The Hero's Journey

In this episode, we delve into the Hero's Journey, focusing on Joseph Campbell's famous excursus. As an addendum to our previous discussion on epics, we'll explore Campbell's three main stages of storytelling: 'departure or separation,' 'initiation,' and 'return,' which he calls the "nuclear unit of the monomyth." This episode examines how Campbell's seventeen-step breakdown accommodates variations in stories, myths, and fables across cultures and time.

We'll also discuss rites of passage, highlighting their role in signifying significant life transitions. From religious ceremonies like Catholic confirmation and Jewish mitzvahs to modern initiations, these rituals mirror the hero's journey, elevating ordinary experiences into epic narratives. While historically male-dominated, the hero's journey now features more female protagonists, such as Katniss Everdeen and Lara Croft.

We will also examine the journeys of heroes like Inanna, Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker, and Leopold Bloom to illustrate how the hero's journey transforms the mundane into the extraordinary, revealing our deep-seated love for storytelling.

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Transcript

The Hero's Journey

SPEAKERS

Darren Koolman

The Monomyth

Hello, my name is Darren, and welcome to the Makers Rage podcast. So, as mentioned in the last essay on the epic, I thought I'd do an addendum discussing the Hero's Journey. Specifically, Joseph Campbell's version, since it is the most detailed, and arguably the most famous. The three main stages of the hero's journey are 'departure or separation', 'initiation' and 'return'. Campbell calls this the "nuclear unit of the monomyth". And just to remind you, monomyth is a term taken by Campbell from Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Campbell breaks down the three stages into seventeen steps, five for departure, six for initiation, and six for return. The number 17 is arbitrary to an extent. Other versions have 8 steps, 12 steps... what they all have in common is the three-stage nuclear unit. And I feel Campbell's version allows for variations that can occur in stories and myths and fables and fairy tales, across cultures, and through time. Much influenced by Freud and, especially Jung, Campbell, it seems did believe in the monomyth as an ultimate narrative archetype, a way of telling stories that emerges independently in the collective unconscious because the potential for this kind of storytelling is imprinted on the human brain. And the fact ritual separation, initiation, and return is commonplace in so many tribal cultures throughout time, is cited as strong circumstantial evidence of this. 

Rites of Passage

The function of the initiation ritual, of course, is that when the subject returns, they have changed in some significant sense. In the Catholic confirmation ritual, or the Jewish mitzvahs, the rituals signify the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today, such rites of passage still involve ordeals as such, like fasting, a period of intensive study, or other preparation. In some cultures, more invasive ordeals like flagellation, piercing, even genital mutilation are demanded. Similar initiation rituals form part of various Recruitment Trainings or the hazing that occurs before being introduced into some secret club or frat. The more traditional initiations involving the child's transition into adulthood are of course supposed to coincide with puberty. The hero's journey takes this simple 3-stage formula and raises to the level of epic, because superheroes and gods must experience superhuman ordeals that justify their return as heroes of their culture, whose stories will be remembered and celebrated as part of a people's cultural and linguistic inheritance. A young Jewish boy say, must leave his childhood behind, undergo a ritual initiation in the Bar Mitzvah and return to his community, a man. Often the hero too begins their journey as a callow juvenile but being initiated as not just a man or woman but a hero, requires a more onerous process. And yes, I did say man. Most of these monomyths, and the heroes described are, alas male, because in the pre-Modern Period, especially, the model of heroism was rarely considered to be a woman. If you think of Greek or Roman heroes, Near Eastern ones, South Asian, East Asian, you have to look hard to find the heroines, unless they are goddesses as the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who does have a hero's journey to the underworld, which I'll be discussing presently. It's only quite recently that this gender bias has been challenged, and most frequently in film, think of Katniss from The Hunger Games, or any of the female Marvel superheroines. Also gaming - think Lara Croft, or Ellie in The Last of Us. 

