The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Tiresias, the blinded seer, was both male and female: his eyes were closed to the broken forms of the light-world of the pairs of opposites, yet he saw in his own interior darkness the destiny of Oedipus.^[96] Śiva appears united in a single body with Śakti, his spouse — he the right side, she the left — in the manifestation known as Ardhanārīśvara, “The Half-Woman Lord.”^[97] The ancestral images of certain African and Melanesian tribes show on one being the breasts of the mother and the beard and penis of the father.^[98] And in Australia, about a year following the ordeal of the circumcision, the candidate for full manhood undergoes a second ritual operation — that of subincision (a slitting open of the underside of the penis, to form a permanent cleft into the urethra). The opening is termed the “penis womb.” It is a symbolical male vagina. The hero has become, by virtue of the ceremonial, more than man.^[99]

The blood for ceremonial painting and for gluing white bird’s-down to the body is derived by the Australian fathers from their subincision holes. They break open again the old wounds, and let it flow.^[100] It symbolizes at once the menstrual blood of the vagina and the semen of the male, as well as urine, water, and male milk. The flowing shows that the old men have the source of life and nourishment within themselves;^[101] i.e., that they and the inexhaustible world fountain are the same.^[102]

The call of the Great Father Snake was alarming to the child; the mother was protection. But the father came. He was the guide and initiator into the mysteries of the unknown. As the original intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father. “Whatever is killed becomes the father.”^[103] Hence the veneration in headhunting communities (in New Guinea, for example) of the heads brought home from vendetta raids.^[104] Hence, too, the irresistible compulsion to make war: the impulse to destroy the father is continually transforming itself into public violence. The old men of the immediate community or race protect themselves from their growing sons by the psychological magic of their totem ceremonials. They enact the ogre father, and then reveal themselves to be the feeding mother too. A new and larger paradise is thus established. But this paradise does not include the traditional enemy tribes, or races, against whom aggression is still systematically projected. All of the “good” father-mother content is saved for home, while the “bad” is flung abroad and about: “for who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”^[105] “And slacken not in following up the enemy: if ye are suffering hardships, they are suffering similar hardships; but ye have hope from Allah, while they have none.”^[106]

Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, “native,” or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.^[107]

The world is full of the resultant mutually contending bands: totem-, flag-, and party-worshipers. Even the so-called Christian nations — which are supposed to be following a “World” Redeemer — are better known to history for their colonial barbarity and internecine strife than for any practical display of that unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego, ego’s world, and ego’s tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord: