Jospeh Campbell - The Keys

The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again - if the powers have remained unfriendly to him - his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).

The outlines of myths and tales are subject to damage and obscuration. Archaic traits are generally eliminated or subdued. Imported materials are revised to fit local landscape, custom, or belief, and always suffer in the process. Furthermore, in the inumerable retellings of a traditional story, accidental or intentional dislocations are inevitable. To account for elements that have become, for one reason or another, meaningless, secondary interpretations are invented, often with considerable skill.

When a civilization has passed from a mythological to a secular point of view, the older images are no longer felt or quite approved. The myths were read as superhuman romances.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky.

Joseph Campbell - the Return Part 2

The Crossing of the Return Threshold
The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other - different as life and death, as day and night. The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless - and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol - the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness.

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the milleniums of mankind's prudent folly?

The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss?

The equating of a single year in Paradise to one hundred of earthly existence is a motif well known to myth.

Master of the Two Worlds
Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back - not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other - is the talent of the master.

Symbols are only the vehicles of communication; they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference.

The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live bt willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him.

Freedom to Live.
The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that...one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of both man and the cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.

Man in the world of action loses his centering in the principle of eternity if he is anxious for the outcome of his deeds, but resting them and their fruits on the knees of the Living God he is released by them, as by a sacrifice, from the bondages of the sea of death.

Joseph Campbell - the Return

When ther hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal, personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin his labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.

Refusal of the return.
Numerous indeed are the heroes fabled to have taken up residence forever in the blessed isle of the unaging Goddess of Immortal Being.

Muchukunda, awoken by Vishnu incarnate in the person of Krishna, who defeated the demons and ruled India in Utopian peace, decimated barbarians who stumbled upon him asleep.

"My Lord God! When I lived and wrought as a man, I lived and wrought - straying restlessly; through many lives, birth after birth, I sought and suffered, nowhere knowing cease or rest. Distress I mistook for joy. Mirages appearing over the desert I mistook for refreshing waters. Delights I grasped, and what I obtained was misery. Kingly power and earthly possession, riches and might, friends and sons, wife and followers, everything that lures the senses: I wanted them all, because I believed that these would bring me beatitude. But the moment anything was mine it changed its nature, and became as a burning fire.

Then I found my way into the company of the gods, and they welcomed me as a companion. But where, still, surcease? Where rest? The creatures of this world, gods included, all are tricked, my Lord God, by your playful ruses; that is why they continue in their futile round of birth, life agony, old age, and death. Between lives, they confront the lord of the dead and are forced to endure hells of every degree of pitiless pain. And it all comes from you!

My Lord God, deluded by your playful ruses, I too was a prey of the world, wandering in a labyrinth of error, netter in the meshes of ego-consciousness. Now, therefore, I take refuge in your Presence - the boundless, the adorable - desiring only freedom from it all."

The Magic Flight.
If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commisioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron. On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero's wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit.

A popular variety of the magic flight is that in which objects are left behind to speak for the fugitive and thus delay pursuit.

Another well-known variety of the magic flight is one in which a number of delaying obstacles are tossed behind by the wildly fleeing hero.

"The incomparibly useful function of the dogmatic symbol {is that} it protects a person from a direct experience of God as long as he does not mischievously expose himself. But if...he leaves home and family, lives too long alone, and gazes too deeply into the dark mirror, then the awful event of the meeting may befall him. Yet even then the traditional symbol, come to full flower through the centuries, may operate like a healing draught and divert the fatal incursion of the living godhead into the hallowed spaces of the church."
Dr. C. Jung

Escape from the Underworld
Orpheus & Eurydice
In spite of the failure recorded, a possibility exists of a return of the lover with his lost love from beyond the terrible threshold. It is always some little fault, some slight yet critical symptom of human frailty, that makes impossible the open interrelationship between the worlds; so that one is tempted to believe, almost, that is the small, marring accident could be avoided, all would be well. The myths of failure touch us with the tragedy of life, but those of success only with their own incredibility. And yet, if the monomyth is to fulfill its promise, not human failure or superhuman success but human success is what we shall have to be shown.

