos the feminine attributes of the first, nourishing and protecting presence. The fantasy is primarily spontaneous; for there exists a close and obvious correspondence between the attitude of the young child toward its mother and that of the adult toward the surrounding material world.^[29] But there has been also, in numerous religious traditions, a consciously controlled pedagogical utilization of this archetypal image for the purpose of the purging, balancing, and initiation of the mind into the nature of the visible world.

In the Tantric books of medieval and modern India The sacred writings (Śastras) of Hinduism are divided into four classes: (1) Śruti, which are regarded as direct divine revelation; these include the four Vedas (ancient books of psalms) and certain of the Upaniṣads (ancient books of philosophy); (2) Smṛti, which include the traditional teachings of the orthodox sages, canonical instructions for domestic ceremonials, and certain works of secular and religious law, as well as the great Hindu epic, the Mahābhārata, which of course includes the Bhagavad Gītā; (3) Purāṇa, which are the Hindu mythological and epic works par excellence; these treat of cosmogonic, theological, astronomical, and physical knowledge; and (4) Tantra, texts describing techniques and rituals for the worship of deities, and for the attainment of supranormal power. Among the Tantras are a group of particularly important scriptures (called Āgamas) which are supposed to have been revealed directly by the Universal God Śiva and his Goddess Pārvatī. (They are termed, therefore, “The Fifth Veda.”) These support a mystical tradition known specifically as “The Tantra,” which has exercised a pervasive influence on the later forms of Hindu and Buddhist iconography. Tantric symbolism was carried by medieval Buddhism out of India into Tibet, China, and Japan.the abode of the goddess is called Mani-dvipa, “The Island of Jewels.” Her ­couch-and-throne is there, in a grove of wish-fulfilling trees. The beaches of the isle are of golden sands. They are laved by the still waters of the ocean of the nectar of immortality. The goddess is red with the fire of life; the earth, the solar system, the galaxies of far-extending space, all swell within her womb. For she is the world creatrix, ever mother, ever virgin. She encompasses the encompassing, nourishes the nourishing, and is the life of everything that lives.

She is also the death of everything that dies. The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb: the sow that eats her farrow. Thus she unites the “good” and the “bad,” exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother, not as personal only, but as universal. The devotee is expected to contemplate the two with equal equanimity. Through this exercise his spirit is purged of its infantile, inappropriate sentimentalities and resentments, and his mind opened to the inscrutable presence which exists, not primarily as “good” and “bad” with respect to his childlike human convenience, his weal and woe, but as the law and image of the nature of being.

The great Hindu mystic of the nineteenth century Ramakrishna (1836–1886) was a priest in a temple newly erected to the Cosmic Mother at Dakshineswar, a suburb of Calcutta. The temple image displayed the divinity in her two aspects simultaneously, the terrible and the benign. Her four arms exhibited the symbols of her universal power: the upper left hand brandishing a bloody saber, the lower gripping by the hair a severed human head; the upper right was lifted in the “fear not” gesture, the lower extended in bestowal of boons. As necklace she wore a garland of human heads; her kilt was a girdle of human arms; her long tongue was out to lick blood. She was Cosmic Power, the totality of the universe, the harmonization of all the pairs of opposites, combining wonderfully the terror of absolute destruction with an impersonal yet motherly reassurance. As change, the river of time, the fluidity of life, the goddess at once creates, preserves, and destroys. Her name is Kālī, the Black One; her title: The Ferry across the Ocean of Existence.^[30]

Figure 25. Devouring Kālī (carved wood, Nepal, eighteenth–nineteenth century a.d.)

One quiet afternoon Ramakrishna beheld a beautiful woman ascend from the Ganges and approach the grove in which he was meditating. He perceived that she was about to give birth to a child. In a moment the babe was born, and she gently nursed it. Presently, however, she assumed a horrible aspect, took the infant in her now ugly jaws and crushed it, chewed it. Swallowing it, she returned again to the Ganges, where she disappeared.^[31]