The Hero with a Thousand Faces

by Joseph Campbell

  She recited an incantation, she pronounced her spell.

  And the gods of the battle cried out for their weapons.

  Then advanced Tiamat and Marduk, the counselor of the gods;

  To the fight they came on, to the battle they drew nigh.

  The lord spread out his net and caught her.

  And the evil wind that was behind him he let loose in her face.

  The terrible winds filled her belly,

  And her courage was taken from her, and her mouth she opened wide.

  He seized the trident and burst her belly,

  He severed her inward parts, he pierced her heart.

  He overcame her and cut off her life;

  He cast down her body and stood upon it.

  Having then subdued the remainder of her swarming host, the god of Babylon returned to the mother of the world:

  And the lord stood upon Tiamat’s hinder parts,

  And with his merciless club he smashed her skull.

  He cut through the channels of her blood,

  And he made the north wind bear it away into secret places....

  Then the lord rested, gazing upon her dead body,... and devised a cunning plan,

  He split her up like a flat fish into two halves;

  One half of her he established as a covering for heaven.

  He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman,

  And bade them not to let her waters come forth.

  He passed through the heavens, he surveyed the regions thereof,

  And over against the Deep he set the dwelling of Nudimmud.

  And the Lord measured the structure of the Deep....[42]

  Marduk in this heroic manner pushed back with a ceiling the waters above, and with a floor the waters beneath. Then in the world between he created man.

  Figure 62. Chaos Monster and Sun God (carved alabaster, Assyria, 885–860 b.c.)

  The myths never tire of illustrating the point that conflict in the created world is not what it seems. Tiamat, though slain and dismembered, was not thereby undone. Had the battle been viewed from another angle, the chaos-monster would have been seen to shatter of her own accord, and her fragments move to their respective stations. Marduk and his whole generation of divinities were but particles of her substance. From the standpoint of those created forms all seemed accomplished as by a mighty arm, amid danger and pain. But from the center of the emanating presence, the flesh was yielded willingly, and the hand that carved it was ultimately no more than an agent of the will of the victim herself.

  Herein lies the basic paradox of myth: the paradox of the dual focus. Just as at the opening of the cosmogonic cycle it was possible to say “God is not involved,” but at the same time “God is creator-preserver-destroyer,” so now at this critical juncture, where the One breaks into the many, destiny “happens,” but at the same time “is brought about.” From the perspective of the source, the world is a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding, and dissolving. But what the swiftly passing creatures experience is a terrible cacaphony of battle cries and pain. The myths do not deny this agony (the crucifixion); they reveal within, behind, and around it essential peace (the heavenly rose).[43]

  The shift of perspective from the repose of the central Cause to the turbulation of the peripheral effects is represented in the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They ate of the forbidden fruit, “And the eyes of them both were opened.”[44] The bliss of Paradise was closed to them and they beheld the created field from the other side of a transforming veil. Henceforth they should experience the inevitable as the hard to gain.

  6. Folk Stories of Creation

  The simplicity of the origin stories of the undeveloped folk mythologies stands in contrast to the profoundly suggestive myths of the cosmogonic cycle. No long-sustained attempt to fathom the mysteries behind the veil of space makes itself apparent in these. Through the blank wall of timelessness there breaks and enters a shadowy creator-figure to shape the world of forms. His clay is dreamlike in its duration, fluidity, and ambient power. The earth has not yet hardened; much remains to be done to make it habitable for the future people.

  A broad distinction can be made between the mythologies of the truly primitive (fishing, hunting, root-digging, and berry-picking) peoples and those of the civilizations that came into being following the development of the arts of agriculture, dairying, and herding, c. 6000 b.c. Most of what we call primitive, however, is actually colonial, i.e., diffused from some high culture center and adapted to the needs of a simpler society. It is in order to avoid the misleading term “primitive” that I am calling the undeveloped or degenerate traditions “folk mythologies.” The term is adequate for the purposes of the present elementary comparative study of the universal forms, though it would certainly not serve for a strict historical analysis.

  Old Man was traveling about, declare the Blackfeet of Montana; he was making people and arranging things.

  He came from the south, traveling north, making animals and birds as he passed along. He made the mountains, prairies, timber, and brush first. So he went along, traveling northward, making things as he went, putting rivers here and there, and falls on them, putting red paint here and there in the ground — fixing up the world as we see it today. He made the Milk River (the Teton) and crossed it, and, being tired, went up on a hill and lay down to rest. As he lay on his back, stretched out on the ground, with arms extended, he marked himself out with stones — the shape of his body, head, legs, arms, and everything. There you can see those rocks to-day. After he had rested, he went on northward, and stumbled over a knoll and fell down on his knees. Then he said, “You are a bad thing to be stumbling against”; so he raised up two large buttes there, and named them the Knees, and they are called so to this day. He went further north, and with some of the rocks he carried with him he built the Sweet Grass Hills....