Inanna, Frodo, Luke, Bloom

Anyway, the heroes I'll be discussing in this follow up on the epic, are Inanna (as mentioned), Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker, and Leopold Bloom, with a smattering of others. So, although Cis males are over-represented here, think they've also been over-represented historically, but I think a Bronze Age goddess, a Jedi warrior, a Hobbit, and a Dublin Jew a diverse enough selection. By the way, those of you acquainted with Ulysses will know it is based on Homer's Odyssey. But I decided not to discuss them together here, mainly for variety. Besides, I'll likely do something on Ulysses at some point. And I still will be mentioning the Odyssey, and other examples, as I go through Campbell's 17 steps. Just to mention, that I don't believe the monomyth is an archetype that's imprinted on our brains, like Chomsky's universal grammar, or that the impulse to tell these stories emerges as naturally as a language does in an infant. I believe that is the simple formula that many different cultures have converged upon, independently, as pictographic writing systems did in Egypt, China, and Central America. And since children in every culture go through puberty, transition from youth to adulthood (religions even make a ritual of it), why not make it a hero's journey? After all, human beings love to exaggerate the banal, to make the ordinary extraordinary. And where we do this, most often, is in our stories. 

Departure: The Call to Adventure

Three stages, Departure, Initiation and Return. First, Departure, and step one: 'the call to adventure'. The hero receives an omen, has a dream, a mysterious letter arrives out of the blue... Before making her descent to the underworld, the Sumerian goddess Inanna, "opened her ears to the great below". Think Frodo Baggins being entrusted with the ring on which a mysterious message in Elvish is engraved. Think Luke Skywalker discovering the holographic recording of Leia requesting help. And by the way, Star Wars was directly influenced by Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"; George Lucas even called Joseph Campbell "my Yoda". In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom's getting ready for his friend Paddy Dignam's funeral. But that's not the reason he's about to spend all day wandering the streets of Dublin. He sees a letter from his wife's paramour, Blazes Boylan. He knows they're having an affair. He doesn't want to go home and catch them in the act because he would be honor bound to knock the bastard out. And as we'll learn, Bloom is not a violent man. So he'll avoid going home until it's quite safe and word need not spread that he caught his wife in the act and did nothing about it. But you could say his adventure begins before he sees the letter. Joyce introduces him as a man "ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." And that morning "Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish." And "kidneys were on his mind."  Before ever seeing Boylan's letter, he's off to the butcher to collect his quarry.

Departure: Refusal of the Call

After the call to adventure, the hero may show some reluctance, even refuse the call initially. And this is step two. They may be intimidated by the burden or have misgivings about abandoning their duties to their family, the king or the state. Think of Frodo's doubting a lowly Hobbit could carry the ring to its destruction. And remember Luke in A New Hope when Obi Wan says he must learn the ways of the Force and go with him to Alderan: "Alderan? I'm not going to Alderan. I've gotta get home." Bloom doesn't refuse the call to go walking the streets of Dublin most of the day. In fact, it's going back home he delays until well after midnight (Like his Homeric counterpart Odysseus, who spends 20 years not 20 hours away from home). Inanna, though a goddess, still hesitates to answer the call from the great below. After all, why would she want to go to the underworld, where her sister Ereshkigal the queen of darkness reigns. But the calls grow louder and louder. So along with her faithful servant, Ninshubur, she readies herself to go where she's never gone before.

Departure: Supernatural Aid

Once the hero comes round, there is often some supernatural aid, like Bilbo giving Frodo the Elven sword, Sting, which glows in the presence of Orcs; or much later, Galadriel giving him a phial of light. Luke’s supernatural Aid comes when he’s of course introduced to the force. For Bloom, it's a bar of yellow soap he buys from Sweeney's chemist, which is supposed to correspond to the magical herb or moly Odysseus receives to protect him from the evil of Circe's abode. So, Bloom imagines the lemon soap in his pocket to be a kind of protective amulet as he wanders around Dublin. He even touches it when he sees Blazes Boylan in the street (as if wanting to become invisible - "my heart!" he says once the coast is clear). Inanna, being a goddess, doesn't need supernatural aid. On the contrary, while passing through the underworld, she must give up her own supernatural powers by divesting herself, one by one, of all the emblems of her power (crown, bracelets, cloak...)  before entering the final gate, naked and prostrate. For that is how we all confront death. However rich we are in the upper world; we can’t take it with us to the place below. 

