The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Such is royal rule? Such is life itself. The goddess guardian of the inexhaustible well — whether as Fergus, or as Actaeon, or as the Prince of the Lonesome Isle discovered her — requires that the hero should be endowed with what the troubadours and minnesingers termed the “gentle heart.” Not by the animal desire of an Actaeon, not by the fastidious revulsion of such as Fergus, can she be comprehended and rightly served, but only by gentleness: aware (“gentle sympathy”) it was named in the romantic courtly poetry of tenth- to twelfth-century Japan.

Within the gentle heart Love shelters himself,

As birds within the green shade of the grove.

Before the gentle heart, in nature’s scheme,

Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love.

For with the sun, at once,

So sprang the light immediately; nor was

Its birth before the sun’s.

And Love hath his effect in gentleness

Of very self; even as

Within the middle fire the heat’s excess.^[33]

The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.

And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed — whether she will or no. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace.

The Arapaho girl who followed the porcupine up the stretching tree was enticed to the camp-circle of the people of the sky. There she became the wife of a heavenly youth. It was he who, under the form of the luring porcupine, had seduced her to his supernatural home.

The king’s daughter of the nursery tale, the day following the adventure at the well, heard a thumping at her castle door: the frog had arrived to press her to her bargain. And in spite of her great disgust, he followed her to her chair at table, shared the meal from her little golden plate and cup, even insisted on going to sleep with her in her little silken bed. In a tantrum she plucked him from the floor and flung him at the wall. When he fell, he was no frog but a king’s son with kind and beautiful eyes. And then we hear that they were married and were driven in a beautiful coach back to the young man’s waiting kingdom, where the two became a king and queen.

Or once again: when Psyche had accomplished all of the difficult tasks, Jupiter himself gave to her a draft of the elixir of immortality; so that she is now and forever united with Cupid, her beloved, in the paradise of perfected form.

The Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches celebrate the same mystery in the Feast of the Assumption:

“The Virgin Mary is taken up into the bridal chamber of heaven, where the King of Kings sits on his starry throne.”

“O Virgin most prudent, whither goest thou, bright as the morn? all beautiful and sweet art thou, O daughter of Zion, fair as the moon, elect as the sun.”^[34]

Figure 26. Vierge Ouvrante (Opening Virgin) (polychrome wood, France, fifteenth century a.d.)3. Woman as the Temptress

The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero’s total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father’s place.