The First Hero’s Journey?

The following paragraphs are from the May 2020 e-update to Before Orion: Finding the Face of the Hero (2017). This section explores stages of the hero’s journey as popularized by mythologist Joseph Campbell and expressed in Paleolithic cave art to 34,000 years ago. Learn more about the first hero’s journey.

By Bernie Taylor | Bernie’s Blog

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Published May 13, 2020

The Monomyth (from Chapter 17 – The Timeless Story)

We might further and more speculatively elaborate on this Gallery of Discs story in the structure of most epics such that the hero takes on impossible tasks, faces grave danger, confronts his self, and returns to share his own story, thus becoming the teacher. This idea of a “monomyth” was coined by the Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941) and popularized by Joseph Campbell who was best known for his work in comparative mythology and religion. Campbell believed in a monomyth that sees all mythic narratives as variations of a single great story. The monomyth hypothesis is based on the observation that there is a common pattern beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin. This monomyth is fundamentally the description of human nature—our fears, desires, hope, etc.—which are manifested in our stories. The central pattern most studied by Campbell is often referred to as “the hero’s journey” and was first described by Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Broadly described, “the hero’s journey” is the story of the man or woman, who through great suffering, reaches an experience with a solution found within themselves and returns with gifts powerful enough to set their society free. 

The story starts with an individual who is in an unsatisfying place in life. The person then travels to a new place where he or she is mentored by a spiritual individual who bestows magical powers. In this place, the self—the monsters within the individual—are faced. There is a crisis point. The person finds the courage to face his or her fears. The individual is then made better, or whole, through a personal transformation, and becomes the hero. There is a return back to the original physical place to share the story, or to give back the essence of the hero’s journey.  

One often hears of a hero who had a miraculous but humble birth. He or she has early proof of superhuman strength. The hero who rises to the night sky with the aid of bottlenose dolphin or transforms into a golden eagle might be an example of such superhuman strength. In the hero, there is a rapid rise to prominence or power and a triumphant struggle with the forces of evil (Henderson, J. 1964). Yet one doesn’t have to be a medieval knight or Greek demigod to experience the hero’s journey. This journey is experienced by all of us from birth, through the struggles of adolescence, and the stages of adulthood. Mythology is a metaphor for that human existence whose characters are within us.  In mythology, we meet the archetypes of mankind who are incarnated through ourselves in the story that we seek to express.

We found all of the stages in this archetypal hero’s journey on the Gallery of Discs. We may include the crisis point where the hero faces his self. The Paleolithic artist depicted this moment when the red-haired man and the strong swimmer meet, as pictured above. The gaze of the strong swimmer’s face closest to the red-haired man seems perplexed. They also appear to be fighting each other. One with left fist clenched, the other bearing a club in his right hand, and their remaining hands raised to touch one another. They are, in fact, one character on a cosmic journey, as we found in the constellations of Orion for the red-haired man and Perseus swimming in the Milky Way. The red-haired man or the strong swimmer sees an echo of his self in the same cosmic water that the latter swims. Their raised hands may be touching both sides of that celestial river as one sees the reflection of meeting hands in the surface of a gentle pool. Although he appears to be fighting himself in his present, the hero has actually traveled back in time through the movement of the stars to “beat himself up” about something, perhaps a deep regret. Not unlike us, he cannot change what happened in the past because the feat would influence the present. This is just as Ebenezer Scrooge was able to travel back in time to contemplate on where he had been through the spirit of Christmas past in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Yet Scrooge’s visit to the future with the guidance of another spirit could only be changed by his actions in the present. When we have deep regrets—those inner demons—from our past, we carry them as unseen baggage and like those of Scrooge they haunt us in our dreams. That battle within must be consciously faced, as does the depicted Paleolithic hero, taken ownership of, and then let go to complete our own hero’s journey.

This self-battling hero may be the most impactful portrayal of characters in this work. If this author’s interpretation is correct, we must reconsider not only that these images are a great artistic achievement and there was systematic knowledge and use of mapmaking and astronomy in the Paleolithic tens of millennia before what we previously thought was possible, but there was also a conscious depth of psychological understanding we otherwise believe was not appreciated until the last two centuries. This proposal should not be taken lightly as it speaks to a people who had graduated from mimicking what they observed in the natural world to contemplative intellectual thought in time and space with a narrative that rivals self-reflective characters in the works of Dicken’s and other great authors of our age. The ancient Greeks also recognized the struggles of their hero Hercules but instead of this psychological self-reflection they projected his anger—one of those inner energies—in myth at the many foes he battles in the present over the course of his labours.

Bernie Taylor is the author of Before Orion: Finding the Face of the Hero (2017).

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