Tag: Atonement with the Father

The Hero with a Thousand Faces – The Critique: Occam, might I borrow your razor for a moment?

The point of this blog is not to attack or criticize the work of other authors, and I want to (despite my naturally cynical disposition) maintain a mostly positive tone. However, there were some parts of The Hero with a Thousand Faces that were so absurd, so irritating and offensive to rationality that I can’t overlook them.

The core of Campbell’s argument goes something like this: there are elements of the human psyche that run so deep humans unconsciously express them through symbolism in our mythology. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces he applies his two favorite modes of thought – Freudian psychoanalysis and transcendental buddhism – to uncovering these primordial archetypes.

But Campbell’s original sin is this – before beginning his investigation, he had already decided what he was trying to discover. Even a casual reading of The Hero with a Thousand Faces makes it clear he did not approach his source material as an investigator. He already knew that the Freudian and transcendental buddhist interpretations were correct and was willing to shamelessly twist or omit evidence to make the mythology conform to that viewpoint.

If you decide to pick up the book I recommend reading it with this in mind: Campbell is not an impartial academic. He’s a lawyer making the best case for his client.

But even lawyers tell the truth sometimes, and there are element’s of Campbell’s case where he does seem to give the best explanation for the evidence. I have been grudgingly forced to admit that there are parts of a story which operate outside of plain view. But we cannot accept this too naively or we’ll leave ourselves open to any bizarre or outright manipulative interpretation that Campbell or others care to suggest.

So how do we cut Campbell’s genuine scholarship free from his ideology? After wrestling with the question for a few months I think I’ve found the right tool: the trusty razor of William of Occam.

 

Freud:

Campbell believed that Freud, Jung, and the other psychoanalysts had basically nailed human nature. To some extent he can be forgiven for this. As I’ve mentioned before, Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, and was using the best information he had available at the time.

But the reason forgiveness can only be partial is this: when confronted with evidence that did not fit into a Freudian explanation, Campbell either ignored or downplayed the contradicting facts. One could fill a small book with examples, but two in particular stand out. First, his section on the Atonement with the Father, and second, his descriptions of The Ultimate Boon.

The Atonement with the Father is one of the longest sections in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Campbell crams in every example he can think of where the villain or antagonist is a father figure. One can detect a tinge of desperation as Campbell tries to find links between everything from Greek myths and the vengeful aspect of the Judeo-Christian God to the circumcision rites of aboriginal tribes. After several rereadings, I can’t help but conclude Campbell was trying to make up for his lack of good examples by simply giving more of them.

After attempting to demonstrate that the villains in mythology are really Freudian tyrannical fathers in disguise, Campbell then claims that the moral of all these stories is coming of age. By defeating the malevolent father figure the hero undergoes a spiritual transformation where “-the male phallus, instead of the female breast, is made the central point (axis mundi) of the imagination,” (Campbell 138). Campbell goes on to say:

“The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open is soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe for understanding how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated by the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands – and the two are atoned.” (Campbell 147)

These assertions do not hold up to scrutiny. To start with, Campbell had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find his examples and in doing so cites myths that do not follow the earlier steps of the hero’s journey. He cannot have this both ways. If he wants to claim that the climactic conflict of a hero’s journey is a clash with a father figure, his examples must be taken from stories that fit the model he is proposing. Every example he cites save one fails this test, which leads me to propose that a simpler explanation is likely the correct one: a conflict with a father figure is a compelling and enduring archetype, but there are far more villains a hero can defeat than this one alone

Campbell also carefully ignores stories that clearly are hero’s journeys, but where the final conflict does not involve a father figure. Theseus’s defeat of the Minotaur is often cited as a classic example of Campbell’s monomyth, but his battle with the monster has none of the Freudian symbolism Campbell was so desperate to find. Since he was advocating for a particular worldview, Campbell shrewdly leaves this story out of his analysis.

As for the spiritual transformation Campbell sought to insert, he made a critical error in conflating the stories of a Hero’s Journey and Coming of Age. While there can be significant overlap, the difference between these two archetypes is narrow but deep. It’s entirely possible for mature adults to set out on a hero’s journey, such as Indiana Jones and Odysseus, both of whom had grand adventures without facing any of the angst of a young person trying to discover themselves and their role in society. One of the best ways for a young person to come of age is by undertaking a hero’s journey, but it is not the only method, and once we distinguish between these two types of narratives the spiritual growth Campbell claims is central to a hero’s journey falls apart.

