# The Hero With a Thousand Faces  ## Metadata - Author: [[Joseph Campbell]] - Full Title: The Hero With a Thousand Faces - Category: #heros-journey ## Highlights - The other interesting thing about Campbell’s approach to mythology was that he was very focused on the humanist part of the religious equation, rather than the theological. While he studied, wrote, and lectured on humanity’s metaphysical traditions for over sixty years, Campbell’s focus was not on the question “What is out there?” but rather on the question, “Why do we tell the stories that we do about whatever it is that is out there?” ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=269)) - “Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.” ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=280)) - A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. ([Location 315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=315)) - It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation. ([Location 463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=463)) - The unfortunate father is the first radical intrusion of another order of reality into the beatitude of this earthly restatement of the excellence of the situation within the womb; he, therefore, is experienced primarily as an enemy. ([Location 512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=512)) - It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. ([Location 581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=581)) - The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. ([Location 664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=664)) - schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be — if we are to experience long survival — a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified — and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn. ([Location 667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=667)) - Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. ([Location 694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=694)) - The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man — perfected, unspecific, universal man — he has been reborn. ([Location 740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=740)) - 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. ([Location 741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=741)) - Thus the two are the terms of a single mythological theme and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming (kathodos and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis = purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form). ([Location 884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=884)) - The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation — initiation — return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. ([Location 909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=909)) - As we soon shall see, whether presented in the vast, almost oceanic images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, or in the majestic legends of the Bible, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above described: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return. ([Location 1001](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1001)) - Such varieties of image alternate easily, representing three degrees of condensation of the one life force. An abundant harvest is the sign of God’s grace; God’s grace is the food of the soul; the lightning bolt is the harbinger of fertilizing rain, and at the same time the manifestation of the released energy of God. Grace, food substance, energy: these pour into the living world, and wherever they fail, life decomposes into death. ([Location 1099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1099)) - Again, the figure may be that of the cosmic man or woman (for example the Buddha himself, or the dancing Hindu goddess Kālī) seated or standing on this spot, or even fixed to the tree (Attis, Jesus, Wotan); for the hero as the incarnation of God is himself the navel of the world, the umbilical point through which the energies of eternity break into time. ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1110)) - Hence, the traditional importance of the mathematical problem of the quadrature of the circle: it contains the secret of the transformation of heavenly into earthly forms. ([Location 1123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1123)) - Ancient cities are built like temples, having their portals to the four directions, while in the central place stands the major shrine of the divine city founder. ([Location 1146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1146)) - Virtue is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight, which goes beyond all pairs of opposites. Virtue quells the self-centered ego and makes the transpersonal centeredness possible; but when that has been achieved, what then of the pain or pleasure, vice or virtue, either of our own ego or of any other? Through all, the transcendent force is then perceived which lives in all, in all is wonderful, and is worthy, in all, of our profound obeisance. ([Location 1162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1162)) - This is an example of one of the ways in which the adventure can begin. A blunder — apparently the merest chance — reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood. As Freud has shown,[2] blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1398)) - As a preliminary manifestation of the powers that are breaking into play, the frog, coming up as it were by miracle, can be termed the “herald”; the crisis of his appearance is the “call to adventure.” ([Location 1404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1404)) - Or it may mark the dawn of religious illumination. As apprehended by the mystic, it marks what has been termed “the awakening of the self.” ([Location 1407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1407)) - Typical of the circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny. ([Location 1415](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1415)) - This first stage of the mythological journey — which we have designated the “call to adventure” — signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. ([Location 1511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1511)) - Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or “culture,” the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless — even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration. ([Location 1531](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1531)) - The myths and folktales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one’s present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure. ([Location 1542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1542)) - Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control. ([Location 1626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1626)) - For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass. ([Location 