The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The native Australian mythologies teach that the first initiation rites were carried out in such a way that all the young men were killed.^[55] The ritual is thus shown to be, among other things, a dramatized expression of the Oedipal aggression of the elder generation; and the circumcision, a mitigated castration.^[56] But the rites provide also for the cannibal, patricidal impulse of the younger, rising group of males, and at the same time reveal the benign self-giving aspect of the archetypal father; for during the long period of symbolical instruction, there is a time when the initiates are forced to live only on the fresh-drawn blood of the older men. “The natives,” we are told,

are particularly interested in the Christian communion rite, and having heard about it from missionaries they compare it to the blood-drinking rituals of their own.^[57]

In the evening the men come and take their places according to tribal precedence, the boy lying with his head on his father’s thighs. He must make no movement or he will die. The father blindfolds him with his hands because if the boy should witness the following proceedings it is believed that his father and mother will both die. The wooden vessel or a bark vessel is placed near one of the boy’s mother’s brothers, who, having tied his arm lightly, pierces the upper part with a nosebone and holds the arm over the vessel until a certain amount of blood has been taken. The man next to him pierces his arm, and so on, until the vessel is filled. It may hold two quarts or so. The boy takes a long draught of the blood. Should his stomach rebel, the father holds his throat to prevent his ejecting the blood, because if it happens his father, mother, sisters, and brothers would all die. The remainder of the blood is thrown over him.

From this time on, sometimes for a whole moon, the boy is allowed no other food than human blood, Yamminga, the mythical ancestor, having made this law....Sometimes the blood is dried in the vessel and then the guardian cuts it in sections with his nose-bone, and it is eaten by the boy, the two end sections first. The sections must be regularly divided or the boy will die.^[58]

In one recorded case, two of the boys looked up when they were not supposed to. “Then the old men went forward, each with a stone knife in hand. Stooping over the two boys they opened veins in each. Out flowed the blood, and the other men all raised a death cry. The boys were lifeless. The old wirreenuns (medicine men), dipping their stone knives in the blood, touched with them the lips of all present....The bodies of the Boorah victims were cooked. Each man who had been to five Boorahs ate a piece of this flesh; no others were allowed to see this done”^[61]

Frequently the men who give their blood faint and remain in a state of coma for an hour or more because of exhaustion.^[59] “In former times,” writes another observer, “this blood (drunk ceremonially by the novices) was obtained from a man who was killed for the purpose, and portions of his body were eaten.”^[60] “Here,” comments Dr. Róheim, “we come as near to a ritual representation of the killing and eating of the primal father as we can ever get.”

There can be no doubt that no matter how unilluminated the stark-naked Australian savages may seem to us, their symbolical ceremonials represent a survival into modern times of an incredibly old system of spiritual instruction, the far-flung evidences of which are to be found not only in all the lands and islands bordering the Indian Ocean, but also among the remains of the archaic centers of what we tend to regard as our own very special brand of civilization. Just how much the old men know, it is difficult to judge from the published accounts of our Occidental observers. But it can be seen from a comparison of the figures of Australian ritual with those familiar to us from higher cultures, that the great themes, the ageless archetypes, and their operation upon the soul remain the same.

For an astounding revelation of the survival in contemporary Melanesia of a symbolic system essentially identical with that of the Egypto-Babylonian, Trojan-Cretan “labyrinth complex” of the second millennium b.c., see John Layard’s Stone Men of Malekula.^[62] W.F.J. Knight has discussed the evident relationship of the Malekulan “journey of the soul to the underworld” with the classical descent of Aeneas, and the Babylonian of Gilgamesh,^[63] while W.J. Perry thought he could recognize evidences of this culture-continuity running all the way from Egypt and Sumer out through the Oceanic area to North America.^[64] Many scholars have pointed out the close correspondences between the details of the classical Greek and primitive Australian rites of initiation.^[65]