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A B O U T T H E C O L L E C T E D W O R K S O F

J O S E P H C A M P B E L L

At his death in 1987, Joseph Campbell left a significant body of published work that explored his lifelong passion, the complex of universal myths and symbols that he called “Mankind’s one great story.” He also left, however, a large volume of unreleased work: uncollected articles, notes, letters, and diaries, as well as audio- and videotape-recorded lectures.

The Joseph Campbell Foundation—founded in 1990 to pre-serve, protect, and perpetuate Campbell's work—has undertaken to create a digital archive of his papers and recordings and to publish The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell.

The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell

Robert Walter, Executive Editor David Kudler, Managing Editor

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P R E F A C E T O T H E 1 9 4 9 E D I T I O N

“The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised,” writes Sigmund Freud,

that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that newborn babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.1

It is the purpose of the present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology by bringing together a multitude of not-too-difficult examples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself. The old teach-ers knew what they were saying. Once we have learned to read again their symbolic language, it requires no more than the talent of an anthologist to let their teaching be heard. But first we must learn the grammar of the symbols, and as a key to this mystery I know of no better modern tool than psychoanalysis. Without regarding this as the last word on the subject, one can nevertheless permit it to serve

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as an approach. The second step will be then to bring together a host of myths and folktales from every corner of the world, and to let the symbols speak for themselves. The parallels will be immedi-ately apparent; and these will develop a vast and amazingly constant statement of the basic truths by which man has lived throughout the millennia of his residence on the planet.

Perhaps it will be objected that in bringing out the correspon-dences I have overlooked the differences between the various Oriental and Occidental, modern, ancient, and primitive traditions. The same objection might be brought, however, against any textbook or chart of anatomy, where the physiological variations of race are disregarded in the interest of a basic general understanding of the human physique. There are of course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of mankind, but this is a book about the similarities; and once these are understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly (and politically) supposed. My hope is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the present world for unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or politi-cal empire, but in the sense of human mutual understanding. As we are told in the Vedas: “Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.”2

For help in the long task of bringing my materials into readable form, I wish to thank Mr. Henry Morton Robinson, whose advice greatly assisted me in the first and final stages of the work, Mrs. Peter Geiger, Mrs. Margaret Wing, and Mrs. Helen McMaster, who went over the manuscripts many times and offered invaluable suggestions, and my wife, who has worked with me from first to last, listening, reading, and revising.

— J. C.n e W Y o r k C i T Y | J u n e 1 0 , 1 9 4 8

C H A P T E R I

Departure

1. The Call to Adventure

long long ago , when wishing still could lead to something, there lived a king whose daughters all were beautiful, but the young-est was so beautiful that the sun itself, who had seen so many things, simply marveled every time it shone on her face. Now close to the castle of this king was a great dark forest, and in the forest under an old lime tree a spring, and when the day was very hot, the king’s child would go out into the wood and sit on the edge of the cool spring. And to pass the time she would take a golden ball, toss it up and catch it; and this was her favorite plaything.

Now it so happened one day that the golden ball of the prin-cess did not fall into the little hand lifted into the air, but passed it, bounced on the ground, and rolled directly into the water. The prin-cess followed it with her eyes, but the ball disappeared; and the spring was deep, so deep that the bottom could not be seen. Thereupon she began to cry, and her crying became louder and louder, and she was unable to find consolation. And while she was lamenting in this way, she heard someone call to her: “What is the matter, Princess? You are crying so hard, a stone would be forced to pity you.” She looked around to see where the voice had come from, and there she beheld a frog, holding its fat, ugly head out of the water. “Oh, it’s you, old Water Plopper,” she said. “I am crying over my golden ball, which has fallen into the spring.” “Be calm; don’t cry,” answered the frog. “I can surely be of assistance. But what will you give me if I fetch your toy for you?” “Whatever you would like to have, dear frog,” she said; “my clothes, my pearls and jewels, even the golden

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crown that I wear.” The frog replied, “Your clothes, your pearls and jewels, and your golden crown, I do not want; but if you will care for me and let me be your companion and playmate, let me sit beside you at your little table, eat from your little golden plate, drink from your little cup, sleep in your little bed: if you will promise me that, I will go straight down and fetch your golden ball.” “All right,” she said. “I promise you anything you want, if you will only bring me back the ball.” But she thought: “How that simple frog chatters! There he sits in the water with his own kind, and could never be the companion of a human being.”

As soon as the frog had obtained her promise, he ducked his head and sank, and after a little while came swimming up again; he had the ball in his mouth, and tossed it on the grass. The prin-cess was elated when she saw her pretty toy. She picked it up and scampered away. “Wait, wait,” called the frog, “take me along; I can’t run like you.” But what good did it do, though he croaked after her as loudly as he could? She paid not the slightest heed, but hurried home, and soon had completely forgotten the poor frog—who must have hopped back again into his spring.1

This is an example of one of the ways in which the adventure can begin. A blunder—apparently the merest chance—reveals an unsus-pected 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. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by un-suspected springs. And these may be very deep—as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny. Thus it happens, in this fairy tale, that the disappearance of the ball is the first sign of something coming for the princess, the frog is the second, and the unconsidered promise is the third.

