The Helper

Siegfried at Regin's forge.

Joseph Campbell identifies, as a standard feature of hero legends, a guide or helper figure who appears near the outset of the hero’s quest to advise him or her.

For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.i 

In fairy lore it may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require. The higher mythologies develop the role in the great figure of the guide, the teacher, the ferryman, the conductor of souls to the afterworld.ii

He cites Theseus’s Ariadne, Dante’s Beatrice, or Faust’s Gretchen.

This figure, says Campbell, represents “the benign, protecting power of destiny”; “all the forces of the unconscious,” “Mother Nature herself.”iii But these seem only awkward circumlocutions to avoid using the word “God.” Nature does not have a will or an intent, nor is there any “destiny,” without some divine will to make it so.

Very well; God is present in the hero quest. In the Samson legend, his birth is even announced by an angel, who designates him as a hero. In the story of Moses, Yahweh God himself is the helper figure.

Moses and the burning bush. Bouts the Elder.

But so what? Have we learned anything? After all, if God exists, everything comes from God, or if you prefer euphemisms, “destiny” or “Mother Nature.” And God is always with us, in principle; especially, proverbially, in times of trial. So why the need in these legends for a particular figure simply to assert God’s presence? It seems there must be more to it than this.

But first, is Campbell correct that a helper figure is a standard feature of these legends? Surely he is. Have we not already seen such helper figures?

Recall the aged priest St. Gerebernus who accompanies St, Dymphna when she flees her father King Damon; and the secondary, less commonly remarked, figure of the court fool.iv

We have seen as well that these two are remarkably similar to Lear’s two companions in his wanderings, the fool and Kent: the one an artist, that is, an actor, comedian, musician, and juggler; and the other apparently a religious figure, surprisingly monotheist in a pagan milieu.

There is also such a figure, easily missed, perhaps, in Hamlet; although there seems to be only one of the two: Yorick, who was a mentor to Hamlet in his youth.

“I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times.” (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1)

Yorick is, yet again, a court jester. And he is a guide, surely, to Hamlet in his assumed role as feigned madman. “A whoreson mad fellow,” as one of the gravediggers describes him.

Young Hamlet with Yorick. 1868.

Interesting: three legends, three court jesters.

There seems to be no clear parallel of Father Gerebernus in Hamlet; no religious guide. The ghost of Hamlet’s father might seem to qualify; but it is unclear whether he is a helpful guide or a demon and the ultimate source of the problem. The latter seems more likely. What about Yorick, now dead and so having a solid connection with the spiritual world, serving both functions? He might because of this circumstance combine both figures. Hamlet does appeal to him for supernatural aid, as one might commend oneself to Saint Dymphna or Saint Gerebernus:
Now get you to my ladyʼs chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. (Act 5, Scene 1)

But so far this is all Shakespeare. Are there similar guides in the hero legends?

Indeed, we seem to find the same two figures in the world’s first known epic, the story of Gilgamesh. Assuming that Utnapishtim, the immortal old man who lives beyond the sea of death, is more the goal of the quest than a helper at the threshold, Gilgamesh comes upon two guides in seeking him: first Siduri, the “gentle girl who sits by the sea”; then Urshanabi, the ferryman who “rows the seas of death.”v Both give directions, help, and advice.

And Siduri is apparently an artist, just as are the court fools we find in Shakespeare. 

She crafted the first gold bowl
while peeking at the sun
through a slit across her face veil.

Urshanabi is a priestly figure, a psychopomp (guide of souls to the afterlife), the one who ferries souls across the sea of death. “He is one who plays with deadly snakes,” says Siduri. As Gerberinus serves as confessor for Dymphna, so Urshanabi scolds Gilgamesh for impiously breaking sacred columns and handling sacred stones.

We seem to find the same two in some of the Greek hero legends. Heroes are typically guided and aided by the twin figures Athena and Hermes. According to Apollodorus:

With Hermes and Athena as his guides Perseus sought out the daughters of Phorkys who told him where to find the Nymphai (Nymphs) who kept certain treasures of the gods‒winged sandals, the kibisis (a sack), and the helmet of Hades … He [Perseus] also received from Hermes a sickle made of adamant … [After his quest was complete:] Perseus gave the sandals, kibisis, and helmet back to Hermes, and the Gorgonʼs head to Athena. Hermes returned the aforementioned articles to the Nymphai.vi

Athene helps Perseus kill Medusa

When he completed his quest, according to Ovid, “he built three turf altars to three gods, the left to Mercurius [Hermes], the middle Joveʼs [Zeusʼ], the right the warrior queenʼs [Athenaʼs], and sacrificed a cow to Minerva [Athena], to the wing-foot god [Hermes] a calf and to the king of heaven [Zeus] a bull.”vii These three seem neatly to correspond to Urshanabi, Utnapishtim, and Siduri.

