The Hero with a Thousand Faces

He beheld in either field a farmer at work and proposed to play the two a turn. He donned a hat that was on the one side red but on the other white, green before and black behind [these being the colors of the four World Directions: i.e., Edshu was a personification of the Center, the axis mundi, or the World Navel]; so that when the two friendly farmers had gone home to their village and the one had said to the other, “Did you see that old fellow go by today in the white hat?” the other replied, “Why, the hat was red.” To which the first retorted, “It was not; it was white.” “But it was red,” insisted the friend, “I saw it with my own two eyes.” “Well, you must be blind,” declared the first. “You must be drunk,” rejoined the other. And so the argument developed and the two came to blows. When they began to knife each other, they were brought by neighbors before the headman for judgment. Edshu was among the crowd at the trial, and when the headman sat at a loss to know where justice lay, the old trickster revealed himself, made known his prank, and showed the hat. “The two could not help but quarrel,” he said. “I wanted it that way. Spreading strife is my greatest joy.”^[55]

Where the moralist would be filled with indignation and the tragic poet with pity and terror, mythology breaks the whole of life into a vast, horrendous Divine Comedy. Its Olympian laugh is not escapist in the least, but hard, with the hardness of life itself — which, we may take it, is the hardness of God, the Creator. Mythology, in this respect, makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical, and the merely moral judgment shortsighted. Yet the hardness is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. Thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless — suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time.

FOOTNOTES

* It has been pointed out that the father also can be experienced as a protector and the mother, then, as a temptress. This is the way from Oedipus to Hamlet. “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” (Hamlet II.ii). “All neurotics,” writes Dr. Freud, “are either Oedipus or Hamlet.”

And as for the case of the daughter (which is one degree more complicated), the following passage will suffice for the present thumbnail exposition. “I dreamed last night that my father stabbed my mother in the heart. She died. I knew no one blamed him for what he did, although I was crying bitterly. The dream seemed to change, and he and I seemed to be going on a trip together, and I was very happy.” This is the dream of an unmarried young woman of twenty-four (Wood, Dreams, p. 130).

* In such ceremonials as those of birth and burial, the significant effects are, of course, those experienced by the parents and relatives. All rites of passage are intended to touch not only the candidate but also every member of his circle.

* Compare Dante, “Inferno,” XIV, 76–84 (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol. I, p. 89): “a little brook, the redness of which still makes me shudder...which the sinful women share among them.”

* Compare Dante, “Purgatorio,” XXVIII, 22–30 (op. cit., vol. II, p. 214): “A stream...which with its little waves was bending toward the left the grass that sprang upon its bank. All the waters that are purest here on earth would seem to have some mixture in them, compared with that which hides nothing.”

* Dante’s Virgil.

* “Those who in old time sang of the Golden Age, and of its happy state, perchance, upon Parnassus, dreamed of this place: here was the root of mankind innocent; here is always spring, and every fruit; this is the nectar of which each of them tells” (“Purgatorio,” XXVIII, 139–144; op. cit., vol. II, p. 219).

Endnotes

[1] Clement Wood, Dreams: Their Meaning and Practical Application (New York: Greenberg, 1931), p. 124. “The dream material in this book,” states the author (p. viii), “is drawn primarily from the thousand and more dreams submitted to me each week for analysis, in connection with my daily feature syndicated throughout the newspapers of the country. This has been supplemented by dreams analysed by me in my private practice.” In contrast to most of the dreams presented in the standard works on the subject, those in this popular introduction to Freud come from people not undergoing analysis. They are remarkably ingenuous.

[2] Géza Róheim, The Origin and Function of Culture (Nervous and Mental Disease Monographs, No. 69, New York, 1943), pp. 17–25.