The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Enlil was the Sumerian air-god, Nanna the moon-god, Enki the water-god and god of wisdom. At the time of the composition of our document (third millennium b.c.) Enlil was the chief divinity of the Sumerian pantheon. He was quick to anger. He was the sender of the Flood. Nanna was one of his sons. In the myths the benign god Enki appears typically in the role of the helper. He is the patron and adviser both of Gilgamesh and of the flood hero, Atarhasis-Utnapishtim-Noah. The motif of Enki vs. Enlil is carried on by Classical mythology, in the counterplay of Poseidon vs. Zeus (Neptune vs. Jove).

This is the beginning of the rescue of the goddess, and illustrates the case of one who so knew the power of the zone into which she was entering that she took the precaution to have herself aroused. Ninshubur went first to the god Enlil; but the god said that, Inanna having gone from the great above to the great below, in the nether world the decrees of the nether world should prevail. Ninshubur next went to the god Nanna; but the god said that she had gone from the great above to the great below, and that in the nether world the decrees of the nether world should prevail. Ninshubur went to the god Enki; and the god Enki devised a plan. He fashioned two sexless creatures and entrusted to them the “food of life” and the “water of life” with instructions to proceed to the nether world and sprinkle this food and water sixty times on Inanna’s suspended corpse.

Upon the corpse hung from a stake they directed the fear

of the rays of fire,

Sixty times the food of life, sixty times the water of life,

they sprinkled upon it,

Inanna arose.

Inanna ascends from the nether world,

The Anunnaki fled,

And whoever of the nether world may have descended

peacefully to the nether world;

When Inanna ascends from the nether world,

Verily the dead hasten ahead of her.

Verily the dead hasten ahead of her.

The small demons like reeds,

The large demons like tablet styluses,

Walked at her side.

Who walked in front of her, held a staff in hand,

Who walked at her side, carried a weapon on the loin.

They who preceded her,

They who preceded Inanna,

Were beings who know not food, who know not water,

Who eat not sprinkled flour,

Who drink not libated wine,

Who take away the wife from the loins of man,

Who take away the child from the breast of the nursing mother.

Surrounded by this ghostly, ghastly crowd, Inanna wandered through the land of Sumer, from city to city.^[19]

These three examples from widely separated culture areas — Raven, Amaterasu, and Inanna — sufficiently illustrate the rescue from without. They show in the final stages of the adventure the continued operation of the supernatural assisting force that has been attending the elect through the whole course of his ordeal. His consciousness having succumbed, the unconscious nevertheless supplies its own balances, and he is born back into the world from which he came. Instead of holding to and saving his ego, as in the pattern of the magic flight, he loses it, and yet, through grace is returned.

This brings us to the final crisis of the round, to which the whole miraculous excursion has been but a prelude — that, namely, of the paradoxical, supremely difficult threshold-crossing of the hero’s return from the mystic realm into the land of common day. Whether rescued from without, driven from within, or gently carried along by the guiding divinities, he has yet to re-enter with his boon the long-forgotten atmosphere where men who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete. He has yet to confront society with his ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.

Figure 50. The Reappearance of the Hero: Samson with the Temple-Doors • Christ Arisen • Jonah (engraving, German, a.d. 1471)4. The Crossing of the Return Threshold