Systems come and systems go, but one that I’ve used to teach mythology in the various classes (English, Latin, World Religions, etc.) that I’ve taught to k-12 students in the last several years that has remained useful to me personally as an explanatory tool is what I sometimes like to call a critical or deconstructed hero’s journey. We owe the modern iteration of the hero’s journey to basically three people: Carl Jung, who never exactly gives this model of it in his vast corpus of writings, but who nevertheless provides a lot of the fundamental psychological architecture that the second guy, more important to this idea, would later use; Joseph Campbell, that guy I just mentioned, whose The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949) was a hugely influential, popular, and widely disseminated version of Jung’s reading of dream, myth, religion, and philosophy in the Anglophone world; and George Lucas, who had his Joseph Campbell in one hand and Dune in the other when he wrote Star Wars.
People can and have criticized this tradition of thinking on various levels and for various reasons. I like Jung, but I realize he’s not everyone’s cup of tea; I also like Campbell, even though I realize that he, like one of his contemporaries I also enjoy Alan Watts, belongs to a particular intellectual culture around comparative religion and philosophy that we could broadly call “perennialist” and so both share certain weaknesses of that tradition. Both were also somewhere between academic and not in their level of scholarly integrity around the issues they wanted to write about: they lived through the transition in academia during which a PhD became the expected benchmark of scholarly acumen in the English-speaking world, and they were living through a time of uncertain separation between church and academy, so to speak, in which some of the basic barriers that, say, modern scholars of religion and theologians take for granted between their disciplines were still being negotiated in some places. So, all of that said, I like them plenty while acknowledging the ways their context helps to explain who they were and what one can and can’t do with them. Star Wars I make no apology for loving.
Anyway, my critical and appreciative use of Campbell’s hero’s journey goes something like this. I think that, broadly, religion, myth, legend, and dreams reflect the fact that in the first half of life we are often spent in the repeating cycle of the hero’s journey: leaving our ordinary life, our stabilized world, for initiation in a special world, the acquisition of special knowledge or wisdom through a kind of katabasis, krisis, death, resurrection, apotheosis, and anabasis, and that we return to our lives masters of two worlds but also, in the process, too big for the confines we left. For many young men and women, the things one seeks on a hero’s journey correspond in some broad way to the first three of the purusharthas in Hindu thought: artha, success, wealth, and power; kama, pleasure, especially of the sexual, relational, and marital kind; and dharma, “justice,” “righteousness,” and even religious and social recognition for moral leadership and spiritual insight. These are the journeys of our Bronze and early Iron Age heroes in Greek myth and biblical texts: they leave in quest of something, be it kleos/kudos (“glory”), a golden fleece, a princess, the freedom of Israel from the Philistines, whatever, they go out and get it, and then they come back. In modern comic books, manga, anime, and action flicks, this is basically every self-contained arc or story of our favorite characters: Spider-Man, Thor, Batman, Wonder Woman, Goku, John Wick, Lara Croft, Indiana Jones—these guys have been on thousands of hero’s journeys collectively, and they usually share features with their ancient precedents. In our case, we do a hero’s journey once and it can be “life-changing”: we do it several times, and we’ve got a comic book franchise.
But there’s a danger to the hero’s journey, and it’s one that hero texts themselves are clear-eyed about, with a raw honesty that we ignore to our peril. Achilles has two possible fates: he can either leave Troy and go home to Phthia, having gone to the war, defended his honor, and left, at which point he will grow old and full of years and die surrounded by children and grandchildren, who will remember him but then, eventually, as time and generations pass, forget him, just like everyone else. His other possible fate is to die young at the gates of Troy, and be remembered forever. As I often ask my students, “Are we still talking about Achilles?” That the answer is yes tells us all we need to know: when his male lover, Patroclus, is killed before the gates of Troy by Hector, Achilles chooses to rejoin the fight, even agreeing to Agamemnon’s apology offer in the knowledge that he will never get to enjoy the spoils. Odysseus returns to Ithaca after twenty years away, reveals himself to the suitors eating him out of house and home, but then doesn’t accept their pleas for mercy and reconciliation through restitution: he slaughters them all in his megaron, and has to pay the social price at the end of the epic. Iliad and Odyssey are, as much as anything, about answering the question, “That age of epic heroes, monsters, and magic—whatever happened to it?” with a very sensible response: “Zeus got rid of it all because it was not compatible with a stable social order not built on violence.”