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.” The herald’s summons may be to live, as in the present instance, or, at a later moment of the biography, to die. It may sound the call to some high historical undertaking. 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.”3 In the case of the princess of the fairy tale, it signified no more than the coming of ado-lescence. But whether small or great, and no matter what the stage or grade of life, the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of

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transfiguration—a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.

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. We recognize in the scene the symbols of the World Navel. The frog, the little dragon, is the nursery counterpart of the underworld serpent whose head supports the earth and who represents the life-progenitive, demiurgic powers of the abyss. He comes up with the golden sun ball, his dark deep waters having just taken it down: at this moment resembling the great Chinese Dragon of

figure 11. Apis in the Form of a Bull Transports the Deceased as Osiris to the Underworld (carved wood, Egypt, c. 700–650 b.C.)

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the East, delivering the rising sun in his jaws, or the frog on whose head rides the handsome young immortal, Han Hsiang, carrying in a basket the peaches of immortality. Freud has suggested that all moments of anxiety reproduce the painful feelings of the first separation from the mother—the tightening of the breath, congestion of the blood, etc., of the crisis of birth.4 Conversely, all moments of separation and new birth produce anxiety. Whether it be the king’s child about to be taken from the felicity of her established dual-unity with King Daddy, or God’s daughter Eve, now ripe to depart from the idyl of the Garden, or again, the supremely concentrated Future Buddha breaking past the last horizons of the created world, the same archetypal images are acti-vated, symbolizing danger, reassurance, trial, passage, and the strange holiness of the mysteries of birth.

The disgusting and rejected frog or dragon of the fairy tale brings up the sun ball in its mouth; for the frog, the serpent, the rejected one, is the representative of that unconscious deep (“so deep that the bottom cannot be seen”) wherein are hoarded all of the rejected, unadmitted, unrecognized, unknown, or undeveloped factors, laws, and elements of existence. Those are the pearls of the fabled subma-rine palaces of the nixies, tritons, and water guardians; the jewels that give light to the demon cities of the underworld; the fire seeds in the ocean of immortality which supports the earth and surrounds it like a snake; the stars in the bosom of immortal night. Those are the nuggets in the gold hoard of the dragon; the guarded apples of the Hesperides; the filaments of the Golden Fleece. The herald or an-nouncer of the adventure, therefore, is often dark, loathly, or terrify-ing, judged evil by the world; yet if one could follow, the way would be opened through the walls of day into the dark where the jewels glow. Or the herald is a beast (as in the fairy tale), representative of the repressed instinctual fecundity within ourselves, or again a veiled mysterious figure—the unknown.

The story is told, for example, of King Arthur, and how he made him ready with many knights to ride ahunting.

As soon as he was in the forest, the King saw a great hart afore him. This hart will I chase, said King Arthur, and so he spurred the horse, and rode after long, and so by fine force he was like to have smitten the hart; whereas the King had chased the hart so long, that his horse lost his breath, and fell down dead; then a yeoman fetched the King another horse. So the King saw the hart embushed, and his horse dead; he set him down by a fountain, and

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there he fell in great thoughts. And as he sat so, him thought he heard a noise of hounds, to the sum of thirty. And with that the King saw coming toward him the strangest beast that ever he saw or heard of; so the beast went to the well and drank, and the noise was in the beast’s belly like unto the questyng of thirty couple hounds; but all the while the beast drank there was no noise in the beast’s belly: and therewith the beast departed with a great noise, whereof the King had great marvel.5

Or we have the case—from a very different portion of the world— of an Arapaho girl of the North American plains. She spied a porcu-pine near a cottonwood tree. She tried to hit the animal, but it ran behind the tree and began to climb. The girl started after, to catch it, but it continued just out of reach. “Well!” she said, “I am climbing to catch the porcupine, for I want those quills, and if necessary I will go to the top.” The porcupine reached the top of the tree, but as she approached and was about to lay hands on it, the cottonwood tree suddenly lengthened, and the porcupine resumed his climb. Looking

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figure 12. Isis in the Form of a Hawk Joins Osiris in the Underworld (carved stone, Ptolemaic, Egypt, c. first century a.d.)

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down, she saw her friends craning up at her and beckoning her to descend; but having passed under the influence of the porcupine, and fearful for the great distance between herself and the ground, she continued to mount the tree, until she became the merest speck to those looking from below, and with the porcupine she finally reached the sky.6

Two dreams will suffice to illustrate the spontaneous appearance of the figure of the herald in the psyche that is ripe for transforma-tion. The first is the dream of a young man seeking the way to a new world-orientation:

“I am in a green land where many sheep are at pasture. It is the ‘land of sheep.’ In the land of sheep stands an unknown woman and points the way.”7

The second is the dream of a young girl whose girl companion has lately died of consumption; she is afraid that she may have the disease herself.

