Mythological images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part. I think that’s the purpose of a mythology that we can live by. We have to find the one that we are in fact living by and know what it is so that we can direct our craft with competence.

Now, many of us live by myths that guide us,

There is a level of your dream consciousness that springs from your nature, not from your personal biography. Your nature itself is of two orders. First comes the order of animal nature: the instinct system which is the same in all human beings. Next comes the order of your spiritual life: what goes from the neck up.

No other animal has this great thing up there, this mind. When Dr. Freud began interpreting the inspirations and zeals of the top end of the spinal column in terms of the other end, he misunderstood the whole thing. Since the whole sense of mythological imagery is to propel you up into the spiritual realm, interpreting these things in a purely physical, biological way pulls you down again; it punctures and deflates the symbol. We share with the animals the desire to live, the urge toward survival and security. We share with the animals the zeal for sex and the zeal for winning and pres- tige-I’m the winner. Yet we bear within us the potential for an entirely dif- ferent level of experience, a level that can come to us in a moment.

Dante described this enlightened moment in his Vita nuova-the mo ment when he beheld Beatrice, the moment that turned him from a mere human animal into a poet. One might see her as an erotic object, yet what he saw was a manifestation of beauty; he experienced her presence on a different level altogether.

Five values: survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, and self- development. I looked at that list and I wondered why it should seem so strange to me. I finally realized that it struck me as strange because these are exactly the values that mythology transcends.

Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development- in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ gives you the clue when he says, “He that loses his life for my sake shall find it.”

Maslow’s five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. These are the bores. (In a marvelous footnote to an essay on Don Quixote, Ortega y Gasset once wrote, “A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship.

How do we find this thing in ourselves, that which truly moves us? Well, as I’ve said, mythologies are basically the same everywhere. Consequently, mythic images do not refer primarily to historical events. They come from the psyche and talk to the psyche; their primary reference is to the psyche-to the spirit, as we call it-and not to a historical event.

Now, there’s no doubt about it that there are certain sensations which spontaneously activate responses in the human body. You don’t have to be told what sexual signals are; in fact, very often one isn’t told at all, yet the biological imperative takes hold, and everything works just fine. Everything gets started and the parents begin to wonder what’s happening. So we don’t have to receive instructions there-though it doesn’t hurt.

Libresse, certain odors immediately start the salivary glands going. Sleep overtakes you when you find a place to lie down. There are given sig- nals to which the human body responds. These we share with the animals: torpor, activity, sexual zeal, mother love for the just-born creature, aggres- sion toward the one who threatens you, and so on.

There’s another level of consciousness in the human psyche, which I would associate with those levels of the wonderful thing that is human consciousness from the heart up to the crown of the head. When the awe and the zeal and the human mind yearning to know are awakened, a new sense of what it is to be human is born. Just as we have a physical body that we share with each other so that we can respond similarly to the same smells, so also we have a spiritual consciousness that is responding comparable to signals, and the whole concept of the archetypes of the human psyche is based on the notion that in the human brain, in the human sympathetic nervous system, there are structures that create a readiness to respond to certain signals. These are shared by all of humanity, with variations individually, but essentially pretty close along the line. And when these are triggered, there is the automatic response, just as there would be to an odor, whether that odor of bananas comes from an African cooking pot or from the fruit basket in my beautiful hotel room. Over the millennia, we have developed some experience of how people respond to spiritual symbols and how contemplating a particular symbol slants the mind places the mind on a certain plane of consciousness, which activates deeper spiritual powers in the individual. Everyone has his own favorites; everyone is ready for an experience unlike that of anybody else. The symbol which you are ready for

evokes a response in you. In our tradition, however, these images-these symbols- have been applied to historical events. In our religious traditions, we interpret the motifs of the Virgin Birth, death, Resurrection, and ascension as particular, temporal episodes. If you begin to doubt the possibility of these occurrences, your faith may be troubled. You will lose the symbol because you reject it. It was

given to you as a kind of newspaper report of something that’s supposed to have happened somewhere; now, you’ve studied biology, and you don’t even want to consider whether or how a virgin birth can have been accomplished. Is that what it referred to; is that what the mystery is? No, the mystery does not refer to something that might or might not have happened at a certain date in a certain place. It is a motif that is found in myths all over the world, and so must speak to the human psyche in another way entirely.

When these symbols disappear, we have lost the vehicle for communication between our waking consciousness and our deepest spiritual life. We have to reactivate the symbol, to bring it back to life, and to find what it means, to relate it to ourselves in some way or another.

