The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Figure 14. The Rocks That Crush, the Reeds That Cut (sand painting, Navaho, North America, a.d. 1943)

The helpful crone and fairy godmother is a familiar feature of European fairy lore; in Christian saints’ legends the role is com­monly played by the Virgin. The Virgin by her intercession can win the mercy of the Father. Spider Woman with her web can control the movements of the Sun. The hero who has come under the protection of the Cosmic Mother cannot be harmed. The thread of Ariadne brought Theseus safely through the adventure of the labyrinth. This is the guiding power that runs through the work of Dante in the female figures of Beatrice and the Virgin, and appears in Goethe’s Faust successively as Gretchen, Helen of Troy, and the Virgin. “Thou art the living fount of hope,” prays Dante, at the end of his safe passage through the perils of the Three Worlds; “Lady, thou art so great and so availest, that whoso would have grace, and has not recourse to thee, would have his desire fly without wings. Thy benignity not only succors him who asks, but oftentimes freely foreruns the asking. In thee mercy, in thee pity, in thee magnificence, in thee whatever of goodness is in any creature, are united.”^[26]

What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance — a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task. And in so far as the hero’s act coincides with that for which his society itself is ready, he seems to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process. “I feel myself,” said Napoleon at the opening of his Russian campaign, “driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me.”^[27]

Figure 15. Virgil Leading Dante (ink on vellum, Italy, fourteenth century a.d.)

Not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine in form. In fairy lore it may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require. The higher mythologies develop the role in the great figure of the guide, the teacher, the ferryman, the conductor of souls to the afterworld. In classical myth this is Hermes-Mercury; in Egyptian, usually Thoth (the ibis god, the baboon god); in Christian, the Holy Ghost.^[28] Goethe presents the masculine guide in Faust as Mephistopheles — and not infrequently the dangerous aspect of the “mercurial” figure is stressed; for he is the lurer of the innocent soul into realms of trial. In Dante’s vision the part is played by Virgil, who yields to Beatrice at the threshold of Paradise. Protective and dangerous, motherly and fatherly at the same time, this supernatural principle of guardianship and direction unites in itself all the ambiguities of the unconscious — thus signifying the support of our conscious personality by that other, larger system, but also the inscrutability of the guide that we are following, to the peril of all our rational ends.

The following dream supplies a vivid example of the fusion of opposites in the unconscious:

“I dreamed that I had gone into a street of brothels and to one of the girls. As I entered, she changed into a man, who was lying, half clothed, on a sofa. He said: ‘It doesn’t disturb you (that I am now a man)?’ The man looked old, and he had white sideburns. He reminded me of a certain chief forester who was a good friend of my father.”^[29]

“All dreams,” Dr. Stekel observes, “have a bisexual tendency. Where the bisexuality cannot be perceived, it is hidden in the latent dream content.”^[30]

The hero to whom such a helper appears is typically one who has responded to the call. The call, in fact, was the first announcement of the approach of this initiatory priest. But even to those who apparently have hardened their hearts the supernatural guardian may appear; for, as we have seen: “Well able is Allah to save.”