The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Gilgamesh, on landing, had to listen to the patriarch’s long recitation of the story of the deluge. Then Utnapishtim bid his visitor sleep, and he slept for six days. Utnapishtim had his wife bake seven loaves and place them by the head of Gilgamesh as he lay asleep beside the boat. And Utnapishtim touched Gilgamesh, and he awoke, and the host ordered the ferryman Ursanapi to give the guest a bath in a certain pool and then fresh garments. Following that, Utnapishtim announced to Gilgamesh the secret of the plant.

Gilgamesh, something secret I will disclose to thee,

and give thee thine instruction:

That plant is like a brier in the field;

its thorn, like that of the rose, will pierce thy hand.

But if thy hand attain to that plant,

thou wilt return to thy native land.

Figure 42. The Branch of Immortal Life (alabaster wall panel, Assyria, c. 885–860 b.c.)

Though the hero was warned against touching these waters on the journey out, he now can enter them with impunity. This is a measure of the power gained through his visit with the old Lord and Lady of the Everlasting Island. Utnapishtim-Noah, the flood hero, is an archetypal father figure; his island, the World Navel, is a prefigurement of the later Greco-Roman “Islands of the Blessed.”

The plant was growing at the bottom of the cosmic sea.

Ursanapi ferried the hero out again into the waters. Gilgamesh tied stones to his feet and plunged. Down he rushed, beyond every bound of endurance, while the ferryman remained in the boat. And when the diver had reached the bottom of the bottomless sea, he plucked the plant, though it mutilated his hand, cut off the stones, and made again for the surface. When he broke the surface and the ferryman had hauled him back into the boat, he announced in triumph:

Ursanapi, this plant is the one...

By which Man may attain to full vigor.

I will bring it back to Erech of the sheep-pens....

Its name is: “In his age, Man becomes young again.”

I will eat of it and return to the condition of my youth.

They proceeded across the sea. When they had landed, Gilgamesh bathed in a cool water-hole and lay down to rest. But while he slept, a serpent smelled the wonderful perfume of the plant, darted forth, and carried it away. Eating it, the snake immediately gained the power of sloughing its skin, and so renewed its youth. But Gilgamesh, when he awoke, sat down and wept, “and the tears ran down the wall of his nose.”^[161]

To this very day, the possibility of physical immortality charms the heart of man. The Utopian play by Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, produced in 1921, converted the theme into a modern socio­biological parable. Four hundred years earlier the more literal-minded Juan Ponce de León discovered Florida in a search for the land of “Bimini,” where he had expected to find the fountain of youth. While centuries before and far away, the Chinese philosopher Ko Hung spent the latter years of a long lifetime preparing pills of immortality. “Take three pounds of genuine cinnabar,” Ko Hung wrote,

and one pound of white honey. Mix them. Dry the mixture in the sun. Then roast it over a fire until it can be shaped into pills. Take ten pills the size of a hemp seed every morning. Inside of a year, white hair will turn black, decayed teeth will grow again, and the body will become sleek and glistening. If an old man takes this medicine for a long period of time, he will develop into a young man. The one who takes it constantly will enjoy eternal life, and will not die.^[162]

A friend one day arrived to pay a visit to the solitary experimenter and philosopher, but all he found were Ko Hung’s empty clothes. The old man was gone; he had passed into the realm of the immortals.^[163]

Figure 43. Bodhisattva (carved stone, Cambodia, twelfth century a.d.)