Departure: Crossing of the First Threshold

The most important step of the Departure stage is the ‘crossing of the first threshold’ - leaving the familiar behind to cross into the unknown, turning your back on your old self and confronting the new. Like when Frodo and Sam reached the boundary of the Shire and Sam said "This is it. One more step and it's the farthest away from home” he’s been. It's not clear if it's the farthest Frodo had been, but the step is momentous for them both considering what lies ahead. Or when Luke leaves home and arrives at the spaceport and enters the cantina full of creatures he's never seen who've been to places he's never been. They represent the unknown that lies ahead for him as he embarks on his journey towards becoming a Jedi. Bloom starts his adventure less dramatically, by closing his front door softly so as not to disturb his sleeping wife. The path he'll take through the streets of his own Dublin City will be very familiar. But the psychic drama that unfolds will take him places yet unvisited recesses of the soul, and the reader to places unexplored in the history of prose. Inanna knocks on the gates of the Underworld. The gatekeeper asks, "Who are you and why have you come?" "My name is Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth, I have come to attend the funeral rites of my sister's husband, the Lord Nergal". To enter, the gatekeeper says she must abide by the custom of the0 underworld and remove an item of clothing at each of the seven portals. Upon entering the first, she removes her crown, which signifies her power over Heaven and Earth, for in the Underworld her sister Ereshkigal is Queen. Thus, she sets off to explore a real she’s never been to before to experience something she’s never experienced: Death.

Departure: The Belly of the Whale

The next step Campbell calls the 'belly of the whale', taken of course from the book of Jonah, in which the prophet volunteers to be thrown overboard to calm a storm, and is swallowed up by a 'great fish'. After spending three days in the fish or whale's belly, he is vomited up on the shore in a kind of rebirth. Besides being interpreted by Christians as prefiguring the death and resurrection of Jesus, the time spent in the whale or fish is deemed a period of seclusion, of separation in all its senses from the familiar world. As Inanna, who after being stripped of her power and killed spends three days hanging naked from a hook in the depths of hell; Frodo in Shelob’s cave; or Luke Skywalker in the middle of the Death Star. In the epic tradition, the journey to the underworld is a common motif. As Odysseus who meets his mother and Achilles in Hades, or Aeneas who meets the shade of Dido, whom he abandoned to found Rome. She turns away from him and says nothing. Dante of course is guided by Virgil as he journeys through the circles of hell. In Ulysses, there is a chapter called Hades, in which Bloom too meets the shades of dead Dubliners in his private musings while following Dignam’s cortege. On re-emerging from the belly of the whale, as it were, the hero redivivus now commits fully to the enterprise. Frodo recovers from Shelob’s sting, Luke destroys the Death Star, and rescues Leia; Inanna, slowly coming back to life after the intervention of her father Enki; And in Ulysses Bloom finally exits the cemetery after his friend’s interment and his musings about what happens to the body after death, thinking in a stream of consciousness, quote, “Back to the world again, enough of this place, brings you a bit nearer every time. Gives you the creeps after a bit. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds, warm, full-blooded life.”

Initiation: The Road of Trials

This marks the end of the beginning of the hero's journey. With phase one, ‘the departure’, complete, we have phase two, or ‘the initiation’, and step one, ‘the road of trials.’ There can be any number of such trials or labors, and they usually come in the form of monsters, puzzles, feats of strength or daring, or cunning, or tests of endurance – Inanna growing weaker and weaker as she passes through the portals of the underworld, being asked to remove one by one the emblems of her power; Frodo Baggins encountering the orcs, the Nazgul and Gollum (in fact, Frodo’s journey from beginning to end is a road of trials). Same goes for Luke who encounters several trials (monsters, storm troopers, a trash compactor) between ANH and ESB. Odysseus navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis (a sea monster and a whirlpool). And in Ulysses, there is a chapter called Scylla and Charybdis where Stephen as Scylla rhetorically snaps up other members of the Dublin literatti with his casuistic theory of Hamlet. At the end of the episode Bloom slips between Stephen and Buck Mulligan, forcing a momentary sundering. Bloom will later rescue Stephen from this unscrupulous associate in the red-light district, so this scene is portentous. 