“I was in a blossoming garden; the sun was just going down with a blood-red glow. Then there appeared before me a black, noble knight, who spoke to me with a very serious, deep and frightening voice: ‘Wilt thou go with me?’ Without attending my answer, he took me by the hand, and carried me away.”8

Whether dream or myth, in these adventures there is an atmo-sphere of irresistible fascination about the figure that appears sud-denly as guide, marking a new period, a new stage, in the biography. That which has to be faced, and is somehow profoundly familiar to the unconscious—though unknown, surprising, and even frighten-ing to the conscious personality—makes itself known; and what for-merly was meaningful may become strangely emptied of value: like the world of the king’s child, with the sudden disappearance into the well of the golden ball. Thereafter, even though the hero returns for a while to his familiar occupations, they may be found unfruitful. A series of signs of increasing force then will become visible, until—as in the following legend of “The Four Signs,” which is the most celebrated example of the call to adventure in the literature of the world—the summons can no longer be denied.

The young prince Gautama ‡åkyam«ni, the Future Buddha, had been protected by his father from all knowledge of age, sickness, death, or monkhood, lest he should be moved to thoughts of life renuncia-tion; for it had been prophesied at his birth that he was to become either a world emperor or a Buddha. The king—prejudiced in favor

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of the royal vocation—provided his son with three palaces and forty thousand dancing girls to keep his mind attached to the world. But these only served to advance the inevitable; for while still relatively young, the youth exhausted for himself the fields of fleshly joy and became ripe for the other experience. The moment he was ready, the proper heralds automatically appeared:

Now on a certain day the Future Buddha wished to go to the park, and told his charioteer to make ready the chariot. Accordingly the man brought out a sumptuous and elegant chariot, and, adorning it richly, he harnessed to it four state horses of the Sindhava breed, as white as the petals of the white lotus, and announced to the Future Buddha that everything was ready. And the Future Buddha mounted the chariot, which was like to a palace of the gods, and proceeded toward the park.

“The time for the enlightenment of the prince Siddhartha draweth nigh,” thought the gods; “we must show him a sign”: and they changed one of their number into a decrepit old man, broken-toothed, gray-haired, crooked and bent of body, leaning on a staff, and trembling, and showed him to the Future Buddha, but so that only he and the charioteer saw him.

Then said the Future Buddha to the charioteer, “Friend, pray, who is this man? Even his hair is not like that of other men.” And when he heard the answer, he said, “Shame on birth, since to every one that is born old age must come.” And agitated in heart, he thereupon returned and ascended his palace.

“Why has my son returned so quickly?” asked the king.“Sire, he has seen an old man,” was the reply; “and because he

has seen an old man, he is about to retire from the world.”“Do you want to kill me, that you say such things? Quickly

get ready some plays to be performed before my son. If we can but get him to enjoying pleasure, he will cease to think of retiring from the world.” Then the king extended the guard to half a league in each direction.

Again on a certain day, as the Future Buddha was going to the park, he saw a diseased man whom the gods had fashioned; and having again made inquiry, he returned, agitated in heart, and ascended his palace.

And the king made the same inquiry and gave the same order as before; and again extending the guard, placed them for three quarters of a league around.

And again on a certain day, as the Future Buddha was going to the park, he saw a dead man whom the gods had fashioned;

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and having again made inquiry, he returned, agitated in heart, and ascended his palace.

And the king made the same inquiry and gave the same orders as before; and again extending the guard placed them for a league around.

And again on a certain day, as the Future Buddha was going to the park, he saw a monk, carefully and decently clad, whom the gods had fashioned; and he asked his charioteer, “Pray, who is this man?” “Sire, this is one who has retired from the world”; and the charioteer thereupon proceeded to sound the praises of retirement from the world. The thought of retiring from the world was a pleasing one to the Future Buddha.9

This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have des-ignated 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. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimagi-nable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight. The hero can go forth of his own volition to accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus when he arrived in his father’s city, Athens, and heard the horrible history of the Minotaur; or he may be carried or sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent, as was Odysseus, driven about the Mediterranean by the winds of the angered god Poseidon. The ad-venture may begin as a mere blunder, as did that of the princess of the fairy tale; or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from the frequented paths of man. Examples might be multiplied, ad infinitum, from every corner of the world.

In the above section, and throughout the following pages, I have made no attempt to exhaust the evidence. To have done so (after the manner, for example, of Frazer, in The Golden Bough) would have enlarged my chapters prodigiously without making the main line of the monomyth any clearer. Instead, I am giving in each section a few striking examples from a number of widely scattered, representative traditions. During the course of the work I shift my sources gradually, so that the reader may savor the peculiar qualities of the various styles. By the time he comes to the last page, he will have reviewed an immense number of mythologies. Should he wish to prove whether all might have been cited for every section of the monomyth, he need only turn to some of the source volumes enumerated in the footnotes and ramble through a few of the multitude of tales.

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From the book THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES. Third edition (with revisions) copyright © 2008 by the Joseph Campbell Foundation (jcf.org). Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800/972-6657 ext. 52.