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Joseph CampbellThe Hero with a Thousand Faces
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2, Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Cosmogonic Cycle”, Chapter 4: “Dissolutions”
Part 2, Chapter 4, Section 1 Summary: “End of the Microcosm”
Every person on earth is a hero with the capacity to experience the void, but most do not witness it until death. As expressed in a quoted passage from the Upanishads, “all things wait for him who has this knowledge and cry: ‘Here is the Imperishable coming!’” (366). An ancient Egyptian passage similarly equates the departed speaker with every god in the pantheon. Campbell also references a hero’s capacity to return from death, as illustrated by the myth of the Buddha and a ritual from natives of Greenland.
Campbell quotes the recitations of the Aztecs over a person on their deathbed. The person is told they can’t come back and is elaborately prepared for burial. These preparations, including the body of a little red dog that will get the person across a great river in the underworld, are given to the deceased so that they can pass through the trials along the way to meet the god and enter the void.
Other traditions similarly trace a passage to the beyond and a soul’s understanding of its earthly life, and the soul might return thereafter. The stages of the afterlife in Dante’s Divine Comedy picture this passage as the realm of punishment for sin in hell, the transformation from sin to transcendence in purgatory, and successive levels of spiritual transcendence in heaven.
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a deceased person becomes the god Osiris and is reborn in the act of dying. The soul is depicted as gaining memory and a new heart. This new heart, a piece of basalt in gold, is placed within the body upon burial. The deceased fights crocodiles, snakes, a demon named Apshait, and two goddesses. To avoid being killed in the underworld, the deceased recites a list of their qualities, which are each features of various gods. Says the deceased, “There is no member of my body that is not the member of some God” (371). In this and other traditions, the gods are reintegrated into the individual.
Further, the deceased in the Book of the Dead appoints themselves authority over the cosmic egg and unites with the Source. From here, the deceased can travel into the homes of the gods and change forms.
Part 2, Chapter 4, Section 2 Summary: “End of the Macrocosm”
Campbell begins the section by quoting a myth from the Buddhist tradition, which describes the “Cyclic-Uproar.” When a new cosmogonic cycle is to start, the gods Loka byuhas visit the world to weep and proclaim its destruction. In the ancient Mayan tradition, on the other hand, writers picture cycles of 34,000 years followed by an apocalypse in which supernatural creatures flood the world.
The Viking myth in the Poetic Edda shows an oracle foretelling great violence throughout the earth at the end of time to the hero-god Othin. Other signs will mark the end, such as roosters crowing, the hound of the underworld howling, and the occurrence of earthquakes and floods. Supernatural monsters will rise up, and Othin and his troops will engage them in battle. The gods will slay monsters, and monsters will slay gods, “Till fire leaps high about heaven itself” (377).
Similarly, in the biblical Gospel of Matthew, Christ foretells that war, famine, and natural disaster will befall the earth. Love will fail, false prophets will come, and he encourages his followers to stay on the true path. He elaborates on the real dangers at hand and urges people to flee their homes when the destruction comes. Jesus’s speech further details the deceptions of false prophets, the darkness of the world, and the coming of the “Son of man” (378) with angels.
Part 2, Chapter 4 Analysis
In this chapter, Campbell dwells on the finale of the monomyth, both on an individual and cosmic scale. His former themes of enlightenment and oneness with the source return here in a discussion of humanity’s various conceptions of endings, namely death and the apocalypse.
The myths and rituals Campbell lists in Section 1 give a heroic finale to the dead. Just as the person experiences trials in childhood and the hero’s journey in adulthood, so too is death depicted as a series of tests to attain oneness with the divine. In the afterlife, the deceased might cross a river with a dog, fight crocodiles, or idle in purgatory. Each of these fates is a symbol of the soul’s actual destiny in death, which Campbell explains this way when considering the Egyptian Book of the Dead:
the soul comes to the fulness of its stature and power through assimilating the deities that formerly had been thought to be separate from and outside of it. They are projections of its own being; and as it returns to its true state they are all reassumed (371).
What many traditions see as the soul’s fate—a meeting with the divine—is only a metaphor for its release into the source. For the ancient Egyptians, this means taking on the aspects of various divinities, with supernatural power as the boon after the trials of the underworld. In Campbell’s depiction, this is a happy event, in which “the individual should now return to his pristine knowledge of the world-creative divinity who during life was reflected within his heart” (365).
The end of the cosmogonic cycle, on the other hand, is a mighty ordeal according to many world traditions. The various myths Campbell quotes in Section 2 depict a world ending with monsters, natural disasters, mourning, and death. These events, to draw on the psychological analogy throughout the book, resemble the fantastic dream world. The end of the universe is like the beginning, full of power and wonder, and mimics the fluid and confounding dream state of the human mind. The monsters of the unconscious might well appear like the weeping Loka byuhas, the Mayan rain serpent, or the Poetic Edda’s enormous wolf. Yet, in the universal round Campbell has already discussed, these events do not mark a true ending in mythology. A new universe will arise out of the silent void to take the place of the destroyed one.
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