THE SELF AS HERO

In the West, you have the liberty and the obligation of finding out what your destiny is. You can discover it for yourself. But do you?

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be blessed with the accident of money, and a certain amount of support, and a margin of free time. But let me say this: people without money very often have the courage to risk a life of their own, and they can do it. Money doesn’t count, it’s not that important in our culture; it really isn’t.

I’ve taught students of all financial strata, and the most fortunate are not always the very wealthy ones. In fact, they’re very often the least fortunate because there’s nothing to drive them. A very common experience is a student who has all kinds of possibilities and talents and essentially limitless money and becomes nothing more than a dilettante. The student is not forced to follow one path, to make a decision: “I’m going to do this.” As soon as what they are doing gets difficult, as soon as it begins to get to the crunch, he or she moves over into another pursuit, and another, and another. They just splash their lives all over. Very often a youngster without the margin to do that makes the intelligent, courageous decision and follows it through.

Now, I’m not saying that we are perfect on that point here in the United States,or in the West. Yet the opportunity is there for each person with the courage to seek a destiny. There are several ways of discovering your destiny.

The first is in retrospect. In a wonderful essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that, once you have reached an advanced age, as I have, as you look back over your life, it can seem to have had a plot, as though composed by a novel- ist.54 Events that seemed entirely accidental or incidental turn out to have been central in the composition.

So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer’s idea is that, just like our dreams, our lives are directed by what he called the will, that self of which we are largely unconscious. We have been, he says, dreamers of our own lives, like Vişnu on his seven-headed serpent.

I would like now to review the archetypal myth of the hero’s journey as I ideal with it in The Hero with a Thousand Faces,this is what Joyce called Monomyth.

The Monomyth: an archetypal story that springs from the collective unconscious. Its motifs can appear not only in myth and literature, but, if you are sensitive to it, in the working out of the plot of your own life.

The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.

The first stage is leaving where you are, whatever the environment. You may leave because the environment is too repressive and you are consciously uneasy and eager to leave. Or it may be that

a call to adventure, an alluring temptation, comes and draws you out. In European myths this call is frequently represented by some animal-a stag or boar-that manages to elude a hunter and brings him into a part of the forest that he doesn’t recognize. And he doesn’t know where he is, how to get out, or where he should go. And then the adventure begins.

Another obvious case of

the call to adventure occurs when something or someone has been taken away and you then go in quest of it into the realms of adventure. Always, the realm of adventure is one of un- known forces and unknown powers.

On the other hand, there may come what I call a refusal of the call, where the summons is heard or felt, and perhaps even heeded, but for one reason or another cut off. One thinks of some reason for not going, or one has fear or something like this and one remains; the results are then radically different from those of the one following the call.

I think the shaman’s crisis is the most vivid and interesting example of the call in real life. In researching the first volume of my Historical Atlas of World Mythology, I came across many examples of this, from tribes around the world. Typically the young person is walking alone on the ocean shore or in the mountains or in the forest, and hears an unearthly music; this music then is accompanied by some kind of visionary visitation, which amounts to a summons.

Now, being a shaman is no fun in any of these societies, and a lot of young people just don’t want to accept it. Unfortunately, those who choose to refuse the call don’t have a life. Either they die, or, in trying to lead more mundane lives, they exist as nonentities, what T. S. Eliot called “hollow

men.”

Earlier, I mentioned the case of the West Virginia woman who was in analysis late in her life. She was so overwhelmed by the feeling that she had missed her life, that she was just a shell. Through analysis, fishing back, she remembered wandering in the woods and hearing wonderful music; unfortunately, she hadn’t known what to do about this experience. And ever since then, she had not been living the life that this music had called her to. If she had been in a primitive community, her family and the tribal shaman would have known just what to do. When the call isn’t answered, you experience a kind of drying up and a sense of life lost.

If the call is heeded, however, the individual is invoked to engage in a dangerous adventure. It’s always a dangerous adventure because you’re moving out of the familiar sphere of your community. In myths, this is represented as moving out of the known sphere altogether into the great beyond.

