Meeting with Goddess

Please forgive me if there are any errors. MY daughter is up early because she is teething and having a rough time. As the title of this section implies, the hero at some point must reconcile himself with his opposite. IF you are having trouble following the reading be sure to return to the Monomyth website to brush up on each stage. In meeting with the goddess the hero encounters the feminine aspect of himself. The nature of her appearance and her stature are scaled to the difficulty of the hero deed. In folk tales the goddess is represented by the sleeping princess who must be awakened to love. Usually such a tale ends in marriage showing us that the meeting with the goddess can be an awakening to love. She can also take a terrifying and powerful form such as Kali who represents the totality of life in time. Such a meeting would likely be the end for any hero who was not prepared to face such a power. While all heroes return from their journeys with some gift, the highest kind of heroes will return with a spiritual message. If a hero is not prepared for such a meeting with the goddess it is likely he will misinterpret his encounter. Such errors occur and, in my opinion, exist in Christianity with Mary Magdalene’s classification as a whore. In such traditions all the things which are associated with the feminine also become profane. As you may remember, the goddess has a great many associations including: the physical world, fertility, sex, birth, death. As you may know all these things were or are considered profane in Christianity. This is from an excessive patriarchy and too much obedience to the masculine principle of divinity.

We find very few traditions along the line of Christianity which emphasize the corruptness of the physical world and denial of its joys and divinity. Sex is dirty, birth is dirty, and death also must be scrubbed clean by prayer.

From the weekends reading we see that a new world opens for the hero when he discovers the divinity in the feminine principle which is in reality the other half of his divided self. Love is perhaps the greatest joy one can find in this world and its ability to overwhelm all other worldly obligations proves its status as sacred. Suddenly people don't care what their parents (society) think and dismiss social obligation. This is one of the barriers that faced the Buddha who also had to face lust and greed which are perversions of love. This is a huge problem today.

Ultimately the woman can represent a temptation to the hero, in the form of worldly pleasures, which may cause him to forsake his spiritual adventure for physical comfort.

To spend a minute with the slaying of Fafnir I'd like to point out two important things about that story: 1. the dragon is a symbol of avarice in the west. He accumulates great wealth and spends none of it. This is why it is a typical trial for a hero to face. Do you take the money to give up your quest? 2. Sigurd performs excellently well in this story as he gives the treasure away. Had he stayed and kept the wealth he would have supplanted the dragon and ceased to be a heroic figure.

For tomorrow please look at the following reading: Owain and the Lady of the Fountain
This reading very clearly identifies the different parts of the hero cycle and is a great example of the monomyth. Finish for Wed. if you need to.


For Friday please read: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we will discuss a bit every day until Friday. You should be able to get through about 10 pages a night.

Crossing the Threshold

I have been reading your comments over the past couple of days and they are really good. I am glad to see that we have made some connections between story and life. As a student of literature, i have always seen this connection in what i read. In myth however, the connections are much more pronounced.

I read Kevin's positng about his brother with sadness. My own step brother has been on three tours himself in Iraq. Luckily he has returned intact both mentally and physically from those dangers.

The foriegn wars we have conducted throughout our nations history are great examples of typical hero stories. The most pronounced threshold crossings appear in these stories of folks who travel by air or water to a foriegn land. They have clearly passed through to the zone of adventure and often are thrown directly into the Belly of the Whale. In the military this would be the first battle, where you are certain that there is no easy way out. Your home and safety are far away and return is uncertain.

Little Red Cap by the Grimm brothers and Jonah and the Whale are great examples of the transiion to the zone of transformative power. The reemergence from which marks a clear change in the protagonists consciousness.

In the piece from the Volsung Saga the Supernatural Aid appears clearly in the typical form of Odin, which was the model for Gandalf in Lord of the Rings who also serves the same purpose to the characters of those stories. From his interaction with Odin he recieves a fantastic steed which will help him on his journey.

For Monday we will examine the Road of Trials, and more specifically the Meeting with the Goddess and Woman as Temptress.

Trials: Slaying of Fafnir

Meeting with Goddess: Meeting with Brynhild

A folk interpretation of the Meeting: Sleeping Beauty

Woman as Temptress: The Temptations of Christ

Supernatural Aid

This image presents Odin as the "Grey Wanderer" who appears to Aid Sigurd in the Volsung Saga.  Incidentally he was the basis for JRR Tolkiens' "Gandalf the Gray"

As we saw with the reading for today, the refusal to answer the call of your own destiny can lead to being permanently "bound" in a state of inaction and stagnation.