  One day Old Man determined that he would make a woman and a child; so he formed them both — the woman and the child, her son — of clay. After he had moulded the clay in human shape, he said to the clay, “You must be people,” and then he covered it up and left it, and went away. The next morning he went to the place and took the covering off, and saw that the clay shapes had changed a little. The second morning there was still more change, and the third still more. The fourth morning he went to the place, took the covering off, looked at the images, and told them to rise and walk; and they did so. They walked to the river with their Maker, and then he told them that his name was Na’pi, Old Man.

  As they were standing by the river, the woman said to him, “How is it? Will we always live, will there be no end to it?” He said: “I have never thought of that. We will have to decide it. I will take this buffalo chip and throw it in the river. If it floats, when people die, in four days they will become alive again; they will die for only four days. But if it sinks, there will be an end to them.” He threw the chip in the river, and it floated. The woman turned and picked up a stone, and said: “No, I will throw this stone in the river; if it floats, we will always live, if it sinks people must die, that they may always be sorry for each other.” The woman threw the stone into the water, and it sank. “There,” said Old Man, “you have chosen. There will be an end to them.”[45]

  The arranging of the world, the creation of man, and the decision about death are typical themes from the tales of the primitive creator. It is difficult to know how seriously or in what sense these stories were believed. The mythological mode is one not so much of direct as of oblique reference: it is as if Old Man had done so-and-so. Many of the tales that appear in the collections under the category of origin stories were certainly regarded more as popular fairy tales than as a book of genesis. Such playful mythologizing is common in all civilizations, higher as well as lower. The simpler members of the populations may regard the resultant images with undue seriousness, but in the main they cannot be said to represent doctrine, or the local “myth.” The Maoris, for example, from wh
om we have some of our finest cosmogonies, have the story of an egg dropped by a bird into the primeval sea; it burst, and out came a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, a pig, a dog, and a canoe. All got into the canoe and drifted to New Zealand.[46] This clearly is a burlesque of the cosmic egg. On the other hand, the Kamchatkans declare, apparently in all seriousness, that God inhabited heaven originally, but then descended to earth. When he traveled about on his snowshoes, the new ground yielded under him like thin and pliant ice. The land has been uneven ever since.[47] Or again, according to the Central Asiatic Kirghiz, when two early people tending a great ox had been without drink for a very long time and were nearly dead of thirst, the animal got water for them by ripping open the ground with its big horns. That is how the lakes in the country of the Kirghiz were made.[48]

  Figure 63. Khnemu Shapes Pharaoh’s Son on a Potter’s Wheel While Thoth Marks Life Span (papyrus, Ptolemaic, Egypt, c. third–first century b.c.)

  A clown figure working in continuous opposition to the wellwishing creator very often appears in myth and folktale, as accounting for the ills and difficulties of existence this side of the veil. The Melanesians of New Britain tell of an obscure being, “the one who was first there,” who drew two male figures on the ground, scratched open his own skin, and sprinkled the drawings with his blood. He plucked two large leaves and covered the figures, which became, after a while, two men. The names of the men were To Kabinana and To Karvuvu.

  To Kabinana went off alone, climbed a coconut tree that had light yellow nuts, picked two that were still unripe, and threw them to the ground; they broke and became two handsome women. To Karvuvu admired the women and asked how his brother had come by them. “Climb a coconut tree,” To Kabinana said, “pick two unripe nuts, and throw them to the ground.” But To Karvuvu threw the nuts point downward, and the women who came from them had flat ugly noses.[49]

  One day To Kabinana carved a Thum-fish out of wood and let it swim off into the ocean, so that it should be a living fish forever after. Now this Thum-fish drove the Malivaran-fish to the shore, where To Kabinana simply gathered them up from the beach. To Karvuvu admired the Thum-fish and wanted to make one, but when he was taught how, he carved a shark instead. This shark ate the Malivaran-fish instead of driving them ashore. To Karvuvu, crying, went to his brother and said: “I wish I had not made that fish; he does nothing but eat up all the others.” “What sort of fish is it?” he was asked. “Well,” he answered, “I made a shark.” “You really are a disgusting fellow,” his brother said. “Now you have fixed it so that our mortal descendants shall suffer. That fish of yours will eat up all the others, and people too.”[50]

  Behind this foolishness, it is possible to see that the one cause (the obscure being who cut himself) yields within the frame of the world dual effects — good and evil. The story is not as naïve as it appears.[51] Furthermore, the metaphysical pre-existence of the Platonic archetype of the shark is implied in the curious logic of the final dialogue. This is a conception inherent in every myth. Universal too is the casting of the antagonist, the representative of evil, in the role of the clown. Devils — both the lusty thickheads and the sharp, clever deceivers — are always clowns. Though they may triumph in the world of space and time, both they and their work simply disappear when the perspective shifts to the transcendental. They are the mistakers of shadow for substance: they symbolize the inevitable imperfections of the realm of shadow, and so long as we remain this side the veil cannot be done away.

  Figure 64. Edshu the Trickster (carved wood, cowries, and leather; Yoruba; Nigeria; nineteenth–early twentieth century a.d.)

