The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The motif of the sun as a goddess, instead of as a god, is a rare and precious survival from an archaic, apparently once widely diffused, mythological context. The great maternal divinity of South Arabia is the feminine sun, Ilat. The word in German for the sun (die Sonne) is feminine. Throughout Siberia, as well as in North America, scattered stories survive of a female sun. And in the fairy tale of Red Ridinghood, who was eaten by the wolf but rescued from its belly by the hunter, we may have a remote echo of the same adventure as that of Amaterasu. Traces remain in many lands; but only in Japan do we find the once-great mythology still effective in civilization; for the Emperor is a direct descendant of the grandson of Amaterasu, and as ancestress of the royal house she is honored as one of the supreme divinities of the national tradition of Shintō. In her adventures may be sensed a different world-feeling from that of the now better-known mythologies of the solar god: a certain tenderness toward the lovely gift of light, a gentle gratitude for things made visible — such as must once have distinguished the religious mood of many peoples.

The mirror, the sword, and the tree, we recognize. The mirror, reflecting the goddess and drawing her forth from the august repose of her divine nonmanifestation, is symbolic of the world, the field of the reflected image. Therein divinity is pleased to regard its own glory, and this pleasure is itself inducement to the act of manifestation or “creation.” The sword is the counterpart of the thunderbolt. The tree is the World Axis in its wish-fulfilling, fruitful aspect — the same as that displayed in Christian homes at the season of the winter solstice, which is the moment of the rebirth or return of the sun, a joyous custom inherited from the Germanic paganism that has given to the modern German language its feminine Sonne. The dance of Uzume and the uproar of the gods belong to carnival: the world left topsy-turvy by the withdrawal of the supreme divinity, but joyous for the coming renewal. And the shimenawa, the august rope of straw that was stretched behind the goddess when she reappeared, symbolizes the graciousness of the miracle of the light’s return. This shimenawa is one of the most conspicuous, important, and silently eloquent, of the traditional symbols of the folk religion of Japan. Hung above the entrances of the temples, festooned along the streets at the New Year festival, it denotes the renovation of the world at the threshold of the return. If the Christian cross is the most telling symbol of the mythological passage into the abyss of death, the shimenawa is the simplest sign of the resurrection. The two represent the mystery of the boundary between the worlds — the existent nonexistent line.

Amaterasu is an Oriental sister of the great Inanna, the supreme goddess of the ancient Sumerian cuneiform temple-tablets, whose descent we have already followed into the lower world. Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, Venus: those were the names she bore in the successive culture periods of the Occidental development — associated, not with the sun, but with the planet that carries her name, and at the same time with the moon, the heavens, and the fruitful earth. In Egypt she became the goddess of the Dog Star, Sirius, whose annual reappearance in the sky announced the earth-fructifying flood season of the river Nile.

Inanna, it will be remembered, descended from the heavens into the hell region of her sister-opposite, the Queen of Death, Ereshkigal. And she left behind Ninshubur, her messenger, with instructions to rescue her should she not return. She arrived naked before the seven judges; they fastened their eyes upon her, she was turned into a corpse, and the corpse — as we have seen — was hung upon a stake.

After three days and three nights had passed,*

Inanna’s messenger Ninshubur,

Her messenger of favorable words,

Her carrier of supporting words,

Filled the heaven with complaints for her,

Cried for her in the assembly shrine,

Rushed about for her in the house of the gods....

Like a pauper in a single garment he dressed for her,

To the Ekur, the house of Enlil, all alone he directed his step.

Figure 49. Goddess Rising (carved marble, Italy/Greece, c. 460 b.c.)