Initiation: Meeting with the Goddess

Next the hero has a meeting with the goddess (or other supernatural entity). In Star Wars, The Goddess is Yoda. Frodo of course meets the Lady of the Woods, Galadriel. In Homer, both Achilles and Odysseus are visited by Athena, usually in disguise. In Ulysses, Athena is represented also in disguise as the old milkwoman Stephen meets in the first Chapter whom he describes as a “messenger from the secret morning”. Bloom has his meeting via a message or a letter from Martha Clifford, likely a pseudonym, which is also a kind of disguise. He’s engaged in an erotic correspondence with her, so Bloom too is unfaithful in a way, although there’s no evidence this affair has been consummated. The name Martha means “Lady or Mistress of the House”, and we see the full BDSM implications of this much later in the phantasmagorical Circe episode. Inanna’s meeting with the Goddess occurs when she presents herself naked and prostrate before her sister, Ereshkigal, although this meeting is far from propitious, as we'll see in the next step, the “Temptation”. 

Initiation: The Temptation

This can be conflated with the previous one i.e., the Goddess can both provide aid and/or act as a temptress to distract the hero from his journey. Frodo is tempted to give Galadriel the ring and she herself is tempted to take it. Inanna is tempted at every portal of the underworld to resist giving up an element of her divine power before being allowed to proceed. But she’s determined to experience what no God or Goddess has ever experienced before and so willingly gives up her power, her immortality, to present herself naked and powerless at the mercy of her sister. Of course, the experience she was promised is to die. Bloom is tempted both by Martha Clifford in her letter and by Gertie McDowell in the Nausica episode on the beach where he went to masturbate (after reading the contents of the letter in the library). She notices him looking at her from a distance and offers him a view of her undergarments. One of the passages that almost got the book banned in America. In Star Wars, Luke is lured away from his training under Yoda by a vision of His suffering friends. 

Initiation: Atonement with the father

Next step is ‘Atonement with the father’. And here we have some of that sprinkling of Freud I mentioned earlier. This step isn’t simply a coming to terms with one's childhood, but the hero’s coming to terms with the callowness they exhibited before the outset of their adventure, before their emergence from the Belly of the Whale or overcoming the temptation, etc. On confronting the father figure, the hero may regress through intimidation, experience self-doubt at being properly equipped for the undertaking whose most challenging steps are still ahead. Yet, in some Hero’s Journeys, this is indeed the most challenging step. Reconciling with the past, with unresolved trauma. By confronting the father figure and defeating him, the hero moves past his greatest psychological stumbling block. The father figure is overcome not necessarily by killing him but forgiving him. Of course, The father figure can initially be seen as an insuperable force who must be destroyed, like Sauron (the all-seeing eye of the vengeful god). Darth Vader must be defeated for Anakin to finally reject the dark side and destroy the Sith Lord, which itself is a kind of atoning with the father. Bloom, whose father, Rudolph, killed himself after losing his faith, has a vision of him in the Circe episode, reaching out to touch his face, he says, “Are you not my son, Leopold?” – a reenactment of the recognition scene between Isaac and Jacob in the Bible. Ereshkigal, who blames Inanna for the death of her husband and hangs her naked from a hook. After three days when Inanna fails to return, her father, Enki, whom she tricked into giving up much of his power, intervenes to rescue her.

Initiation: The Apotheosis

What follows is the climax of the hero's journey, ‘the Apotheosis.’ The Greek word literally means ‘achieving godlike status.’ But it can also mean simply ‘reaching one's full potential’, which the hero clearly needs for heroic achievement to be actualized. In Lord of the Rings this moment is difficult to pin down for Frodo. And as I said earlier, Campbell’s seventeen steps are exhaustive but not all-encompassing. That said, Frodo isn’t the only hero on a journey in LOTR, and I could easily have focused on any of the others in the story, like Of course, Gandalf who also has a call to adventure, a road of trials, etc., and more obvious apotheosis when he transforms the grey wizard into the white. Luke Skywalker has a similar transformation when he recovers from his defeat to Vader and the loss of his hand, a fully-fledged Jedi Knight. As for Inanna, whose corpse has been rotting on a hook for three days and nights, her father Enki sends two androgynous beings called Gala to help her servant Ninshubur to bring her back to Earth. They secure Inanna’s release by commiserating what Ereshkigal, who appreciates their sympathy and so relinquishes her sister’s corpse. Inanna is then revived with holy sustenance and the water of life, and the Goddess is restored in a literal apotheosis.  In Ulysses, Bloom’s apotheosis has a very different tone: after riling up the bigoted Citizen and Barnie Kiernan’s pub by delivering a speech condemning hatred and antisemitism, he makes a swift escape aboard a stagecoach pursued by the one-eyed galoot what his eyepatch, signifying the Cyclops Odysseus escapes from – “puffing and blowing with the dropsy, spitting and spatting” as he curses the curse of Cromwell. And bloom jumps on a stage coach gesticulating triumphantly, declaiming “Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza… your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.” At which the Citizen says “By Jesus, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will.” And he grabs a biscuit box and flings it at Bloom as he rounds the corner all sheep-faced with Garryowen, the Citizen’s mongrel, chasing after. And Joyce writes, “There came about all a great brightness, and they beheld the chariot wherein he stood, ascend to heaven. And they beheld him even him. Ben bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of 45 degrees over Donahue’s in Little Green Street, like a shot of a shovel.” 