Moving on to the Ultimate Boon, Campbell claims that the prevalence of food and drink as divine reward – a la the peaches of immortality and the never-ending feasts that feature in so many afterlives – symbolizes humanity’s deep-seated and infantile desire to return to the comfort of our mother’s breast. He says:

“The supreme boon desired for the Indestructible Body is uninterrupted residence in the Paradise of the milk that Never Fails . . . Soul and body food, heart’s ease, is the gift of the ‘All Heal,’ the nipple inexhaustible.” (Campbell 176)

Our borrowed razor makes short work of this. Which do you think is more likely, dear reader? That the commonality of food and drink as vessels of divine favor symbolizes our subconscious craving for breastfeeding? Or simply that food is vital to human survival and quality of life, and would have been the subject of great fantasies in ancient times when it was scarce? It is perhaps revealing that the trope of divine feasts doesn’t seem to have continued in modern stories unless the author is deliberately referencing older myths. If you crave a return to your mother’s breast then, well, I guess that’s between you and her, but in this case I’ll stick with the simpler explanation.

To be fair to Campbell, he admits that the above ‘divine food’ imagery cannot be interpreted as purely psychological. However, that doesn’t stop him from trying to cite Freud to add some substance to his theory, only to back out when he realizes how weak his proposed connection is. I found this to be an excellent demonstration of Campbell’s thought process; he does his best to apply his preferred theories to his source material, and if they don’t seem to take he walks back just enough to avoid rank absurdity but never stops to wonder if he may need to reevaluate his approach. Well if he won’t, I’ll do it for him: the majority of the Freudian connections he wants to draw are ridiculous and we’ll understand both the mythology and hero’s journey better if we start by assuming they’re incorrect until proven otherwise.

 

Religion:

The following quote is perhaps my favorite in all of The Hero with a Thousand Faces because it so clearly illustrates the author’s mindset as he wrote the book. Watch with amazement as Campbell begins by stating a fairly reasonable literary interpretation, shifts to some dodgy philosophy, and finally pivots to a declaration that anyone save the most fervent religious believer would blush to repeat in public.

“The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that, like Hamlet or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in one’s inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of both man and the cosmos. The goal of myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time with the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.” (Campbell 238)

While listening to this passage in the audiobook, I suddenly heard myself mutter aloud, “Oh, you’re going to explain the nature of time to me, motherfucker?”

Perhaps this reveals a bit more about myself than Campbell, but by that point I was fed up with Campbell’s love affair with transcendental Buddhism. It’s influence on his work was omnipresent and corrosive, causing Campbell to not just say, but write down and publish the most impressively stupid things.

Campbell believed that there was a universal consciousness – or ‘source,’ as he sometimes referred to it – that all our individual minds spring from. Mythology is an attempt to pierce the veil of the everyday and reach this transcendent ideal. There’s no room for cultural nuance here – according to Campbell all of mythology is a part of this noble endeavor, whether its creators were aware of it or not.

Even if we leave aside the metaphysical proof Campbell would need for these claims – which, you should know, he does not even attempt to provide – his central assertion is easily cut down by our dear friend Occam. I invite you to choose the simpler explanation: that the rich mythology of the Vikings, Greeks, Native Americans, and countless other peoples were all unconscious attempts to reach the ego-destroying bliss of nirvana, or that the author we’re examining imposed his own beliefs on the stories he examined.

I’ll happily grant that trying to understand transcendence can be a motivation for some myths, but it is not the only motivation. The nature of time, the roles of men and women, and what it means to be a conscious being are similarly hard problems that myth can attempt to address.  But by claiming that all myths are unconsciously seeking Buddhist spirituality, Campbell makes a fool of himself and attempts to make a fool of us.

Finally, there’s one last bit of religious nonsense from Campbell that needs a direct response:

“Briefly formulated, the universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world – all things and beings – are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as wakonda, the Hindus as shakti, and the Christians as the power of God.” (Campbell 257)

This is not the first time or the last that, like a poorly educated new-ager or a cleric flailing in the face of incisive questioning, Campbell attempts to meld science and religion.  It’s a trick, one that counts on the audience being too credulous or stupid to notice that a thief has nicked a respectable man’s clothes. There is an unsubtle difference between spiritualism and science, and that is the ability to make testable predictions. Campbell would prefer that you forget this distinction in favor of superficial similarities, and I can only hope he felt a pang of conscience each time he tried to support his theories by drawing a patently false equivalence.

—

This is a truncated version of my objections to Campbell, but it’s representative of the overall book. I’d say to think of it as, ‘including, but not limited to.’

Now that it’s finished, we’ll move on to my final post on Joseph Campbell, where I’ll take the best parts of his work and use them to start constructing my own model for the Hero’s Journey.