1707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1707)) - The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades. ([Location 1924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=1924)) - The thunderbolt (vajra) is one of the major symbols in Buddhist iconography, signifying the spiritual power of Buddhahood (indestructible enlightenment) which shatters the illusory realities of the world. ([Location 2003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2003)) - As a symbol of the world to which the five senses glue us, and which cannot be pressed aside by the actions of the physical organs, Sticky-hair was subdued only when the Future Buddha, no longer protected by the five weapons of his momentary name and physical character, resorted to the unnamed, invisible sixth: the divine thunderbolt of the knowledge of the transcendent principle, which is beyond the phenomenal realm of names and forms. ([Location 2024](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2024)) - The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. ([Location 2045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2045)) - That is why the approaches of and the entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarves, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silence within. ([Location 2082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2082)) - They are preliminary embodiments of the dangerous aspect of the presence, corresponding to the mythological ogres that bound the conventional world, or to the two rows of teeth of the whale. They illustrate the fact that the devotee at the moment of the entry into the temple undergoes a metamorphosis. His secular character remains without; he sheds it as a snake its slough. Once inside he may be said to have died to time and returned to the World Womb, the World Navel, the Earthly Paradise. The mere fact that anyone can physically walk past the temple guardians does not invalidate their significance; for if the intruder is incapable of encompassing the sanctuary, he has effectually remained without. Anyone unable to understand a god sees it as a devil and is thus defended from the approach. Allegorically, then, the passage into a temple and the hero-dive through the jaws of the whale are identical adventures, both denoting, in the picture language, the life-centering, life-renewing act. ([Location 2084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2084)) - “No creature,” writes Ananda Coomaraswamy, “can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist.” ([Location 2091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2091)) - Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. ([Location 2337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2337)) - And so it happens that if anyone — in whatever society — undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures (any one of which may swallow him) which is no less marvelous than the wild Siberian world of the pudak and sacred mountains. ([Location 2402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2402)) - There can be no question: the psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best, with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, “enlightened” individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.* Nevertheless, in the multitude of myths and legends that have been preserved to us, or collected from the ends of the earth, we may yet see delineated something of our still human course. To hear and profit, however, one may have to submit somehow to purgation and surrender. And that is part of our problem: just how to do that. “Or do ye think that ye shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed away before you?”[24] ([Location 2465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2465)) - Inanna and Ereshkigal, the two sisters, light and dark respectively, together represent, according to the antique manner of symbolization, the one goddess in two aspects; and their confrontation epitomizes the whole sense of the difficult road of trials. The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh. ([Location 2571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2571)) - The ordeal is a deepening of the problem of the first threshold and the question is still in balance: Can the ego put itself to death? For many-headed is this surrounding Hydra; one head cut off, two more appear — unless the right caustic is applied to the mutilated stump. ([Location 2578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2578)) - The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage (ἱερὸς γάµος) of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. ([Location 2586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2586)) - The Lady of the House of Sleep is a familiar figure in fairy tale and myth. We have already spoken of her, under the forms of Brynhild and little Briar-rose.[27] She is the paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply to all desire, the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero’s earthly and unearthly quest. ([Location 2607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2607)) - The fantasy is primarily spontaneous; for there exists a close and obvious correspondence between the attitude of the young child toward its mother and that of the adult toward the surrounding material world. ([Location 2645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2645)) - And as at the first thou hast seen me ugly, brutish, loathly — in the end, beautiful — even so is royal rule: for without battles, without fierce conflict, it may not be won; but in the result, he that is king of no matter what shows comely and handsome forth.” ([Location 2724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2724)) - The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero’s total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. ([Location 2772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2772)) - But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul. ([Location 2791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2791)) - Not even monastery walls, however, not even the remoteness of the desert, can defend against the female presences; for as long as the hermit’s flesh clings to his bones and pulses warm, the images of life are alert to storm his mind. ([Location 2865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2865)) - The Bow of God’s Wrath is bent, and the Arrow made ready on the String; and Justice bends the Arrow at your Heart, and strains the Bow; and it is nothing but the mere Pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any Promise or Obligation at all, that keeps the Arrow one Moment from being made drunk with your Blood....” ([Location 2881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2881)) - For the ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim’s own ego — derived from the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind, but projected before; and the fixating idolatry of that pedagogical nonthing is itself the fault that keeps one steeped in a sense of sin, sealing the potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of the father, and therewith of the world. ([Location 2962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2962)) - Four symbolical colors, representing the points of the compass, play a prominent role in Navaho iconography and cult. They are white, blue, yellow, and black, signifying, respectively, east, south, west, and north. These correspond to the red, white, green, and black on the hat of the African trickster divinity Edshu; for the House of the Father, like the Father himself, symbolizes the Center. ([Location 2986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=2986)) - This tale of indulgent parenthood illustrates the antique idea that when the roles of life are assumed by the improperly initiated, chaos supervenes. ([Location 3070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3070)) - The traditional idea of initiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue (father or father-substitute) is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes — for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized) motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent, consequently, now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from the infantile illusions of “good” and “evil” to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being. ([Location 3077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3077)) - The meaning is that the grace that pours into the universe through the sun door is the same as the energy of the bolt that annihilates and is itself indestructible: the delusion-shattering light of the Imperishable is the same as the light that creates. ([Location 3264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3264)) - In his mercy, in his love for the forms of time, this demiurgic man of men yields countenance to the sea of pangs; but in his full awareness of what he is doing, the seminal waters of the life that he gives are the tears of his eyes. ([Location 3274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3274)) - The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence. ([Location 3276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3276)) - The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands — and the two are atoned. ([Location 3280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3280)) - Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth. They emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind. ([Location 3392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3392)) - This is the biblical version of a myth known to many lands. It represents one of the basic ways of symbolizing the mystery of creation: the devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two. This image stands at the beginning of the cosmogonic cycle,[94] and with equal propriety at the conclusion of the hero-task, at the moment when the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and recollected, and wisdom regained. ([Location 3418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3418)) - Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, “native,” or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.[107] ([Location 3462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3462)) - But death was not the end. New life, new birth, new knowledge of existence (so that we live not in this physique only, but in all bodies, all physiques of the world, as the Bodhisattva) was given us. That father was himself the womb, the mother, of a second birth. ([Location 3578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3578)) - This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is the mystery of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the mother, chewed into fragments, and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were. ([Location 3581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3581)) - Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure excessively suffering individuals of the unconsciously misdirected desires and hostilities that weave around them their private webs of unreal terrors and ambivalent attractions; the patient released from these finds himself able to participate with comparative satisfaction in the more realistic fears, hostilities, erotic and religious practices, business enterprises, wars, pastimes, and household tasks offered to him by his particular culture. ([Location 3627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3627)) - With the final “extirpation of delusion, desire, and hostility” (nirvāṇa) the mind knows that it is not what it thought: thought goes. The mind rests in its true state. And here it may dwell until the body drops away. ([Location 3640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3640)) - He rises, returns to them, and dwells with them as an egoless center, through whom the principle of emptiness is made manifest in its own simplicity. And this is his great “compassionate act”; for by it the truth is revealed that in the understanding of one in whom the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion is dead, this world is nirvāṇa. “Gift waves” go out from such a one for the liberation of us all. “This our worldly life is an activity of nirvāṇa itself, not the slightest distinction exists between them.”[127] ([Location 3655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3655)) - The teahouse is called “the abode of the unsymmetrical”: the unsymmetrical suggests movement; the purposely unfinished leaves a vacuum into which the imagination of the beholder can pour. ([Location 3693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3693)) - During the long and peaceful Tokugawa period (1603–1868), before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854, the texture of Japanese life became so imbued with significant formalization that existence to the slightest detail was a conscious expression of eternity, the landscape itself a shrine. Similarly, throughout the Orient, throughout the ancient world, and in the pre-Columbian Americas, society and nature represented to the mind the inexpressible. “The plants, rocks, fire, water, all are alive. They watch us and see our needs. They see when we have nothing to protect us,” declared an old Apache storyteller, “and it is then that they reveal themselves and speak to us.”[132] This is what the Buddhist calls “the sermon of the inanimate.” ([Location 3702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3702)) - The third wonder of the Bodhisattva myth is that the first wonder (namely, the bisexual form) is symbolical of the second (the identity of eternity and time). For in the language of the divine pictures, the world of time is the great mother womb. The life therein, begotten by the father, is compounded of her darkness and his light.