Now, what did Jung do when he decided to seek out his myth? His process of discovery is interesting in that it was so childish. Here he was, thirty-seven years old or so, and he asked himself, What was it I most enjoyed doing as a little boy when I was alone and allowed to play? As it turned out, what he liked to do was put rocks together and make little cities out of stone.

So he said, Why, I’m a big man now, so I’ll play with big stones. He bought himself a piece of property in a beautiful place on the lake opposite the city of Zürich. He began planning and building a house in this lovely place, Ascona, and as he worked with his hands, he activated his imagination.

Now, that’s the big thing, to activate your imagination somehow. You can’t do this by taking suggestions from somebody else. You must find that which your own unconscious wants to meditate on. With his imagination activated, Jung found all kinds of new fantasies coming, dreams of all kinds. He began making records of what he had dreamed and then amplifying it by all kinds of associations.

By doing this, he began the work of discovering his myth. He found that his dreams were becoming very important to him and very rich; he began writing about his dreams in a little journal. He put down each silly little impulse, each theme that came up in his dreams. He recorded the dreams so as to bring them up into his consciousness, and as he kept the journal, the underlying images began coming through. Then he would take pictures of some of these dream things always in a very solemn way. Now, this book is the kind of thing one would not wish to have published; it is just too private. It was his ceremonial, ritualistic exploration of the place from which the mystery of his life came.

A mythologically grounded culture presents you with symbols that im- mediately evoke your participation; they are all vital, living connections, and so they link you both to the underlying mystery and to the culture it- self. Yet when that culture uses symbols that are no longer alive, that are no longer effective, it cuts you off. The marga or the Elementargedanken provide a path back to the heart of the issue. Looking at the symbol in terms of its universal meaning rather than its local, specific reference takes you down the path to self-discovery and illumination.

The way to find your own myth is to determine those traditional sym- bols that speak to you and use them, you might say, as bases for medita- tion. Let them work on you.

A ritual is nothing but the dramatic, visual, active manifestation or rep- resentation of a myth. By participating in the rite, you are engaged in the myth, and the myth works on you-provided, of course, that you are caught by the image.

But when you just go through the routine without real commitment, expecting it to work magically and get you into heaven-because you know that when you’re baptized, you get into heaven, after all-you’ve turned away from the proper use of these rites and images.

First, think about your own childhood, as Jung did-the symbols that were put into you then remain. Think not how they relate to an institu- tion, which is probably defunct and likely difficult to respect. Rather, think how the symbols operate on you. Let them play on the imagination, acti- vating it. By bringing your own imagination into play in relation to these symbols, you will be experiencing the marga, the symbols’ power to open a path to the heart of mysteries.

It is my belief, drawn from experience, that there’s nothing better than comparative mythological studies to let you grasp the big, general form of an image and to give you many different ways of approaching that image. Images are eloquent in themselves; they talk to you. When the intellect tries to explicate an image, one can never exhaust its meaning, one can never ex- haust its possibility. Images don’t essentially mean anything: they are, just as you are. They talk to some kernel in you that is.

So ask an artist, “What does your picture mean?” Well, if he despises you enough, he’ll tell you.

The point is that if you need him to tell you what it means, then you haven’t even seen it. What’s the meaning of a sunset? What’s the meaning of a flower? What’s the meaning of a cow?

The Buddha is called the tathāgata, “the one thus come.” He is as he is. The universe is “thus come,” too. Every piece of it arises out of the same ground. This is called the Doctrine of Mutual Arising.

The first instruction would be to follow the hints of the myth itself and of your guru, your teacher, who should know. It’s like an athlete going to a coach. The coach tells him how to bring his own energies into play. A good coach doesn’t tell a runner exactly how to hold his arms or anything like that. He watches him run, then helps him to correct his own natural mode. A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are then to give advice, not commands. The command would be. “This is the way I do it, so you must do it this way, too.” Some artists teach their students that way. But the teacher in any case has to talk it out, to give some general clues. If you don’t have someone to do that for you, you’ve got to work it all out from scratch-like reinventing the wheel. A good way to learn is to find a book that seems to be dealing with the problems that you’re now dealing with. That will certainly give you some clues. In my own life I took my instruction from reading Thomas Mann and James Joyce, both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realizations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world. You can discover your own guiding-myth motifs through the works of a good novelist who himself understands these things_Joseph compbell

The Hero With Thousand Faces:

The same was done by many heroes:

Because there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many periods of history. Essentially, it might even be said there is but one archetypal mythic hero whose life has been replicated in many lands by many, many people. A legendary hero is usually the founder of something-the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life. In order to find something new, one has to leave the old and go in quest of the seed idea, a germinal idea that will have the potentiality of bringing forth that new thing.