Thank you for reading.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces – The Initiation: To a man with a hammer . . .

As I alluded to in my first post on The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for the book to have any value for us as storytellers we need to separate Joseph Campbell’s study of mythology from his personal beliefs about psychology, religious experience, and spirituality. Unfortunately, Campbell is determined to make this as difficult as possible and weaves the two lines of thought together as though sheer proximity would prove the connection his arguments fail to establish.

I’ve been tempted to just ignore the bizarreness of Campbell’s beliefs. This blog is about learning to write, and I don’t want it to become a polemic against a man who’s been dead for thirty years. It would also be unfair to overlook that the book was published in 1949 and Campbell was very much a product of his times. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s unwise to give Campbell a free pass, because some of his interpretations of myth and symbolism are so utterly absurd that I genuinely believe they’ll damage the storytelling of anyone who takes them too seriously.

So for the sake of clarity going forward, my next several posts will – as much as possible – focus on just the useful elements of Campbell’s work: i.e. his research into the common elements found in myths and legends around the world. Then I’ll address all the problems with the book with a single post, and finally end with a summary or TL;DR post that can serve as a reference for our future projects.

With that out of the way, the next step of the hero’s journey is the Initiation. Let’s get to it.

—

After successfully completing the Departure, the character begins the Initiation that forges them into the hero they’re destined to be. Campbell divides it into six sections, some of which can be left out or swapped around depending on the nature of the story. They are:

  1. The road of trials
  2. The meeting with the goddess
  3. Woman as temptress
  4. Atonement with the father
  5. Apotheosis
  6. The ultimate boon

First up is:

 

1) The Road of Trials

The hero has adventures, meets friends and enemies, develops their skills, and matures into the hero’s role.

 

Once they’ve left the ordinary world, the hero has a series of adventures where they meet friends who support them, battle enemies that resist them, and develop the skills they will need to complete their journey. This is Harry, Ron and Hermione becoming friends through defeating a troll, Neo learning kung-fu, and the heroes in A New Hope nearly getting crushed in a garbage compactor. The road of trials is the heart of a hero’s journey and begins to define the person that the hero will grow into, so it’s often the longest part of a hero’s journey story.

When you take all this together, it makes Campbell’s lackadaisical chapter on the event all the more disappointing.

Campbell only gives the Road of Trials 12 pages in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and more than half of the anemic chapter is focused on shamanistic rites or Freudian dream analysis. I’d hoped for some investigation into the types of challenge a hero may face, or perhaps how the trials of great heroes shaped them into the legendary figures we all know, but sadly these are near-absent from Campbell’s work. At the risk of being presumptuous I’ll go so far as to say that there’s nothing of real value for an author in this chapter. Campbell is correct that the Road of Trials is an important part of a hero’s journey, but leaves it criminally shortchanged in his analysis.

So if Campbell won’t do it for us, we’ll do it ourselves. As I’m analyzing hero’s journey stories I’ve started taking notes on the types of trials the hero experiences and considering how those trials define them. An example of what I’m looking for is the trial of facing a Rival, where the hero must overcome an opponent who is not quite evil or dangerous enough to be a true villain, but nevertheless hinders, embarrasses, and otherwise obstructs the main character. My goal is to gather a collection of potent challenges so I’ll have ready inspiration while developing a path of trials for my own character to face.

 

2) The Meeting with the Goddess

The hero meets the ultimate good in their universe and attempts to receive their blessing.

 

At the end of their Path of Trials, the hero faces a penultimate challenge for the blessing they need to ultimately succeed in their quest. The Meeting with the Goddess marks the end of the Road of Trials, and every joy or triumph that preceded it pales in comparison. The blessing the hero receives can vary in form, but usually manifests as some sort of protection or critical insight during the Atonement with the Father.

As best I can tell, the Meeting with the Goddess should always take the form of a worthiness test. Even if the hero has become strong, smart, tricky, charming, and an all around badass during their Road of Trials, the goddess’s favor can only be attained by proving their virtue. This doesn’t have to be an active test (the goddess may be able to determine the hero’s virtue simply by looking at them) but it’s always a measure of the hero’s moral fortitude.

Campbell says that the goddess often exhibits a dual nature – one terrible, the other benevolent – and the hero must learn to understand both. A hero who faces the totality of a goddess when they are not spiritually prepared is in for a rough time. This makes a bit more sense with an example; the goddess in Star Wars is Princess Leia, and she has quite different reactions to meeting Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. The virtuous Luke earns her good graces in fairly short order, while Han Solo is mocked, derided, and otherwise made miserable until he eventually commits to a higher calling in the rebellion.

