The Problem of the Return and the End of the Hero’s Adventure

We have an ever- increasing wealth of myths and stories, fueled by new discoveries and ongoing mythmaking. There are also dominant myths and stories, and dominant ideas about myths and stories, that limit the usefulness of this inheritance and the possibilities we entertain.

In the last episode, I turned to the Hero’s Adventure, a mythic pattern articulated by Joseph Campbell,  to reflect on some of the many ways that we can hear a call to a new life. A bigger life, a life of purpose.

In this episode, I pick up the hero’s adventure once again to consider the final phase of the process, what Campbell called “The Return.” This final phase is essential to the image of a hero as a person who serves the community, and yet it rarely receives much attention.

Why is this phase overlooked so often? And how do we make the journey back to our old world?

Transcript of The Problem of the Return and the End of the Hero’s Adventure

Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and what myth can offer us today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle. 

Today I want to build on some ideas I introduced in the last episode, which was called “Answering the Call of 2024.” In that episode, I suggested that we are in a time of sorting through our mythologies and stories, that this is not a time to be looking for the myth and the answer, but rather to first of all, consider our mythmaking activity and how it appears essential to us. 

And secondly, to look at our stories and our myths in all of their rich variation. To come to them for information, models, mistakes, as illustrations of our adaptability, and to generate opportunities. That could also be questions. It could be questions and it could be a reshaping or even a rejection of some of the values and beliefs and ways of living that are conveyed in the myths that we’ve inherited. 

I also talked about the urge to go back to “the golden days.” A lot of that rhetoric is percolating around right now. This impulse or the notion that we can recover some kind of a lost paradise. I suggested that those impulses and that rhetoric is actually a mythological perspective, because we have these stories of the lost paradise like the Garden of Eden. And what this tells us is that that longing to go back is going to be unfulfilled because that’s part of the story.  

So maybe today, our question is not “how can we be better, like people were before”?  But “Who do we need to be now in this time”?  As a mythologist, I wonder about how our inherited myths and fairy tales, and our ongoing storytelling, can help or hinder us. 

Now, in the last episode, again, I picked up the pattern of the hero’s adventure articulated by Joseph Campbell, as an example of our stories that could be useful to bring these ideas down to earth. To ground the things I’m talking about in something more tangible. Now, in brief, “the hero’s adventure” in Campbell’s language has three parts. There’s the departure, which includes the call to something new. The hero leaves the known familiar world. Then there is the initiation, which is where all of the tests and the challenges and the transformation takes place. And then the third phase, is the return. The hero now transformed, has to go back to the old world and share the transformation. 

Now, I think that the hero’s adventure is a good tool to use for this exercise, because it’s very well known. And it’s recognized, even if you don’t study myth, specifically. This idea has also spread throughout the culture and all around the world in the decades since Campbell’s death and I think this is a testimony to it’s power. I think it’s powerful because it feels true. It’s a creative and useful lens. 

So, in the last podcast, I used these ideas and the hero’s adventure, to examine the first phase, the call, the departure. And today, I want to consider the third and final stage of the hero’s adventure as a way of further playing around with these ideas, and that, as I said, is “the return.”

The hero has left the familiar, known world, entered a liminal space, and undergone a series of tests. Met helpers and enemies. Met death. The self has been transformed. Now it’s time to return to the known world. To bring back the boon to your community. Campbell writes:

“The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.”

This part of Campbell’s model has always been tricky for me because the “boon,” that is the transformation itself, the object of the adventure, can be so lofty. I mean, hello, the golden fleece, the runes of wisdom. In many of the examples that Campbell offers, it boils down to enlightenment basically, that type of spiritual realization. And honestly, how many of us get there. Now, I suspect that the loftiness and profundity of the end of the adventure that is undertaken by Buddha, for example–and the story of Sidhartha is one that Campbell uses throughout as an example of the hero’s adventure. Well, I suspect that this contributes to the relative lack of energy and attention brought to this final stage of the adventure in the majority of our narratives.

Think about most of the stories that we tell, and this includes many of the stories that we’ve, you know, received that have been handed down through the ages. Usually, the hero or protagonist is introduced, a problem appears, and the tests begin. The individual makes it through, survives and is transformed in some way and so performs the good and essential act to solve the problem, save the day, give the gift, build the bridge so to speak. Whatever is required to meet the need at the heart of the story.

