what's the difference?

There are no two ways about this: heroes down the ages and across borders have an abundance of similarities. C G Jung who has contributed hugely to the understnding of hero myths has said that the collective unconscious drives mankind to create myths that are similar in outlook and content. This explains the similarities between the life cycles of heroes from Sumerian, Mayan, Chinese and Indian myths.

To explain the differences, we should perhaps look at the collective conscious which works in many ways. For instance, let us take the quest/adventure that takes a hero from his familiar environment into uncharted territory. Every hero has one and as Campbell has clarified in his book 'The hero with a thousand faces', every hero's journey is looped in this common cycle. But the quest itself varies from hero to hero and this is what is shaped by immediate and local concerns or waht we could call the collective conscious.

Consider the Sumerian myth -- Gilgamesh. After the death of Enkidu, his close friend and in some ways his alter ego, Gilgamesh the King of Uruk is devastated. he mourns the loss of his friend and fears the end of his own. This fear takes him on a journey into the unknown -- in search of the elixir of immortality.

Gilgamesh is told that there lives, in a land separated by cavernous gorges, shark infested oceans and uncrossable mountains, a grand old man called Ziusudra. This is the man who survived the great floods and upon whom the gods have bestowed immortality.

Gilgamesh decides to set out in search of this man and finds him after an arduous journey. But he is thwarted in his efforts by Ziusudra who tells him that “mankind is no more than a fragile reed and cannot expect permanence. Nothing is permanent on earth:

The dragon-fly emerges and flies.
But its face is in the sun for but a day.”

However not one to lose heart easily, Gilgamesh persists and finally wins the secret of the flower of immortality only to lose it to the snake who, ever since, has learnt to live on and on by simply shedding its skin! Gilgamesh loses the elixir because he is careless and in a brief moment of frailty, neglects to guard his gift as well as he should have. And thus as the clay tablets say, he fulfilled what the gods had in store for all men: ‘All men had returned to clay,’ said Ziusudra.

Take another hero: Hercules. He could have been an immortal hero but for the wrath of Hera, wife of Zeus. This is what made him human and ultimately even though he performed the 12 labours and fought hard, he could not overcome the obstacles placed in his path by Hera and her wily aides.

These stories reflect a concern over the end of human life. The characters carry the burdens placed by society in the form of social conduct, gender and duty and show the rest how to live their lives. However they also share what seems to have been a key concern of the times – immortality. Perhaps, we can say, that these societies were debating and theorising about death and what happens to us when we die.

Now let us move over to the heroes of Indian myth: Ram, Krishna, Buddha, Indra. Immortality is not an overriding concern in any of their lives. They fight rakhshasas, Asuras, evil relatives and cousins to emerge victorious and to always uphold the strength of good over evil.

One reason could be that the Vedic philosophy had grappled with death and life and created its own rationale that looked at life and death as the two milestones in a
recurring cyclical journey. Thsu there was already an acceptance of death as a temporary stop before the soul moved on and in most cases, lodged itself in another body. It was reborn and a hero's sould always went up and uniteds with god before it found the need to launch into an avatar. Mortality was not such a problem in a society that was dealing with assimilating different philosophies and cultures.

This is not to say that it never was a concern in Indian myth. It was and this is relfected in the battle for amrita and the samudra manthan. But the point is the cultural and social context that gave birth to the Indian heroes was at ease with the concept of mortality. And hence our heroes fought very different battles from their counterparts in the West

the hero is among us

C G Jung, whose work on archetypes has shaped much of modern day thinking on heroes believes that our myths conceal a valuable treasure in their structures and teachings. He believed that all human souls are tied together by an invisible thread which he calls the “collective unconscious”. This thread helps stitch a tapestry of images that reflect common desires, aspirations, fears and expectations.

Our hero myths draw on this collective unconscious to reveal a structure that is universal and laden with familiar motifs and symbols. We see the collective unconscious at work everywhere. This is also what draws our heroes into Campbell’s exhaustive list of stages that a hero must live his or her life through.

For instance every hero has a miraculous birth -- the birth of Ram and Krishna and Odysseus and Perseus are all miraculous conceptions.

All heroes are beckoned by the call of adventure -- whether it is Ram and his conquest of Lanka or Gilgamesh and his battle with Humbaba (the demon of the forests of Lebanon), or Perseus’ trials with Medusa – the stories demonstrate a common pattern.

Campbell tells us, in the context of the hero myth: “the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the centre of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

There is no disputing this at all. What Campbell and Jung were doing in their own ways was creating a frame within which all of humanity could find its place. For Jung, who was a student of Freud, the objective was to study myths with the tools of psychology and for Campbell, it was to establish the purpose of myth which, he believed was to convey a simple and effective message that was global in reach, content and outlook.

For many today, the concerns are different. There is a growing feeling that there are no more heroes to be had – they just don’t make them any more.

Perhaps it would help our search if we looked at the mythical hero as more than a global symbol. His life is important not only because it holds up a model for all of mankind to follow but also because it is a repository of the literary and storytelling traditions, cultural concerns and social norms of the time.

For example even though Ram and Krishna answer the call to adventure, Ram’s guide is Viswamitra in the first phase of his journey while Krishna is his own guide. That is why even though Arjun and Perseus are out to slay the demons of injustice, the evils they fight are very different and so are their lives and loves.

Yet their lives would fit into the frame of both Campbell and Jung. And that is what makes myths so fascinating – they dip into the same universe of values and life stories but they create their own distinct worlds within that universe.

If, for a moment, we do focus on the differences in cultures and traditions that are reflected by our hero myths, we may find it easier to build our modern day hero. He may not be very far from the ancient ones but the narrative cloak and the moral codes that we create for him would be drawn from all that is around us.