Rescue From Without
Amaterasu, Japanese sun goddess
Ilat, South Arabian
Die Sonne, German
Feminine sun goddess

Shinto "Way of the Gods"
Way of devotion to the guardians of life and custom (local spirits, ancestral powers, heroes, the divine king, one's living parents, and one's living children). Preserving and cultivating purity of heart.

Butsudo "Way of the Buddha"
The powers that yield release from the round.

Eight Hundred Myraid of Gods are but differing manifestations of one unique Deity, Kuni-tokotachi-no-Kami, the Eternally Standing Divine Being of the Earth, the Great Unity of All Things in the Universe, the Primordial Being of Heaven and Earth, eternally existing from the
beginning to the end of the world.

The mirror, the sword, the tree.

The mirror, reflecting the goddess and drawing her forth from the august repose of her divine nonmanifestation, is symbolic of the world, the field of reflected glory. Therein divinity is pleased to regard its own glory, and this pleasure is itself inducement to the act of
manifestation or "creation".

The sword is the counterpart of the thunderbolt.

The tree is the World Axis in its wish-fulfilling, fruitful aspect - the same as that displayed in Christian homes at the season of the winter solstice, which is the moment of the rebirth or return from the sun, a joyous custom inherited from the Germanic paganism that has given to the modern German language its feminine Sonne.

The dance of Uzume and the uproar of the gods belong to the carnival: the world left topsy-turvy by the withdrawal of the supreme divinity, but joyous for the coming renewal.

Inanna's descent into Underworld.
Ninshubur, her messenger, ran to the gods.
Enlil, Sumerian air-god, Nanna the moon god, Enki the water god and god of wisdom.

3000 BC

Inanna three days and nights upon a stake.

Two sexless creaturesm one with "food of life" and one with "water of life", sent to sprinkle it on Inanna sixty times.

The conclusion of the poem, this valuable document of the sources of the myths and symbols of our civilization, is forever lost.

Instead of holding to and saving his ego, as in the pattern of magic flight, he loses it, and yet, through grace, is returned.

Whether rescued from without, driven from within, or gently carried along by the guiding divinities, he has yet to re-enter with his boon the long-forgotten atmosphere where men who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete. He has yet to confront society with his ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.

Joseph Campbell - The Ultimate Boon Part 2

Kashyapa "the Turtle Man" 

Married 13 daughters of ancient demiurgic patriarch, Daksha "Lord of Virtue". Two daughters gave birth to titans and gods who battled for many years. Titan priest comes in Shiva's "Lord of the Universe" favor who bestows a charm to raise the dead. Brahma & Vishnu tell the gods to form a truce

Brahma, Vishnu, & Shiva - Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer

After 7th Century BC Brahma becomes an agent of Vishnu.

Creator-Preserver versus world-destroyer

Truce to churn the Milky Ocean of immortal life for its butter 'Amrita' "not mortal" aka "nectar of deathlessness". Mount Mandara as churning stick, Vasuki "King of Serpents" churning rope

Vishnu in the form of a tortoise dove into the Milky Ocean to support the base of the mountain

A thousand years

Black, poisonous smoke, Kalakuta "Black Summit" highest concentration of the power of death

Shiva drank and held it in his throat which turned blue aka "Blue Neck" Nilakantha

Apsarases (nymphs)

Lakshmi "Goddess of Fortune"

Uchchaihshravas, milk-white horse "Neighing Aloud"

Kaustubha, the pearl of gems

Other objects to the number 13

Dhanvantari, physician of the gods, holding the moon, the cup of the nectar of life

Battle for the possession of the drink

Rahu, stole a sip, then beheaded before swallowed, body died, head immortal, his head pursuing the moon through the sky, eclipses of the moon.

Vishnu, in guise of a dancing damsel, beguiled the titans and passed the cup to the gods.

Mount Sumeru, gods victorious, titans banished.

The gods as icons are not ends in themselves. Their entertaining myths transport the mind and spirit, not up to, but past them, into the yonder void; from which perspective the more heavily freighted theological dogmas then appear to have been only pedagogical lures: their function, to cart the unandroit intellect away from its concrete clutter of facts and events to a comparitively rarefied zone, where, as a final boon, all existence - whether heavenly, earthly, or infernal - may at last be seen transmuted into the semblance of a lightly passing, recurrent, mere childhood dream of bliss and fright. 