I call this crossing the threshold. This is the crossing from the conscious into the unconscious world, but the unconscious world is represented in many, many, many different images, depending on the cultural surroundings of the mythos. It may be a plunge into the ocean, it may be a passage into the desert, it may be getting lost in a dark forest, it may be finding yourself in a strange city. It may be depicted as an ascent or as a descent or as a going beyond the horizon, but this is the adventure-it’s always the path into the unknown, through the gateway or the cave or the clashing rocks.

One asks: what is the meaning of this business of the clashing rocks? It’s a wonderful image. We live, on this side of the mystery, in the realm of the pairs of opposites: true and false, light and dark, good and evil, male and female, and all that dualistic rational worldview. One can have an in- tuition that is beyond good and evil, that goes beyond pairs of opposites- that’s the opening of this gateway into the mystery. But it’s just one of those little intuitive flashes, because the conscious mind comes back again and closes the door. The idea in the hero adventure is to walk bodily through the door into the world where the dualistic rules don’t apply.

where are you between two thoughts? You’re thinking of yourself all the time, everything you do. You know, there’s the image of yourself your ego. So, where are you between two thoughts?

That’s what that intuitive flash is giving you a taste of. This thought, that thought, the ripple of the mind-do you ever have a glimpse that transcends anything you could think of about yourself? That’s the source field out of which all of your energies are coming. And so the hero journey through the threshold is simply a journey beyond the pairs of opposites, where you go beyond good and evil. That is the sense of the image of the clashing rocks, there’s simply no doubt about it.

This motif is known also, mythologically, as the active door. This mythic device appears in American Indian stories, in Greek stories, in Eskimo stories, in stories from all over. It is an archetypal image that com- municates the sense of going past judgment.

Another challenge at the threshold can be the encounter with the dark counterpart, the shadow, where the shining hero meets the dark. It may be in the form of a dragon, or it may be in the form of a malignant enemy. In either case, the hero has to slay the other and go into the other world alive.

On the other hand, another image for this passage is dismemberment. where the hero is chopped into pieces. In this case, you enter the realm of adventure dead. You get this in the story of the Egyptian god Osiris, where he’s killed, dismembered, and then put together again. This is a typical event in this kind of story; think of the father of the buffalo bride in the Blackfoot story, who is stomped to bits and then resurrected.

In this sort of story, after the trial has been passed, you have a resurrection from death. There are many, many ways of representing this journey and many ways of experiencing it. Sometimes it is personified a  confrontation with demons or gods, as in the Tibetan Book of the Dead while other times in myths and dreams it appears more like the journey across a dark ocean or through a mountain.

In any case, whether chopped up, nailed to a cross, or swallowed by a whale, you are passing into the realm of death. Christ on the Cross is making that passage: the Cross is the threshold to the adventure of his reunion with God the Father.

Once you have crossed the threshold, if it really is your adventure-if it is a journey that is appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness- helpers will come along the way to provide magical aid. This may be some little wood sprite or wise man or fairy godmother or animal that comes to you as a companion or as an adviser, letting you know what the dangers are along the way and how to overcome them. You are given little tokens that will protect you, images to meditate on, mudrās gestures or postures of the hand-and mantras-words to chant and think on-that will guide you and keep you on the path. It’s a narrow path, the sword bridge, and if you fall off that, you are in a helpless condition because you don’t know what to do and there’s nobody around to help you.

After you have received the magical aid, you will have a series of increasingly threatening tests or trials to pass. The deeper you get into this gauntlet, the heavier the resistance. You are coming into areas of the unconscious that have been repressed: the shadow, the anima/animus, and the rest of the unintegrated self; it is that repression system that you have to pass through. This, of course, is where the magical aid is most required.

These tests, then, symbolize self-realization, a process of initiation into the mysteries of life. There are four kinds of hurdles along this road of trials that I think represent all of the possibilities.