Athena is, like Siduri, an artist, patroness of the arts. Ovid in particular makes this plain, in describing a weaving contest between her and Arachne. The piece she weaves goes far beyond mere craft:

…. There, shades of purple, dyed in Tyrian bronze vessels, are woven into the cloth, and also lighter colours, shading off gradually. The threads that touch seem the same, but the extremes are distant, as when, often, after a rainstorm, the expanse of the sky, struck by the sunlight, is stained by a rainbow in one vast arch, in which a thousand separate colours shine, but the eye itself still cannot see the transitions. There, are inserted lasting threads of gold, and an ancient tale is spun in the web. 

Pallas Athene depicts the hill of Mars, and the court of the Aeropagus, in Cecrops’s Athens, and the old dispute between Neptune and herself, as to who had the right to the city and its name. There the twelve gods sit in great majesty, on their high thrones, with Jupiter in the middle. She weaves the gods with their familiar attributes. The image of Jupiter is a royal one. There she portrays the Ocean god, standing and striking the rough stone, with his long trident, and seawater flowing from the centre of the shattered rock, a token of his claim to the city. She gives herself a shield, a sharp pointed spear, and a helmet for her head, while the aegis protects her breast. She shows an olive-tree with pale trunk, thick with fruit, born from the earth at a blow from her spear, the gods marvelling: and Victory crowns the work. 

Then she adds four scenes of contest in the four corners, each with miniature figures, in their own clear colours, so that her rival might learn, from the examples quoted, what prize she might expect, for her outrageous daring. One corner shows Thracian Mount Rhodope and Mount Haemus, now icy peaks, once mortal beings who ascribed the names of the highest gods to themselves. A second corner shows the miserable fate of the queen of the Pygmies: how Juno, having overcome her in a contest, ordered her to become a crane and make war on her own people. Also she pictures Antigone, whom Queen Juno turned into a bird for having dared to compete with Jupiter’s great consort: neither her father Laomedon, nor her city Ilium were of any use to her, but taking wing as a white stork she applauds herself with clattering beak. The only corner left shows Cinyras, bereaved: and he is seen weeping as he clasps the stone steps of the temple that were once his daughters’ limbs. Minerva surrounded the outer edges with the olive wreaths of peace (this was the last part) and so ended her work with emblems of her own tree.viii

It is, in short, a masterpiece.

The weaving contest: Velasquez.

Hermes, in turn, is the Greek cognate to Urshanabi: Hermes Psychopompos, the figure who guides souls to the spirit world.

Both Hermes and Athena guide and help Herakles as well. In his quest for Cerberus, Hermes leads Herakles to the underworld. Athena guides him back. The Temple of Zeus at Olympia featured twelve metopes showing the twelve labours of Herakles. Athena is shown in four of them. She gave Herakles the noisemakers with which he startled the Stymphalian birds. She helped him support the sky when he sought the apples of the Hesperides. She intervened to end his killing spree during his madness.ix Both perform similar services for Odysseus.

Athena is divine patron of the arts, of military valour, and of wisdom. These fields do not obviously intersect. But interestingly, they are three fields Aristotle cited as typically populated by the melancholy: artists, heroes, and philosophers.x This may reveal Athena’s true interests and her true character.

In the Völsunga Saga, Siegfried/Sigurd again has two helpers and guides in overcoming the dragon Fafnir. The first is Regin, a smith, who “had all wisdom and deftness of hand. … he has the ability to work iron as well as silver and gold and he makes many beautiful and useful things”xi—an artist. Regin crafts Siegfried’s invincible sword, then gives him vital advice on how to proceed. The second helper is the god Odin, who appears as an old man to amend and complete Fafnir’s advice. Odin is cognate to the Greek Hermes. 

Then said Regin, “Make thee a hole, and sit down therein, and whenas the worm comes to the water, smite him into the heart, and so do him to death, and win thee great fame thereby.”
But Sigurd said, “What will betide me if I be before the blood of the worm?” 

