1

The Shapeshifter

THERE is no final system for the interpretation of myths, and there

will never be any such thing. Mythology is like the god Proteus,
"the ancient one of the sea, whose speech is sooth." The god "will
make assay, and take all manner of shapes of things that creep
upon the earth, of water likewise, and of fierce fire burning." 1

The life-voyager wishing to be taught by Proteus must "grasp

him steadfastly and press him yet the more," and at length he
will appear in his proper shape. But this wily god never dis-
closes even to the skillful questioner the whole content of his
wisdom. He will reply only to the question put to him, and what
he discloses will be great or trivial, according to the question
asked. "So often as the sun in his course stands high in mid
heaven, then forth from the brine comes the ancient one of the
sea, whose speech is sooth, before the breath of the West Wind
he comes, and the sea's dark ripple covers him. And when he is
got forth, he lies down to sleep in the hollow of the caves. And
around him the seals, the brood of the fair daughter of the brine,
sleep all in a flock, stolen forth from the grey sea water, and bit-
ter is the scent they breathe of the deeps of the salt sea." The 2

Greek warrior-king Menelaus, who was guided by a helpful daugh-

ter of this old sea-father to the wild lair, and instructed by her how
to wring from the god his response, desired only to ask the se-
cret of his own personal difficulties and the whereabouts of his
personal friends. And the god did not disdain to reply.
Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a
primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer);
as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misun-
derstood by succeeding ages (Millier); as a repository of allegorical

1
Odyssey, IV, 401, 417-418, translation by S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang
(London, 1879).
2
Ibid., IV, 400-406.

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instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim);

as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the
depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of
man's profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and
as God's Revelation to His children (the Church). Mythology is
all of these. The various judgments are determined by the view-
points of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it
is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the
past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as
amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the
individual, the race, the age.

• 2 •

The Function of Myth, Cult, and Meditation

In his life-form the individual is necessarily only a fraction and

distortion of the total image of man. He is limited either as male
or as female; at any given period of his life he is again limited as
child, youth, mature adult, or ancient; furthermore, in his life-
role he is necessarily specialized as craftsman, tradesman, ser-
vant, or thief, priest, leader, wife, nun, or harlot; he cannot be all.
Hence, the totality—the fullness of man—is not in the separate
member, but in the body of the society as a whole; the individual
can be only an organ. From his group he has derived his tech-
niques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on
which he thrives; through the past of that society descended the
genes that built his body. If he presumes to cut himself off, ei-
ther in deed or in thought and feeling, he only breaks connection
with the sources of his existence.
The tribal ceremonies of birth, initiation, marriage, burial, in-
stallation, and so forth, serve to translate the individual's life-crises
and life-deeds into classic, impersonal forms. They disclose him
to himself, not as this personality or that, but as the warrior, the

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bride, the widow, the priest, the chieftain; at the same time re-
hearsing for the rest of the community the old lesson of the ar-
chetypal stages. All participate in the ceremonial according to
rank and function. The whole society becomes visible to itself as
an imperishable living unit. Generations of individuals pass, like
anonymous cells from a living body; but the sustaining, timeless
form remains. By an enlargement of vision to embrace this super-
individual, each discovers himself enhanced, enriched, supported,
and magnified. His role, however unimpressive, is seen to be in-
trinsic to the beautiful festival-image of man—the image, potential
yet necessarily inhibited, within himself.
Social duties continue the lesson of the festival into normal,
everyday existence, and the individual is validated still. Con-
versely, indifference, revolt—or exile—break the vitalizing con-
nectives. From the standpoint of the social unit, the broken-off
individual is simply nothing—waste. Whereas the man or woman
who can honestly say that he or she has lived the role—whether
that of priest, harlot, queen, or slave—is something in the full
sense of the verb to be.
Rites of initiation and installation, then, teach the lesson of the
essential oneness of the individual and the group; seasonal festi-
vals open a larger horizon. As the individual is an organ of soci-
ety, so is the tribe or city—so is humanity entire—only a phase
of the mighty organism of the cosmos.
It has been customary to describe the seasonal festivals of so-
called native peoples as efforts to control nature. This is a mis-
representation. There is much of the will to control in every act
of man, and particularly in those magical ceremonies that are
thought to bring rain clouds, cure sickness, or stay the flood;
nevertheless, the dominant motive in all truly religious (as op-
posed to black-magical) ceremonial is that of submission to the
inevitables of destiny—and in the seasonal festivals this motive
is particularly apparent.
No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep
winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare
the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the
season of the terrible cold. And in the spring, the rites do not