The gods and goddesses then are to be understood as embodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not themselves the Ultimate in its primary state. What the hero seeks through his intercourse wit them is therefore not finally themselves, but their grace, the power of their sustaining substance. This miraculous energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable; the names and forms of the deities who everywhere embody, dispense, and represent it come and go. This is the misaculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, Yahweh, and the Supreme Buddha, the fertility of the rain of Viracocha, the virtue announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of the ultimate illumination of the saint and sage. It guardians dare release it only to the duly proven.

Gilgamesh, Mesopotamian

Summerian city of Erech

Watercress of immortality, the plant "Never Grow Old"

Lions guard foothills, scorpion-men the heaven supporting mountains, a paradise garden.

The sea that surrounds the world, Goddess Ishtar in a cave, Siduri-Sabitu, closed the gates.

She advised him not pursue his quest but to enjoy the mortal joys of life.

Seeming hedonistic but actually a test. 

Seek ferryman Ursanapi, found chopping wood in the forest, guarded by "those who rejoice to live" or "those of stones", once defeated he traverses the water of death.

Utnapishtim, hero of the primordial deluge, "Noah", tells Gilgamesh the story of the flood then has him sleep six days. A bath, and seven loaves, then the secret of the plant, it was growing atthe bottom of the Cosmic Sea. Gilgamesh tied stones to his feet and sunk, grabbing the plant, mutilated his hand with its thorns. Rested, serpent stole away the plant, ate it, gained power to shed its skin, and so renew its youth. 

Fountain of Youth "Bimini", Juan Ponce de Leon

Chinese philosopher Ko Hung, pills of immortality

Three pounds of genuine cinnabar (red mercury) and one pound of white honey, mix, and dry, and roast over a fire to be shaped into pills. Ten pills a day.

To enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact. 

"All things are in process, rising and returning. Plants come to blossom, but only to return to the root. Returning to the root is like seeking tranquility. Seeking tranquility is like moving toward destiny. To move toward destiny is like eternity. To know eternity is enlightenment, and not to recognize eternity brings disorder and evi. Knowing eternity makes one comprehensive; comprehension makes one broadminded; breadth of vision brings nobility; nobility is like heaven. The heavenly is like Tao. Tao is the Eternal. The decay of the body is not to be feared."

Lao-tse

The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.

This is the highest and ultimate crucifixion, not only of the hero, but of his god as well. Hee the Son and the Father alike are annihilated - as personality-masks over the unnamed. For just as the figments of a dream derive from the life energy of one dreamer, representing only fluid splittings and complications of that single force, so do all the forms of all the worlds, whether terrestrial or divine, reflect the universal force of a single inscrutable mystery: the power that constructs the atom and controls the orbits of the stars. 

The Buddha's victory beneath the Bo Tree.

With the sword of his mind he pierced the bubble of the universe - and it shattered into naught. The whole world of natural experience, as well as the continents, heavens, and hells of traditional religious belief, exploded - together with their gods and demons. But the miracle of miracles was that though all exploded, all was nevertheless thereby renewed, revivified, and made glorious with the effulgence of true being. Indeed, the gods of the redeemed heavens raised their voices in harmonious acclaim of the man-hero who had penetrated beyond them to the void that was their life and source.

Joseph Campbell - The Ultimate Boon

...it is possible to observe, in the earliest phases of the development of the infant, symptoms of a dawning "mythology" of a state beyond the vicissitudes of time. These appear as reactions to, and spontaneous defenses against, the body-destruction fantasies that assail the child when it is deprived of the mother breast. 

"The infant reacts with a temper tantrum and the fantasy that goes with the temper tantrum is to tear everything out of the mother's body...The child then fears retaliation for these impulses, i.e., that everything will be scooped out of its own inside." 

Roehim

Anxieties for the integrity of its body, fantasies of restitution, a silent, deep requirement for indestructibility and protection against the "bad" forces from within and without, begin to direct the shaping psyche; and these remain as determining factors in the later neurotic, and even normal, life activities, spiritual efforts, religious beliefs, and ritual practices of the adult.

The profession of the medicine man, this nucleus of all primitive societies, "originates...on the basis of the infantile body-destruction fantasies, by means of a series of defense mechanisms."

