The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Buddha’s victory beneath the Bo Tree is the classic Oriental example of this deed. With the sword of his mind he pierced the bubble of the universe — and it shattered into nought. The whole world of natural experience, as well as the continents, heavens, and hells of traditional religious belief, exploded — together with their gods and demons. But the miracle of miracles was that though all exploded, all was nevertheless thereby renewed, revivified, and made glorious with the effulgence of true being. Indeed, the gods of the redeemed heavens raised their voices in harmonious acclaim of the man-hero who had penetrated beyond them to the void that was their life and source:

Flags and banners erected on the eastern rim of the world let their streamers fly to the western rim of the world; likewise those erected on the western rim of the world, to the eastern rim of the world; those erected on the northern rim of the world, to the southern rim of the world; and those erected on the southern rim of the world, to the northern rim of the world; while those erected on the level of the earth let theirs fly until they beat against the Brahma-world; and those of the Brahma-world let theirs hang down to the level of the earth. Throughout the ten thousand worlds the flowering trees bloomed; the fruit trees were weighted down by the burden of their fruit; trunk-lotuses bloomed on the trunks of trees; branch-lotuses on the branches of trees; vine-lotuses on the vines; hanging-lotuses in the sky; and stalk-lotuses burst through the rocks and came up by sevens. The system of ten thousand worlds was like a bouquet of flowers sent whirling through the air, or like a thick carpet of flowers; in the intermundane spaces the eight-thousand-league-long hells, which not even the light of seven suns had formerly been able to illumine, were now flooded with radiance; the eighty-four-thousand-league-deep ocean became sweet to the taste; the rivers checked their flowing; the blind from birth received their sight; the deaf from birth their hearing; the crippled from birth the use of their limbs; and the bonds and fetters of captives broke and fell off.^[169]

Footnotes

* Swedenborg’s own comment on this dream was as follows: “Dragons of this kind, which do not reveal themselves as dragons until one sees their wings, symbolize false love. I am just now writing on this subject” (Ježower, Das Buch der Träume, p. 490).

* “The problem is not new,” writes Dr. C.G. Jung, “for all ages before us have believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious....Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.” (Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” par. 50.)

* Or, as James Joyce has phrased it: “equals of opposites, evolved by a one-same power of nature or of spirit, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies” (Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 92).

* [This succubus is the spirit of the Queen of Sheba: Ah! Beautiful hermitess, beautiful hermitess!...If you set your finger against my flesh, it would be as a strand of fire through thy veins. The possession of the least part of my body should fill thee with a joy more vehement than an empire’s conquest. Bring on thy lips.... — Ed.]

* Or “interego” (see note above).

* Compare the numerous thresholds crossed by Inanna.

* See above.

* Avalokita (Sanskrit) = “looking down,” but also, “seen”; iśvara = “Lord”; hence, both “The Lord Looking Down [in Pity],” and “The Lord Seen [Within]” (a and i combine into e in Sanskrit: hence Avalokiteśvara). See W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 233, note 2.

* This is the Wall of Paradise; see above, here and also here. We are now inside. Hsi Wang Mu is the feminine aspect of the Lord who walks in the Garden, who created man in his own image, male and female (Book of Genesis, 1:27).

* “And the Word was made flesh”; verse of the Angelus, celebrating the conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb.

* Babylonian prototype of the biblical Noah.

* “Naturally,” writes Dr. Stekel, “‘to be dead’ here means ‘to be alive.’ She begins to live and the officer ‘lives’ with her. They die together. This throws a glaring light on the popular fantasy of the double-suicide.”

It should be noted also that this dream includes the well-nigh universal mythological image of the sword bridge (the razor’s edge), which appears in the romance of Lancelot’s rescue of Queen Guinevere from the castle of King Death.

Endnotes

[1] Apuleius, The Golden Ass (Modern Library edition), pp. 131–41.