Initiation: The Ultimate Boon

The last step of the Initiation stage, and step 11 of the total 17 is ‘the ultimate boon’, where the hero achieves some reward for their efforts. This needn't be anything substantial, like a magical object, or treasure – the apotheosis can be a boon in itself. For Frodo, who had no clear moment of apotheosis, destroying Sauron’s power was not only his ultimate boon, but that of Middle Earth. Luke defeats Darth Vader and brings back his father Anakin. The Sith are also destroyed, and the Empire crushed. Bloom’s ultimate boon after his mock apotheosis in the Cyclops episode is ejaculating on the beach while perving at Gerty McDowell. Certainly, a boon for the censors. Inanna’s ultimate boon is having her powers restored. Once again, an immortal goddess, though she has now experienced what it is to die. 

Return: Refusal to Return

The third and final stage of the hero's journey is ‘the return.’ In some tales, this can be as onerous as ‘the departure’ – you can still die climbing down Everest after the ultimate boon of summiting, which is why the first step of the return is often ‘the refusal to return’, which echoes the initial ‘refusal of the call’. Frodo, dismayed at having succumbed to the ring’s power, wishes to stay in the mountain and die. Luke becomes detached after the destruction of the Jedi, and being the last of them, becomes a galactic Wayfarer, determined to uncover their secrets. Bloom’s refusal to go home was motivated simply by the fact that he knows his wife has an assignation with the roguish Blazes Boylan. After being revived, you can imagine Inanna couldn't wait to get out of the underworld. So, while there is no refusal to return in her case, she does stop at each of the seven portals through which she entered and where she had to give up one of her adornments, or emblems of her power, deciding ultimately to return without them. The refusal therefore is not to return, but to return as she was. 

Return: The Magic Flight

Next, we have the ‘Magic Flight’. Having achieved his or her goal, to use the Everest analogy again, it's not just summiting the mountain that matters, it's arriving safely home. The Magic Flight can be a supernatural intervention that wouldn't have occurred during the departure. Because the hero has achieved apotheosis, has acquired the ultimate boon, there are evil forces, preventing the hero’s crossing the threshold back to safety. Frodo’s return is a literal magic flight with an Eagle saving him from a fall and flying him to safety, a stark contrast to how he arrived on the mountain. When done crudely, this step can strike one as a deus ex machina. But as a storytelling technique, it works to move the narrative swiftly towards its conclusion. Luke Skywalker’s Magic Flight is his flight into myth. Being the last Jedi, he goes into hiding in the ancient Jedi Temple of Ahch-To, and the rest of the galaxy comes to believe there are no Jedis left. Bloom’s Magic Flight is conflated with his apotheosis when he escapes the citizen as Elijah in a fiery chariot. 

