“…the most heroic of all acts is the courage to discover who you are and what you would like to be.”

Bill Moyer speaking about Joseph Campbell

Your life has been a series of heroic journeys and adventures, and there are more still to come. Don’t believe me? Don’t feel much like a hero?

Allow me to introduce you, if you are not already familiar with him, to the late American writer Joseph Campbell. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. In 1988 he was interviewed by Bill Moyers for a PBS documentary called The Power Of Myth which explored a number of Campbell’s studies and concepts. The first of these was The Hero’s Adventure.

Yes, the documentary is understandably dated in terms of its aesthetic and video quality. Yes, it is pretty darn male-centric. However, it introduced me to the idea of the hero’s journey and it is something that has helped me enormously so I wanted to share it with you as another way in which to explain our experiences in life.

In this post I will explore:

• What is the Hero’s Journey?
• How do we experience this as women?
• Why no one relishes adventure.
• How do we save the world?

The heroes of all time have gone before us

We all know the classic hero story, we’ve seen it time and again in books and on film (indeed, Joseph Campbell heavily influenced George Lucas and the making of the original Star Wars films). It is a story that has been part of human mythology since human mythology began. For an explanation of the classic steps of the journey you can have a read of this post, but this is my quick n dirty summary:

Our hero begins in the ordinary world, the comfortable familiar world they have always been in.

Something happens that creates a call to adventure. In The Lion King, Mufasa dies. In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf tells Frodo he has to remove the ring from Hobbiton. The hero is pitched into an adventure, rarely of their own choosing, and they have to try to get to their end goal or find a new way to live.

Initially the hero tries various tactics to get through the adventure unscathed. However, it always and inevitably becomes apparent that to reach the triumph of the adventure, our hero must strip away all that they thought that they knew, reveal their vulnerabilities, look stupid, cock up royally, show weakness or whatever else it is they have been desperately trying to avoid. Only then can they triumph, through deeper self knowledge and understanding.

Our hero is then changed forever. They may not be able to go back to the ordinary world, or they may have to take up a different place within it. They are not the same person, they have gained new knowledge, they are now different from everyone else.

And that knowledge can be shared. As is said in episode 1 of The Power of Myth: “The heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is fully known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path and where we had thought to travel outwards we shall come to the centre of our existence.”

To follow your bliss to the truth of your life

Well, that sounds all very well for men doesn’t it? Off slaying their dragons, disposing of inconvenient rings, battling Darth Vader or whatever else they get up to. Stories have been written about men following the ol’ Hero’s Journey for millennia, no problem.

How about us women? When do we get to be the hero?

I could go off on a tangent here and discuss books and films where a woman clearly follows the hero’s journey, but I bet you can think of those on your own. What is important about myth and story however is not the story itself but what it can tell us about our own lives. Very few of us, of any gender, will form a fellowship, visit the elves, attack Mordor or even wield a sword. What we all do though is live human lives, which is what these stories are really about.

If you have ever battled with your mental health, you have been on a hero’s journey. That crisis of anxiety or depression is the call to adventure, and you must travel deep into the abyss, stripped of all coping mechanisms to fully explore the truth of who you are, if you are to slay that monster of illness. Myths are simply how humans have always explained their real lives. Ogres and balrogs don’t really exist, but depression is a monster to be sure, and one requiring heroic efforts of conquest.

The experience of becoming a mother is about as classic a hero’s journey as one can get. My own experience was certainly one of desperately trying to cling on to the ordinary world, and then learning that I had to let it go and follow the call to adventure to fully explore every vulnerable corner of my soul if I was to become the mother I needed to be. No woman walks through any period of motherhood and remains unchanged. The self-knowledge that is acquired, and the demons slayed, are immense.

“Campbell believed that the most heroic of all acts is the courage to discover who you are and what you would like to be. To slay the savage dragon of the ego and to follow your bliss to the truth of your life.”

Given that perspective, can you now see what heroic journeys you have already accomplished, or how many you have abandoned because the need to dive into self knowledge and vulnerability was too much to face?

Leaving the realm of light

We often revere heroes, I imagine you can think of heroes you admire as can I. We love them in movies, we cheer them on in books, we watch them avidly in the theatre. Yet to be a hero is not a pleasant experience. Ignore the capes and adulation, the swash-buckling and posing; most heroes really do not want to be following their path. Frodo hated having to carry the ring. Harry Potter didn’t want to have to stand up to Voldemort. In the same way, absolutely nobody wants to fight the demon of mental ill-health, or drop into the abyss of bereavement.

Watching a hero, learning about them is brilliant. Being one is a challenge which changes us forever. Joseph Campbell explains that at the beginning of any story the hero “is leaving the realm of light, which he controls and knows about and moving toward the threshold and it’s at the threshold that the monsters the abyss come to meet him.” In real life those monsters might be toxic people, physical challenges, difficult circumstances or, most likely, the unresolved problems that live within our minds.

How to save the world

Adventures are not chosen, they are thrust upon us. Your next call to adventure will most likely be something unpleasant, a shock, a change, something not planned for and not wanted. These things we cannot choose.

What we can choose, however, is how we respond. Do we resist with all our might and do our best to cling on to the ordinary world? Or do we accept the adventure and all that it entails, having the courage to reveal our weaknesses and learn new things, to come out the other side with scars and knowledge and a deeper understanding?

Campbell talks about the movement from psychological dependency to psychological responsibility that comes with the transition from childhood to adulthood – one of our biggest adventures. We may feel that, for myriad reasons, we were not able to make that transition effectively or it was not an adventure we fully realised. At some point though that movement to psychological responsibility has to take place if we are to become the people we were meant to be.

One of the choices he suggests we all have to make is between being eaten alive by the system of society or finding ways to use that system to human purposes. Campbell states that if we ignore our spiritual and human needs and try to just live within the societal system, to a certain “program”, we will forever be off centre. A programmatic life is not a life that our body is interested in, but he says that all over the world we will find people who have stopped listening to themselves.

So is saving ourselves from the system and finding ways to listen to our humanity the way to save the world, even if we do not carry swords or have magical powers or the ability to fly through the air? Campbell explains it this way:

“The world is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth. No, any world is a living world if it’s alive, and the thing is to bring it to life. And the way to bring it to life is to find in your own case where your life is, and be alive yourself, it seems to me.”

Hear the call to adventure. Recognise it for what it is. Gather your courage (and the right people) around you. Accept your weaknesses. Fight your demons. Wade through the abyss and keep walking the path. Do that and you will discover more and more of your humanity, and new ways to reach the humanity of others. To save the world by bringing ourselves to life.

Forget capes and superpowers. Discovering and honouring our real selves is true heroism.

Helen Calvert
January 2023