And that’s the end. They all lived happily ever after. Or in some new state. The process that takes place between the moment of personal transformation of the hero individual and the hero’s decision to rejoin the community and serve, isn’t spelled out in much detail or at all. In some instances, they maybe one and the same. No process at all. I’m transformed, and boom, I’m the solution. And that’s it thank you very much, happily ever after.

Now, the model of the hero’s adventure is drawn from existing myths and fairy tales. It’s not a pre-existing blueprint. Narratives, old and new, don’t have to conform to Campbell’s pattern to be complete or valuable. His idea is an observation, an insight, not a critique. In my reading of A Hero With A Thousand Faces, I think Campbell also has a harder time describing and illustrating this final phase of the adventure. The ultimate boon–Enlightenment and/or the collapse of dualities, the lived recognition of the Self as part of the All and the All in the Self, the eternal in the impermanent– these are abstractions to those of us who aren’t living this realization and difficult to put in words or portray. 

The Buddha, who is a hero who received this boon of enlightenment, initially refused to teach due to this difficulty in communication. What could I say to people, he thought, other than “sit and see what happens?” 

Clearly, the Buddha changed his mind. He was persuaded by the gods who implored him to teach. Still, it is much, much harder to articulate deeply transformative experiences that reframe our understanding of reality then those awakenings that are closer to the daily perceptions and demands of life. All to say, the return must be part of the journey if service is part of our image of the hero, and this part of the story is difficult to tell.

Does this matter? Well, if we’re turning to myths and fairy tales– or tuning into contemporary stories in today’s culture as far as that goes, then finding your place in the” return” is as important as looking for metaphors to inform your experience of the call and the initiation. The return can be very difficult. According to Campbell, the return might be the most difficult part of the whole adventure. The relative lack of storied detail here might have consequences for you or me or anyone else undertaking the adventure, and for our communities. 

The return and how we imagine and narrate it might be even more important now. It might be an opportunity. Perhaps this is a piece of the public debates about who has authority, who has the right to speak. About who gets a platform and who’s included. Who knows? 

Embracing the truth that you discovered, finding the courage to share it– because it is going to be counter to the mainstream in some way– and figuring out how to offer it– these are common questions in the heart minds of many people that I speak with. These are challenges of the return. And here’s another piece of the puzzle today: it’s very unlikely (and I imagine undesirable) that the image or symbol or myth that catalyzes consciousness, that opens up the portal to the mystery for you or for me is going to speak to everyone. The one-shoe fits all myth and the culture that supports–everybody in lockstep conforming to a limited model–well, this is breaking down, right? Breaking down as questions about what’s really fixed in human nature, questions about authentic individuality and agency, as all of this come to the forefront. This is part of the current debate.

Now, as I say, many of the examples in our myths and examples and language offered by Campbell are very lofty. They speak to what I would consider to be our ultimate, personal and spiritual aspirations. So, let’s open up this notion of the boon a little bit by using some different words or reframing it. Let’s say that the boon and when you receive the boon, you are transformed as your perception and understanding of the self, and the world is transformed. You see with new eyes and you’ve not forgotten the world that you know. You’re in the paradox of both worlds, they both exist and it’s possible now to be in both, but you won’t be until you return, right. In the old setting as a new person who sees old and new. There’s the rejuvenation of the world.

Campbell outlines several possible return scenarios based on the myths that he surveyed. In some instances, the examples that he provides are primarily Hindu and other Eastern mythologies,  the hero achieves bliss and doesn’t want to come back. He stays in the other world. But in most of the stories, especially popular stories in the dominant culture, the hero does come back. 

If you want to come back and your transformation been supported by the gods, then you might have a very easy journey out of that other realm. They might help you. But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes the hero had to fight to get the boon, or sneak in and steal it. In which case, then, he or she or they have to make a mad rush back to the known world and endure an arduous threshold crossing to get back. Campbell refers to a Celtic story about the goddess Ceridwen and the poet sage Taliesin. I’ve told this story many times, including in past podcast episodes, and I’ll post a link to my telling of the story with the transcript of this episode. 

