Carl Jung : The Origin of the Hero

Georges de La Tour - Job Mocked by his Wife

Carl Gustav Jung

Aspects of the Masculine

THE ORIGIN OF THE HERO

The finest of all symbols of the libido is the human figure, conceived as a demon or hero. Here the symbolism leaves the objective, material realm of astral and meteorological images and takes on human form, changing into a figure who passes from joy to sorrow, from sorrow to joy, and, like the sun, now stands high at the zenith and now is plunged into darkest night, only to rise again in new splendour. Just as the sun, by its own motion and in accordance with its own inner law, climbs from morn till noon, crosses the meridian and goes its downward way towards evening, leaving its radiance behind it, and finally plunges into all-enveloping night, so man sets his course by immutable laws and, his journey over, sinks into darkness, to rise again in his children and begin the cycle anew.

The psychic life-force, the libido, symbolizes itself in the sun or personifies itself in figures of heroes with solar attributes. (...) The sun comparison can easily be taken in this sense: the heroes are like the wandering sun, from which it is concluded that the myth of the hero is a solar myth. It seems to us, rather, that he is first and foremost a self-representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness. But consciousness, continually in danger of being led astray by its own light and of becoming a rootless will o’ the wisp, longs for the healing power of nature, for the deep wells of being and for unconscious communion with life in all its countless forms.

Here I must make way for the master, who has plumbed to the root of these Faustian longings:

MEPHISTOPHELES:

This lofty mystery I must now unfold.

Goddesses throned in solitude, sublime,

Set in no place, still less in any time,

At the mere thought of them my blood runs cold.

They are the Mothers!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Goddesses, unknown to mortal mind,

And named indeed with dread among our kind.

To reach them you must plumb earth’s deepest vault;

That we have need of them is your own fault.

FAUST:

Where leads the way ?

MEPHISTOPHELES:

There’s none ! To the untrodden,

Untreadable regions—the unforgotten

And unforgettable—for which prepare!

There are no bolts, no hatches to be lifted,

Through endless solitudes you shall be drifted.

Can you imagine Nothing everywhere ?

(...)

That the torment which afflicts mankind does not come from outside, but that man is his own huntsman, his own sacrificer, his own sacrificial knife, is clear from another poem of Nietzsche’s, where the dualism is resolved into a psychic conflict through the same symbolism:

O Zarathustra,

Most cruel Nimrod!

Erstwhile hunter of God,

Snare of all virtue,

Arrow of evil!

And now

Self-hunted,

Thine own quarry,

Thyself pierced through …

Now

Alone with thyself,

Split in thine own knowledge,

Amidst a hundred mirrors

To thine own self false,

Amidst a hundred memories

Uncertain,

Languishing with each wound,

Shivering with each frost,

Strangled in thine own snares,

Self-knower! Self-hangman!

Why didst thou hang thyself

With the noose of thy wisdom?

Why hast thou enticed thyself

Into the old serpent’s Paradise?

Why hast thou stolen

Into thyself, thyself?

The deadly arrows do not strike the hero from without; it is himself who hunts, fights, and tortures himself. In him, instinct wars with instinct; therefore the poet says, “Thyself pierced through,” which means that he is wounded by his own arrow. As we know that the arrow is a libido-symbol, the meaning of this “piercing” is clear: it is the act of union with oneself, a

sort of self-fertilization, and also a self-violation, a self-murder, so that Zarathustra can justly call himself his own hangman (like Odin, who sacrifices himself to Odin).

One should not of course take this psychologem in too voluntaristic a sense: nobody deliberately inflicts such tortures on himself, they just happen to him. If a man reckons the

unconscious as part of his personality, then one must admit that he is in fact raging against himself. But, in so far as the symbolism thrown up by his suffering is archetypal and collective, it can be taken as a sign that he is no longer suffering from himself, but rather from the spirit of the age. He is suffering from an objective, impersonal cause, from his collective unconscious which he has in common with all men.

Being wounded by one’s own arrow signifies, therefore, a state of introversion. What this means we already know: the libido sinks “into its own depths” (a favourite image of Nietzsche’s), and discovers in the darkness a substitute for the upper world it has abandoned— the world of memories (“Amidst a hundred memories”), the strongest and most influential of which are the earliest ones. It is the world of the child, the paradisal state of early infancy, from which we are driven out by the relentless law of time. In this subterranean kingdom slumber sweet feelings of home and the hopes of all that is to be.

As Heinrich says of his miraculous work in Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell:

It sings a song, long lost and long forgotten,

A song of home, a childlike song of love,

Born in the waters of some fairy well,

Known to all mortals, and yet heard of none.

Yet “the danger is great,” as Mephistopheles says, for these depths fascinate. When the libido leaves the bright upper world, whether from choice, or from inertia, or from fate, it sinks back into its own depths, into the source from which it originally flowed, and returns to the point of cleavage, the navel, where it first entered the body. This point of cleavage is called the mother, because from her the current of life reached us.

Whenever some great work is to be accomplished, before which a man recoils, doubtful of his strength, his libido streams back to the fountainhead — and that is the dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life. For if the libido gets stuck in the wonderland of this inner world, then for the upper world man is nothing but a shadow, he is already moribund or at least seriously ill. But if the libido manages to tear itself loose and force its way up again, something like a miracle happens: the journey to the underworld was a plunge into the fountain of youth, and the libido, apparently dead, wakes to renewed fruitfulness.

(...).

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