The Hero with a Thousand Faces

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.