The Hero's Rebirth

In the legends that tell the story of the adventurous quest for the fountain of youth, the difficulties and hardships of the journey stand out conspicuously. The place of miraculous metamorphosis can only be reached by overcoming difficulties of an incredible character. It is guarded from the quest of the average mortal by the inaccessibility of the approach.

In Rider Haggard's “She” there is a stirring description of the ordeal of body and mind through which the adventurers must pass in order to reach a cave in the heart of the mountain where the flame of life bursts forth from the ground in a stupendous rose-colored glow. In the glory of eternal youth, Ayesha steps into the fire from which she had emerged two thousand years before, and pays the awful price of death, aging and shriveling away in the matter of seconds, for she did not know that no man can bathe in the living fire more than once.

This romantic story is a beautiful allegory of the penalty attendant on our yearning to return into the womb. From that fountain of youth, from that living fire we had once emerged in the splendor of physical perfection. If we did find the way of return, our fate would be sealed by death. The quest, therefore, must be allegorical. Only by a spiritual journey through can we reach the fountain of eternal youth.

The Catholic religion expresses this truth by claiming that only through the water and the spirit can we reach the Kingdom of Heaven. That is the symbolic meaning of the baptismal ceremonies of the church, and we can dimly discern the presence of the same idea in the age-old claim of mythology that the dead, before they can reach the other side of life, have to pass through the river Lethe, Styx or Acheron. These gloomy journeys, however, are accomplished in the shadow of death and not in the glory of a new sunrise. The pagan world had yearned for immortal life as much as the Christian yearns; however, in that age they knew but one instinctual way, through the mother's wom