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seek to compel nature to pour forth immediately corn, beans,

and squash for the lean community; on the contrary: the rites
dedicate the whole people to the work of nature's season. The
wonderful cycle of the year, with its hardships and periods of
joy, is celebrated, and delineated, and represented as continued
in the life-round of the human group.
Many other symbolizations of this continuity fill the world of
the mythologically instructed community. For example, the clans
of the American hunting tribes commonly regarded themselves
as descended from half-animal, half-human, ancestors. These an-
cestors fathered not only the human members of the clan, but
also the animal species after which the clan was named; thus the
human members of the beaver clan were blood cousins of the an-
imal beavers, protectors of the species and in turn protected by
the animal wisdom of the wood folk. Or another example: The
hogan, or mud hut, of the Navahos of New Mexico and Arizona,
is constructed on the plan of the Navaho image of the cosmos.
The entrance faces east. The eight sides represent the four direc-
tions and the points between. Every beam and joist corresponds
to an element in the great hogan of the all-embracing earth and
sky. And since the soul of man itself is regarded as identical in
form with the universe, the mud hut is a representation of the
basic harmony of man and world, and a reminder of the hidden
life-way of perfection.
But there is another way—-in diametric opposition to that of
social duty and the popular cult. From the standpoint of the way
of duty, anyone in exile from the community is a nothing. From
the other point of view, however, this exile is the first step of the
quest. Each carries within himself the all; therefore it may be
sought and discovered within. The differentiations of sex, age,
and occupation are not essential to our character, but mere cos-
tumes which we wear for a time on the stage of the world. The
image of man within is not to be confounded with the garments.
We think of ourselves as Americans, children of the twentieth
century, Occidentals, civilized Christians. We are virtuous or sin-
ful. Yet such designations do not tell what it is to be man, they

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denote only the accidents of geography, birth-date, and income.

What is the core of us? What is the basic character of our being?
The asceticism of the medieval saints and of the yogis of
India, the Hellenistic mystery initiations, the ancient philoso-
phies of the East and of the West, are techniques for the shifting
of the emphasis of individual consciousness away from the gar-
ments. The preliminary meditations of the aspirant detach his
mind and sentiments from the accidents of life and drive him to
the core. "I am not that, not that," he meditates: "not my mother
or son who has just died; my body, which is ill or aging; my
arm, my eye, my head; not the summation of all these things. I
am not my feeling; not my mind; not my power of intuition." By
such meditations he is driven to his own profundity and breaks
through, at last, to unfathomable realizations. No man can re-
turn from such exercises and take very seriously himself as Mr.
So-an-so of Such-and-such a township, U.S.A. —Society and du-
ties drop away. Mr. So-and-so, having discovered himself big
with man, becomes indrawn and aloof.
This is the stage of Narcissus looking into the pool, of the
Buddha sitting contemplative under the tree, but it is not the ul-
timate goal; it is a requisite step, but not the end. The aim is not
to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to
wander as that essence in the world. Furthermore: the world too
is of that essence. The essence of oneself and the essence of the
world: these two are one. Hence separateness, withdrawal, is no
longer necessary. Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he
may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence—for he has
the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness. Thus, just as
the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realiza-
tion of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero
to the Self in all.
Centered in this hub-point, the question of selfishness or al-
truism disappears. The individual has lost himself in the law and
been reborn in identity with the whole meaning of the universe.
For Him, by Him, the world was made. "O Mohammed," God
said, "hadst thou not been, I would not have created the sky."

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• 3 •

The Hero Today

All of which is far indeed from the contemporary view; for the
democratic ideal of the self-determining individual, the inven-
tion of the power-driven machine, and the development of the
scientific method of research, have so transformed human life
that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has col-
lapsed. In the fateful, epoch-announcing words of Nietzsche's
Zarathustra: "Dead are all the gods." One knows the tale; it has
3

been told a thousand ways. It is the hero-cycle of the modern

age, the wonder-story of mankind's coming to maturity. The
spell of the past, the bondage of tradition, was shattered with
sure and mighty strokes. The dream-web of myth fell away; the
mind opened to full waking consciousness; and modern man
emerged from ancient ignorance, like a butterfly from its cocoon,
or like the sun at dawn from the womb of mother night.
It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from
the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society
any more as the gods once supported. The social unit is not a
carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organiza-
tion. Its ideals are not those of the hieratic pantomime, making
visible on earth the forms of heaven, but of the secular state, in
hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and
resources. Isolated societies, dream-bounded within a mytholog-
ically charged horizon, no longer exist except as areas to be ex-
ploited. And within the progressive societies themselves, every
last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality, and
art is in full decay.
The problem of mankind today, therefore, is precisely the op-
posite to that of men in the comparatively stable periods of those
great co-ordinating mythologies which now are known as lies.

3
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1. 22. 3.