Related to this, the goddess may appear different ways to different people. Those who view her with lust, fear, or hesitation cannot progress on their hero’s journey. If the hero is not ready to face her in her totality she may choose to only reveal part of herself, and enlighten the hero bit by bit as they become mature enough to handle steadily greater truths.

All of Campbell’s examples are centered around female characters, but it’s entirely possible (if a bit less common) for the character in the goddess role to be male. In fact, after reading the chapter I’m not even sure the ‘goddess’ needs to be a character at all. I suspect that a power, place or thing could serve the same purpose so long as it tests the Hero’s worthiness and grants a boon.

By way of example, in the Marvel universe Mjolnir may be Thor’s goddess. It has all the key traits – he must prove that he is worthy to wield it, and once he does it grants him the power to overcome his greatest trials. I haven’t yet made up my mind on if this is a correct or viable interpretation, but it’s an interesting possibility that Campbell unfortunately does not address.

3) Woman as Temptress

The hero is tempted to stray from the hero’s path by worldly pleasure.

 

I have no idea why this event gets its own section. It’s a fairly simple concept: the hero is tempted to abandon their quest in favor of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. While this is a perfectly acceptable challenge for a hero to have to overcome, it seems to me like the Woman as Temptress is just another obstacle a hero may encounter on the Path of Trials. The majority of heroes I know of go through their entire adventure without facing it. If it makes sense for your story then by all means include it, but I don’t think anyone should feel like it’s a requirement.

A quick aside on Campbell’s titles for the last two sections: Campbell is certainly not the most sexist writer I’ve ever read, but The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written in 1949 and it shows. I don’t know enough about Campbell to comment on if it’s a reflection of his source material or him as a person, but it does lead to such uncomfortable quotes as (from the Meeting with the Goddess chapter):

“And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed- whether she will or no. And if she shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes,; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace.” (Campbell 119)

I’m choosing to ignore the discomfort and salvage everything I can from the book, but your mileage may vary.

 

4) Atonement with the father

The hero has a showdown with the ultimate power in their universe.

 

This is it, the greatest and most dangerous part of a hero’s journey. The hero has a showdown with the most powerful being in their universe, and either defeats it (in the case of an evil, tyrannical father), or earns its favor (in the case of a benign and just father). As the name suggests, Campbell lets Freud take center stage here, and Freud’s idea that children fight with their father for the affection of their mother guides Campbell’s interpretation of all his source material.

The climax of a story is especially important for us writers because it’s what most readers will remember as the best part of our book. In modern stories the battle with an evil force has become far more common than earning the favor of a benevolent one, so audiences can look forward to the hero ousting an evil dictator, slaying a terrible dragon, and generally overcoming incredible odds to save the world. Because of its importance I thought that Campbell would surely draw on great works of mythology to discuss the many forms such a showdown might take and how a hero can overcome them.

But no. Instead, he’d rather talk about the symbolism behind circumcision and cannibalism.

I’m serious. It’s that or Freud for almost the entire section, and even Freud comes across as bland when contrasted with Campbell’s descriptions of genital mutilation and cannibalistic rites that some tribal peoples used when initiating young men from children into adulthood. It starts out disconcerting, but becomes downright irritating when he shackles these acts to the strongest point he makes in this section, which is that the Atonement with the Father can have strong parallels to the transition from child to adult. I think that’s a valuable insight and can help writers with envisioning the emotional challenges our heroes should face at this stage, but he’s chained the idea to two raving mad men shouting things like:

“The culminating instruction of the long series of rites is the release of the boy’s own hero-penis from the protection of its foreskin, through the frightening and painful attack on it by the circumciser.” (Campbell, 138)

As it stands, everything of value that I got out of this chapter can be summed up in the following sentence: the Atonement with the Father is the event that, by finally overcoming it, toughens the hero enough that they can stand on their own as an individual, ready to become a parent, teacher or leader in their own right.

If we want to find anything more useful than that, we’re going to have to look somewhere else.

 

5) Apotheosis

The hero ascends to the highest possible version of themselves.

 

The Apotheosis is the last step of the hero’s personal journey – the final transformation where they reach the pinnacle of their power, wisdom, and purity. The hero may still have work to do out in the world, but the Apotheosis is the end of their internal struggle. It’s Neo realizing he is The One, and Luke becoming a Jedi, like his father before him.  This change must occur before the hero can achieve the Ultimate Boon – i.e. Neo must accept that he is The One before he can free humanity from the Matrix.

