Benjamin Lawrence Walker’s Reviews > The Hero With a Thousand Faces > Status Update

"The tree is the World Axe 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 rebirth or return of the sun, a joyous custom inherited from the Germanic paganism that has given to the modern German language its feminine Somme."

Ch 2.6: The Ultimate Boom

“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.”

Ch. 2.4: Atonement with the Father

“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.”

Ch. 2.3: Woman as the Temptress

“Nevertheless every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance regrets are illumination‘s come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the heroes passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women whenever they may stand along the scale.”

Chapter 2.2: The Meeting with the Goddess

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

Chapter 2.1: The Road of Trials

“In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the ‘purification of the self,’ when the senses are ‘cleansed and humbled,’ and the energies and interests ‘concentrated upon transcendental things…’”

Chapter 1.5: The Belly of the Whale

“The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died…This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation.”