The story so far…
It is 3 am. She lies sleepless on her bed, staring into…nothing. It is not fear, or terror, or sorrow that transfixes her. She stares into the heart of nothingness. She realizes that, for the first time in her long life, she has no story to tell herself.
There was a time when the Hero’s Journey was everything to her. Decades after Joseph Campbell crystallized it into “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” it was seized upon by such screenwriting mentors as Christopher Vogler in “The Writers Journey, Mythic Structures for Writers.” She was such a writer and she not only wrote the Hero’s Journey, she lived it.
In short: the human mind is hard-wired to respond to a story of an orphaned loner who goes on a quest into the wilderness (after first refusing the call). He has a wise old man as a guide. He is tempted by Woman. He descends into the Underworld to confront monsters. Down there he will win the boon that will save his world. He will return to triumphant accolades.
The Hero’s Journey received the thumbs up from George Lucas, who had enthusiastically applied it in the Star Wars movies to great box office success. Disney and Warners and Paramount ran the Hero’s template over all their scripts.
But times change. The idea that we are hard-wired for a particular type of story passed out of vogue as post-modernism and brain plasticity studies took centre stage. Really what the Hero needed was CBT & NLP. Change his way of looking at the world and all his (self-created) problems would vanish.
The Hero was beginning to find that his services were no longer required. Perhaps it was time for him, like Odysseus, to pick up his oar and disappear into a foreign land?
Or to sleep in his mountain cave.
Or to lie transfixed in her bed, not knowing which way was forward and which was back. Where was Up? Was that Down? She had set out on her own Hero’s Journey as a foolish young man. The Fool, in fact, from the Tarot.
“With all his worldly possessions in one small pack, the Fool travels he knows not where. So filled with visions and daydreams is he, that he doesn’t see the cliff he is likely to fall over. At his heel, a small dog harries him – or perhaps tries to warn him of a possible misstep? But he takes no heed.”
He has no idea of what lies ahead and where his adventure will take him. And now she is his lived Avatar. Everything he both feared and desired in life has been granted him. He IS no more. She exists. And no one can tell her what to do next.
Joseph Campbell in, ‘The Hero With a Thousand Faces’.
“The third wonder of the Bodhisattva myth is that the first wonder (namely, the bisexual form) is symbolical of the second (the identity of eternity and time)….This is the meaning of those Tibetan images of the union of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with their own feminine aspects…the union of the two is productive of the world in which all things are at once temporal and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing male-female God.”
I had reached a point beyond which no stories from my culture could penetrate. All the guides had shown me how to go down to the final confrontation with my feminine Self. None showed me the way back into the world. There are no manuals, primers, pamphlets or FAQs on how one lives beyond this momentous change. It is seen as merely physical when it is the real essence of our metaphysics. The sexual and the spiritual are one.
I had no story any more. No guiding myth.
Trickster (in Lewis Hyde’s, Trickster Makes This World) called to me. He mocked the hero and the Hero’s Journey. There were times in his story when he did play the female – but only for a moment, to avoid capture – and then would revert to his own masculine groundedness. But he brought out ambiguity and sexuality and the earthy fragility of the human body and its desires in contrast to the hero’s airy detachment from such things. He did suggest the possibility of shape-shifting but not the reality of a life lived as mental flesh that coalesces into physical being. Trickster was Coyote: the dog who snaps at the heels of the Fool.
It bothered Lewis Hyde that he could find so little evidence for female Tricksters. As he so neatly said, “The classical hermaphrodite is born of the union of Hermes and Aphrodite; to say the figure represents Hermes is an insult to Aphrodite.” He did find some female Trickster stories amongst the Hopi and wondered if their matrilineal culture lay behind them. Was the paucity of such stories a reflection of rampant patriarchy? he wondered.
So why had he not read Walter Williams’ study of cross-gender lives in Native America? (The Spirit and the Flesh.) In particular, the role of the Berdache in Hopi society? Was it just the blinkered vision of science, where an answer to a question in one discipline lies just across the road in another, but the chicken never crosses that road and never picks it up?