Roheim

The first formula is abreaction in fantasy (my inside has already been destroyed) followed by reaction-formation (my inside is not something corruptible and full of faeces, but incorruptible, full of quartz crystals). The second is projection:' It is not I who am trying to penetrate into the body but foreign sorcerers who shoot disease-substance into people.' The third formula is restitution: ' I am not trying to destroy people's insides, I am healing them.' 

Image of indestructibility 

spiritual double - an external soul not afflicted by the losses and injuries of the present body, but existing safely in some place removed. 

Tjurunga - talisman of the man's totem ancestor

The Eternal Ones of the Dream

Roheim

Indestructible Body

Paradise of the Milk that Nver Fails

Mt. Olympus - Ambrosia (not mortal)

Wotan - 32,000 heroes eat flesh of Sachrimnir, the Cosmic Boar and milk from she-goat Hidrum: she feeds on leaves of Yggdrasil, the World Ash. 

It is obvious that the infantile fantasies which we all cherish still in the unconscious play continually into myth, fairy tale, and the teachings of the church, as symbols of indestructible being. This is helpful, for the mind feels at home with the images, and seems to be remembering something already known. But the circumstance is obstructive too, for the feelings come to rest in the symbols and resist passionately every effort to go beyond. The prodigious gulf between those childishly blissful multitudes who fill the world with piety and the truly free breaks open at the line where the symbols give way and are transcended. The ineffable teaching of the beatitude beyond imagination comes to us clothed, necessarily, in figures reminiscent of the imagined beatitude of infancy; hence the deceptive childishness of the tales. 

The ineffable teaching of the beatitude beyond imagination comes to us clothed, necessarily, in figures reminiscent of the imagined beatitude of infancy; hence the deceptive childishness of the tales. 

Joseph Campbell - Apotheosis Part 2

Nirvana - "Extinguised of the threefold fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion."

Nirva (snskrit) - 'to blow out', deprived of fuel, the fire of life is 'pacified', it is by ceasing to feed our fires that the peace is reached. Nirvana - "blown out, gone out,extinguished"

Kama-Mara vs. Future Buddha

Magician of Delusion vs. Subdued, ultimate ember of threefold fire

the last projected fantasies of his primitive physical will to live like other human beings

Myth, psychology, metaphysics

Vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the interdependence of the inner and the outer worlds.

Life-wish "eros or libido" corresponding to the Buddhist Kama "desire"

Death-wish "thanatos or destrudo" identical to Buddhist Mara "hostility or death"

The unconsciously grounded delusions from which desires and hostilities arise are in both systems dispelled by psychological analysis (Sanskrit: viveka) and illumination (Sanskrit: vidya).

Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure excessively suffering individuals of the unconsciously misdirected desires and hostilities that weave around them their private webs of unreal terrors and ambivalent attractions; the patient released from these finds himself able to participate with comparative satisfaction in the more realistic fears, hostilities, erotic and religious practices, business enterprises, wars, pastimes, and household tasks offered to him by his particular culture. 

Therefore the aim of the religious teaching is not to cure the individual back again to the general delusion, but to detach him from delusion altogether; and this not be readjusting the deisre ((eros) and hostility (thanatos) - for that would only originate a new context of delusion - but by extinguishing the impulses to the very root.

Buddhist Eightfold Path

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is indeed form. Emptiness is not different from form, form is not different from emptiness. What is form, that is emptiness; what is emptiness, that is form. And the same applies to perception, name, conception, and knowledge."

Having surpassed the delusions of his formerly self-assertive, self-defensive, self-concerned ego, he knows without and within the same repose. What he beholds without is the visual aspect of the magnitudinous, thought-transcending emptiness on which his own experiences of ego, form, perceptions, speech, conceptions, and knowledge ride. And he is filled with compassion for the self-terrorized beings who live in fright of their own nightmare. He rises, returns to them, and dwells with them as an egoless center, through whom the principle of emptiness is made manifest in its own simplicity. 

"Gift waves" go out from such a one for the liberation of us all. "This our worldy life is an activity of Nirvana itself, not the slightest distinction exists between them."