  The Black Tatars of Siberia say that when the demiurge Pajana fashioned the first human beings, he found that he was unable to produce a life-giving spirit for them. So he had to go up to heaven and procure souls from Kudai, the High God, leaving meanwhile a naked dog to guard the figures of his manufacture. The devil, Erlik, arrived while he was away. And Erlik said to the dog: “Thou hast no hair. I will give thee golden hair if thou wilt give into my hands these soulless people.” The proposal pleased the dog, and he gave the people he was guarding to the tempter. Erlik defiled them with his spittle, but took flight the moment he saw God approaching to give them life. God saw what had been done, and so he turned the human bodies inside out. That is why we have spittle and impurity in our intestines.[52]

  The folk mythologies take up the story of creation only at the moment where the transcendental emanations break into spatial forms. Nevertheless, they do not differ from the great mythologies on any essential point in their evaluations of human circumstance. Their symbolic personages correspond in import — frequently also in trait and deed — to those of the higher iconographies, and the wonder world in which they move is precisely that of the greater revelations: the world and the age between deep sleep and waking consciousness, the zone where the One breaks into the manifold and the many are reconciled in the One.

  Breaking free from cosmogonic associations, the negative, clown-devil aspect of the demiurgic power has become a particular favorite in the tales told for amusement. A vivid example is Coyote of the American plains. Reynard the Fox is a European incarnation of this figure.

  * * *

  Footnotes

  * Sanskrit: māyā-śakti.

  * Beyond the categories, and therefore not defined by either of the pair of opposites called “void” and “being.” Such terms are only clues to the transcendency.

  * A divine year is equal to 360 human years. See above.

  * Since in Sanskrit A and U coalesce in O, the sacred syllable is pronounced and often written “OM.” See the prayers in Apotheosis and Arjuna's obeisance, above.

  * In the sacred writings of Mahāyāna Buddhism, eighteen “voidnesses” or degrees of the void are enumerated and described. These are experienced by the yogi and by the soul as it passes into death. See Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrine, pp. 206, 239 f.

  * The five elements according to the Chinese system are earth, fire, water, wood, and gold.

  * Ta’aroa (Tahitian dialect) is Tangaroaā.

  * Ginnungagap, the void, the abyss of chaos into which all devolves at the end of the cycle (“Twilight of the Gods”) and out of which then all appears again after a timeless age of reincubation.

  * * *

  Endnotes

  [1] See C.G. Jung, “On Psychic Energy” (orig. 1928, Collected Works, vol. 8), entitled in its earliest draft “The Theory of the Libido.”

  [2] See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

  [3] Freud, Moses and Monotheism, translated by James Strachey (Standard Edition, XXIII, 1964). (Orig. 1939.)

  [4] Gospel According to Luke, 17:21.

  [5] See above.

  [6] See above.

  [7] See above.

  [8] See above.

  [9] Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Historia de la Nación Chichimeca (1608), Capítulo I (published in Lord Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico, London, 1830–48, vol. IX, p. 205; also by Alfredo Chavero, Obras Históricas de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Mexico, 1891–92, vol. II, pp. 21–22).

  [10] Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. V, p. 375.

  [11] See Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson, The Heart of Jainism (Oxford University Press, 1915), pp. 272–78.

  [12] See Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, 3–6.

  [13] Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, 8–12. [For Campbell’s further thoughts on the sacred syllable AUM, see Myths of Light, pp. 33–35. — Ed.]

  [14] Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, 7.

  [15] Ha idra zuta, Zohar, iii, 288a. Compare to the Tibetan lama, above.

  [16] Ha idra rabba qadisha, xi, 212–14 and 233, translation by S.L. MacGregor Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Ltd., 1887), pp. 134–35 and 137.

  [17] Summa contra Gentiles, I.i.

  [18] See Tragedy & Comedy above.

  [19] Johannes C. Anderson, Maori Life in Ao-tea (Christchurch [New Zealand], no date [1907?])
, p. 127.

  [20] See The Vedantasara of Sadananda, translated with Introduction, Sanskrit Text, and Comments, by Swami Nikhilananda (Mayavati, 1931).

  [21] Translated from Richard Wilhelm, Chinesische Märchen (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1921), pp. 29–31.

  [22] Rev. Richard Taylor, Te ika a Maui, or New Zealand and Its Inhabitants (London, 1855), pp. 14–15.

  [23] The little circle underneath the main portion of Figure 59. Compare the Chinese Tao or yin-yang.

  [24] Kenneth P. Emory, “The Tuamotuan Creation Charts by Paiore,” Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 48, no. 1 (March 1939), pp. 1–29.

  [25] Ibid., p. 12.

  [26] Chāndogya Upaniṣad, 3.19.1–3.

  [27] A.S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, p. 83. Copyright 1928 by the Macmillan Company and used with their permission. [The mythic image of the Cosmic Egg also resonates with that theory known by modern physicists as the Big Bang, first propounded in 1927 by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest. — Ed.]

  [28] “Entropy always increases.” (See Eddington, pp. 63 ff.) [This is a restatement of what is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, first formulated in 1824 by French scientist Sadi Carnot. — Ed.]

  [29] Kenneth P. Emory, “The Tahitian Account of Creation by Mare,” Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 47, No. 2 (June 1938), pp. 53–54.