The heroes are a rowdy bunch. Sociologically, they take their origin from the wild man archetype in ancient cultures, the human being that is between civilization and animality, and is therefore in some sense closer to the gods, enjoying shamanistic powers of mediation and preternatural strength, agility, and so on. This is Herakles, wandering the steppe naked other than his lion skin with his club, fighting and killing monsters so people can populate the oikoumenē; this is Samson, killing a lion with his bear hands and a thousand Philistines with the jaw bone of an ass, rather than with a “civilized” weapon like a sword or bow; this is even David, felling Goliath with stone and sling but then, unlike Samson, taking up Goliath’s sword to behead him and then being clothed in Jonathan’s own armor. The heroes transgress social norms: given the mores of the Bronze Age, it is notable that they often have multiple spouses and paramours, some of them female but others male (Herakles has Hylas, and Zeus, of interest, has Ganymede; Gilgamesh and Enkidu are clearly more than friends, as are Achilles and Patroclus and, I would wager, David and Jonathan), that on occasion they cross dress (Herakles during his enslavement to Omphalē) or even completely transition their gender (Tiresias, whom Hera turned into a woman), they contend with gods and divine forces (think Odysseus up against Polyphemus, a cyclops but also a son of Poseidon, or Enkidu throwing the divine bull shank at Ishtar). All of these loose, fluid boundaries work well in liminal space, where gods, animals, and humans mix and intermingle; they are not as workable, or at least they did not seem so to the ancients, for building a consistent, coherent social order. The virtues of settled space are those of institutions: less fluidity, more concretization; less ambiguity, more clarity; less mingling, more separation.
The problem with the hero’s journey, then, is that addiction to it can leave a hero in a hell of their own making, as liminality with no sense of settlement is as meaningless as the rigidity of settlement without liminality. Herakles finishes his Twelve (originally Ten) Labors and proceeds to become a god on Olympus; his hero’s journey concludes with a transcendence of the terms of the cycle. But Samson never successfully grows up: he never leaves the long-haired, wild man life of adventure behind to successfully marry, raise children, make strong friendships, or integrate into the community as an elder. David does most of this, but he, too, is ill-suited for settled life, as all his virtues are liminal: warfare, the dirty side of politics. Only Solomon is fully possessed of the settled virtues of kingship, but he is consequently too cosmopolitan because not at all accustomed to the liminality (at least for the Deuteronomist).
So, the hero hits a point where the hero’s journey just isn’t doing it for them anymore. Theoretically, this is the time where they begin to notice that they are getting older and that if they want their current lifestyle and values to age with them they are going to have to, in some sense, circumvent age. Gilgamesh loses Enkidu and immediately seeks immortality: he goes on another long, arduous journey to find endless life, only to lose the opportunity to become immortal and have to face his mortality anyway. If I were in charge of writing the next Thor movie, I would write something like this: an old, bitter, far-future, All-Father Thor getting the chance to go on one last hero’s journey that allows him to come to terms with his own mortality (basically Logan but for Thor). If the first half of life is devoted to questing in pursuit of artha, kama, and dharma, then the second half of life is ideally devoted to finding moksha, liberation from the cycle of life, death, rebirth, and the suffering they generate: and this begins, and necessitates, that we face our mortality, accept it, and learn to catalyze it as the opportunity for spiritual immortality, if not physical immortality.
Lots of heroes get stuck between these two cycles or somewhere along them. Think, say, the heroes of Cobra Kai, Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso: one guy visibly dysfunctional as a result of a misspent youth, the other, though, successful, established, and living anybody’s dream, but both easily prone to the same midlife crisis of resurrecting the rival karate schools of their youth. Or think Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi or Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny, Harrison Ford’s recent and last outing as the character. In both of these, our heroes are now old and bitter: they have realized that youth is not eternal and that for all of their swashbuckling, adventuring, and glorying in their manhood, they have either not made a dent in the nature of things (Luke) or they have driven away from them all the people they most loved and cared for (Indy). One last adventure—often consisting in the teaching of the new generation—leads them out of their funk and towards spiritual maturity and integration: acceptance of age, acceptance of the call to be a sage, and knowledge of the path of spiritual ascent that will take them from this world and into the next.