The short version is that the goddess Ceridwen wants to make a potion for one of her sons because he doesn’t have a whole heck of a lot going for him. He’s not handsome, he’s not particularly wise, he’s maybe not really even that nice of a person. So, she wants to make a potion that will instill wisdom and make him a poet. Make him the best poet in the world. This will take some time. She works on this potion for a year. And during this whole time, the pot has to be stirred and the fire underneath it tended. She gets a couple of servants to help her by performing those two tasks. 

The pot stirrer is a young man named Gwion. And what happens– at the very moment that the potion is done the fire sputters and Gwion gets burned by three drops of the potion. It lands on his fingers and he puts them in his mouth and bingo, now suddenly, he’s got the boon. He’s got the gift of the potion. He’s going to be the wise sage and the greatest poet and Ceridwen does not want this to happen. So, she chases him and he runs. I mean, he knows because now he’s wise, right? He knows everything. 

He runs and he turns himself into a hare and Ceridwen turns herself into a grey hound. Just as she is about to catch him Gwion jumps into a creek and turns himself into a salmon. Well, Ceridwen turns herself into an otter and dives in after and again, almost catches him. And Gwion flings himself out of the water and turns into a bird. Ceridwen comes up out of the water too and turns herself into a hawk. Again, she is right on his heels. Death is right there. And he has the inspiration to turn himself into a grain of wheat. He drops down onto the threshing floor in a barn below. Ceridwen turns herself into a hen and she finds this grain of wheat and eats it.

Looks like it might be the end. But Ceridwen becomes pregnant and she knows that it’s that grain of wheat. She ends up giving birth to Gwion now in the new form of this beautiful baby boy, and he’s so beautiful that she just can’t bring herself to kill him. So, she puts him in a leather bag and throws him into the ocean. And that bag is found by Prince Elphin who takes the baby home and raises him. Now this baby is named Taliesin, because he is so beautiful. Taliesin means “shining brow.” He goes on to become this great mystical bard in the Celtic poetic tradition. 

So you see, he makes the transition. But that’s a hell of a return right? He had to shape shift and run. He died as it appears. But then he was reincarnated basically, on the other side. So, getting back can be very difficult and in some instances, you can’t do it without help from the outside world. You are trapped, imprisoned, wounded, enchanted, even in a liminal death state. The Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna is one example. I’ve told this story in the podcast and will post a link with this transcript.

In the myth of The Descent of Inanna, the bright upperworld goddess of life goes to the underworld, ostensibly to visit her sister. Things don’t go as expected. They don’t go very well. The sister fixes Inanna with the eye of death and her corpse is hung on a meat hook. She can’t get back. But Inanna is a very important goddess. She keeps the world going. And she’s savvy. Savvy enough to have confided in her devoted and powerful friend Ninshubur, and to have left instructions about what to do if she failed to return at the agreed upon time and place. 

Luckily for Inanna, Ninshubur is dogged and steadfast and eventually persuades the god of wisdom to send envoys to the underworld to rescue Inanna.  So, she makes it back. 

You can’t cross the threshold, back into the known world, back into your old world, as a person transformed, with without a lot of effort because you’ve changed. You’ve changed. You’re no longer like everyone else in some important way. This presents a number of potential problems. For example, how to explain what you’ve experienced and what you’ve learned. How do you make that intelligible? How do you get across something that is beyond words? 

How do you get people’s attention? Especially a problem today, right, so much information. How do you get people’s attention? And how do you get them to value what they might not even believe to be real? How do you face resentments and jealousies and power struggles? And how do you hold on to the value of your experience and what you have learned? How do you hold on to that yourself in light of the ordinary world? How do you do that? The problem of integrating deep transformative experiences, it’s very real. 

And another thing I’ll throw out there is, things might have changed while you were gone, gone on your adventure. Campbell points to the story of Rip van Winkle. The man falls asleep, enters a dream, and unwittingly leaves his ordinary wakeful world for years and years. If Rip gained some wisdom, this isn’t part of the story. He rejoins this plane  in a state of utter confusion as everything around him is changed. is he still dreaming? No. He’s just as strange to the people in his village who don’t recognize him. I mean, look at, you know, his clothes. Everything about him is wrong. He’s almost attacked and then outcast. 