Says Regin, “Of what avail to counsel thee if thou art still afeard of everything? Little art thou like thy kin in stoutness of heart.”
Then Sigurd rides right over the heath; but Regin gets him gone, sore afeard. 

But Sigurd fell to digging him a pit, and whiles he was at that work, there came to him an old man with a long beard [Odin], and asked what he wrought there, and he told him. 

Then answered the old man and said, “Thou doest after sorry counsel: rather dig thee many pits, and let the blood run therein; but sit thee down in one thereof, and so thrust the worm’s heart through.”xii

Siegfried is able to kill Fafnir, following this advice.

Siegfried kills Fafnir.

The artist figure gives his advice first, then retreats. The psychopomp figure next appears, with more complete knowledge. Just as with Siduri and Urshanabi.

This may be another reason why the Fool mysteriously disappears before the end of King Lear. His artistic vision only goes so far: it is Kent, the religious figure, who treads the complete path.

In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Sir Launcelot’s grail quest begin when he is unjustly accused of infidelity by his wife Guinevere. The trauma drives him instantly insane. Again here, we see the common pre-modern understanding that madness comes from trauma, and specifically from an experience of emotional betrayal.

She [Guinevere] said: False traitor knight that thou art, look thou never abide in my court, and avoid my chamber, and not so hardy, thou false traitor knight that thou art, that ever thou come in my sight. Alas, said Sir Launcelot; and therewith he took such an heartly sorrow at her words that he fell down to the floor in a swoon. And therewithal Queen Guenever departed. And when Sir Launcelot awoke of his swoon, he leapt out at a bay window into a garden, and there with thorns he was all to-scratched in his visage and his body; and so he ran forth he wist not whither, and was wild wood as ever was man; and so her an two year, and never man might have grace to know him.xiii

Now turn we unto Queen Guenever and to the fair Lady Elaine, that when Dame Elaine heard the queen so to rebuke Sir Launcelot, and also she saw how he swooned, and how he leaped out at a bay window, then she said unto Queen Guenever: Madam, ye are greatly to blame for Sir Launcelot, for now have ye lost him, for I saw and heard by his countenance that he is mad for ever. … Alas, madam, ye do great sin, and to yourself great dishonour, for yehave a lord of your own, and therefore it is your part to love him.xiv

After two years of wandering, Sir Launcelot, still mad, happens upon a tree in which are hanging two swords and two shields. “Upon a tree, there hung a white shield, and two swords hung thereby, and two spears leaned there by a tree.”

What can it mean?

Launcelot takes one of the swords, and with it strikes one of the shields, making a loud noise. A dwarf appears and wrestles him for the sword. Then a knight all in red appears, and fights him for it.

Once Launcelot falls, however, they prove themselves helpers, not enemies. The dwarf says to the knight, 

Sir, …, it is not worship to hurt him, for he is a man out of his wit; and doubt ye not he hath been a man of great worship, and for some heartly sorrow that he hath taken, he is fallen mad; and me beseemeth, said the dwarf, he resembleth much unto Sir Launcelot.

The knight responds:

…Whatsomever he be, said that knight, harm will I none do him.xv

So they put him on a litter, take him to the knight’s castle, and nurse him back to health. He slowly recovers, and eventually rises to do battle with a great boar. The boar can no doubt be taken as a guardian figure; the hero quest has begun. Here as elsewhere, the hero quest is presented as the proper and healthful response to the experience of mental illness generally. Launcelot goes on from this to eventually find the grail.

So, have we met our two helper figures? Two swords, two shields, two helper figures, the dwarf and the red knight?

Not so fast. Launcelot, after all, struck only one of the shields with only one of the swords; he was, then, summoning only one of the helpers. There is an implication here of more to come. And more comes. In vanquishing the boar, he receives terrible wounds, and again passes out. He is found by a holy hermit, who again nurses him back to health.

And here, surely, we have our Gerberinus, our religious figure.

This suggests that the red knight and the dwarf, who respond to the first shield, are collectively the artist figure, aka the court jester. Not an obvious connection to make, perhaps; but dwarves were often employed as court jesters. Once healed by the hermit, Launcelot stumbles into a city and is adopted, being still somewhat mad, as a court jester by the local king. As the sign of his office, he is invested with a red cloak.
And then Sir Castor sent for the fool–that was Sir Launcelot. And when he was come afore Sir Castor, he gave Sir Launcelot a robe of scarlet and all that longed unto him.