Return: Rescue from without

Occasionally, it's not a magic flight that secures the hero’s return but a rescue. In such cases, mentors or supernatural guides may intervene as the elders who rushed to the underworld to rescue Inanna. Sometimes, the rescue may be spiritual or mental, needing some kind of psychic or indeed oneiric intervention (there’s a word of the day for you: pertaining to dreams). In other words, rescue from an inescapable dream, or awakened from a death like sleep as Odysseus who fell into a deep sleep on the final stage of his journey back to Ithaca. And when Hermes awakens Odysseus with his staff, it is described like an awakening from death, and the forgetfulness of death as the river Lethe in Hades whose waters helped the dead forget the worries they left behind. When he finally reaches the shores of Ithaca, he doesn't recognize Athena at first, and has to be persuaded that he is in fact home. The rescue from without is often conflated with the magic flight, and they don't usually occur together: indeed, both can seem like the hero being plucked out of danger and transported to safety once the ultimate boon has been attained (a deus ex machina, as mentioned). Frodo had his flight on the eagle. Luke is rescued from a self-imposed seclusion by Ray and Yoda who remind him who he is. In Ulysses, while Bloom had his magic flight, like Elijah, escaping from the Citizen, It is the other hero of the novel, Steven, who needs the rescue from without. And of course, it is Bloom, who rescues a drunken Steven from his mercenary friends in the red light district. 

Return: Crossing the Return Threshold

The next step is the crossing of the Return threshold. This could very well be the same threshold a hero crossed on departure. And like the Refusal to Return, mirrors the earlier step. Crossing that same threshold again upon returning may be but a small step, but it represents a giant leap in the hero’s journey. He or she has fundamentally changed from who they were the first time they crossed that liminal space. As Frodo, when he returns to the Shire in The Return of the King. But it's not the idyllic place he remembers, for he finds it overrun by the so-called Shiriffs – outsiders and ruffians who act as law enforcement to keep the Hobbits in check. So, instead of arriving home and putting his hairy feet up after defeating Sauron, Frodo must perform one last fear of domestic heroism and rescue the shire from these interlopers. As Odysseus did when he returned home and found it overrun by suitors plundering his property while competing for the hand of his wife, who has remained faithful and chaste all these years. Unlike Molly, of course, in Ulysses. When Bloom finally returns home in the Ithaca episode (corresponding to the Homeric one just described), a not quite sober Stephen in toe, Bloom doesn't have his key, and has to climb over the fence and enter by the basement. So after refusing all day to return home, in the end, he’s not able to get in the door cos he forgot his key at the outset. Bloom, who lost his son Rudy 10 years before invites, this young surrogate and stand in for Odysseus son, Telemachus, and lights a fire – hospitality or ritualized friendship, being so privileged in ancient Greece, but also Ireland. As for Luke Skywalker, upon ending his seclusion, he returns more powerful than ever, and confirms to the galaxy that he is no myth by returning to save the resistance at its most desperate hour. As for Inanna, before leaving the underworld, she's told by its guardians that she must leave something of value behind to take her place. Looking around at the elders who rescued her and her faithful servant Ninshubur, she considers perhaps she may have to stay after all. And this part, I suppose, can be construed as a refusal of return, or at least a hesitation. What she knows is there is one person who is not among her rescuers – her husband, Dumuzid. When she asks where he is, Ninshubur tells her that he stayed behind, still dressed in his finery, sitting on his magnificent drone. Outraged, heartbroken, she makes her choice: her husband, Dumuzid will take her place. So the Galla demons seize him, strip him of his finery (since, like Inanna, he must go naked to the underworld). As all of us do when we die: leaving the world as we came into it, in other words.

Return: Master of the Two Worlds

The second to last next step is called ‘master of two worlds.’ Many heroes may successfully cross the final or return threshold with unresolved internal conflict. Having defeated the great adversary, they come home to realize their house is not in order. As Odysseus with the suitors infesting his palace; as Frodo and the Shiriffs. One is never more vulnerable than where you expect to be safest: home. Upon defeating the enemies within, the hero can now safely bestride both the public and private worlds. Or in some cases, the physical and spiritual. Self-control is the ability to retain one's composure, despite the chaos surrounding you or within you. And as Nietzsche said, “one must still have chaos in oneself, to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” Luke eventually passes away with peace and purpose, dying the greatest Jedi who ever lived, and being now at one with the force, can travel seamlessly through both the material and spirit realms. In “The Hero with A Thousand Faces, Campbell references the Nietzsche quote from The Birth of Tragedy, “The Cosmic Dancer does not rest heavily in a single spot. But gayly, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to the other.” It's hard not to imagine this passage influencing the young George Lucas. Once the Galla demons drag Inanna’s husband Dumuzid, also known as Tammuz, down to hell as her replacement, Inanna will later regret this decision and decide that he should only spend half the year in the underworld. For the other half, his sister Geštinanna would stay there (her function is uncertain although she’s been long associated with dream interpretation and the scribal arts). Inanna’s ability to enforce this demonstrates her mastery over both the upper and under worlds. Mastery she clearly lacked before her descent, death, and rebirth. Bloom, having navigated through the public space of Dublin City the entire day, avoiding returning home to confront suitor, Blazes Boylan, plundering his bed, in the end reclaims his place next to his wife who decides she doesn’t love Boylan and will give old Poldy another go. Having fallen asleep, he’s unaware he’s become master of two worlds. 