It’s not just fictional heroes that get stuck here: my life has been shaped by men (mostly but not singularly a man) who couldn’t get over the loss of their youth. Without getting too autobiographical, I’ll just say that the majority of men I’ve ever known are in some sense either bemoaning a youth that left them widowed of all the qualities and opportunities they once best enjoyed or else numbing themselves with the pleasures of selling out. I’ve known so few men competent to process their ascent through life’s stages with integral psychic wholeness and who can nevertheless retain their youthful personae within their inner congress—so few, in other words, who could point the way to an integrated masculinity. And I’m kind of old enough to be in some earnest measure bitter about these disappointments: resentful that the men in my life (predominantly my father) were as incapable as they were, resentful for the loss of men who would have been better for me had we a chance to connect (my estranged brother who recently passed), and in some sense resentful towards God as Father for this seemingly constant stream of losses.
Anyway, those are my problems: I’m sharing them for the sake of authenticity and for saying, as clearly as I can, that the thing I’m touching here is a live problem in the culture that affects people, makes reputations and ruins lives. It belongs very much to the take on the crisis around modern men that I talked about in Zephyr III and to the succession narrative of The Boy and the Heron that I talked about in Zephyr V. And so when honest takes on it come out in our media, we should pause and take notice.
Cue Our Flag Means Death. The show aired two seasons—one in 2022, the other in 2023—telling a highly fictionalized account of the relationship between Stede Bonnet and Edward Teach, the latter better known as Blackbeard, who fall in love with one another over the course of the show. Bonnet (Rhys Darby, of Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows, and Voltron fame) is a bored aristocrat who has been harassed by his abusive father and his resentful, arranged-marriage wife for the ways he fails to fulfill the role society charts out for his masculinity, but who dreams of a life at sea, and desires to integrate into what he perceives to be missing from himself in the rough-and-tumble life of a pirate. Blackbeard is, of course, Blackbeard: every rendition of Teach has to be more outrageously over the top than the last, as a rule, and Taika Waititi’s take on the character is, in my personal opinion, the best (exactly as comedic as we ought to regard such a figure). Waititi and the other actors who play the more traditional pirates, like Will Arnett who portrays Calico Jack, are probably not far from the money in presenting pirates as simultaneously the rockstars of their world (as Johnny Depp also intuited in modeling Jack Sparrow off of Mick Jagger for The Curse of the Black Pearl) and, also, the ultimate “bros,” embodying all the traits we typically identify with “toxic masculinity” and that the ancient world, with the same degree of suspicion, would have been likely to predicate of the heroes. The pirates of Our Flag Means Death are basically pansexual: several are in homoerotic relationships with other pirates, some are bisexual, very few are hetero. The main pairing between Darby’s Bonnet and Waititi’s Blackbeard has been praised by critics for its representative value, because—and I think this is probably right—it is an authentic depiction of a relationship onscreen, capturing the complications of attraction, building friendship, disappointment, and fallout, that just happens to be between two men. Each of them, and their respective crews, on the one hand represent stereotyped masculinities—Bonnet a “soft,” Blackbeard a “hard” masculinity—but each of them also, through the embrace of the other’s virtues, become more holistically rounded people over the course of the series.
Blackbeard is the guy to focus on in a discussion of heroism, because when he meets Bonnet, he’s contemplating suicide out of boredom with the monotony of his chaotic, idiosyncratic lifestyle. As is often repeated in the first season, he’s Blackbeard: he’s the pop idol of piracy, he’s done some epic stuff, knows all there is to know about pirating, and has instant respect and adulation from every pirate he meets. But he’s spinning his wheels on the hero’s journey: he is bored of accomplishment. In the first season, this leads him to stay on Stede’s boat and show him the ropes of piracy—initially with the plan of killing Stede and adopting his lifestyle, but later, with the plan of running away with Stede to China to restart their life together away from the entanglements of their crews. In the second season, this leads him on a series of brutal, toxic, even “poisonous” raids which see him simply throw treasure overboard into the sea upon acquiring it in order to go steal new treasure. Heartbroken over his betrayal by Stede, Blackbeard decides on a course of action that will see him and his crew always at sea, never stopping on land, and later drives them into a storm, unfeeling as his pain and rage drive them all to unsafe psychic regions. It is only a mixture, of Stede’s real love for Blackbeard, and of Blackbeard coming to learn to love himself—to be willing to “sit with himself,” as Blackbeard’s former sailor Fang tells him—that lead to his being able to psychically heal and reintegrate himself.