This seems to retroactively identify the red knight—as a court jester.

Athena helps Herakles

Here too, as elsewhere, the artist appears first, the dwarf and red knight, then the psychopomp, the hermit, takes over.

For Jason and the Argonauts, there is an obvious helper figure in Phineus; a prophet, someone with spiritual second sight: “Phineus who above all men endured most bitter woes because of the gift of prophecy which Letoʼs son had granted him aforetime.”xvi Phineas gives the Argonauts detailed directions to Colchis and the Golden Fleece, outlining the dangers they will face on the way, and how to overcome them. He is their guide, then, for the entire trip.

There is nothing here to clearly identify Phineas as an artistic type; except that he is not on good terms with the gods, having revealed too many of their secrets to mankind. That sounds more like the rebellious artist than the priest. Like Siduri, the primordial artist in the Gilgamesh tale, he lives on the shore of the sea; he does not cross over. He does not go with the Argonauts on their journey, but describes their destination from afar. He paints the picture, as it were.

And there is here a second guide and helper: Medea. She is, explicitly, a priestess, a priestess of Hecate. Her advice and help is vital once Jason has reached the far side of that great sea, the other side.

Tiresias: Fuseli

If we then consider Oedipus Rex, we find a figure very similar to Phineas there, an old man with second sight, who guides Oedipus on his quest—in this case, unhappily. It is Tiresias, the all-purpose prophet of Greek legend. Also like Phineus, he is blind—blind, that is, to the physical world, the better to see without distraction the invisible spiritual world.

And in the Oedipus cycle, again, there is a second helper figure: Antigone. She is not formally a priestess, but, like Kent, she is conspicuous for her religious sentiments. When her brother Polynices dies, she violates the law to mourn for him, arguing that the divine law supercedes human law. “I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living,” she explains to her sister. “In that world I shall abide for ever.”xvii To her, it seems, the spirit world is the real world. She ministers to her brother, and then also to her father, Oedipus.

So why are these helper figures here? Because, surely, they indicate the two reliable aids and supports for the abused and the depressed: the two great spiritual disciplines, the two great guides for the perplexed: religion and art. Modern psychiatry and psychology are not included, of course. They did not yet exist. Should they be? Have they offered anything better?

The Gilgamesh epic calls Siduri, the archetypal artist, “The girl who gives men lifesaving drinks”; “whose drinks refresh the soul.”xviii That, surely, aptly describes the proper effect of art. She warns Gilgamesh that, in undertaking the hero quest, he is “staring at the sun.” An interesting image; particularly since the epic has at this point just described Siduri, the artist, as one who has “peeked at the sun” in order to fashion her golden bowls. Artists, then, are those who have seen the transcendent, and reflect or reveal it in their work. They live on the shore of the eternal sea; and so are authorities for those of us who undertake hero quests. Every work of art is a glimpse of eternity.

Ushanabi, the religious figure, on the other hand, has actually himself crossed over to the other side of that sea. In principle, he is the greater and the later guide.

Here we plainly have suggestions for the treatment of depression.


iCampbell, op. cit., p. 69.

ii Ibid., p. 72.

iiiIbid.

ivone account that includes the court jester is given at http://people.wku.edu/sally.kuhlenschmidt/whimsy/dymphna.htm

vEpic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 10, Kenneth Sublett, trans.

viApollodorus, Library, 2. 37 & 46, Aldrich, trans.

viiOvid, Metamorphoses Book 4, ll. 740 ff Melville, trans.

viiiIbid., Book 4, ll. 70-102 Kline trans.

ixhttps://www.thoughtco.com/the-goddess-athena-helps-hercules-117193

x“Through what is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts turn out to be melancholics (μελαγχολικοι)?” “Many other heroes seem to have been similarly afflicted, and among men of recent times Empedocles, Plato, and Socrates, and numerous other well-known men, and also most of the poets.” Problem XXX.

xiVölsunga Saga, Chapter 14, William Morris trans.

xiiVölsunga Saga, Chapter 18.

xiiiMalory, Morte d’Arthur, Book 11, Ch. 8.

xivIbid., Ch. 9.

xvIbid.

xviApollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 2. 179 - 434 RC Seaton trans.

xviiSophocles, Antigone.

xviiiEpic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 10.

The One and the Many

Moreau: The Lernean Hydra

It is characteristic of the hero that, sooner or later in his career, he must stand alone against all comers.