Campbell makes a couple good points here. The Apotheosis often, though not always, involves the hero regaining something from the past. He earns bonus points if that something was thought lost forever. Luke becoming the last Jedi is probably the best popular example, but Harry Potter also reclaims a magical heritage, and Neo becomes the latest in a long line of ‘The Ones.’ The enlightenment found in the Apotheosis event is more often reclaimed than discovered for the first time.

The hero may also become a bit otherworldly, as they have ascended so far past everyday experience that it’s difficult for normal people to relate. I know where Campbell is going with this, and I think you’ll understand what I mean when I say there’s something ever so slightly uncanny about people who have achieved the highest possible mastery in their chosen field. In stories this sensation gets magnified for dramatic effect, so a hero who’s gone through the Apotheosis may become an actual magical being or even a god.

Which brings us to the most significant weakness of this section, which is that Campbell spends nearly all of it focusing on a very specific kind of religious enlightenment. He talks, at great length, about the merits of transcendent Buddhism and various divine religious figures, but almost completely ignores more modest heroes who did not set out to become world saviors. Unless you’re writing a story about a saint, this bias towards religious figures makes it a bit difficult to directly apply most of the chapter.

That’s why I’ve taken the liberty of slightly broadening Campbell’s conception of the Apotheosis. Rather than the hero reaching enlightenment or ascending to godhood, I think the key point is that the character becomes the best possible version of themselves. A trickster becomes supremely devious, a fighter becomes the ultimate warrior, and so on. But keep in mind, the personal acceptance and understanding that comes with the Apotheosis is much more important than any power our characters attain. A trickster character may accept that they are a bit of a liar, a bit of a cheat, but also realize those traits don’t mean they have to be evil. This self-acceptance is what allows them to finally attain the Ultimate Boon.

 

6) The Ultimate Boon

The hero achieves the ultimate goal of their quest.

 

At long last, the hero has overcome all the challenges that barred their way and finally completes their destiny. Like Campbell’s writing on the Apotheosis he does his best to hide his insights in a sea of strangeness, but with a bit of work we can fish them out.

The most valuable point I found was this: the hero’s challenges aren’t necessarily over just because they’ve completed the Atonement with the Father. Campbell says that if the hero is a god, saint, chosen one or otherwise perfect being they may reach the Ultimate Boon with little to no struggle, but everyone is going to have one final test. The Ultimate Boon is often held or guarded by someone or something, and an imperfect hero will have to trick, appease, or slay them.

I think this will generally be a less climactic challenge than the Atonement with the Father, and is instead a demonstration of how far the hero has come since they started on their journey. Luke Skywalker battling Darth Vader in the Return of the Jedi was definitely the more dramatic scene, but the true holder of the Ultimate Boon was not Vader, but the Emperor. Even after Luke bested his father (George Lucas was nothing if not literal in applying Campbell’s ideas) he still had to defeat that final foe. This last test took a radically different form than the one before; rather than a direct and violent battle, it’s a moral victory where Luke convinces Vader to turn on his former master.

If the hero manages to achieve the Ultimate Boon without fully maturing during their journey, the boon they seek may ruin them. Campbell points to the story of king Midas and his wish for everything he touched to turn to gold. As an author I see two ways we could apply this concept: either the hero attains the boon before they are ready, experiences disaster, then has to re-achieve the boon after maturing, or another character that was ruined by premature access to the boon serves as a warning to the hero.

Campbell makes a big deal of the fact that in mythology the ultimate boon often takes the form of food and drink. He has strong opinions about the symbolic importance of this commonality, and likens it to the Freudian image of a child yearning for a return to its mother’s milk.  I am, probably predictably by now, not terribly impressed by the Freudian link, but I still thought this point was worth noting in case we ever needed to develop a mythology for our stories or wrote a novel that was deliberately mythological in tone.

 

The Initiation: Conclusions

While this chapter has a few useful gems, I can’t quite bring myself to say it was worth the time I spent reading it. With the exception of the Woman as Temptress section – which still strikes me as entirely superfluous – the structure Campbell presents does a decent job of describing the middle-to-end of the archetypal hero’s journey story. But once we go looking for more than a general outline there’s little to recommend. Sections like the Road of Trials, which would have greatly benefited from additional examples and analysis, are sadly undernourished. Conversely, the Atonement with the Father and Apotheosis are almost grotesquely bloated with symbolic interpretation and religious fetishism that bury what I believe is the real value of Campbell’s work.

The problem could be that I’m approaching the book as a storyteller, and hoped for a much more practical study of myth and legend than Campbell seems interested in providing. The signal to noise ratio has become steadily worse as I progress, which is not encouraging sign. With any luck Campbell’s ship will steady a bit as we head into the next chapter of The Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Return.