The return is the completion of a process found in myth and stories and life. Just like the departure phase, the time of hearing the call, here is no one way for it to happen. But despite the variety in our stories, and lived experience, there are some common assumptions that make the process more difficult. In our discussion of the Call, I noted the common assumption and expectation is that it’s supposed to be awesome and exciting, a moment of clarity. Hey, my life is beginning the world is opening up. And sometimes that’s true. And often, that’s not the case. And this is very helpful to bear in mind. 

Similarly, the Return– to the degree that we even articulate and think about it as a process– is often imagined to be uncomplicated. I think it’s one reason that we don’t tell the story. The person who survives the initiation we imagine, is just pumped up and full of conviction and doesn’t have any fear or doubt. And again, that is not true. As Campbell observed, the return is a journey too. Going back doesn’t occur in a wink of an eye. So, it’s useful to have a broader view of the possibilities and challenges of this phase of the adventure.

A couple more observations about transformation and the hero’s adventure. We are present in the stories of others. As Shakespeare said, “all the world is a stage.” We are all players in a collective drama, developing our assigned character and part of the unfolding plot in the world. We must make conscious space for change and accept it as inherent to life. We have to allow ourselves to change. So you give yourself room to revisit and reimagine your perspectives, your beliefs, and your story. 

And you have to make space for this in the lives of other people. And that can be tricky. We often want people, especially the people close to us, to stay the same, to stay the person we’re comfortable with.

You may be the person undergoing the transformation or you may be the person witnessing or living adjacent to the process of the other. In either case, remember this: change happens. Change happens and when we are transformed we contribute to the transformation of those around us, perhaps catalyze it. There is impact. Transformation is in service to the soul, to the awakening of the larger self, and this has impact. It’s a gift even if it’s not welcome or initially recognized as such. 

Here is an example from a myth that has been very potent for me over the years. The myth of Inanna doesn’t end with her descent and rescue from the meat hook. Inanna’s return to the upper world and what her return, as a transformed goddess who partakes of the mysteries of death as well as life– one interpretation of her boon–puts in motion is a part of the myth that many overlook. Again, limiting the story of the adventure to the initiation phase and the fact of survival and neglecting the need to go back and offer renewal to the old world.  

In Inanna’s case, she is told that someone must take her place in the underworld and she chooses her husband Dumuzi. This may seem vindictive or cruel. According to the myth, Dumuzi was not particularly troubled by his wife’s absence. Attitudes and themes of the patriarchy perhaps– the myth as we receive it today is part of a transition to patriarchal culture. And yet, also,  when we are transformed we bring the possibility of transformation to others. What happened to Inanna was profound and essential. How wouldn’t it be a gift for Dumuzi as well? 

He’s is afraid to go and why not, he’s chased by demons. I think again of our receptivity to change, our willingness to allow other people to change and to be impacted by each other. We propel our partners and soul companions into the mystery.

Speaking of partners in transformation, let me tell you about an opportunity to do some personal myth exploration–Mapping your Hero’s Adventure, A Mythogenesis Playshop. This is being offered by Bob Walter at Esalen Institute in California, March 24th- 29th. Bob was a friend of Joseph Campbell’s and an editor of his works. He’s also the founder of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Bob has a deep understanding of the patterns and also the potential in working with myth. His six-day workshop is really inspiring and enlivening, and the Esalen Institute is an extraordinary place to have this experience. I’m going to post a link to information about Mapping your Hero’s Adventure, A Mythogenesis Playshop with the transcript of this episode. If you are looking for a catalyst for change in your life, I do hope that you will investigate Bob’s offering.

A big welcome to new email subscribers: David, Kathryn, Peter, Sylvia, Elaine, Chet, Mpumi, Laura,  Welcome!

If you’re new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website. You’ll find a transcript of this episode with all the links that I’m mentioning, and information about the ways that you can work with me if you would like to unpack the mythic dimension in your life. And you can also join the email list if you’d like to receive links to new Myth Matters episodes in your inbox.

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In closing- if we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world. 

Feel free to email me in response to this episode or post a comment on the mythicmojo website.  If you have questions about mythology, I’ll do my best to answer them.

And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.

Links to stories in past episodes:

Cerridwen’s cauldron of inspiration

Quest for new metaphors: Sumerian myth of Inanna part 1

Inanna and Dumuzi: Her honey man (part 2 of 4)

Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld, episode 3 in a 4-part series

Dumuzi’s Dream and the regions of kindness