The Voyage of the Hero

 Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces is, like Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, one of the most intriguing books I have ever encountered.  This is because, among its major themes are two overarching questions.  First, are all mythic traditions, including all the world's religions, basically the same, with details differing due to geography and climate, because human nature is everywhere basically the same?  The monomyth and Jungian psychology seem to answer with a resounding yes.  Second, is the hero's journey one restricted only to a few extraordinary souls widely separated in time and place, or is it a process which every human being must undergo whether he will or no?

This brings us to a consideration of who and what goes toward making up a hero.  Obviously, Theseus and Heracles are very different from Ronald Reagan and Joe Dimaggio.  Is a supernatural or fanciful element required for a hero to achieve mythic stature?  If so, then St. George and Siegfried and Joan of Arc are heroes in a way in which George Washington and Winston Churchill and Otto von Bismarck are not.  Is heroism a function of courage (Achilles) or wisdom (Solomon) or faith (St. Francis of Assisi) or is it a combination of other qualities entirely?  Is the hero chosen by the gods, or does he choose himself?

It seems to me that the call to adventure is something which virtually everyone on earth experiences, usually in youth, and which virtually everyone on earth likewise ignores or rejects deliberately.  The hero, I think, must break out of the shackles of whatever narrowly circumscribed society in which he finds himself because he finds it irremediably inconsistent with the element of the divine within himself.  The drudgery of adhering to societal mores and sequences--"Birth!  School!  Work!  Death!"--is not his way, and he recognizes this early on and fights with every fiber of his being to seek another path.  This voyage of discovery takes him to strange and unfamiliar terrain which, like Marco Polo, will cause those who stayed behind to accuse him of falsehood and error; only the hero will realize that the journey was essential because of what he brings back with him.

So how does the survivor of the epic journey communicate with those for whom no epic journey is possible, who are so entirely blinded by the triviality of daily routine and money-grubbing and materialism and sex that other modes of organizing awareness can only seem like an episode of dementia?

Mathematics will not work, and this is why science has largely failed modern man.  The experience beyond all experience is irreducible to number, contrary to the hopes of the Pythagoreans.  But poetry, and even the poetry of music, may fare no better;  Keats, a profound hero in my eyes, was rejected by his contemporaries and remains rejected still.  The poetry of Jesus, second-rate as it no doubt was, has been so utterly twisted by twenty centuries of vested interests that it is hollowed of all value:  witness the fact that the teachings of Jesus, entirely anti-materialistic in their tendency, are diametrically opposed by the national culture of the United States, which, by staggering paradox, claims to be the most Christian of modern nations while at the same time is unquestionably the most money-oriented and least spiritual nation in the history of Western Civilization.  (Matt. 19:21 is the pertinent citation here)

Campbell is less effective when he mimics Fraser in his marshalling of evidence, and one wonders which of the two great arguments which he apppears to be making occupies the central place in his intellectual affections.  I suspect that in 1949 when this book first appeared he was more the scholar and therefore inclined to emphasize the first truth which, while hardly original, would still come as news to most humans living today.  The second, more profoundly Jungian reading of the mythic material, was one he probably came to embrace more and more as he aged and his wisdom, like Chateau Ausone 1846, mellowed.

339 days, 47 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.