The Taoist Immortals

Four benevolent animals - phoenix, unicorn, tortoise, dragon

Goddess Hsi Wang Mu "The Golden Mother of the Tortoise"

K'un-lun Mountain

"Feast of the Peaches" every six thousand years

Teshouse "abode of fancy" encloses poetic ituition "abode of vacancy"

"abode of the unsymmetrical" suggests movement; the purposely unfinished leaves a vacuum into which the imagination of the beholder can pour

"the secret of temporal existence" "existence to the slightest detail was a conscious expression of eternity"

"The plants, rocks, fire, water, all are alive. They watch us and see our needs. They see when we have nothing to protext us and it is then that they reveal themselves and speak to us" 

Apache or Buddhist "sermon of the inanimate"

Shiva symbol "Lingam" combined phallus and vulva

Third wonder of the Bodhisattva myth is that the first wonder (the bisexual form) is symbolical of the second (the identity of eternity and time). For in the language of the divine pictures, the world of time is the great mother womb. The wise realize that they have come from the father and are returning to the father; while the very wise know that she and he are in substance one.

Tibetan 'Yum - female - time' 'Yab - male - eternity'

The union of the two is productive of the world, in which all things are at once temporal and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing male-female G0d. The initiate, through meditation, is led to the recollection of this Form of forms (yab-yum) within himself. 

The male figure may be regarded as symbolizing the initiating principle, the method; in which case the female denotes the goal to which initiation leads (Nirvana or Eternity). The two are the same, each is both, and the dual form is only an effect of illusion, which itself, however, is not different from enlightenment. 

"...the pairs of opposites of the universal agony are not what they seem, and that for one centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of temporal 'goods' and 'evils' is but a reflex of the mind..."

This is a supreme statement of the great paradox by which the wall of the pairs of opposites is shattered and the candidate admitted to the vision of the God, who when he created man in his own image created man in his own image created him male and female. In the male's right hand is the thunderbolt, while in his left he holds a bell, symbolizing the goddess. The thunderbolt is both the method and eternity, whereas the bell is "illumined mind"; its note is the beautiful sound of eternity that is heard by the pure mind throughout creation, and therefore within itself.

"And The Word was made flesh"

Et Verbum caro factum est 

"The Jewel is in the Lotus"

Om mani padme hum

Tao

Supreme Buddha

Bodhisattva

Jivan Mukta

The Word Made Flesh

***

The Void    The World

Eternity     Time

Nirvana    Samsara

Truth    Illusoriness

Elightenment    Compassion

The God    The Goddess

The Enemy    The Friend

Death    Birth

The Thunderbolt    The Bell

The Jewel    The Lotus

Subject   Object

Yab   Yum

Yang   Yin

Joseph Campbell - Apotheosis

Bodhisattvas
Avalokiteshvara "The Lord Looking Down in Pity"
Suffering the evils of existence
Om mani padme hum "the jewel is in the lotus"
During his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paushed: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard.

Hinayana Buddhism reveres the Buddha as a human hero, a supreme saint and sage. Mahayana Buddhism regards the Enlightened One as a world savior, and incarnation of the universal principle of enlightenment.

A Bodhisattva is a personage on the point of Buddhahood: according to the Hinayana view, and adept who will become a Buddha in a subsequent reincarnation; according to the Mahayana view, a type of world savior, representing particularily the universal principle or essence is enlightenment.

Mahayana Buddhism has developed a pantheon of many Bdhisattvas and many past and future Buddhas. These all inflect the manifested powers of the transcendent, one and only Adi-Buddha (Primal Buddha) who is the highest conceivable source and ultimate boundary of all being, suspended in the void of nonbeing like a wonderful bubble.

"When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change."

This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain-through herohood; for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things" or All beings are without self."

The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva (he whose being is enlightenment); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them - and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps.

Eighty four thousand

Kwannon
The pause on the threshold of Nirvana, the resolution to forego until the end of time ( which never ends) immersion in the untroubled pool of eternity, represents a realization that the distinction between eternity and time is only apparent - made, perforce, by the rational mind, but dissolved in the perfect knowledge of the mind that has transcended the pairs of opposites. What is understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i.e., the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani padme hum.

Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth. They emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind.

