* * * * *
The Hero's Arc
[Notes taken from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces. The text
is quoted directly from his book. Typographical errors are most likely mine.]
* Departure
* * the call to adventure
* * A blunder—apparently the merest chance—reveals an unsuspected world, and
the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not
rightly understood.
* * refusal of the call
* * Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular
tales, we encounter the dull case fo the call unanswered; for it is
always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the
summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard
work, or “culture,” the subject loses the power of significant
affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved.
* * supernatural aid
* * For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-
journey is with a protective fiture (often a little old crone or old man)
who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is
about to pass.
* * What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny.
The fantasy is a reassurance—a promise that the peace of Paradise, which
was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost …
* * Not infrequenty, the supernatural helper is masculine in form. In fairy
lore it may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit,
shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that
the hero will require.
* * the crossing of the first threshold
* * With the personification of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero
goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the “threshold guardian”
at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the
world in the four directions—also up and down—standing for the limits of
the hero's present sphere, or life horizon.
* * the belly of the whale
* * The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a
sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly
of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or consiliating the power
of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have
died.
* Initiation
* * The road of trials
* * Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape
of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survice a succession
of trials. … The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and
secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance
into the region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time
that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman
passage.
* * And so it happens that if anyone—in whatever society—undertakes for
himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either
intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own
spiritual labyrinth, he soon fineds himself in a landscape of symbolical
figures (any one of which may swallow him) … In the vocabulary of the
mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the “purification
of the self,” which the senses are “cleansed and humbled,” and the
energies and interests “concentrated upon transcendental things”; or in a
vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving,
transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past.
* * The ordeal is the deepening of the problem of the first threshold and the
question is still in balance: Can the ego put itself to death?
* * the meeting with the goddess
* * The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and orgres have been
overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the
triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the
crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth,
at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or
within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart.
* * Only geniuses capable of the highest realization can support the full
revelation of the sublimity of this goddess. For lesser men she reduces
her effulgence and permits herself to appear in forms concordant with
their undeveloped powers. Fully to behold her would be a terrible
accident for any person not spiritually prepared.
* * woman as the temptress
* * The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the
hero's total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower
and master. … With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in
the father's place.
* * … Where this Oedipus-Hamlet revulsion remains to beset the soul, there
the world, the body, the woman above all, become the symbols no longer of
victory but of defeat.
* * atonement with the father
* * For the ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim's own ego—
derived from the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind, but
projected before; and the fixating idolatry of that pedagogical nothing
is itself the fault that keeps one steeped in a sense of sin, sealing the
potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of
the father, and therewith of the world. Atonement (at-one-ment) consists
in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster—the
dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin
(repressed id). But this requres an abandonment of the attachment of ego
itself, and that is what is difficult.
* * 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.
* * apotheosis
* * And so it must be known that, though this ignorant, limited, self-
defineding, suffering body may reguard itself as threatened by some other
the enemy—that one too is the God. The ogre breaks us, but the hero, the
fit candidate, undergoes the initiation “like a man”; and behold, it was
the father: we in Him and He in us. The dear, protecting mother of our
body could not defind us from the Great Father Serpent; the mortal,
tangible body that she gave us was delivered into his frightening power.
But death was not the end. New life, new birth, new knowledge of
existence was given us. That father was himself the womb, the mother, of
a second birth.
* * This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is the mystery
of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the mother, chewed into
fragments and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for
whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast;
but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were.
* * the ultimate boon
* * The boon bestowed on the worshiper is always scaled to his stature and to
the nature of his dominant desire: the boon is simply a symbol of the
life energy stepped down to the requirements of a certain specific case.
The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, whereas the hero who has won
the favor of the god may beg for the boon of perfect illunination, what
he generally seeks are longer years to live, weapons with which to slay
his neighbor, or the health of his child.
* Return
* * refusal of the return
* * When the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the
source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal,
personification, the adventurer still must return with this life-
transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires
that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom,
the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of
humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community,
the nation, the planet, or the then thousand worlds.
* * But the responsiblity has been frequently refused. Even the Buddha, after
his triumph, doubted whether the message of realization could be
communicated, and saints are reported to have passed away while in the
supernal ecstasy. Numerous indeed are the heros fabled to have taken up
residence forever in the blessed isle of the unaging Goddess of Immortal
Being.
* * the magic flight
* * If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or god and is
then explicitly commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for
the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported
by all the powers of his supernatural patron. On the other hand, if the
trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if
the hero's wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or
demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively,
often comical, pursuit. This flight may be complicated by marvels of
magical obstruction and evasion.
* * A popular variety of the magic flight is that in which objects are left
behind to speak for the fugitive and thus delay persuit. …
* * Another well-known variety of the magic flight is one in which a number
of delaying obstacles are tossed behind by the wildly fleeing hero. …
* * resucue from without
* * The hero may have to be brought back from his supernatual adventure by
assistance from without. That is to say, the world may have to come and
get him. For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in
favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state. “Who having cast off
the world," we read, "would desire to return again? He would be only
there.” And yet, in so far as one is alive, life will call. Society is
jealous of those who remain away from it, and will come knocking at the
door.
* * the crossing of the return threshold
* * The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as
distinct from each other—different as life and death, as day and night.
The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there is
accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or
in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that
yonder zone. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of
myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods
is a forgotten dimention of the world we know. And the exploration of
that dimention, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of
the deed of the hero. …
* * … The boon brought from the transcendent deep becomes quickly
rationalized into nonentity, and the need becomes great for another hero
to refresh the world.
* * Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative
threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real,
after an experience of the sould-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the
passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why
re-enter such a world? … The easy thing is to commit the whole community
to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock-dwelling, close the
door, and make it fast.
* * master of the two worlds
* * Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the
perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and
back—not contaminating the principles fo the one with those of the other,
yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other—is the
talent of the master. …
* * The meaning is very clear; it is the meaning of all religious practice.
The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up
completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies,
hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is
prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe,
at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally
dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever
may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The
Law lives in him with his unreserved consent.
* * freedom to live
* * The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become,
because he is.
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