The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Compare Nietzsche: “In our sleep and in our dreams we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity. I mean, in the same way that man reasons in his dreams, he reasoned when in the waking state many thousands of years....The dream carries us back into earlier states of human culture, and affords us a means of understanding it better.”^[19]

Compare Adolf Bastian’s theory of the ethnic “Elementary Ideas” (Elementar­gedanken), which, in their primal psychic character (corresponding to the Stoic Logoi spermatikoi), should be regarded as “the spiritual (or psychic) germinal dispositions out of which the whole social structure has been developed organically,” and, as such, should serve as bases of inductive research.^[20]

Compare Franz Boas: “Since Waitz’s thorough discussion of the question of the unity of the human species, there can be no doubt that in the main the mental characteristics of man are the same all over the world....Bastian was led to speak of the appalling monotony of the fundamental ideas of mankind all over the globe....Certain patterns of associated ideas may be recognized in all types of culture.”^[21]

Compare Sir James G. Frazer: “We need not, with some enquirers in ancient and modern times, suppose that the Western peoples borrowed from the older civilization of the Orient the conception of the Dying and Reviving God, together with the solemn ritual, in which that conception was dramatically set forth before the eyes of the worshippers. More probably the resemblance which may be traced in this respect between the religions of the East and West is no more than what we commonly, though incorrectly, call a fortuitous coincidence, the effect of similar causes acting alike on the similar constitution of the human mind in different countries and under different skies.”^[22]

Compare Sigmund Freud: “I recognized the presence of symbolism in dreams from the very beginning. But it was only by degrees and as my experience increased that I arrived at a full appreciation of its extent and significance, and I did so under the influence of...Wilhelm Stekel....Stekel arrived at his interpretations of symbols by way of intuition, thanks to a peculiar gift for the direct understanding of them....Advances in psycho-analytic experience have brought to our notice patients who have shown a direct understanding of dream-symbolism of this kind to a surprising extent....This symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular among the people, and it is to be found in folklore, and in popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in dreams.”^[23]

Dr. Jung points out that he has borrowed his term archetype from classic sources: Cicero, Pliny, the Corpus Hermeticum, Augustine, etc.^[24] Bastian notes the correspondence of his own theory of “Elementary Ideas” with the Stoic concept of the Logoi spermatikoi. The tradition of the “subjectively known forms” (Sanskrit: antarjñeya-rūpa) is, in fact, coextensive with the tradition of myth, and is the key to the understanding and use of mythological images — as will appear abundantly in the following chapters.

Figure 4. Minotauromachy (red-figure krater, Greece, c. 470 b.c.)

The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms. Such a one’s visions, ideas, and inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought. Hence they are eloquent, not of the present, disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn. The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man — perfected, unspecific, universal man — he has been reborn. His second solemn task and deed therefore (as Toynbee declares and as all the mythologies of mankind indicate) is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed.

It must be noted against Professor Toynbee, however, that he seriously misrepresents the mythological scene when he advertises Christianity as the only religion teaching this second task. All religions teach it, as do all mythologies and folk traditions everywhere. Professor Toynbee arrives at his misconstruction by way of a trite and incorrect interpretation of the Oriental ideas of nirvāṇa, Buddha, and Bodhisattva; then contrasting these ideals, as he misinterprets them, with a very sophisticated rereading of the Christian idea of the City of God. This is what leads him to the error of supposing that the salvation of the present world-situation might lie in a return to the arms of the Roman Catholic church.