[133] We are conceived in her and dwell removed from the father, but when we pass from the womb of time at death (which is our birth to eternity) we are given into his hands. The wise realize, even within this womb, that they have come from and are returning to the father; while the very wise know that she and he are in substance one. ([Location 3717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3717)) - According to one of the traditional ways of looking at these supports of meditation, the female form (Tibetan: yum) is to be regarded as time and the male (yab) as eternity. The union of the two is productive of the world, in which all things are at once temporal and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing male-female God. The initiate, through meditation, is led to the recollection of this Form of forms (yab-yum) within himself. ([Location 3741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3741)) - The ease with which the adventure is here accomplished signifies that the hero is a superior man, a born king. Such ease distinguishes numerous fairy tales and all legends of the deeds of incarnate gods. Where the usual hero would face a test, the elect encounters no delaying obstacle and makes no mistake. ([Location 3805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3805)) - Another image of indestructibility is represented in the folk idea of the spiritual “double” — an external soul not afflicted by the losses and injuries of the present body, but existing safely in some place removed.[144] “My death,” said a certain ogre, “is far from here and hard to find, on the wide ocean. In that sea is an island, and on the island there grows a green oak, and beneath the oak is an iron chest, and in the chest is a small basket, and in the basket is a hare, and in the hare is a duck, and in the duck is an egg; and he who finds the egg and breaks it, kills me at the same time.”[145] ([Location 3836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3836)) - The supreme boon desired for the Indestructible Body is uninterrupted residence in the Paradise of the Milk That Never Fails: ([Location 3856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3856)) - It is obvious that the infantile fantasies which we all cherish still in the unconscious play continually into myth, fairy tale, and the teachings of the church, as symbols of indestructible being. This is helpful, for the mind feels at home with the images, and seems to be remembering something already known. But the circumstance is obstructive too, for the feelings come to rest in the symbols and resist passionately every effort to go beyond. ([Location 3873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3873)) - Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood. The gods as icons are not ends in themselves. Their entertaining myths transport the mind and spirit, not up to, but past them, into the yonder void; from which perspective the more heavily freighted theological dogmas then appear to have been only pedagogical lures: their function, to cart the unadroit intellect away from its concrete clutter of facts and events to a comparatively rarefied zone, where, as a final boon, all existence — whether heavenly, earthly, or infernal — may at last be seen transmuted into the semblance of a lightly passing, recurrent, mere childhood dream of bliss and fright. ([Location 3937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3937)) - “All of these visualized deities are but symbols representing the various things that occur on the Path”;[154] as well as a doctrine of the contemporary psychoanalytical schools.[155] And the same meta-theological insight seems to be what is suggested in Dante’s final verses, where the illuminated voyager at last is able to lift his courageous eyes beyond the beatific vision of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to the one Eternal Light.[156] ([Location 3944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3944)) - The gods and goddesses then are to be understood as embodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not themselves the Ultimate in its primary state. ([Location 3953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=3953)) - Immortality is then experienced as a present fact: “It is here! It is here!”[164] All things are in process, rising and returning. Plants come to blossom, but only to return to the root. Returning to the root is like seeking tranquility. Seeking tranquility is like moving toward destiny. To move toward destiny is like eternity. To know eternity is enlightenment, and not to recognize eternity brings disorder and evil. Knowing eternity makes one comprehensive; comprehension makes one broadminded; breadth of vision brings nobility; nobility is like heaven. The heavenly is like Tao. Tao is the Eternal. The decay of the body is not to be feared.[165] ([Location 4119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4119)) - The Japanese have a proverb: “The gods only laugh when men pray to them for wealth.” The boon bestowed on the worshiper is always scaled to his stature and to the nature of his dominant desire: the boon is simply a symbol of life energy stepped down to the requirements of a certain specific case. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, whereas the hero who has won the favor of the god may beg for the boon of perfect illumination, what he generally seeks are longer years to live, weapons with which to slay his neighbor, or the health of his child. ([Location 4129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4129)) - the power that constructs the atom and controls the orbits of the stars. ([Location 4156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4156)) - When the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. ([Location 4658](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4658)) - If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron. On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero’s wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becames a lively, often comical, pursuit. This flight may be complicated by marvels of magical obstruction and evasion. ([Location 4717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4717)) - In the Orient, a great point is made of the danger of undertaking the psychologically disturbing practices of yoga without competent supervision. The meditations of the postulant have to be adjusted to his progress, so that the imagination may be defended at every step by devatas (envisioned, adequate deities) until the moment comes for the prepared spirit to step alone beyond. ([Location 4811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4811)) - The myths of failure touch us with the tragedy of life, but those of success only with their own incredibility. And yet, if the monomyth is to fulfill its promise, not human failure or superhuman success but human success is what we shall have to be shown. That is the problem of the crisis of the threshold of the return. ([Location 4872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4872)) - The hero may have to be brought back from his supernatural adventure by assistance from without. That is to say, the world may have to come and get him. For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state. ([Location 4879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4879)) - The tree