As of right now it’s unclear that Our Flag Means Death is getting a third season (or whether it needs one). It is an utterly well-made and hilarious show, and it should appeal to you regardless of where you fall on the spectrum (I’m the most boring of the sexual identities, the straight white male, and I think this is one of the better written romances I’ve ever seen). But the thing that stands out to me is the real psychic darkness of Blackbeard, as someone caught in a never-ending cycle of heroic deeds, called to something deeper (in this case, love with someone else) but unable to answer that call in a healthy way because of his own inner dysfunction and penchant for self-hatred. Stories like these convince me that we need rituals not only for the first part of life—not only those rites of initiation by which young people become adults—but also for the middle parts of life, those transitions through which those of us who live to adulthood will go through and for which we are minimally prepared most of the time. In Hinduism, the purusharthas are often keyed to ashramas, the idealized “stages of life” as student, married householder, retiree, and ascetic. I’m not saying it has to be this system, but just that we need something: something for the guys in their late twenties, thirties, and forties that are either getting stuck adventuring or putting the adventuring away as they get married, have kids, and/or move into stable vocational commitments, something for the men moving into middle and older age and finding that family and friends are dying, kids are growing up and moving out, and their lives are feeling less full and certain than they once did.
This is not just a problem for men, let me be clear: women also have to face these tensions, between the freedom of agency in singleness and the commitments that family brings, between the privileges society affords to the young and the expectations and scorn it heaps upon the old, and so on. I’m not trying to bemoan our fate without recognizing that it is our common fate. I’m simply speaking to that which I have the most experience with, both as patient to someone else’s arrested development and as someone who has had to spend a lot of time and energy investing into understanding his own psyche to avoid passing those sins on to my kid. I also think (but I’m open to correction if I’m misreading the room, female readers!) that women are at a unique cultural moment in which numerous models exist of what a successful, whole woman can look like at each of these stages which can inspire as exempla, where our masculine role models are generally bupkis. The two most visible men in the United States right now are an octogenarian and a septuagenarian whose political capital rests on the fact that they are the antithesis of one another and they are the two options their parties are fronting (for the time being). From religious officials to political ones to social influencers to entertainment industry folks, it is way easier to find examples of problematic, imbalanced men wielding their voices over others than it is to find examples of balanced, wholesome men handling themselves with grace and dignity.
I think a lot of it comes back to this dynamic, that no one can live the hero’s journey forever. It’s an important language in certain ways: the heroic should be an element of everyone’s humanity, not just men’s, but also not just young men’s. We need our liminal virtues: life includes the liminal, and spaces where our clear and categorical rules don’t make sense, and we need the ability to travel into those spaces and learn what they have to teach us. Without that exploratory power of traveling, changing, and growing, we’re not really living. But also, the very nature of one’s questing has to change over time: its directionality, its goals. There’s only so much chased artha, kama, and dharma that will satisfy us: at some point we have to stop and realize that this life is an opportunity to find moksha, “liberation,” to confront our mortality and, like Nachiketas, secure the secret to immortality from Death, or, as I might paraphrase John Behr, make use of our death as a site of God’s life-creating power. At the very least, we need to come to realize that the more mundane objects of our questing can become themselves instruments not only of our addiction, through continuous pursuit and frustration (dukkha), but also of our enlightenment, be it through the responsibility with which the power of artha comes, or the affirmation and support that loving kama can supply, or the direction and divine communion that dharma enables. Sometimes we may be so unraveled by the spinning of the wheel that we just have to grab hold of whatever we can. Liminality without stability, like the open sea without ever making landfall, is movement without rest, just like stability without liminality is entropy and stagnancy, rest without movement. It’s where the two come together that we find our peace—and in finding it for ourselves, hopefully, too, for those around us.