The princess and the frog highlight the seeming insignificance of the Call to Adventure. The princess' golden ball seems to roll into the well by accident. In actuality it is the forces of life moving her toward her future. This reminds me of Lindsey's story that she posted yesterday.  It was no accident that her friend pushed her to go out and meet some handsome stranger.  It was life and destiny calling her forth from her shell of life negating pity and depression.  

It also worth noticing the symbolism of the golden ball and the well. Gold, as well as the circle or sphere, are symbols of perfection and the Well is a symbol of the unconscious mind. When the ball falls into the well we are immediately aware that the girl has moved into the realm of unconscious action and that something significant will happen.  Namely she has lost the beauty of her childhood, to the growth which is necessary for all of us to become adults.  Take a look at Dylan Thomas on the subject of childhood in his poem Fern Hill and you will see the beauty and wonder of childhood recreated there.

It is at this moment where the frog appears from the well with the ball. This leads us to believe that he is a messenger of her destiny that, because of his repugnant form, is an unacknowledged part of her own unconscious. In this story the frog is her other half, the male aspect of her own nature which she must come to terms with in order to become a woman.

Daphne represents the extreme case of the princess, as she rejects wholly the message that the time has come to be a woman, apart from her father. She clings to her infantile notions of male/female relationships and thus becomes an image of life in suspension. Nevermind Apollo's grief, Daphne's suspended state requires a real hero to break. If we remember sleeping beauty it was the prince who won through and woke the princess to the wonders of life as a woman. Until then she was merely sleeping and not awake to her own life cycle.

If the call is accepted, the hero will usually encounter a beneficial figure who gives aid to the hero in order to enable his success. History is rich with Supernatural Aid figures such as Merlin, Athene, Yoda and others. It is often this figure who helps the hero cross the initial threshold and reach the zone of adventure. The great hero Jason from greek myth had Medea to facilitate his success and as we find out he is not much of a man without her.

I suppose it is also necessary to address the question of Destiny, what it is and its purpose.  Destiny is referred to often in reference to these Hero stories as a force supporting the Hero.  As far as i can tell Destiny amounts to that Dionysian impulse of life that resides within each of us and guides our actions.  If we are psychologically and spiritually aligned with it there is nothing we cannot accomplish.  But Destiny also ties us to the greater stories that we have been reading.  If you remember the Thomas poem i posted earlier; "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age" is the force that connects and binds everything.  Destiny is tied to this and makes the mundane magical.

Here is a selection from the Volsung Saga which became Wagners greatest Opera. This outlines Sigurd after he accepted the call. Sigurd

Another classic hero tale that illustrates the "Belly of the Whale" literally is Jonah. Jonah and The Whale

Note the similarities between the Jonah tale as a cosmological myth and the folk tale Little Red Cap or Little Red Riding Hood.

The Call to Adventure

No matter who the hero or his stature he/she will at some point reach the limits of his living environment. This is a situation where he is bored and longs to see new things or where he is simply exhausted the possibilities of his current way of living. This is typicaly when the hero is "called" to adventure. For most of us this probably happens the first time we move away from home or go off to college. The world we lived in for the first 20 years of our lives has grown to comfortable and predictable and we need to be cut open by a new experience to discover the joy of living once again and grow. The call can take many forms but in fairy tales it is often in an unfamiliar or scary form.

Eventually even if the call is not answered the hero may be pressed into action by cicumstances beyond his control.

Here is a classic tale to read: The Frog Prince


The classic tale of Daphne and Apollo also highlights the Call to Adventure and the Refusal of the Call:
Refusal of the Call Daphne and Apollo

Even the Buddha was forced by destiny to uncover his eyes, despite the intervention of his parents.  Be sure to read through the second page.

If you want, take a look at the video on the right which covers the call to adventure in Star Wars.  In this clip he also meets his Supernatural Aid/Spiritual Advisor.

Take a look at these stories for tomorrow and we will discuss their importance. Then we will review Supernatural Aid, Crossing the Threshold and Belly of the Whale.