The Hero’s Journey is a pattern in myths and stories, where the hero undergoes psychological struggles and trials. It starts with a call to adventure, resistance, and crossing the threshold. The hero faces challenges, meets a guide, and confronts their inner self, feminine side, and father figure. The hero returns with wisdom, transcendence, or deification. The pattern applies more to male heroes, but feminists argue for a journey that recognizes women’s ability to create and give birth.
The hero’s journey is a group of events in a story or myth, used by Joseph Campbell, who was influenced by Jung, to describe the similar elements in all mythic structures. In any story that represents a Hero’s Journey, the hero must experience passages that represent the struggle for psychological integrity, or as Jung called it, individuation.
The hero’s journey begins with an inner desire to undertake a mission or with an outer calling for the hero’s help. Heroes can, at first, reject the call or can answer the call right away. There is usually some resistance to the call as it means leaving a comfortable existence to walk into unknown physical and psychological danger.
In some cases, a guide or supernatural aid will direct the first part of the hero’s journey. This is the case with various biblical passages in which God, for example, orders Noah to build an ark, or in which angels reveal the path for Christ to follow. The next step is the crossing of the threshold, the moment when the hero has to leave the known world and venture into unknown places.
In the hero’s journey, a guardian of the threshold can be encountered, who tries to discourage the hero from crossing. In Greek myths, traveling to the underworld means overcoming Cerberus, the three-headed dog, and physically crossing the River Styx. Crossing the threshold is symbolically interpreted as entering the unconscious psyche.
Once in the unconscious, the hero often has moments of doubt and despair, called “The Belly of the Whale”. Dante’s narrator laments his awakening in the woods and his first entry into Hell. This desperation is short-lived and is followed by various trials that will test the hero and reveal his true nature.
After the trials, the hero has to negotiate with his feminine side or soul. He tends to encounter a goddess and/or a temptress, although this is not present in all myths and religions. The goddess tends to represent sacred marriage (union between male and female), while the temptress tries to dissuade the hero from continuing his journey. In Grail legends, women offer sexual gratification to tempt knights. When an offer is accepted, the mission is a failed hero’s journey. Knights like Galahad or Percival refused such offers and revealed that such women were demons.
The last conflict before returning to the normal world is the confrontation with the father figure. In some cases this means killing the father, while in others it means somehow overcoming the father’s power over oneself. In Return of the Jedi, for example, Luke offers his father Darth Vader a chance to redeem himself, instead of reaching for his lightsaber to kill him. Luke saves Vader from his own evil nature, and though Vader dies, Luke has now faced what has shown ultimate control over him.
This step can lead to deification or a period of rest and relaxation before returning as an individualized self to the normal world. The return can be fraught with difficulties, in which the hero must prove himself or save. On the contrary, it may turn out to be peaceful.
The result of returning to the hero’s journey can be to live with wisdom for the rest of one’s life, or to become truly transcendental like the Buddha or Christ. This achievement in Hero’s Journey means that true individuation has been achieved. Living and dying are not feared. Variants include deification, ascension into heaven, or dramatic changes in a hero’s life direction.
The Hero’s Journey applies very well to male heroes. It seems more artificial to apply it to heroines, even though some aspects of the journey might be similar. Women, however, have the power to create, and many feminists argue that a hero’s journey that doesn’t mark women’s ability to conceive and give birth is vastly out of place. However, the similarities between different cultural conceptions of the hero’s journey for males are striking and worth examining.
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