is the World Axis in its wish-fulfilling, fruitful aspect — the same as that displayed in Christian homes at the season of the winter solstice, which is the moment of the rebirth or return of the sun, a joyous custom inherited from the Germanic paganism that has given to the modern German language its feminine Sonne. ([Location 4980](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4980)) - If the Christian cross is the most telling symbol of the mythological passage into the abyss of death, the shimenawa is the simplest sign of the resurrection. ([Location 4987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=4987)) - The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other — different as life and death, as day and night. The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless — and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol — the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness. As in the stories of the cannibal ogresses, the fearfulness of this loss of personal individuation can be the whole burden of the transcendental experience for unqualified souls. But the hero-soul goes boldly in — and discovers the hags converted into goddesses and the dragons into the watchdogs of the gods. ([Location 5079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5079)) - That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of “yes” and “no” revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void? ([Location 5095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5095)) - The equating of a single year in Paradise to one hundred of earthly existence is a motif well known to myth. The full round of one hundred signifies totality. Similarly, the three hundred and sixty degrees of the circle signify totality; accordingly the Hindu Purāṇas represent one year of the gods as equal to three hundred and sixty of men. ([Location 5183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5183)) - The encounter and separation, for all its wildness, is typical of the sufferings of love. For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. ([Location 5263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5263)) - This is the sign of the hero’s requirement, now, to knit together his two worlds. ([Location 5268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5268)) - Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back — not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other — is the talent of the master. ([Location 5273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5273)) - Symbols are only the vehicles of communication; they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding. Hence the personality or personalities of God — whether represented in trinitarian, dualistic, or unitarian terms, in polytheistic, monotheistic, or henotheistic terms, pictorially or verbally, as documented fact or as apocalyptic vision — no one should attempt to read or interpret as the final thing. ([Location 5405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5405)) - The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey. “For then alone do we know God truly,” writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, “when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God.”[33] And in the Kena Upaniṣad, in the same spirit: “To know is not to know; not to know is to know.”[34] Mistaking a vehicle for its tenor may lead to the spilling not only of valueless ink, but of valuable blood. ([Location 5409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5409)) - A corresponding formulation by Jesus makes the point more succinctly: “Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”[36] ([Location 5420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5420)) - The meaning is very clear; it is the meaning of all religious practice. The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent. ([Location 5423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5423)) - The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that, like Hamlet or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in one’s inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of both man and the cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. ([Location 5442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5442)) - Man in the world of action loses his centering in the principle of eternity if he is anxious for the outcome of his deeds, but resting them and their fruits on the knees of the Living God he is released by them, as by a sacrifice, from the bondages of the sea of death. “Do without attachment the work you have to do....Surrendering all action to Me, with mind intent on the Self, freeing yourself from longing and selfishness, fight — unperturbed by grief.”[39] ([Location 5454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5454)) - Powerful in this insight, calm and free in action, elated that through his hand should flow the grace of Viracocha, the hero is the conscious vehicle of the terrible, wonderful Law, whether his work be that of butcher, jockey, or king. ([Location 5459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5459)) - The mythological hero, setting forth from his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again — if the powers have remained unfriendly to him — his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir). ([Location 5701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5701)) - The archetype of the hero in the belly of the whale is widely known. The principal deed of the adventurer is usually to make fire with his fire sticks in the interior of the monster, thus bringing about the whale’s death and his own release. Fire making in this manner is symbolic of the sex act. The two sticks — socket-stick and spindle — are known respectively as the female and the male; the flame is the newly generated life. The hero making fire in the whale is a variant of the sacred marriage. ([Location 5722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5722)) - In the later stages of many mythologies, the key images hide like needles in great haystacks of secondary anecdote and rationalization; for when a civilization has passed from a mythological to a secular point of view, the older images are no longer felt or quite approved. ([Location 5734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5734)) - And in modern progressive Christianity the Christ — Incarnation of the Logos and Redeemer of the World — is primarily a historical personage, a harmless country wise man of the semi-Oriental past who preached a benign doctrine of “do as you would be done by,” yet was executed as a criminal. His death is read as a splendid lesson in integrity and fortitude. ([Location 5742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5742)) - Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult. ([Location 5745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5745)) - To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning. ([Location 5750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5750)) - The female water spiritually fructified with