Neither Hero nor Journey
The Hero’s Journey is perfectly legitimate myth with a valid place among many others in the pantheon. However, it is not appropriate today as a primary guide for civilization.
The main problem is not that it is male-gendered and needs to be neutered or balanced by a female equivalent. It is that the Hero is a boy archetype, not a man archetype. We need to source guidance from more mature archetypes, which comprise the masculine, feminine, and non-gendered.
I won’t at this time comment too much on the feminist critique of the Hero, fascinating though it is. I’ll just say that we can do better than to merely switch the Hero’s gender (Rey instead of Luke, Supergirl instead of Superman) while following the same arc of the call to adventure, leaving home, the mentor, the threshold, the test, the enemy, the ordeal, the triumph, the return and so forth. Certainly, both sexes may undergo a Hero’s Journey in the course of a lifetime, but we do not fully honor the feminine by making women into honorary men as protagonists in the archetypal boy-to-man journey.
My intention today though is not to discuss what a truly feminine counterpart to the Hero’s Journey might be, but rather to consider other mythic arcs based on mature archetypes. I have a very practical reason for this exploration. I am collaborating with a small group of people to create a dramatic performance—a musical—and it is important to me to drive the plot with a story template and archetypes beyond the Hero and his Journey. This intention brings up questions like, What are other sources of dramatic tension besides conflict? How are they resolved in a satisfying way outside of triumph? (Two of my sources of inspiration in this endeavor are Ursula K. Le Guin, and Hiyao Miyazaki.)
The main theme of the musical is ecological. It is in humanity’s relationship to earth that we most need guidance from post-Hero storylines. For 20 years I have described civilization’s long journey of Separation (of human from nature, self from other, matter from spirit, man from woman, work from play, and many more). The conquering hero in countless myths and legends is a proxy for civilization itself, discovering its powers, conquering nature, domesticating the wild, subduing the barbarians.
There are other ways to develop a soul (individual or collective) besides to leave home and go off on an adventure. I believe that the time is now to engage these other modes of development. For example, it will not be truly developmental for us to push on to Mars, to conquer new frontiers, to find new enemies over which to triumph. We have been flogging the Hero’s Journey like a tired horse in hopes that it will drag the wagon of civilizational sense-making a few more decades into the future. But few people are actually excited about a manned mission to Mars, or the latest in implantable computing. Another mode of development calls us
I write this from the perspective of a middle-aged man, long past his time of leaving home behind in order to go off and seek his fortune. Contrary to the youth-obsessed prejudices of modern society, the soul’s development does not end when one settles down, makes home, roots in place, and starts a family. Life is not a continual Hero’s Journey.
In the human relation to earth, isn’t it obvious right now that our collective soul development will come through fully acknowledging our home here—on earth, as part of life, in matter? Well, it is obvious to me, and sharing that vision motivates me in making this musical. “Rising above” matter to a digital, virtual, or spiritual realm feels more like an escape than a progression, as with someone who trashes every home he lives in and moves onto another every couple years. As long as new homes are available to him, he never learns. Never, until one day he turns to where he is right now and knows it as precious.
To know it as precious he must also know as precious all the other homes he trashed. Grief is thus a crucial phase of the evolutionary story-template for humanity at this time. How many “homes” on earth, how many places, how many entire cultural-ecological realities have we already trashed?
Oh and by the way, guilt is an off-ramp from grief. I will take care in my storytelling to defuse guilt. Guilt is a mighty tool in reversing power relations, but not in reinventing them. And it is useless in the project of healing.
The shape of the musical is starting to come together in my mind. I have already composed two mythic framing stories, but I still have not arrived at the human story that interweaves them. I am excited at the challenge of creating a compelling, immersing plot that is not a journey and not a conflict. There will be a male and a female character. For the male, I’m looking first to Warrior, Magician, Lover, and King for orienting archetypes. In their true expression, none of them seek their own glory. The true Kings walk among us, we who rarely recognize them as kings. That is because the kingdom they serve is beyond most people’s conscious recognition. Part of my purpose is to show the glory of these humble people. For the female, I am starting with Priestess and Queen, looking to those I know who embody those most radiantly. They too are little recognized, especially by themselves.
These archetypes are just a starting place. I will not deliberately fashion characters who represent them, nor will I consciously write into the story the various messages, archetypes, and symbols I have in mind. I will write from those things while allowing the story to be bigger than my understanding of it.
That is a good beginning, don’t you think? The story of humanity is bigger than our understanding. An outcome is available bigger than our design. An intelligence exists in the world beyond what we impose upon it.
PS. I am going to be speaking at a few in-person events in September:
GardenFest in New Hampshire
AUREA, in Miami:
An ecstatic dance + storytelling in Salt Lake City (it's going to be amazing)
The Fuller Field School in Kansas (farming-oriented)
There is a story to be told about the journey of the Post-patiarchal hero. We need to hear this. Feminism cannot afford to ignore the importance of heralding the growth of a post-patriarchal masculinity. It is the story of a man who falls apart, (Rick Tarnas epilogue, Passion of Western Mind), who faces the heart crushing elements of his conditioning as the inheritor of the western tradition and as a child conditioned into patriarchal masculinity (bell hooks). All that he knows and values in himself falls apart - an all too ordinary marriage with no connection? a wife who gives up, a chronic illness? A fallen athlete? He is forced to slow down - he learns to listen - to really listen to that which is not commonly known - to his heart and then to women.
Listen...to his wife, to his mother, to his daughter, like men haven't listened in thousands of years. And from listening to his inner boy (before the love was beaten out of him) and listening to the women in his life with ever growing reverence, a mature man is born who understands a new leadership - one that partners, that empowers, that slows down, watches and learns, one that empowers, understands, and quietly honors.
This man's journey is inward, it is taken at home, and the grail he finds holds the gifts of truly-local, humble action and relational self-expression.
The compelling narrative here is a love story. The love story of our times: A man learning to love his deeper 3 and 4 dimensional self who LEARNS to SEE and HONOR and ELEVATE the women, or a woman in his life supporting her healing and the healing of thousands of years of imbalance, through his love.
The story of our times carries all the wisdom of all the subjugated women of the last several thousand years and turns patriarchy on its head through the True power of Love.
What to Remember When Waking
What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.
What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
IN this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.
David Whyte
Very relevant for where I'm at.
I can say I lived my hero's journey as thoroughly as I could for some years. Traveling, wandering, farther and farther out, learning tons, becoming a 'very cool guy', lone cowboy kinda fellow.
Recently I returned home at the stern call of fate, and the return has been far from heroic; broken, sobering, grief-soaked, soul-fatigued, sitting among the ruins of never having built something rooted.
I'm visited upon by a monumental grief of leaving that former phase, for I had convinced myself fully it would be by following that path only that I would 'manifest my destined life' or whatever.
I long for a new, more mature myth to seize / be seized by, and yet I often see myself wondering if there's any way back into that adventurous way of being, and so I simply find myself in a composting phase. And if you're composting human shit, you need a long time before it turns into something you'd want to use in the garden...
Grief, raw grief. At first it seems like a monstrous curse, and it slowly turns into a loyal, wise, humbling companion.