The founders of all religions have gone on quests like that. The Buddha went into solitude and then sat beneath the bo tree, the tree of immortal knowledge, where he received an illumination that has enlightened all of Asia for twenty-five hundred years.

After baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus went into the desert for forty days; and it was out of that desert that he came with his message. Moses went to the top of a mountain and came down with the tables of the law. Then you have the one who founds a new city-almost all the old Greek cities were founded by heroes who went off on quests and had surprising adventures, out of which each then founded a city. You might also say that the founder of a life-your life or mine, if we live our own lives, instead of imitating everybody else’s life-comes from a quest as well.

THE SELF AS HERO

In the West, you have the liberty and the obligation of finding out what your destiny is. You can discover it for yourself. But do you?

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be blessed with the accident of money, and a certain amount of support, and a margin of free time. But let me say this: people without money very often have the courage to risk a life of their own, and they can do it. Money doesn’t count, it’s not that important in our culture; it really isn’t.

I’ve taught students of all financial strata, and the most fortunate are not always the very wealthy ones. In fact, they’re very often the least fortunate because there’s nothing to drive them. A very common experience is a student who has all kinds of possibilities and talents and essentially limitless money and becomes nothing more than a dilettante. The student is not forced to follow one path, to make a decision: “I’m going to do this.” As soon as what they are doing gets difficult, as soon as it begins to get to the crunch, he or she moves over into another pursuit, and another, and another. They just splash their lives all over. Very often a youngster without the margin to do that makes the intelligent, courageous decision and follows it through.

Now, I’m not saying that we are perfect on that point here in the United States,or in the West. Yet the opportunity is there for each person with the courage to seek a destiny. There are several ways of discovering your destiny.

The first is in retrospect. In a wonderful essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that, once you have reached an advanced age, as I have, as you look back over your life, it can seem to have had a plot, as though composed by a novel- ist.54 Events that seemed entirely accidental or incidental turn out to have been central in the composition.

So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer’s idea is that, just like our dreams, our lives are directed by what he called the will, that self of which we are largely unconscious. We have been, he says, dreamers of our own lives, like Vişnu on his seven-headed serpent.

I would like now to review the archetypal myth of the hero’s journey as I ideal with it in The Hero with a Thousand Faces,this is what Joyce called Monomyth.

The Monomyth: an archetypal story that springs from the collective unconscious. Its motifs can appear not only in myth and literature, but, if you are sensitive to it, in the working out of the plot of your own life.

The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.

The first stage is leaving where you are, whatever the environment. You may leave because the environment is too repressive and you are consciously uneasy and eager to leave. Or it may be that

a call to adventure, an alluring temptation, comes and draws you out. In European myths this call is frequently represented by some animal-a stag or boar-that manages to elude a hunter and brings him into a part of the forest that he doesn’t recognize. And he doesn’t know where he is, how to get out, or where he should go. And then the adventure begins.

Another obvious case of

the call to adventure occurs when something or someone has been taken away and you then go in quest of it into the realms of adventure. Always, the realm of adventure is one of un- known forces and unknown powers.

On the other hand, there may come what I call a refusal of the call, where the summons is heard or felt, and perhaps even heeded, but for one reason or another cut off. One thinks of some reason for not going, or one has fear or something like this and one remains; the results are then radically different from those of the one following the call.

I think the shaman’s crisis is the most vivid and interesting example of the call in real life. In researching the first volume of my Historical Atlas of World Mythology, I came across many examples of this, from tribes around the world. Typically the young person is walking alone on the ocean shore or in the mountains or in the forest, and hears an unearthly music; this music then is accompanied by some kind of visionary visitation, which amounts to a summons.

Now, being a shaman is no fun in any of these societies, and a lot of young people just don’t want to accept it. Unfortunately, those who choose to refuse the call don’t have a life. Either they die, or, in trying to lead more mundane lives, they exist as nonentities, what T. S. Eliot called “hollow

men.”

Earlier, I mentioned the case of the West Virginia woman who was in analysis late in her life. She was so overwhelmed by the feeling that she had missed her life, that she was just a shell. Through analysis, fishing back, she remembered wandering in the woods and hearing wonderful music; unfortunately, she hadn’t known what to do about this experience. And ever since then, she had not been living the life that this music had called her to. If she had been in a primitive community, her family and the tribal shaman would have known just what to do. When the call isn’t answered, you experience a kind of drying up and a sense of life lost.

