The Myth of the Hero by Bill Butler Revision: 20 July 2013 ONE On every beach there is a ninety-seven-pound weakling. He crouches where the The hero, then, is generated by the needs of ordinary mortals. He is the answer tides recede, glaring at the retreating backs of his girlfriend and the bully who to our prayers and will do those things which we are completely incapable of has just kicked sand in his face. What is he to do? Who will help him recover doing for ourselves. The genesis of literature and myth in which there are heroes his girl and his manhood? is in human need. At one end of the spectrum there are such figures as the Revenger, the Avenger, the Destroyer, Mike Hammer and Travis McGee. At the The headlines are a disaster. The economic situation is worsening with the other are Maitreya Buddha, Jesus Christ, and the Messiah of the Jews. All share rats of right and left deserting the ship as fast as they can. If inflation and a common genesis in human need for a good guy to ride in out of the sunset. unemployment continue to rise, the result has to be a political crisis leading to What he will do when he has dismounted depends on the situation. The anarchy or a dictatorship. We need a leader. Revengers will all solve their (and our) equations with bloodbaths, providing answers which are similar to Alexander’s when confronted with the problem Up to her elbows in the dirty dishwater of seven strange men, Snow White sighs of the Gordian Knot. Even Christ and the Messiah will bring with them some for a prince to rescue her from the boredom of her forest life. bloodshed. Only Maitreya will come bearing the final credits, THE END rolling up across the screen. In a political context such directness is intolerable. When Paladin, the Lone Ranger, Mao Tse-tung and Franklyn Delano Roosevelt have Each of these situations expresses a condition which may produce a good guy, a completed their calculations, the world will be a more orderly place whether it Hero. The ninety-seven-pound weakling will either train until he is musclebound is the world of Tombstone, Arizona, or Europe or Asia. For it is usually order enough to kick sand in other people’s faces or he will ally himself with someone that rides with these horsemen, if only the order imposed by the King of the heavy enough to do the job for him. If the people (the frogs) get anxious enough Frogs. for a leader (a king), one will be found for them; he will be named Wyatt Earp, John F. Kennedy, or Adolf Hitler. Snow White will be swept off her feet by Prince Charming. They will all achieve the hero which they need and deserve and he When the concept of the hero was first framed it was in myths which were will be found within a perfectly normal human, for example, in Clark Kent when vehicles of religious truth, history and custom. And in these myths the hero he steps into a telephone booth and takes off his glasses. Or, when stricken would have been produced, as in the situations outlined above, as a result by a fatal disease, he will suddenly discover resources of courage which were of prayer, explicit and dreamed. But prayer is not the sole cause of heroes. unknown before and which will enable him to bear his fate. In such instances Jesus Christ, Saoshyant, Heracles, Romulus and Remus, Siegfried and Jason all the individual becomes his own hero. became heroes at least partly as a result of heavenly meddling. God or the gods 1 determine that a hero is necessary; and wish is father to the man. resoundingly and satisfactorily defeated as one of life in toto, a process of dance The hero is an archetypal figure, a paradigm who bears the possibilities of life, where all, including Krishna, move in patterns which accord with their natures. courage, love — the commonplaces, the indefinables which themselves define In the war of the Bharatas these patterns are revealed as encompassing not only our human lives. Our reactions to the hero’s life, his struggles, his victory or his the valour of Arjuna and Dhritarashtra and the divinity of Krishna but also the defeat, are likely to be gut reactions, more comprised of intuition than intellect. treachery of Arjuna and Krishna and the cruelty of Dhritarashtra. Where he walks, the rules, the boundaries, and even the roles are forever subject War is not, however, the only human situation which generates myth and to change. The laws of this world do not apply. mythic heroes. Any condition of stress, and particularly any ‘frontier’ situation, Whether by prayer or by divine intervention (or by simply sending a wire to will serve as well, in both classic and contemporary myths. In medicine such Paladin, San Francisco) the good guy will appear at a crisis point: a time of doctors as Salk, Barnard, and Kildare counterposit the ancient figures of Aes- stress when the rules of the mundane world are inoperative or unknown. It culapius, Imhotep, and Enmenduranna. All of them inhabit both the ‘real’ and follows that those individuals who work on the frontiers of law are naturals to ‘mythic’ worlds of life and death; and their battles, as psychopomps, are on that become heroes for the mass of us who punch timeclocks. Such a frontier is any frontier which separates the two. battlefield, where the heroes may be the flagbearers at Iwo Jima in the Second Similarly the eighteenth and nineteenth century frontiers of America produced World War, originally a historic event, or Arjuna and Dhritarashtra fighting in such heroes as Paul Bunyan (logging), Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and Daniel the Mahabharata, which may be entirely myth. The Mahabharata is in fact Boone (pioneers), Buffalo Bill and George Armstrong Custer. All flourished on based entirely upon a single great battle, and to relate the causes, events, and the borders of law, order, and civilization which abutted on chaos, anarchy, and results of this conflict requires twelve or more volumes. howling savages. In such territory, where the frontiers are by no means as sure Because the membrane which separates order from chaos is so thin in times as they are sometimes made out to be, one would expect to find the myths and of war, because the subject of war is so plainly death with no disguise, many heroes which do exist. And specific to our own time but having precursors in of the world’s greatest myths and mythic heroes are creations of battle. The earlier eras, there are the nomadic drivers of the big transcontinental diesels Mahabharata, the Iliad, and the Niebelungenlied are all largely concerned with moving across America or across Europe into Asia. On the road (chaos) they not only the heroism but also the divine imperatives of conflict as are the Cid, the exist in an ambience which has nothing to do with the little woman and kids Song of Roland, Beowulf, the Norse Sagas, and many books of the Old Testament. waiting at home with the mortgage. And when at home (civilization) they do In the Bhagavad Gita, a section of the Mahabharata which is often published as not go into any great detail concerning the honky-tonks or any of the other a separate work, the holiness and necessity of strife, even between members of temptations of their road — not if they want to keep on having their cake and the same family, is as well expounded as it is ever likely to be by the character eating it too. of Krishna. To Western readers the personification of Krishna, often thought of The point of these examples is to illustrate what is not so much a conflict as a Hindu Christ and god of love, is a little confusing; for he appears in the between law and anarchy, an image which is usually presented, as a complicity. Bhagavad Gita or Song of God as a god of war, whose song is war. By whatever names the antagonists are called — law and anarchy or good and Considered carefully, however, the characterization is reasonable. The evil — they share a common ground, a common dynamic. Not surprisingly, some Hinduism of the Bhagavad Gita tends toward a polytheistic vision where God of the most important heroes who function in this no-man’s (for it is god’s) land is All — the deities of all the worlds, animal, vegetable, mineral — everything. are cops and robbers, and, to some extent, lawyers, judges, and any who are Such a vision not only includes the god of Christian love but also his counterpart, concerned with the manipulation and manufacture of law. Society constantly the angel of hell; and the dynamic is not so much one in which ‘evil’ will be seeks, whatever society, to establish the line between good and evil (law and 2 anarchy). It is for this purpose that the commandments of every religion, the that they were descended from the goddess Venus. For the Roman Senate to laws of every nation are written, yet in practice immediately a line is drawn it censure Caesar, a hero and a god, is as ridiculous and ultimately futile as the becomes subject to exception. The nearly universal prohibition against killing, condemnation of Nixon in America. Such men were created to be beyond the for example, becomes modified by justifiable circumstances: in a holy cause, to law, which is in this context a container fashioned for lesser mortals.