Return: Freedom to Live

The last of Campbell's 17 steps, and the final step in the Return stage of the hero's journey is denoted ‘freedom to live’. Being master of two worlds, the hero is liberated from the fear of death, and they can now live life fully, deliberately, no longer a victim of circumstance, following a prescribed path, which the hero’s journey really is. The hero therefore becomes to quote Campbell, “the champion of things becoming” – to give birth to dancing stars, one cannot stay still. The journey towards becoming a hero is complete upon their return, but now the hero must live each day as a hero would. One feels it’s almost preferable to end the journey as Achilles did by dying, or as Frodo by joining the Elves aboard the ship to the undying lands to find peace. It seems giving birth to dancing stars every day is a burden too great for some, and even heroes can only live so many days with such chaos within. By contrast, Luke hasn't fled from the physical world but transcended it, and his ability to move between the spirit and material realms reveals a mastery over two worlds which Frodo lacked at the end of his adventure. 

As for bloom, the last we learn about his inner world as he climbs into bed next to Molly, “the child man weary, the man child in the womb, womb weary, he rests. He has travelled.” And so the hero we’ve been following all day on his journey through Dublin City off to sleep (a day’s living for Bloom, but not a day’s reading for us!). The master of two worlds, the public one explored, the private one reclaimed. The man-child in the womb, champion of things becoming, dying into sleep, to be reborn somewhere, somewhen beyond the page. Still awake, Molly bloom begins an inner monologue that is that final spectacular chapter of the novel, revealing to us for the first time, a glimpse of her inner (we’ve only had Poldy’s side of the story until now!). She muses about Blazes Boylan (“I didn’t like him slapping my behind. Though I laughed, I’m not a horse … Sure, he’s no manners, nor no refinement, nor no nothing in his nature. Ignoramus. Doesn’t know poetry from a cabbage.”); wonders if Poldy’s cheating on her (“he couldn’t possibly do without it that long!”); remembers her two pregnancies; why women have two breasts (“funny how it’s two the same, in case of twins”); her married name “Bloom” (“Better than those awful names with “bottom in them – Mrs. Ramsbottom, or some other kind of bottom.”). She fondly thinks of him falling up the stairs with her breakfast each morning and decides to give him one more chance. She then remembers their first time: “the sun shines for you, he said, the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth Head… sixteen years ago. After that long kiss, I nearly lost my breath, yes. He said I was a flower of the mountain, yes. And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again, yes. And he asked me would I yes, to say yes, my mountain flower. And first I put my arms around him, yes. And I drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume, yes. And his heart was going like mad. And yes, I said. Yes I will. Yes”. So ends the novel. The last word, the last affirmative thought not the wayworn sleeping hero’s, but the woman he’s avoided all day because he thought she didn’t love him. 