The first is the symbol of the erotic encounter with the perfect beloved; I call this meeting the goddess. This is the challenge of integrating the anima/animus. In the mythic vocabulary of alchemy, this is called the sacred marriage, or hieros gamos. Jung writes about the symbolism of this union a good deal,  In myths of the man’s adventure, the sacred marriage is union with the world goddess or with some minor secondary representation of her power. This is the story of the prince reaching Sleeping

Beauty, of Rama’s marriage to Sitä in the Ramayana.

The projection-making factor [in the male] is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima. Whenever she appears, in dreams, visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified form, thus demonstrating that the factor she embodies possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being. She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother. On the contrary, there is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother- image so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child. –Jung

The woman’s body is the first world to the newborn. The child’s projections of anima will be of her from then on.

Just as the mother seems to be the first carrier of the projection-making factor for the son, so is the father for the daughter. A woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit….when anima and animus meet, the animus draws his sword of power, and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). -Jung

You know about your anima or animus by your response to the opposite sex.

There’s a fundamental image in the old Babylonian mythology of the God Marduk, the great sun god, the shaper and creator of the world. What does he create the world out of? His grandmother, Tiamat, who comes as a monster, and he carves her up.

She would have cut herself up anyhow, but she lets him become the agent of this deed, because one has to have that kind of confidence needed out there in order that the world can live. So, this is a generous woman,who lets the little boy think he is doing the job, when she could have done it herself.

That’s the way the animus is: it is a projection of something the female could do but instead allows the male to do for her. Though not half so vital a presence, he is a machine with a body that’s specialized, so he can do these things. The realization that the power is within you is one thing; but to realize that the action implied by that power is more adequately rendered by the male than by you as a female is to recognize relationship.

When a woman realizes that the power is within her, then the man emerges as an individual, rather than just being an example of what she thinks she needs. On the male side, when a man looks at a woman and sees only somebody to go to bed with, he is seeing her in relation to a fulfillment of some need of his own and not as a woman at all. It’s like looking at cows and thinking only of roast beef.

Falling in love is nature coming in. It starts with being carried off by the opposite sex.

You should find a way to realize your shadow in your life somehow.

Next comes the problem of gender. Every man has to be a manly man,

and all of the things that society doesn’t allow him to develop he attributes

to the feminine side. These parts of himself he represses in his unconscious. This is the counterplayer to the persona. They become what Jung calls the anima: the female ideal in the masculine unconscious.

Likewise, the woman carries the animus in her unconscious: the male aspect in herself. She’s a woman, and the society gives her certain things to do. All that is in her that she has associated with the masculine mode of life is repressed within the animus.

The interesting thing is that-biologically and psychologically-we have both sexes in us; yet in all human societies, one is allowed to accent only one. The other is internalized within us. Furthermore, our imagery and notions of the other are functions of our biography. This biography in- cludes two aspects. One is general to the human species: nearly everybody has a mother and a father. The other aspect is peculiar to yourself: that your mother should have been as she was and your father as he was. There is a specification of the male and female roles as experienced, and this has com- mitted, has determined, the quality of our experience of these great, great bases which everyone experiences. Everyone experiences Mother; everyone experiences Father.

In both cases, the buried ideal tends to be projected outward. We usually call this reaction falling in love: projecting your own ideal for the op- opposite sex onto some person who, by some kind of magnetism, causes your anima/animus to emerge. Now, you can go to a dance and there’s some perfectly decent, nice-looking girl who’s sitting all alone. Then there’s some other little bumblebee with everybody all around her. What’s she got? Well, it’s something about the way her eyes are set that just evokes anima projections from all the males in the neighborhood. There are ways to present yourself that way; yet we don’t always know what they are or how to achieve them. I’ve seen people who are perfectly good anima ob- jects so make themselves up that they repel the anima projection.

Two people meet and fall in love. Then they marry, and the real Sam or Suzy begins to show through the fantasy, and, boy, is it a shock. So a lot of little boys and girls just withdraw their anima or animus. They get a divorce and wait for another receptive person, pitch the woo again, and, uh-oh, another shock. And so on and so forth.