the male fire of the Holy Ghost is the Christian counterpart of the water of transformation known to all systems of mythological imagery. ([Location 5773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5773)) - The popular interpretation of baptism is that it “washes away original sin,” with emphasis rather on the cleansing than on the rebirth idea. This is a secondary interpretation. Or if the traditional birth image is remembered, nothing is said of an antecedent marriage. Mythological symbols, however, have to be followed through all their implications before they open out the full system of correspondences through which they represent, by analogy, the millennial adventure of the soul. ([Location 5785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5785)) - dreams are symptomatic of the dynamics of the psyche. ([Location 5823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5823)) - Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology. ([Location 5830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5830)) - Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness— that void, or being, beyond the categories which are themselves manifestations of this power,* — into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means — themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves. ([Location 5876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5876)) - The key to the modern systems of psychological interpretation therefore is this: the metaphysical realm = the unconscious. Correspondingly, the key to open the door the other way is the same equation in reverse: the unconscious = the metaphysical realm. “For,” as Jesus states it, “behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”[4] ([Location 5882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5882)) - Equally, the birth, life, and death of the individual may be regarded as a descent into unconsciousness and return. The hero is the one who, while still alive, knows and represents the claims of the superconsciousness which throughout creation is more or less unconscious. The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination — the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death. ([Location 5890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5890)) - The kingdom of God is within, yet without, also; God, however, is but a convenient means to wake the sleeping princess, the soul. Life is her sleep, death the awakening. The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution. God, the waker of the soul, is therewith his own immediate death. ([Location 5895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5895)) - As the consciousness of the individual rests on a sea of night into which it descends in slumber and out of which it mysteriously wakes, so, in the imagery of myth, the universe is precipitated out of, and reposes upon, a timelessness back into which it again dissolves. And as the mental and physical health of the individual depends on an orderly flow of vital forces into the field of waking day from the unconscious dark, so again in myth, the continuance of the cosmic order is assured only by a controlled flow of power from the source. The gods are symbolic personifications of the laws governing this flow. The gods come into existence with the dawn of the world and dissolve with the twilight. They are not eternal in the sense that the night is eternal. Only from the shorter span of human existence does the round of a cosmogonic eon seem to endure. ([Location 5912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5912)) - According to an Aztec version, each of the four elements — water, earth, air, and fire — terminates a period of the world: the eon of the waters ended in deluge, that of the earth with an earthquake, that of air with a wind, and the present eon will be destroyed by flame.[9] ([Location 5920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5920)) - According to the Stoic doctrine of the cyclic conflagration, all souls are resolved into the world soul or primal fire. When this universal dissolution is concluded, the formation of a new universe begins (Cicero’s renovatio), and all things repeat themselves, every divinity, every person, playing again his former part. Seneca gave a description of this destruction in his “De Consolatione ad Marciam,” and appears to have looked forward to living again in the cycle to come.[10] ([Location 5924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5924)) - The philosophical formula illustrated by the cosmogonic cycle is that of the circulation of consciousness through the three planes of being. The first plane is that of waking experience: cognitive of the hard, gross facts of an outer universe, illuminated by the light of the sun, and common to all. The second plane is that of dream experience: cognitive of the fluid, subtle forms of a private interior world, self-luminous and of one substance with the dreamer. The third plane is that of deep sleep: dreamless, profoundly blissful. In the first are encountered the instructive experiences of life; in the second these are digested, assimilated to the inner forces of the dreamer; while in the third all is enjoyed and known unconsciously, in the “space within the heart,” the room of the inner controller, the source and end of all.[12] ([Location 5999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=5999)) - Myth remains, necessarily, within the cycle, but represents this cycle as surrounded and permeated by the silence. Myth is the revelation of a plenum of silence within and around every atom of existence. Myth is a directing of the mind and heart, by means of profoundly informed figurations, to that ultimate mystery which fills and surrounds all existences. Even in the most comical and apparently frivolous of its moments, mythology is directing the mind to this unmanifest which is just beyond the eye. ([Location 6022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=6022)) - The basic principle of all mythology is this of the beginning in the end. ([Location 6066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=6066)) - The Hebrew Kabbala represents the process of creation as a series of emanations (Hebrew: sephiroth) out of the I AM of The Great Face. ([Location 6119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=6119)) - 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] ([Location 6474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=6474)) - 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. ([Location 6556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=6556)) - The world-generating spirit of the father passes into the manifold of earthly experience through a transforming medium — the mother of the world. She is a personification of the primal element named in the second verse of Genesis, where we read that “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” In the Hindu myth, she is the female figure through whom the Self begot all creatures. More abstractly understood, she is the world-bounding frame: “space, time, and causality” — the shell of