As Ovid describes Perseusʼs moment, at his wedding feast, “Phineus and a thousand followers of Phineus, surround the one man. Spears to the right of him, spears to the left of him, fly thicker than winter hail, past his eyes and ears. He sets his back and shoulders against a massive stone column, and protected behind, turns towards the opposing crowd of men, and withstands their threat.”i

Telephus holds off the assembled forces of the Greeks, the same armada that later conquers Troy; he “turned the valiant Danaoi to flight, and drove them into the sterns of their sea-ships,” says Pindar.ii And he rejects the calls of his countrymen to join them in that campaign, continuing to stand apart. Oedipus, if he can be taken as a hero, defeats a force of five mounted men, alone, at the Phokis crossroads.

Jason must defeat an autochthonic army that appears after he sows the dragonʼs teeth: “earthborn men were springing up over all the field; .... And as when abundant snow has fallen on the earth and the storm blasts have dispersed the wintry clouds under the murky night, and all the hosts of the stars appear shining through the gloom; so did those warriors shine springing up above the earth.”iii

Herakles achieves many similar feats. He defeats the Minyans “almost single-handedly.”iv He storms Troy at the head of “only six small craft and scanty forces.”v He holds off the Amazon army, killing each of their leaders. He defeats “hosts of four-legged centaurs.”vi The Lernean Hydraʼs multiple heads seem another image of multitude: “the hydra, that monster with a ring of heads with power to grow again.”vii “Of its fearful heads some severed lay on earth, but many more were budding from its necks,” writes Quintus Smyrnaeus.viii Some say the Hydra had nine heads; some say a hundred.

Being multiple in form seems a standard feature of Herakles’s opponents: “Typhons triple-bodied,” Cerberus, “the three-headed hound, hell’s porter.”ix Geryon has three heads; his watchdog Orthus has two heads. Ladon, guardian of the apples of the Hesperides, is “an immortal dragon with a hundred heads,... which spoke with many and divers sorts of voices.”x

Ravana.

So too, it seems, with Rama’s great adversary, Ravana: he has ten heads and many arms. Karna conquers a more literal multitude, the entire world, in the name of his friend Duryodhana. Alexander, of course, by tradition, does something rather similar. Moses, less dramatically, must repeatedly struggle against the popular consensus of the Hebrews, who continually turn on him as they wander in the desert. In the end, he does literal battle, and with a small minority of Levites, cuts the majority down (Exodus 32:27-30).

In Hamlet, our hero finds himself alone on a pirate ship, facing the entire crew: “in the grapple I boarded them: on the instant they got clear of our ship; so I alone became their prisoner” (Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 6). But he somehow, miraculously, achieves his freedom. In the more heroic original legend upon which Shakespeare based his play, Amleth holds off the assembled might of England almost alone with a bogus army of the dead.xi Even in King Lear, the abused heroine, Cordelia, is a solitary figure, even her husband absent for the action of the play, while the abusers, Regan and Goneril, are multiple. Lear is stripped of all his retainers but Kent and the fool. Dymphna must face the assembled army of Damon’s kingdom Oriel, with only old Father Gerberus at her side.

Churchill, a modern hero, and a depressive, stood famously against the consensus of his day in resisting Hitler, “a lone voice in the wilderness.”

Even Don Quixote, in his quest to be a proper hero, must engage alone against an army of giants:

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”xii

Don Quixote does battle: Dore

Many folk heroes are outlaws, who operate in defiance of the government, the social order, of their day: Robin Hood, the 108 Heroes of the Water Margin of Chinese legend, Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel.

This motif of one against many seems to reflect a characteristic we have seen in the depressed. Solitude is definitive, Robert Burton suggests, of the spiritual zone the melancholic inhabits. “Above all things they love solitariness.”xiii Diderot too cites “a firm penchant for solitude” as one of the chief features of melancholy.xiv The melancholic is a loner.

The hero type, it would seem, intensifies this characteristic. The merely depressed removes himself from the social whirl. The hero attacks it, rapier drawn.

According to Adult Children of Alcoholics, the second sign that you have been raised in a dysfunctional family is “We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.” Number seven is “We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.” Number twelve is “We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and will do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience painful abandonment feelings.”xv

At first glance, this seems to contradict both conventional wisdom about the melancholic, and the hero legends. It paints the abused child as a compulsive crowd-pleaser.

But it may, instead, point out the reason why the depressed crave solitude, and why the hero stands alone in defiance.