Now the one undeniable fact: this disillusion is inevitable. You had an ideal. You married that ideal, then along comes a fact that doesn’t corre- spond to that ideal. You suddenly notice things that don’t quite fit with your projection. So what are you going to do when that happens? There’s only one attitude that will solve the situation: compassion. This poor, poor fact that I married does not correspond to my ideal; it’s only a human being. Well, I’m a human being, too. So I’ll meet a human being for a change; I’ll live with it and be nice to it, showing compassion for the fallibilities that I myself have certainly brought to life as a human being.

Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love and I mean love, not lust-is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person, compared to the ideal of your animus or anima, peeks through, say. This is a challenge to my compassion. Then make a try, and something might begin to get going here. You might begin to be quit of your fix on your anima. It’s just as bad to be fixed on your anima and miss as to be fixed on your persona: you’ve got to get free of that. And the lesson of life is to release you from it. This is what Jung calls individuation, to see people and yourself in terms of what you indeed are, not in terms of all these archetypes that you are projecting around and that have been projected on you.

The function of the mythology, we recall, is also to spiritualize the place as well as the conditions in which you live. The function of the artist is to do that for you. But the artists that are responsible for the poetry of the Bible, which is glorious poetry, are not now here. Their work has been concretized. And we have this perduring and difficult notion, this corruption of metaphor, that the Holy Land, the Promised Land, lies somewhere else.

The Promised Land is any environment that has been metaphorically spiritualized. An elegant example of this universal experience is found in the mythology of the Navaho. Living in a desert, the Navaho have given every detail of that desert a mythological function and value so that wherever persons are in that environment, they are in meditation on the transcendent energy and glory that is the support of the world. The Promised Land is not a place to be conquered by armies and solidified by displacing other people. The Promised Land is a corner in the heart, or it is any environment that has been mythologically spiritualized.

Such phrases are metaphors to help you link yourself to this vast enterprise of being alive. Man can be thought of as an animal without a fixed character. Nietzsche calls Man “the sick animal,” “Das kranke Tiere.” He does not know what his job is. But men and women have such virtuosity that they can be ninety-eight different things. Each of us has a track to find and follow.

So whatever your life commitment is as of now, it involves certain dae- monic relationships-that is, the one you forge with the deity residing in you. One of the big problems in the Christian tradition arises from the in- terpretation of supernatural grace, which says, in effect, that salvation does not come from you, but from outside yourself through some kind of ritual experience. But the function of the sacrament of Baptism, for example, is not to pour anything into you but to pull something out of you. The sacra- ments are an evocation, not an indoctrination.

Carl Jung has suggested, as a means for fathoming one’s own creative depths, a technique that he calls “active imagination.” One way to activate the imagination is to propose to it a mythic image for contemplation and free development. Mythic images-from the Christian tradition, or from any other, for that matter, since they are all actually related-speak to very deep centers of the psyche. They came forth from the psyche originally and speak back to it. If you take in some traditional image proposed to you by your own religious tradition, your own society’s religious lore, proposing it to yourself for active meditation, without any strict game rules defining the sort of thoughts you must bear in mind in relation to it (such as those pro- posed by Ignatius Loyola concerning meditation on aspects of the Passion), letting your own psyche enjoy and develop it, you may find yourself run- ning into imageries, experiences, and amplifications that do not fit exactly into the patterns of the tradition in which you have been trained.

What are you going to do about that?Are you going to let yourself go, following your own activation imagination?Or are you going to cut the run short at some critical point?

The latter God is one who creates. One thinks of that God as a fact That The say, is the Creator. We conceptualize that God as an IT. On the OTher hand, in the impersonal dynamism of the cycles of time the gods are simply the agents of the cycle. The Hindu gods are not, therefore, creators in the way that Yahweh is a creator. This Yahweh creator is, one might say, a metaphysical fact. When he makes up his mind to do something, it is promptly accomplished. This one of the mythologies of God in the Bible was brought in by the nomads who, as herding people, had inherited the mythology of the hunting process in which God is considered out there. The planting people have a mythology of God in here as the dynamism
that informs all of life.