“The berdache receives respect partly as a result of being a mediator. Somewhere between the status of women and men, berdaches not only mediate between the sexes but between the psychic and the physical—between the spirit and the flesh. Since they mix the characteristics of both men and women, they possess the vision of both. They have double vision, with the ability to see more clearly than a single gender perspective can provide. This is why they are often referred to as “seer,” one whose eyes can see beyond the blinders that restrict the average person. Viewing things from outside the usual perspective, they are able to achieve a creative and objective viewpoint that is seldom available to ordinary people. By the Indian view, someone who is different offers advantages to society precisely because she or he is freed from the restrictions of the usual. It is a different window from which to view the world…”
“Proceeding from the view that a person’s different character is a reflection of her or his closeness to the spiritual, berdaches are often associated with shamanism and sacredness. Such spiritual abilities mean that berdaches may take on specific ceremonial tasks that are recognized as specifically their own. Whether in blessing ceremonies, providing lucky names, offering spiritual protection, or predicting the future, berdaches are both respected and feared for their qualities of strength and power.”
Hyde’s study also embraced some of Hindu culture…but not all. Where were the Hijra? And where was Ardhanarishvara.
(Thank you Wikipedia.)
“Ardhanarishvara is one of the most prevalent forms of the Divine in Indian art for the last several thousand years.
The term is a combination of three words- ‘ardha’, ‘nari’ and ‘ishvara’, meaning respectively, ‘half’, ‘woman’ and ‘Lord’ or ‘God’, That is, Ardhanarishvara is the Lord whose half is woman, or who is half woman. Some scholars interpret the term as meaning ‘the half male’ who is Shiva and ‘the half female’ who is Parvati. Such interpretations are suggestive of dvaita, the duality of existence…
…Besides its emphasis on the unity of the outward duality, the Rigveda acclaims, ‘He, who is described as male, is as much the female and the penetrating eye does not fail to see it’. The Rigvedic assertion is explicitly defined. The male is only so much male as much he is female and vice versa the female is only as much female as much she is male. The maleness and femaleness are the attributes contained in one frame.”
There were times when I was in transition that I would go into the Art Gallery of NSW and stand and stare at the much broken statue of Ardhanarishvara there – and wander amongst the feminine grace of the Tibetan Buddhas. But I did not want to give up my own culture and embrace a foreign one. I agreed with Jung that exotic religions and cultures are too easy an escape. The exoticism distracts from the painful reality of lived lives. I felt this in Thailand – seeing the daily struggle for existence that had shaped the outline of the deities there. I prayed to them and they stared back at me and I could not meet their gaze for I had not lived in their world. Whatever it was I sought lay within me and within my own history.
Yet here I lay, so needful to be as fully woman as I could. Must I re-embrace this dreadful duality that I had fought all my life to overcome? From spiritual woman and physical man to physical woman and spiritual…who?
I lay there and I felt a presence near me. I surrendered to it and felt him place his hands on me. He was Hermes. He was The Trickster. Orpheus. Monkey. I felt Coyote’s hot breath. Outcaste dweller at the crossroads, as I dwelt here at my own crossroads.
I prayed to him. How would he answer me?
“Pick a card,” he whispered, with a grin. “Any card.”
I knew he would cheat me. I knew he would lie, but the deck was so enticing and I selected a many-thumbed piece of cardboard and laid it down. It was, Card 21: The World, the Fool Reborn.
“A woman or hermaphrodite dancing, a wreath in the shape of a Yoni (the female sex), two wands, a cherub, an eagle, a lion, a bull.”
The end of the Tarot Hero’s journey. My life lived in a deck of cards. The dancer at the end of time. I had always been a Fool and I would continue to be. Trickster would go on mocking me. He was the little dog yapping at my heels. But I was the Fool who lived her foolishness and made it her story. I would go on living in discomfort and ambiguity. I wasn’t a Hero. I had no certainty. I danced between Yes and No and it was that dance which made the pattern of my story and the pattern of my life.
In the darkness and the nothingness I began to laugh at myself. I threw the card back at him and he vanished with a mocking grin. I got wearily up and made a pot of tea and sat and watched the hopeful dawn.