The family is our first society; it is the introduction for each of us to social life, and all social life in microcosm. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The family is the original cell of social life. ... Authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society. The family is the community in which, from childhood, one can learn moral values, begin to honor God, and make good use of freedom. Family life is an initiation into life in society. (para. 2207).

In the case of an abused child, however, this original society is corrupt: his or her family is “dysfunctional.” It teaches all the wrong lessons. What then?

He must, then, fight against it if he (or she) is ever to grow out of his abused state; just as he must solve the riddle of the double-bind of filial duty. This will require heroic courage: the courage of High Noon. For, as the ACA “Laundry List” suggests, the more spontaneous response is to keep trying harder to seek an approval that will never come. Trapping you in another double-bind.

This illustrates the depth of the challenge faced by the abused depressive; and the degree to which he or she manages to overcome this perhaps marks the division between the ordinary depressed and the heroic. This is indeed what ACA advises in their “recovery” program. Seeking solitude or exile is the first sign of health. Rebelling against the corrupt social consensus is the ultimate victory.

However, this developed ability, if it is ever developed, to think for himself or herself, working only from first principles, would then serve the melancholic well for any enterprise requiring creativity or coming up with novel thoughts; for being a culture hero, an artist, or a leader of any sort; for becoming an explorer, a discoverer. See Burton’s armillary sphere and cross staff, used as personal emblems.

To become a hero, the abused must fight this great battle against the many-headed monster of social consensus, which is poisoning the landscape all about them.

And it is the abused child, specifically, who is called to this by circumstance.

iOvid, Metamorphoses, Book 5, ll.149-199. Mary Innis, trans.


iiPindar, Olympian Odes, 9. Myers trans.


iiiApollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, Book 2, ll. 1340-1407.


ivRobert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol. 2, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Pelican, 1955, “Erginus,” entry 121.


vGraves, op. cit., “Hesione,” entry 137.


viEuripides, Herakles.


viiEuripides, Herakles.


viiiFall of Troy 6. 212 ff. Way trans.


ixEuripides, Herakles, Coleridge trans.


xApollodorus, Library, 2.5.11 Frazer trans.


xiSaxo Grammaticus, “Amleth, Prince of Denmark,” Gesta Danorum, D.L. Ashliman, trans.


xii Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 1, Chapter VIII.


xiiiAnatomy of Melancholy, Part 1, Section 3, Memb. 1, Subsect. 2.


xivDiderot, Melancholie, Vol. 10, 1765, pp. 308–311.




xv“The Laundry List: 14 Traits of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic,” ACA.

The Hero Crosses the Threshold

Andromeda: Poynter

In his analysis of the hero cycle, Joseph Campbell sees in most such legends a dramatic point at which the hero “crosses the first threshold” into the magical world or spiritual realm (or, in Campbell’s terms, the Jungian unconscious):

With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the “threshold guardian” at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in the four directions—also up and down—standing for the limits of the hero’s present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown, and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the member of the tribe.i

Beyond the physical world, in other words, is the metaphysical.

This may not be of special psychological significance. It may not be speaking to us of depression or depressed states specifically. It may be just a necessary plot device. The author must suggest to the reader or listener somehow that the physical world is being left behind, and a different world, the spiritual, being entered.

What more obvious than a door, or some similar “threshold” image?

The appearance of some uncanny creature, a rabbit running by with a pocket watch, say, or a cloven-hoofed faun at the back of the wardrobe, simply alerts listeners that we are in a literary and no longer a literal place.

Campbell says, however that this guardian figure is also often fierce and frightening. Campbell writes:

...the approaches and entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within. They are preliminary embodiments of the dangerous aspect of the presence, corresponding to the mythological ogres that bound the conventional world, or to the two rows of teeth of the whale.ii

It is less obvious that this should be so. Alice’s white rabbit, after all, or her looking glass over the mantel, are threshold images, but carry no tone of menace. The difference may be that Carroll’s Alice stories are not hero quests; they are only travellers’ descriptions of Wonderland. The terror on the threshold may be a special feature of the hero’s experience. And so may tell us something about depression.

Let’s take a step back, and consider the proto-hero as abused child. There must, we can assume, be psychological ties of some sort binding the abused child to the family situation, to the parent, and to the abusive situation with which they grew up. No bully gets far if their victim can run away. You have to immobilize the victim before you can properly beat them, after all. You cannot simply expect the damsel to lie there on the railroad track. Any self-respecting narcissist must ensure that there are cords to bind as a matter of course. 