To give a sense of the real meaning of this agricultural mythology, one must examine the actual number of years it takes for the spring equinox to pass through all of the signs of the zodiac. Called “the procession of the equinoxes,” it takes 25,920 years to complete a cycle of the zodiac. Divide 25,920 by 60, and you get 432. This number, as we shall see, provides the link between the agricultural mythology and the actual cycles of time.

Some years ago a friend of mine gave me a book, Cooper’s Aerobics, that told how many laps a man would have to swim every day in order to stay healthy. A footnote read: “A man in perfect physical shape, at rest, has a heartbeat of about one beat per second.” At sixty seconds to a minute, and sixty minutes to an hour, in one day of twenty-four hours the heart beats 86,400 times. Divided by two, it is 43,200. The heartbeat matches the beat of the universe; they are the same. That coincidence of rhythm was the point of the old cosmic mythologies. The latter envisioned this microcosm, or little cosmos, and the macrocosm, or the big cosmos, as resonating to the same beat. When a person tells the doctor “I’ve got a fever,” the doctor takes his pulse to see if it registers in harmony with the 43,200 beats that is, to find out if the patient is in tune with nature.

These numbers, anchored in the Sumerian discovery that the order of the universe can be discovered mathematically, are found almost every- where. In the Hindu sacred epics, the number of years calculated to the present cycle of time, the Kali Yuga as it is known, is 432,000, the number of the “great cycle” (mahayuga) being 4,320,000. In the Icelandic Eddas, one reads of the 540 doors in Othin’s ( wotan’s) hall, through which, at the end of the current cycle of time, 800 divine warriors would pass to battle the antigods in that “Day of the Wolf” to mutual annihilation. Multiplying 540 by 800 equals 432,000.

An early Babylonian account, translated into Greek by a Babylonian priest named Berossos in 280 B.C., tells us that 432,000 years passed between the time of the rise of the city Kish and the coming of the mythological flood (the biblical story derives from this earlier source). In a famous paper on “Dates in Genesis,” the Jewish Assyriologist Julius Oppert, in 1877, showed that in the 1,656 years from the creation to the Flood, 86,400 weeks had passed. Divided by two, that again produces 43,200.

That is a hint, buried in Genesis, that two notions of God are to be found in its pages. The first was the willful, personal creator who grieved at the wickedness of his creatures and vowed to wipe them out. The other God, in complete contrast, is found hidden in that disguised number, 86,400, a veiled reference to the Gentile, Sumero-Babylonian, mathematical cosmology of cycles, ever recurring, of impersonal time. During this cycle, kingdoms and peoples arise and recede in seasons of the multiple of 43,200. We recall that the Jewish people were exiles in Babylon for half a century and could, indeed, have absorbed these notions that, exquisitely hidden, provide a subtext of recurring cycles of time in their scriptures.

The imagery of rebirth is of two main orders. The moon which dies and is resurrected is the chief symbol of this miracle of rebirth in time. The moon sheds its shadow as the serpent sheds its skin. The serpent also plays a role as the symbol of this same principle of the life that is reborn from its own death. In traditional mythologies, the sacrificial bull, too, is associated with this symbolism of death and rebirth. The horns of the moon are ren- dered in the horns of the bull. The sacrifice of the bull is symbolic of the sacrifice of that mortal part in us which leads to the release of the eternal.

The sun is our second symbol of rebirth, evoking that idea of not com- ing back at all, of not being reborn here but of passing beyond the spheres of rebirth altogether to a transcendent light. The typical image for this is the sun. The moon carries darkness within it but wherever the sun goes there is no darkness. There are only the shadows of those forces that do not open themselves to its light. The image of the sun-door speaks of yet an- other kind of rebirth, that of the return of the lost one that is, the one who is lost in the spheres of shadows and time, who returns to that eternal root which is his own great root.

As the bull is symbolic of the moon, so the lion, with his great radiant solar face, is the symbolic animal of the sun. As the rising sun quenches the moon and the stars, so the lion’s roar scatters the grazing animals, just as the lion’s pouncing on the bull symbolizes the sun’s extinguishing the moon. If we recall the serpent, we recognize the eagle, the solar bird, as its counterpoint. So we have these parallels: eagle against serpent, lion against bull, sun against moon.