The hero with a thousand faces

	Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
	There is not even silence in the mountains
	But dry sterile thunder without rain
	There is not even solitude in the mountains
	But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
	From doors of mudcracked houses.

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. As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, 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 (futureism), 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 is 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.

Theseus, the hero-slayer of the minotaur, entered Crete from without, as the symbol and arm of the rising civilization of the greeks. There was the new and living thing. But it is possible also for the principle of regeneration to be sought and found within the very walls of the tyrant's empire itself. Professor Toynbee uses the terms "detachment" and "transfiguration" to describe the crisis by which the higher spiritual dimension is attained that makes possible the resumption of the work of creation. The first step, detachement or withdrawl, consists in a radical transfer of empthasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperations of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter when we sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life. We should tower in stature. Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day - a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those casual zones of the psyche, where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties eradicate them in his own case (i.e, give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G.  Jung has called "the archtypal images." This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, "discrimination."

The archetypes to be discovered and assimilated are precisely those that have inspired, through the annals of human culture, the basic images of ritual, mythology, and vision. These "Eterna Ones of the Dream" are not to be confused with the personally modified symbolic figures that appear in nightmare and madness to the still tormented individual. 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. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.

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

"I was walking alone around the upper end of a large city, through slummy, muddy streets lined with hard little houses," writes a modern woman, describing a dream that she has had.

"I did not know where i was, but i liked the exploring. I choose one street which was terribly muddy and led across what 			must have been an open sewer. I followed along between rows of shanties and then discovered a little river flowing between me and some nice high, firm ground where there was a paved street. This was a nice, perfectly clear river, flowing over grass. I could see the grass moving under the water. There was no way to cross, so i went to a little house and asked for a boat. A man there said of course he could help me cross. He brought out a small wooden box which he put on the edge of the river and i saw at once that with this box i could easily jump across. I knew all danger was over and wanted to reward the man richly.
In thinking of this dream I have a distinct feeling that i did not have to go where i was at all but could have chosen a comfortable walk along the paved streets. I had gone to the squalid and muddy district because i preferred adventure, and, having begun, i had to go on... When i think of how persistently i kept going straight ahead in the dream, it seems as though i must have kjnown there was something fine ahead, like that lovely, grassy river and the secure, high, paved road beyond. Thinking of it in those terms, it is like a determination to be born - or rather to be be born again - in some spiritual sense. Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the souls destination."


The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist, and, like all who have elected to follow, not the safely marked general highways of the day, but the adventure of the special, dimly audible call that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as without, she has had to make her way alone, through difficulties not commonly encountered. "through slummy, muddy streets"; she has known the dark night of the soul, Dante's "dark wood, midway in the journey of our life" and the sorrows of the pits of hell:

	Through me is the way into the woeful city
	Through me is the way into eternal woe
	Through me is the way among the Lost People

It is remarkable that in this dream the basic outline of the universal mythological formula is the adventure of the hero is reproduced, to the detail. These deeply significant motifs of the perils, obstacles, and good fortunes of the way, we shall find inflected through the following pages in a hundred forms. The crossing first of the open sewer, then of the perfectly clear river flowing over grass, the appearance of the willing helper at the critical moment, and the high, firm ground beyond the final stream. (the Earthly Paradise, the Land over Jordan): these are the everlastingly recurrent themes of the wonderful song of the souls high adventure. And each who has dared to harken and follow the street call has know the perils of dangerous, solitary transit.

	A sharpened edge of a rasor, hard to traverse
	A difficult path is this - poets declare!

The dreamer is assisted across the water by the gift of a small wooden box, which takes the place, in this dream, of the more usual skiff or bridge. This is a symbol of her own special talent and virtue, by which she has been ferried across the waters of the world. The dreamer has supplied us with no account of her associations, so that we do not know what special contents of the box would have revealed; but it is certainly a variety of Pandora's box - that devine gift of the gods to beautiful woman, filled with the seeds of all trouble and blessings of existence. but also provided with the sustaining virtue, hope. By this, the dreamer crosses to the other shore. And by a like miracle, so will each whose work is the difficult, dangerous task of self-discovery and self-development be portered across the ocean of life.

The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconcious civic and trible routines. But these seekers, too, are saved - by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millennia. it is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?

Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, fell in love with the handsome Theseus the moment she saw him disembark from the boat that had brought the pitiful group of Athenian youths and maidens for the Minotaur. She found a way to talk with him, and declaured that she would supply a means to help him back out of the labyrinth if he would promise to take her away from crete with him and make her his wife. The pledge was given. Ariadne turned for help, then, to the crafty Daedalus, by whose art the labyrinth had been constructed and Ariadnes mother enabled to give bith to its inhabitant. Daedalus simply presented her with a skein of linen thread, which the visiting hero might fix to the entrance and unwind as he went into the maze. It is, indeed, very little that we need! But lacking that, the adventure into the labyrinth is without hope. The little is close at hand. Most curiously, the very scientist who, in the service of the sinful king, was the brain behind the horror of the labyrinth, quite as readily can serve the purposes of freedom. But the hero-heart must be at hand. For centuries Daedalus has represented the type of artist-scientist: that curiously disinterested, almost diabolic human phenomenon, beyond the normal bounds of his social judgement, dedicated to the morals nor of his time, but of his art. He is the hero of the way of thought - singlehearted, courageous, and full of faith that the truth, as he finds it, shall make us free.

And so now we may turn to him, as did Ariadne. The flax for the linen of his thread he has gathered from the fields of human imagination. Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands,  gave gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.