the cosmic egg. More abstractly still, she is the lure that moved the Self-brooding Absolute to the act of creation. ([Location 6743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=6743)) - The universal goddess makes her appearance to men under a multitude of guises; for the effects of creation are multitudinous, complex, and of mutually contradictory kind when experienced from the viewpoint of the created world. The mother of life is at the same time the mother of death; she is masked in the ugly demonesses of famine and disease. ([Location 6905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=6905)) - The world of human life is now the problem. Guided by the practical judgment of the kings and the instruction of the priests of the dice of divine revelation (see the hakata of Mwuetsi’s children, p. 263), the field of consciousness so contracts that the grand lines of the human comedy are lost in a welter of cross-purposes. Men’s perspectives become flat, comprehending only the light-reflecting, tangible surfaces of existence. The vista into depth closes over. The significant form of the human agony is lost to view. Society lapses into mistake and disaster. The Little Ego has usurped the judgment seat of the Self. ([Location 6999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=6999)) - The story is recounted everywhere; and with such striking uniformity of the main contours, that the early Christian missionaries were forced to think that the devil himself must be throwing up mockeries of their teaching wherever they set their hand. ([Location 7015](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7015)) - We have come two stages: first, from the immediate emanations of the Uncreated Creating to the fluid yet timeless personages of the mythological age; second, from these Created Creating Ones to the sphere of human history. ([Location 7140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7140)) - In sum: the child of destiny has to face a long period of obscurity. This is a time of extreme danger, impediment, or disgrace. He is thrown inward to his own depths or outward to the unknown; either way, what he touches is a darkness unexplored. And this is a zone of unsuspected presences, benign as well as malignant: an angel appears, a helpful animal, a fisherman, a hunter, crone, or peasant. Fostered in the animal school, or, like Siegfried, below ground among the gnomes that nourish the roots of the tree of life, or again, alone in some little room (the story has been told a thousand ways), the young world-apprentice learns the lesson of the seed powers, which reside just beyond the sphere of the measured and the named. ([Location 7331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7331)) - The place of the hero’s birth, or the remote land of exile from which he returns to perform his adult deeds among men, is the mid-point or navel of the world. Just as ripples go out from an underwater spring, so the forms of the universe expand in circles from the source. ([Location 7467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7467)) - For the mythological hero is the champion not of things become but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo: Holdfast, the keeper of the past. From obscurity the hero emerges, but the enemy is great and conspicuous in the seat of power; he is enemy, dragon, tyrant, because he turns to his own advantage the authority of his position. He is Holdfast not because he keeps the past but because he keeps. ([Location 7515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7515)) - The hero-deed is a continuous shattering of the crystallizations of the moment. The cycle rolls: mythology focuses on the growing-point. Transformation, fluidity, not stubborn ponderosity, is the characteristic of the living God. The great figure of the moment exists only to be broken, cut into chunks, and scattered abroad. Briefly: the ogre-tyrant is the champion of the prodigious fact, the hero the champion of creative life. ([Location 7522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7522)) - The hegemony wrested from the enemy, the freedom won from the malice of the monster, the life energy released from the toils of the tyrant Holdfast — is symbolized as a woman. She is the maiden of the innumerable dragon slayings, the bride abducted from the jealous father, the virgin rescued from the unholy lover. She is the “other portion” of the hero himself — for “each is both”: if his stature is that of world monarch she is the world, and if he is a warrior she is fame. She is the image of his destiny which he is to release from the prison of enveloping circumstance. But where he is ignorant of his destiny, or deluded by false considerations, no effort on his part will overcome the obstacles.* ([Location 7589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7589)) - To a man not led astray from himself by sentiments stemming from the surfaces of what he sees, but courageously responding to the dynamics of his own nature — to a man who is, as Nietzsche phrases it, “a wheel rolling of itself” — difficulties melt and the unpredictable highway opens as he goes. ([Location 7636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7636)) - The hero of action is the agent of the cycle, continuing into the living moment the impulse that first moved the world. Because our eyes are closed to the paradox of the double focus, we regard the deed as accomplished amid danger and great pain by a vigorous arm, whereas from the other perspective it is, like the archetypal dragon-slaying of Tiamat by Marduk, only a bringing to pass of the inevitable. ([Location 7640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7640)) - The supreme hero, however, is not the one who merely continues the dynamics of the cosmogonic round, but he who reopens the eye — so that through all the comings and goings, delights and agonies of the world panorama, the One Presence will be seen again. This requires a deeper wisdom than the other, and results in a pattern not of action but of significant representation. The symbol of the first is the virtuous sword, of the second, the scepter of dominion, or the book of the law. The characteristic adventure of the first is the winning of the bride — the bride is life. The adventure of the second is the going to the father — the father is the invisible unknown. ([Location 7644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7644)) - Two degrees of initiation are to be distinguished in the mansion of the father. From the first the son returns as emissary, but from the second, with the knowledge that “I and the father are one.” Heroes of this second, highest illumination are the world redeemers, the so-called incarnations, in the highest sense. Their myths open out to cosmic proportions. Their words carry an authority beyond anything pronounced by the heroes of the scepter and the book. ([Location 7743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7743)) - Endowed with a pure understanding, restraining the self with firmness, turning away from sound and other objects, and abandoning love and hatred; dwelling in solitude, eating but little, controlling the speech, body, and mind, ever engaged in meditation and concentration, and cultivating freedom from passion; forsaking conceit and power, pride and lust, wrath and possessions, tranquil in heart, and free from ego — he becomes worthy of becoming one with the imperishable.