Finally, we must address Inanna’s mastery over two worlds. Having left her crown, her bracelet, her breastplate, and cloak, etc. behind in the underworld, all the accoutrements that signified her power over the heaven and Earth before her descent, before she experienced death and resurrection, she returns naked as the day she was born, for she is born again, and no longer needs these adornments to signify her mastery over the upper world, being reborn the goddess she was, and having now experienced what no immortal has ever experienced, leaves her crown in the underworld to signify her mastery over death. And moreover, she decrees that her husband and her husband’s sister will take her place in the underworld, each spending six months there, as she continues her dominion over heaven and earth uninterrupted. And this birth-death cycle will institute the cycle of the seasons. And while Dumuzid or Tammuz is in the Underworld, Inanna who sent him there nonetheless weeps for his return, and this was ritualized by women weeping for Tammuz, for he is the god of fertility embodying the power of new life during Spring, the tears signifying rain, which brings forth the harvest, and the freedom to live again. Campbell references Ovid’s Metamorphosis, quote, “nothing retains its own form, but nature, the greater renewer ever makes up forms from forms. Be sure that nothing perishes in the whole universe. It does but vary and renew its form.” Nothing is permanent but change, in other words. Having achieved mastery over life and death, Inanna presides over the life-death cycle in every stage of its unfolding: the Sumerian goddess not just of fertility, but of love, beauty, war, called ‘The Queen of Heaven’, her emblems were the owl and the eight-pointed star. She would later be identified with the Assyrian Ishtar, the Phoenician Astarte, the Greek Aphrodite, and of course, the Roman Venus, whose planet long before we or the Romans called it Venus was identified with Inanna, the evening and the morning star, death and rebirth, master of two worlds. 

Conclusion

Anyway, I think I'll end it there before I go down a rabbit hole of comparative mythology. But if you are interested in the subject, I highly recommend Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, as I do JG Frazer's The Golden Bough, which most definitely inspired it (as it did all subsequent work on comparative mythology). As I said earlier, Campbell's monomyth shouldn't be regarded as a kind of grand narrative that describes the structure of all heroic stories across cultures. It is just a useful interpretative tool that helps one navigate certain stories, myths, novels, films, etc.; a seventeen-step elaboration of a simple formula storytellers have consciously or unconsciously used for as long as stories have been told about the ritual of departure, initiation, and return. Not all stories follow each of the 17 steps delineated, and there is certainly some source selection bias in his work, as there is in this podcast, but you will nonetheless find many more stories following the departure-initiation-return formula, and I suppose what Campbell aimed to do was show that this was something disparate cultures across the globe hit upon independently of one another. And in my selecting Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Ulysses, and the Descent of Inanna, I wanted to illustrate how a popular narrative formula is transmitted across cultures and languages through contact and exchange. Whether or not Joyce was aware of Inanna, Tolkien certainly was, and he clearly knew about Joyce. George Lucas, who was a Campbell acolyte, would also have known about the latter’s reverence for Joyce. So, while I can’t claim the examples I use are independent iterations of the monomyth, they are varied enough to show how this formula has persisted through time, across media, and into popular culture, and will continue doing so as long as people demand stories about heroic journeys. 

Campbell does like to cite examples from African and Native American lore, where the likelihood of contact and exchange with the ancient Near East say, is slim to nonexistent. And you feel it's because he wants to demonstrate that this narrative approach is part of our cognitive apparatus, that it has been imprinted on the human brain like the propensity to form grammatical structures in language; an emergent phenomenon that doesn’t depend on cultural exchange. That is to say, any remote, pristine, untouched community in a jungle somewhere that speaks a language will naturally develop its own monomyths, its own seventeen step tales of heroic departure, initiation, and return. An intriguing proposition, but not falsifiable. Some folklorists have been quite snobbish in dismissing it, though. Likely envious of Campbell's popularity in the 20th century. Campbell was even interviewed by Bill Moyers on George Lucas's ranch in the late 80s, shortly before Campbell’s death. But his approach to myth and religion isn't science. He like Jung and Freud before him, is more an interpreter of dreams – a latter day shaman. And although Campbell's work resonated with the work of cultural anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss who posited that the "savage mind" (most often translation of "pensée sauvage", which is unfortunate: maybe "untamed mind" is better) has the same structures as the "civilized/tamed mind", he wasn't sufficiently 'academic' to be admitted into their club. But what Levi-Strauss and Campbell both offer is just another approach to reading a text, like the many other less interesting ones to come out of academia in the past century. Consider a Marxist reading of Star Wars, for example, or a feminist or queer reading of Inanna, a post-colonial reading of Star Wars, a post-structuralist reading of Ulysses. The value of offering such varied readings isn’t to indoctrinate the reader but to interrogate the reading, to enable one to approach all texts with healthy skepticism, to learn to play gracefully with them, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, without deeming any of them gospel.