Andromeda: Dore

And of course there are: family ties.

Slipping out of these ties may be the initial and defining heroic act; what separates the heroic from the disabled depressive.

Perhaps the particular images used for these thresholds and threshold guardians can give us some further clues to this process.

For Perseus, the threshold guardians are the three Grey Sisters, the Graeae. Aeschylus writes:

The daughters of Phorkys dwell, ancient maids, three in number, shaped like swans, possessing one eye amongst them and a single tooth; neither does the sun with his beams look down upon them, nor ever the nightly moon. And near them are their three winged sisters, the snake-haired Gorgons, loathed of mankind, whom no one of mortal kind shall look upon and still draw breath. Such is the peril that I bid you to guard against.iii

They live at the ends of the earth—suggesting, as Campbell says, the gateway between the physical and what is beyond. They have only one eye and one tooth among them—suggesting the point beyond which the physical senses fade. They live in darkness, at the margin of the visible. 

Graeae: Burne-Jones

They do not seem formidable; but their traditional names hint otherwise: Deino, “the terrible,” Enyo, “the warlike” and Persis, “the destoyer.”iv They may, too, be only an aspect of their “sisters,” who are “near them,” the Gorgons, who are more terrible.

Rather than heroic combat, Perseus is faced here with something like a riddle, an intellectual challenge: how to get the eye from the Graeae. He faces a second riddle in battling their sisters: how to fight Medusa when he cannot look at her.

Oedipus too faces a fierce female figure, at what seems to be, at least as Sophocles frames the tale, the outset of his hero quest; the sphinx. She has the head and breasts of a woman, but wings and a lion’s body; she devours people.v According to Pausanias, she especially loved to devour Theban children.vi Oedipus, like Perseus, faces an intellectual challenge from her: the famous riddle. He solves the puzzle, and she dissolves herself. Or dissolves into the main narrative of the play.

Rama, too, faces a fierce female figure, at the outset of his hero-quest proper: Surpanakha. She appears to him and Lakshmana as a “supremely beautiful damsel,” but she is a shape-shifter. She wants to couple with either brother, but then kill the other, along with Rama’s wife Sita.

Rama Spurns Surpanakha: Goble

And here too, the two heroes face a logical problem. If one rejects her, she simply moves to the other. If they accept her, she will kill Sita, Rama’s wife; and the other brother. Lakshmana seems to solve the immediate dilemma by cutting off her nose and ears, obliging her to withdraw; perhaps a reference, like the Graeae’s shared tooth and eye, to leaving the realm of the senses. Surpanakha retreats, dissolving into the main narrative of the epic.vii

A series of older women: surely Freud would see these as an image of the mother. And perhaps, this once, he is right. In any case, a threatening but generally beautiful female figure suggests a mixed message, at least for a male hero. One expects love, attraction; yet this figure wants to destroy. It might be a fitting image for an abusive parent: one expects love, one gets malice.

Jason crosses an almost literal threshold, and one that is again frightful, when he sails through the clashing rocks of the Symplegades. And he too must solve a riddle: how to time the passage precisely between their outward and inward movements. He also, before this, encounters a sinister female image: the island of Lemnos, where the women have killed all the men.

Theseus too must solve a sort of preliminary riddle to defeat the Minotaur: how to find his way in the labyrinth, deliberately designed to confuse. Here too there seems to be a female threshold guardian, but she is a helpful figure: Ariadne. On the other hand, Theseus has just had to face down a malevolent female figure, Medea, who sought to poison him.

Herakles must solve two puzzles to defeat the foe of his first labour, the Nemean lion, “the cause of many a sorrow to flocks and to men.”viii The lion lives in a cave with two exits; if Herakles corners him within the one, he can pop out the other. Our hero first solves this puzzle, by putting a net over one exit. Then he must puzzle out how to kill a creature that is invulnerable to any weapon.ix He strangles the lion, then wears the invulnerable pelt as his costume: with this first labour, he takes on the mantle of the hero.

The Nemean lion is said by some to be sibling to Oedipus’s sphinx:x that is to say, perhaps, that they represent the same thing.

Another obvious example of a puzzle at the outset of a hero quest is Alexander’s Gordian knot. Untying it is his first task on crossing over into Asia, and untying it predestines him to rule the continent.

