Transcript of the interview between Catherine and Rohini Walker

Transcript of interview conducted by Rohini Walker, Cultural Engineer and organizer of the Heroine’s Journey at the Ace Hotel & Swim Club in Palm Springs, CA, December 2017.

 

Rohini: What is the hero’s journey?

Catherine: It’s a mythological pattern that Joseph Campbell discovered in his study of myths from around the world. Campbell defined a hero as “someone who is willing to give his life for others.” He mapped the stages of how an individual becomes a hero in what he calls the “hero’s journey.”

This journey starts with answering the call, being called to leave your familiar territory, going through a series of challenges and confrontations with forces in the outer world and also, especially, forces in your own self, in your own psyche. So he really maps this process of developing consciousness which lends meaning to the sacrifice that a hero might have to make, and in the myths that we have, what we discover is that this transformation in the individual usually means that the literal death that the hero was willing to face doesn’t have to happen.

So there’s a series of psychological deaths of the small self and then the hero comes to a greater understanding of who he is and that understanding is the reward, or what Campbell called “the boon” for the individual and for the society.

So he’s talking about something that describes the life of a warrior or a soldier these days, but he’s also talking about a process of inner transformation, about the way a person becomes a fully realized human being.

 

Rohini: Can women make the hero’s journey?

Catherine: Campbell talked about the hero’s journey in a couple of different contexts. Technically, the hero’s journey is about the development of men., and in more traditional societies the answer would have been absolutely “no.” In fact Campbell even said that women didn’t need to make the journey because it’s understood, that by virtue of being mothers and going through the process of childbirth, women already live lives of sacrifice to others.

But over time, as he talked about the hero’s journey, and given the fact that we don’t live in a traditional society today, the process came to be more and more about the inner journey to self and inner transformation, and certainly that happens to women.

So I’d say that women can live the hero’s journey, especially to the degree that this requires courage and strength and a willingness to die, but there’s also something called a heroine’s journey and that’s what really interests me because women’s lives are different from men’s lives in very important ways, ways that primarily stem, in my opinion, from patriarchy and the way that the feminine is valued—or not—so I think it’s very important now, that women begin to articulate the specifics of our journey, the heroine’s journey.

 

Rohini: My experience of the heroine’s journey (through workshop and reading) is that it’s a journey to the underworld, as opposed to the journey of the hero which is more in the light, one of overt victory at the end. Can you tell me a bit about this journey into the underworld for the woman?

Catherine: That’s an astute insight, I’m so glad you got that at one of my workshops! The life of action and overcoming, overcoming things, that’s the archetypal masculine and more the energy of many men’s lives. For many women, it’s more about integration, integration of different forces, and this has often been represented in our old stories as an underworld journey because part of what must be integrated is what’s been repressed, what’s been denied expression, and in a patriarchy, that includes pretty much everything that has to do with the interior life and even many of the outer experiences of women.

We don’t like to use these terms these days because there have been many gains for women but the reality is, we’re living in a culture where men are the real people, and what happens to them is important, and what happens to women isn’t so meaningful. So there’s a lot we must go down in to retrieve and it can be very painful, hence that metaphor of the underworld.

 

Rohini: Tell us a bit about this upcoming workshop and story work.

Catherine: The workshop is two days and I’m very excited about it because that gives us a lot more time to really delve into the story that we’re going to use. When I do a workshop I always build it around a story and in this case, the story is the ancient myth of Eros and Psyche, which the myth of the union of love and soul, and involves an underworld journey (as you know).

This is a very rich myth and we’ll be able to spend talking about the different aspects and dimensions of it, writing about it, doing some art work, some meditation; there’ll be time for people to reflect as individuals, also group discussion. I’m happy to have this much time to spend with the story.

As for why I use story, well, we are used to telling “our” story. If I ask you to tell me your life story, you can do that. But the stories that we’ve crafted are often taken from a rather superficial engagement with the culture or psychological language, and they’re not fully invested with the kind of insight that you can get when you spend time really in your heart and your imagination.

If I tell you a story about a woman’s journey, that telling opens up that capacity in you. Stories spark our imagination and get our emotions involved. So people often hear stories, even stories that they think they already know, and these “aha” moments that aren’t available when we stay in that head space of “here’s the life story that I’ve told a million times.”

Stories are a great catalyst for opening up feeling and imagination, and that’s why I like to use them. Story work is basically being with that story and exploring its dimensions, and that’s what we’re going to do in the workshop with the myth of Eros and Psyche.

 

Rohini: One more question. With your passion for using myth to transform culture and people’s lives, can you talk a bit about how you see the heroine’s journey and how it will hopefully become more mainstream, as an important happening and transforming our culture at the moment?

Catherine: In terms of our culture overall, I think that one thing that’s happening is the myths that have been guiding our culture, and in Western culture (we’re sitting here in the United States), that’s primarily Christianity and science, our attachment to technology, capitalism and the economy and I can imagine that some people are sitting out there thinking “what a minute, those aren’t myths. Science is not a myth, the economy is not a myth,” but the fact is that in our rush to be “reasonable,” ever since the Enlightenment really, we’ve lost the understanding that all of these things we’re creating are all stories, they all have a mythological context.

So in the broadest sense, what I’m trying to do is remind people of that and show people how this is true. Because once we start looking at looking at some of the things that we take as given in our lives as myths, we have ideas about how to change them. And how to change these bad stories, this is how I see everything that’s happening in our cultural debates right now.

I also think that one of the main things that’s happening, as we debate these stories and hopefully come to understand that that’s what they are, is the emergence of long repressed feminine values, the archetypal feminine.

When we talk about the archetypal feminine we’re talking about values of relatedness and emotion, we talking about being in service to life (I could say a lot about that but I won’t in this context), we’re talking about the earth, and we’re also talking about the life experience of women, people who identify with the gender ‘female” and are identifying with women’s experience.

We need to reclaim those values, and this is something that both men and women need to do but I think the task, or the joy, of articulating that primarily belongs to those of us who are living as women.

As we give ourselves permission to really excavate our own experience and decide what is significant and how that needs to be expressed, as individual women, I think we’re making a major contribution to this reemergence of the feminine. I really don’t see a way forward for the human race without this happening.

To go back to Campbell for a second, he did say, as I mentioned earlier, that women don’t need to make the journey. But he taught for a long time and in the 1980s, when he was spending a lot of time at Esalen, he had many women coming to his workshops. It’s interesting that women have been the primary audience for any thing that has to do with personal development, soul work, enlightenment, at least in this part of the world, for a long time.

As Campbell had more and more women coming to him saying “what a minute, what about women, what about the heroine?” he somewhat revised his position and ultimately said that the hero’s journey has become a model of individuation and honestly, we don’t have models for women. And why don’t we? Patriarchy.

So it’s up to individual women, as they are playing new roles, as they are moving out of their traditional biological roles, to show us what it is, to tell us about the heroine’s journey based on the lives that they are living.