[26] ([Location 7826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7826)) - The life-eager hero can resist death, and postpone his fate for a certain time. ([Location 7906](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=7906)) - The mighty hero of extraordinary powers — able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe — is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the king within. ([Location 8111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8111)) - There is no final system for the interpretation of myths, and there will never be any such thing. Mythology is like the god Proteus, “the ancient one of the sea, whose speech is sooth.” The god “will make assay, and take all manner of shapes of things that creep upon the earth, of water likewise, and of fierce fire burning.”[1] ([Location 8378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8378)) - Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Müller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man’s profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God’s Revelation to His children (the Church). Mythology is all of these. The various judgments are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age. ([Location 8394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8394)) - Hence, the totality — the fullness of man — is not in the separate member, but in the body of the society as a whole; the individual can be only an organ. From his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; through the past of that society descended the genes that built his body. If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought and feeling, he only breaks connection with the sources of his existence. ([Location 8405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8405)) - It has been customary to describe the seasonal festivals of so-called native peoples as efforts to control nature. This is a misrepresentation. There is much of the will to control in every act of man, and particularly in those magical ceremonies that are thought to bring rain clouds, cure sickness, or stay the flood; nevertheless the dominant motive in all truly religious (as opposed to black-magical) ceremonial is that of submission to the inevitables of destiny — and in the seasonal festivals this motive is particularly apparent. ([Location 8423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8423)) - From the standpoint of the way of duty, anyone in exile from the community is a nothing. From the other point of view, however, this exile is the first step of the quest. Each carries within himself the all; therefore it may be sought and discovered within. The differentiations of sex, age, and occupation are not essential to our character, but mere costumes which we wear for a time on the stage of the world. The image of man within is not to be confounded with the garments. We think of ourselves as Americans, children of the twentieth century, Occidentals, civilized Christians. We are virtuous or sinful. Yet such designations do not tell what it is to be man, they denote only the accidents of geography, birth-date, and income. What is the core of us? What is the basic character of our being? ([Location 8441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8441)) - The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world. Furthermore: the world too is of that essence. The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one. Hence separateness, withdrawal, is no longer necessary. Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence — for he has the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness. Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all. ([Location 8456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8456)) - Centered in this hub-point, the question of selfishness or altruism disappears. The individual has lost himself in the law and been reborn in identity with the whole meaning of the universe. For Him, by Him, the world was made. “O Mohammed,” God said, “hadst thou not been, I would not have created the sky.’’ ([Location 8461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8461)) - The social unit is not a carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organization. ([Location 8473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8473)) - The problem of mankind today, therefore, is precisely the opposite to that of men in the comparatively stable periods of those great co-ordinating mythologies which now are known as lies. Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today no meaning is in the group — none in the world: all is in the individual. But there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two. ([Location 8478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8478)) - The community today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to co-ordinate the in-group now can only break it into factions. The national idea, with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation. Its parody-rituals of the parade ground serve the ends of Holdfast, the tyrant dragon, not the God in whom self-interest is annihilate. And the numerous saints of this anticult — namely the patriots whose ubiquitous photographs, draped with flags, serve as official icons — are precisely the local threshold guardians (our demon Sticky-hair) whom it is the first problem of the hero to surpass. ([Location 8490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8490)) - Nor can the great world religions, as at present understood, meet the requirement. For they have become associated with the causes of the factions, as instruments of propaganda and self-congratulation. ([Location 8495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8495)) - The universal triumph of the secular state has thrown all religious organizations into such a definitely secondary, and finally ineffectual, position that religious pantomime is hardly more today than a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday morning, whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for the remainder of the week. Such a monkey-holiness is not what the functioning world requires; rather, a transmutation of the whole social order is necessary, so that through every detail and act of secular life the vitalizing image of the universal god-man who is actually immanent and effective in all of us may be somehow made known to consciousness. ([Location 8497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8497)) - The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal — carries the cross of the redeemer — not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair. ([Location 8534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08MWW2VDL&location=8534))