Pg 152 yin-yang, tao

Great Original
T'ai Yuan
Combined yin-yang in herself

Word Made Flesh
Androgynous
Adam before Eve
Hermaphrodite (child of Hermes & Aphrodite)

The removal of the feminine into another form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfection into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where Go walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the wall of Paradise, constituted of the "coincidence of opposites", by which Man (now man and woman) is cut off from not only the vision but even the recollection of the image of God.

The mystery of creation
Devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two. This image stands at the beginning of the cosmogonic cycle, and with equal propriety at the conclusion of the hero-task, at the moment when the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and recollected, and wisdom regained.

As the original intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father. "Whatever is killed becomes the father." The impulse to destroy the father is continually transforming itself into public violence.

Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.

Page 157 "turn the other cheek"

Motherly fathers, manipulating sons into defense

Pg 158 techniques/devices versus god is love

"Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves"

"God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself."

Civitas Dei / Civitas Diaboli
St. Augustine

"And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way of consent...They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies"

The perennial agony of man, self-torturing, deluded, tangled in the net of his own tenuous delirium, frustrated, yet having within himself, undiscovered, absolutely unutilized, the secret of release: this too he regards - and is.

We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being. We and that protecting father are one. This is the redeeming insight. That protecting father is every man we meet. And so it must be known that, though this ignorant, limited, self-defending, suffering body may regard itself as threatened by some other - the enemy - that one too is the God.

This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is the mystery of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the mother, chewed into fragments and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were. If the God is a tribal, racial, national, or secretarian archetype, we are the warriors of his cause; but if he is a lord of the universe itself, we then go forth as knowers to whom all men are brothers. And in either case, the childhood parent images and ideas of "good" and "evil" have been surpassed. We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared. All the god, Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas have been subsumed in us, as in the halo of the mighty holder of the lotus of the world.

This is the sense of the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the androgynous character of the presence. Therewith the two apparently opposite mythological adventures come together: the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father. For in the first the initiate learns that male and female are "two halves of a split pea"; whereas in the second, the Father is found to be antecedent to the divison of sex: the pronoun "He" was a manner of speech, the myth of Sonship a guiding line to be erased. And in both cases it is found (or rather, recollected) that the hero himself is that which he had come to find.

Annihilation of the distinction between life and release from life

Joseph Campbell - Atonement With the Father Part 2

Phaethon/Phoebus
Icarus/Daedalus

This tale of indulgent parenthood illustrates the antique idea that when the roles of life are assumed by the improperly initiated, chaos supervenes. The son against the father for the mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered world.

The traditional idea of initiation combines and introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images.

The Mystagogue (father or father-substitute) is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes - for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized) motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent, consequently, now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from the infantile illusions of "good" and "evil" to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being.

Circumcision, cutting off the part of the mother, revealing his male power.

Communion/blood drinking rituals.

Egypto-Babylonian & Trojan-Cretan " labyrinth complex", Aeneas & Gilgamesh, "journey of the soul to the underworld"

The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key know of his limited existence.

The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands - and the two are atoned.

"Gird up thy loins now like a man; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disannul my judgement? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayst be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? Or canst thou thunder with a voice like him? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret. Then I will also confess unto thee that thine own hand can save thee."
God to Job

Man cannot measure the will of God, which derives from a center beyond the range of human categories. Categories are totally shattered to the last. Job was a hero who, by his courage in the fiery furnace, his unreadiness to break down and grovel before a popular conception of the character of the All Highest, had proven himself capable of facing a greater revelation than the one that satisfied his friends.

For the son who has grown really to know the father, the agonies of the ordeal are readily borne; the world is no longer a vale of tears but a bliss-yielding, perpetual manifestation of the Presence.

Joseph Campbell - Atonement With the Father

God's wrath and justice tempered by mercy and grace.

Shiva

AUM: waking consciousness, dream consciousness, dreamless sleep, Unmanifest Transcendent

Idol worshippers. The image in place of the Word. The Word of God manipulating the masses, rather than the idol giving each their understanding of the symbols in the idol.

The ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim's own ego - derived from the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind, but projected before; and the fixating idolatry of that pedagogical nothing is itself the fault that keeps one steeped in a sense of sin, sealing the potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of the father, and therewith the world.

Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster - the dragon thought to be God (superegeo) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult.

Joseph Campbell - Meeting with Godess/Woman as Temptress

There exists a very general association on the one hand between the notion of mind, spirit or soul and the idea of the father or of masculinity; and on the other hand between the notion of the body or of matter (materia - that which belongs to the mother) and the idea of the mother or of the feminine principle. Pg 113
Professor Flugel

Kali as balance, fear of death, comfort of life.

Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know.

By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.

Cupid & Psyche

The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of
realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he know that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place.

Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness.

The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serves as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale.

Acknowledgement of the darkness of humanity, inherent in our very body, causes revulsion of life, and woman in particular as the great symbol of life.

Demonification of the female, transcending earthly planes, embracing the spiritual through chastity.

Joseph Campbell - Initiation - Road of Trials

Shaman
Medicine man
"In every primitive tribe we find the medicine man in the center of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man is either a neurotic or a psychotic or at least that his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or a psychosis. Human groups are actuated by their group ideals, and these are always based on the infantile situation. The infancy situation is modified or inverted by the process of maturation, again modified by the necessary adjustment to reality, yet it is there and supplies those unseen libidinal ties without which no human groups could exist." -Dr. Geza Roheim

The medicine men, therefore, are simply making both visible and public the systems of symbolic fantasy that are present in the psyche of every adult member of their society.

"They are the leaders in this infantile game and the lightning conductors of common anxiety. They fight the demons so that others can hunt the prey and in general fight reality."

"Dragons of this kind, which do not reveal themselves as dragons until one sees their wings, sumbolize false love." -Swedenborg

"The problem is not new, for all ages before us have believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious...Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But 'the heart glows,' and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being."
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious -Dr. C.G. Jung

Inanna/Ereshkigal
Inanna's descent into netherworld
Stripped of her royal robes and adornments
First gate crown
Second rod of lapis lazuli
Third the stones about her neck
Fourth the stones about her breasts
Fifth the gold ring about her hand
Sixth the breastplate
Seventh all garments
Naked and brought before seven judges "Anunnaki"
Turned into a corpse and hung upon a stake

The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.

"equals of opposites, evolved by a one-same power of nature or of spirit, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies" Finnegan's Wake -James Joyce

Joseph Campbell - Crossing of the First Threshold/Belly of the Whale

The divine thunderbolt
Future Buddha
Self-denying he became divine

Wall of paradise
"Coincidence of opposites"
"The highest spirit of reason, who bars the way until he has been overcome"

The world navel, the womb, passage of the threshhold is a form of self-annihilation.

Finn MacCool. Irish hero swallowed.

The devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis.

"No creature can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist."
Ananda Coomaraswamy

Joseph Campbell - Adventure of the Hero

Messenger Gods
Hermes
Greek. God of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of thieves and road travelers, or orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, of inventions, of general commerce, and of the cunning of thieves and liars.

Hermes' epithet Argeiphontes...or Argus-slayer, recalls his slaying of the hundred eyed giant Argus Panoptes, who was watching over the heifer-nymph Io in the sanctuary of Queen Hera herself in Argos. Putting Argus to sleep, Hermes used a spell to permanently close all of Argus' eyes and then slew the giant. Argus' eyes were then put into the tail of the peacockm symbol of the goddess Hera.

Io was a priestess of Hera in Argos who was seduced by Zeus, who changed her into a heifer to escape detection. Her mistress Hera set ever-watchful Argus Panoptes to guard her, but Hermes was sent to distract the guardian and slay him. Heifer Io was loosed to roam the world, stung by a maddening gadfly sent by Hera, and wandered to Egypt, thus placing her descendant Belus in Egypt; his sons Cadmus and Danaus would thus "return" to mainland Greece. Hera tethered Io to the olive-tree in the temenos of her cult-site, the Heraion, and placed her in the charge of many-eyed Argus Panoptes to keep her separated from Zeus. Zeus commended Hermes to kill Argus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes

Mercury

Roman. Messenger and a god of trade, profit and commerce...his name is related to the Latin word merx ("merchandise"; compare merchant, commerce, etc.). In occult circles Mercury is given primary rulership over things megical. this may in part be due to Mercury's association with Odhinn by way of the days of the week. The name Wednesday comes from the Middle English Wednes dei...meaning the day of the Germanic god Woden (Wodan) who was a god of the Anglo-Saxons in England until about the 7th century. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(mythology)

Thoth

Often depicted with the head of an Ibis...he was considered the heart and tongue of Ra as well as the means by which Ra's will was translated into speech. He has also been likened to the Logos of Plato and the mind of God. One of the two deities (the other being Ma'at) who stood on either side of Ra's boat...and has further been involved in arbitration, magic, writing, science, and the judging of the dead.