If the call is heeded, however, the individual is invoked to engage in a dangerous adventure. It’s always a dangerous adventure because you’re moving out of the familiar sphere of your community. In myths, this is represented as moving out of the known sphere altogether into the great beyond.

I call this crossing the threshold. This is the crossing from the conscious into the unconscious world, but the unconscious world is represented in many, many, many different images, depending on the cultural surroundings of the mythos. It may be a plunge into the ocean, it may be a passage into the desert, it may be getting lost in a dark forest, it may be finding yourself in a strange city. It may be depicted as an ascent or as a descent or as a going beyond the horizon, but this is the adventure-it’s always the path into the unknown, through the gateway or the cave or the clashing rocks.

One asks: what is the meaning of this business of the clashing rocks? It’s a wonderful image. We live, on this side of the mystery, in the realm of the pairs of opposites: true and false, light and dark, good and evil, male and female, and all that dualistic rational worldview. One can have an in- tuition that is beyond good and evil, that goes beyond pairs of opposites- that’s the opening of this gateway into the mystery. But it’s just one of those little intuitive flashes, because the conscious mind comes back again and closes the door. The idea in the hero adventure is to walk bodily through the door into the world where the dualistic rules don’t apply.

where are you between two thoughts? You’re thinking of yourself all the time, everything you do. You know, there’s the image of yourself your ego. So, where are you between two thoughts?

That’s what that intuitive flash is giving you a taste of. This thought, that thought, the ripple of the mind-do you ever have a glimpse that transcends anything you could think of about yourself? That’s the source field out of which all of your energies are coming. And so the hero journey through the threshold is simply a journey beyond the pairs of opposites, where you go beyond good and evil. That is the sense of the image of the clashing rocks, there’s simply no doubt about it.

This motif is known also, mythologically, as the active door. This mythic device appears in American Indian stories, in Greek stories, in Eskimo stories, in stories from all over. It is an archetypal image that com- municates the sense of going past judgment.

Another challenge at the threshold can be the encounter with the dark counterpart, the shadow, where the shining hero meets the dark. It may be in the form of a dragon, or it may be in the form of a malignant enemy. In either case, the hero has to slay the other and go into the other world alive.

On the other hand, another image for this passage is dismemberment. where the hero is chopped into pieces. In this case, you enter the realm of adventure dead. You get this in the story of the Egyptian god Osiris, where he’s killed, dismembered, and then put together again. This is a typical event in this kind of story; think of the father of the buffalo bride in the Blackfoot story, who is stomped to bits and then resurrected.

In this sort of story, after the trial has been passed, you have a resurrection from death. There are many, many ways of representing this journey and many ways of experiencing it. Sometimes it is personified a  confrontation with demons or gods, as in the Tibetan Book of the Dead while other times in myths and dreams it appears more like the journey across a dark ocean or through a mountain.

In any case, whether chopped up, nailed to a cross, or swallowed by a whale, you are passing into the realm of death. Christ on the Cross is making that passage: the Cross is the threshold to the adventure of his reunion with God the Father.

Once you have crossed the threshold, if it really is your adventure-if it is a journey that is appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness- helpers will come along the way to provide magical aid. This may be some little wood sprite or wise man or fairy godmother or animal that comes to you as a companion or as an adviser, letting you know what the dangers are along the way and how to overcome them. You are given little tokens that will protect you, images to meditate on, mudrās gestures or postures of the hand-and mantras-words to chant and think on-that will guide you and keep you on the path. It’s a narrow path, the sword bridge, and if you fall off that, you are in a helpless condition because you don’t know what to do and there’s nobody around to help you.

After you have received the magical aid, you will have a series of increasingly threatening tests or trials to pass. The deeper you get into this gauntlet, the heavier the resistance. You are coming into areas of the unconscious that have been repressed: the shadow, the anima/animus, and the rest of the unintegrated self; it is that repression system that you have to pass through. This, of course, is where the magical aid is most required.

These tests, then, symbolize self-realization, a process of initiation into the mysteries of life. There are four kinds of hurdles along this road of trials that I think represent all of the possibilities.

The first is the symbol of the erotic encounter with the perfect beloved; I call this meeting the goddess. This is the challenge of integrating the anima/animus. In the mythic vocabulary of alchemy, this is called the sacred marriage, or hieros gamos. Jung writes about the symbolism of this union a good deal,  In myths of the man’s adventure, the sacred marriage is union with the world goddess or with some minor secondary representation of her power. This is the story of the prince reaching Sleeping

Beauty, of Rama’s marriage to Sitä in the Ramayana.