Campbell mentions as one threshold image the teeth of the whale, most obviously a reference to the Jonah story in the Old Testament. But in fact, in the Bible passage, the whale’s teeth are not mentioned: “Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” (Jonah, 1: 17, NIV)

Jonah: Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel

The threshold image here seems instead to be the deadly storm on board Jonah’s ship: this looks to the sailors like the hand of God. And it presents again a puzzle to be solved:

Then the sailors said to each other, “Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.” They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. So they asked him, “Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us?” (Jonah, 2: 7-8, NIV).

Jonah solves the riddle; and in solving it, be acts for the first time heroically. He realizes he is the cause, and urges that they throw him overboard. They do, and the storm ceases. His hero quest begins.

This storm might symbolize in turn some mental or emotional conflict, just as would a riddle: wind is a common and natural image of the spirit, and the two words “soul” or “mind” (nefesh) and “breath” are related in Hebrew as in Latin and Greek. So a storm can aptly blow the mariner into the “green world” of the spirit; as it obviously does in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or as a tornado in The Wizard of Oz. A wind blows Psyche into the green world in Apuleius’s “Amor and Psyche” legend.

Herakles’s psychotic frenzy, in which he kills his wife and children, leading to his famous labours, may be a more literal form of this spiritual “storm”: a mental or nervous breakdown, in which some inherent mental or emotional puzzle overwhelms us, and demands our total attention.

Medusa: Bocklin

Were it not for the fearsome images surrounding it, such a puzzle might only be a signal that we are entering the mental world: for that is just what happens when we solve a riddle. We turn our attention away from the physical and social world around us, towards purely mental concerns.

But given the fearsome associations—solving the puzzle is usually a matter of life and death for our hero—this may also be a reference to one specific sort of puzzle. Gregory Bateson called it the “double bind.”xi It is the usual way in which a manipulative personality type, a narcissist, will control their victim. He or she will put the abused in a situation in which every possible response is a wrong one; from which, therefore, there is no escape.

And there is such a fundamental double-bind at the core of every abused childhood: how can you turn on your own parent? How can you reject what they say? If you do, you are a bad person. If you do not, however, according to the abusive parent, you are a bad person. Either way, you are a bad person. Any clever narcissist in any relationship, and certainly in the position of a parent, will exploit this: “I hate you. How could you leave me? How dare you contradict me.”

The story of Moses and the Exodus serves to illustrate the routine. The Pharaoh and the Egyptians fear and want to kill the Hebrews (Exodus 1); yet at the same time, they will not allow them to leave (Exodus 5). Pharaoh finally allows them to leave (Exodus 12), then sends an army after them to punish them for leaving (Exodus 14). The dilemma is resolved with the parting of the Red Sea, which may symbolize as image two options, both deadly, pulled apart, and the abused Hebrew children allowed to escape, like Jason between the Symplegades, up the middle. Thus begins the collective hero quest of the Jews.

To become an active hero, perhaps it is necessary, then, to see through this one initial puzzle, symbolized well by two crashing rocks, one of which might be marked “Damned if you do,” the other “Damned if you don’t.” Until you get beyond them, you are paralyzed.

This double bind is also suggested by the entire plot of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex: Oedipus, seeking to escape the charge of wanting to kill his father and marry his mother, discovers he is condemned by his very attempts to avoid it. A perfect double-bind.

In order to move from the disabling sort of depression to the heroic sort, then, it is first necessary to analyse and see through what is really going on. You must see that you have been put in such a double-bind, in order to escape it. Specifically, whatever the particular details, you must first clearly perceive that your parent or parents, or some other dominating figure, from which you have always naturally assumed a reciprocal love, in fact wishes you ill. You must then take the leap of no longer feeling bound by their perceptions of you or of the world around you. This is indeed an exile, if only a mental exile; but it is obviously facilitated by, and my require, an actual physical removal as well.

This must be a great challenge for any child, should she or he have grown to any age: it is a wise child who knows his own father.


iCampbell, op. cit. p. 77.

iiIbid. p. 92.

iiiAeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ll. 791 ff.

ivApollodorus, Library, 1.10

vApollodorus, Library, 3. 52 - 55.

viPausanias, Description of Greece, 5. 11. 2.

vii Valmiki, Ramayana, Aranya Kanda.

viiiTheocritus, Idylls 25. 132 ff.

ixApollodorus, Library, 2. 74 – 76.

xGraves, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 79. 

xiGregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; originally published, San Francisco: Chandler Pub. Co., 1972.