Thoth served as a mediating power, especially between good and evil, making sure neither had a decisive victory over the other. He also served as scribe of the gods, credited with the invention of writing and alphabets (ie. hierogiyphs) themselves. The ancient Egyptians regarded Thoth as One, self-begotten, and self-produced. He was the master of both physical and moral (ie. Divine) law. He is credited with making the calculations for the establishment of the heavens, stars, Earth, and everything in them...and is said to direct the motions of the heavenly bodies. Without his words, the Egyptians believed, the gods would not exist. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoth

Holy Ghost

Hermes Trismegustus
"Hermes Thrice Greatest"
Alchemy
Initiation
Psychology and Alchemy
C.G. Jung

Mercurial figure

Navaho Legends
Where the two came to their father

Faust
Gretchen, Helen of Troy, Virgin
Evolution of male perception of female power

Jinn
Koran 37:158
Iblis "the Despairer"

Kamar al-Zaman
Reluctant hero
Supernatural forces intervene

Unconscious desire coming forth from his dreams, forcing upon him that
which he rejects, for his own benefit. Pride of a protector brings the
two together.

Threshold Guardian
"We are not defenders of the ID"
Safety of society
The fear of unknown keeps tribe together
Forces some out into initiation
The outcast seeing civilization from a distance

Chiruwi "a mysterious thing"
Half-man, victorious battle gives medicine

Incestuous libido
Patricidal destrudo

Oko-jumu
"Dreamer" "one who speaks from dreams"

Joseph Campbell - Hero With A Thousand Faces: The Monomyth

Joseph Campbell has always seemed to be the person who understood the foundation of everything I want to learn about. What is it that lies beneath the surface of the myths that humanity has created for itself.

As a writer I've always been obsessed with the idea of a three act structure and here Campbell shows us the monomyth, the hero's journey from the world he knows, to separation to initiation to his final return. We must see the hero in his natural environment, establishing his character as a member of his community, before we can follow him on his journey. The journey then is a confrontation with some sort of metaphysical force, even if the battles be moral and peaceful, or a physical battle. The hero must go forth and combat (in his own manner) the personification of whatever it is that ails his people, his kingdom, or the world.

Within a three act structure we see the merging of two, the personal/human and the universal/god. I think Campbell illustrates this nicely with the tragedy and the comedy. The tragedy shows us the realistic, the earthly plane, full of woes and ending upon death. The comedy unites us with the sublime, the hope of transcending the tragedy of mankind. We obviously need both sides of the coin that is life; the dread of our inevitable deaths and the hope that there is more beyond.

As an aside this makes me think of the law of 5, or the conspiracy theories about the number 23, where the numbers 2 and 3 have some sort of deeper connection to humanity. 5 could be the merging of the three act structure, the journey, and the two opposing forces that comprise the yin-yang of life. Everything is defined by it opposite number, happiness/sadness, heaven/hell, god/man, and so on.

The World Navel is an interesting concept as well. The fact that it houses all of what is necessary in life, the good as well as the bad, is what I find to be most important. A combination of the sum total of experience, whether we can accept what that means, is what makes us a total living being. Acceptance of that seems to be what brings enlightenment.

As another aside, I saw the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney yesterday and there was something that stood out to be. He incorporated universal concepts in his design work, and his geodisic dome, a sphere made up of triangle shapes, a shape he said was inherent in the cosmos on the most basic level, well this dome would resist pressure from the external, where as a perfect smooth sphere would resist pressure from internal. I'm not even sure 100% of what this means, but it stood out enough to me to begin developing some sort of theory about it. Perhaps being trapped with a sphere containing us, versus the idea of the dome protecting us from external forces.