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.