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Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous

forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today no meaning
is in the group—none in the world: all is in the individual. But
there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know
toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is pro-
pelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and
the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut,
and we have been split in two.
The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the
century of Galileo. Where then there was darkness, now there is
light; but also, where light was, there now is darkness. The mod-
ern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the
lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul.^
Obviously, this work cannot be wrought by turning back, or
away, from what has been accomplished by the modern revolu-
tion; for the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the mod-
ern world spiritually significant—or rather (phrasing the same
principle the other way round) nothing if not that of making it
possible for men and women to come to full human maturity
through the conditions of contemporary life. Indeed, these con-
ditions themselves are what have rendered the ancient formulae
ineffective, misleading, and even pernicious. The community
today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns
of projected aggression which formerly served to co-ordinate the
in-group now can only break it into factions. The national idea,
with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery
ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation. Its parodyrituals
of the parade ground serve the ends of Holdfast, the tyrant dragon,
not the God in whom self-interest is annihilate. And the numer-
ous saints of this anticult—namely the patriots whose ubiquitous
photographs, draped with flags, serve as official icons—are pre-
cisely the local threshold guardians (our demon Sticky-hair)
whom it is the first problem of the hero to surpass.
Nor can the great world religions, as at present understood,
meet the requirement. For they have become associated with
the causes of the factions, as instruments of propaganda and
self-congratulation. (Even Buddhism has lately suffered this

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degradation, in reaction to the lessons of the West.) The univer-

sal triumph of the secular state has thrown all religious organi-
zations into such a definitely secondary, and finally ineffectual,
position that religious pantomime is hardly more today than a
sanctimonious exercise for Sunday morning, whereas business
ethics and patriotism stand for the remainder of the week. Such a
monkey-holiness is not what the functioning world requires;
rather, a transmutation of the whole social order is necessary, so
that through every detail and act of secular life the vitalizing image
of the universal god-man who is actually immanent and effective in
all of us may be somehow made known to consciousness.
And this is not a work that consciousness itself can achieve.
Consciousness can no more invent, or even predict, an effective
symbol than foretell or control tonight's dream. The whole thing
is being worked out on another level, through what is bound to
be a long and very frightening process, not only in the depths of
every living psyche in the modern world, but also on those titanic
battlefields into which the whole planet has lately been con-
verted. We are watching the terrible clash of the Symplegades,
through which the soul must pass—identified with neither side.
But there is one thing we may know, namely, that as the new
symbols become visible, they will not be identical in the various
parts of the globe; the circumstances of local life, race, and tradi-
tion must all be compounded in the effective forms. Therefore, it
is necessary for men to understand, and be able to see, that
through various symbols the same redemption is revealed. "Truth
is one," we read in the Vedas; "the sages call it by many names."
A single song is being inflected through all the colorations of the
human choir. General propaganda for one or another of the local
solutions, therefore, is superfluous—or much rather, a menace.
The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments
of God in all of the wonderful modulations of the face of man.
With this we come to the final hint of what the specific orien-
tation of the modern hero-task must be, and discover the real
cause for the disintegration of all of our inherited religious formu-
lae. The center of gravity, that is to say, of the realm of mystery and
danger has definitely shifted. For the primitive hunting peoples of

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those remotest human millenniums when the sabertooth tiger,

the mammoth, and the lesser presences of the animal kingdom
were the primary manifestations of what was alien—the source
at once of danger, and of sustenance—the great human problem
was to become linked psychologically to the task of sharing the
wilderness with these beings. An unconscious identification took
place, and this was finally rendered conscious in the half-human,
half-animal, figures of the mythological totem-ancestors. The an-
imals became the tutors of humanity. Through acts of literal imi-
tation—such as today appear only on the children's playground
(or in the madhouse)—an effective annihilation of the human
ego was accomplished and society achieved a cohesive organiza-
tion. Similarly, the tribes supporting themselves on plant-food
became cathected to the plant; the life-rituals of planting and
reaping were identified with those of human procreation, birth,
and progress to maturity. Both the plant and the animal worlds,
however, were in the end brought under social control. Where-
upon the great field of instructive wonder shifted—to the skies—
and mankind enacted the great pantomime of the sacred moon-
king, the sacred sun-king, the hieratic, planetary state, and the
symbolic festivals of the world-regulating spheres.
Today all of these mysteries have lost their force; their sym-
bols no longer interest our psyche. The notion of a cosmic law,
which all existence serves and to which man himself must bend,
has long since passed through the preliminary mystical stages
represented in the old astrology, and is now simply accepted
in mechanical terms as a matter of course. The descent of the Occi-
dental sciences from the heavens to the earth (from seventeenth-
century astronomy to nineteenth-century biology), and their con-
centration today, at last, on man himself (in twentieth-century
anthropology and psychology), mark the path of a prodigious
transfer of the focal point of human wonder. Not the animal
world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but
man himself is now the crucial mystery. Man is that alien pres-
ence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms,
through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in
whose image society is to be reformed. Man, understood however

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not as " I " but as "Thou": for the ideals and temporal institu-
tions of no tribe, race, continent, social class, or century, can be
the measure of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful
divine existence that is the life in all of us.
The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed
the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is
our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait
for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rational-
ized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. "Live," Nietzsche
says, "as though the day were here." It is not society that is to
guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And
so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross
of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe's great
victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

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