All you can do is—and here’s the punchline—get close enough. Embrace the blur between theory and practice. In the real world, getting close enough works out fine. Triangles, and everything we can know about them, are terrifically handy when it comes to building things in the physical world, but any expectation that the world can provide theoretically, mathematically perfect triangles will, over time, make you crazy.

So what’s the mythological hypotenuse here? 

The hero’s journey, Campbell’s monomyth, is a theoretical structure based on the data he had available—primarily the works of Heinrich Zimmer and the ton of reading he did during his days up at Woodstock. It’s a terrifically useful way to understand structures in the real world (in your own life, for instance) but, like that plywood, can we expect that our lives will fit his theoretical model perfectly?

That’s the blurred boundary between Campbell’s theoretical model and the lived experience it can help clarify. But again, there’s a danger of letting the craving for clarity drive us crazy.  

When we lose track of that blurred character, theories become ideology—a set of totalitarian prescriptions. Campbell saw this clearly.

The difference between an ideology and a mythology is the difference between the ego and the self: ideology comes from the thinking system and mythology comes from the being.

The Hero’s Journey (book), p. 266

Every once in a while you run across a fan of Campbell or, ahem, an academic somewhere who treats the hero’s journey as ideology, but the hero’s journey is itself a metaphor and, remembering one of Campbell’s favorite observations, it’s easy to get stuck on the metaphor.  When you do that, you lose the meaning.

Now one way you can tell that you’ve gotten stuck on a metaphor, or reduced it to ideology, is to notice that it’ll begin to display weird contradictions. Let’s take Campbell’s wonderful story about the tiger raised by goats who one day discovers he’s really a tiger. The moral of the story is that we’re all tigers but we think we’re goats. 

This is a wonderful way to understand the discontinuities in life, to explain the blurred boundaries between who we think we might be, who we might still be without knowing it yet, and who we turn out to be in real life. But if you turn the metaphor into some kind of theorem (like Pythagoras’s), the clear lines suddenly become sharp enough to cut itself to pieces: I mean, if we’re all tigers, there wouldn’t be anything to eat. No more goats. Taken as mere theory, the myth becomes problematic. That’s one indication that a theoretical model is beginning to rub up against reality. 

There’s another blurred boundary here between what Campbell called your “tiger-face” and the face you show the world.

When al-Hallaj or Jesus let the orthodox community know that they were tigers, they were crucified. And so the Sufis learned the lesson at that time with the death of al-Hallaj, around a.d. 900. And it is: You wear the outer garment of the law; you behave like everyone else. And you wear the inner garment of the mystic way. Now that’s the great secret of life.

The Hero’s Journey p. 271

The attempt to make boundaries utterly clear and concise lands you in trouble or, if you push it, can even get you crucified.

Hitting a boundary layer like this is a reminder to treat the myths as relational narratives and not algorithms, as signs pointing beyond themselves and not as maps, as useful suggestions waiting for your own experiences to validate them and not as adamantine dogma, the fossilization of thought. 

As frustrating as this can be, it’s a sign of mental health.  Embracing the blurry boundaries in life turns out to be required for an authentic life, one that depends on recognizing the relative truths provided by clarity and ambiguity and how, across a blurred boundary, theory and practice can inform one another.

Pretty geeky stuff this week! 

But thanks for musing along.

Discuss this MythBlast with the author and the rest of the JCF community in our forums, Conversations of a Higher Order.

Mark C.E. Peterson is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies with the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and former President of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.  He began his work at the University of Toronto focused primarily on Hegel’s natural philosophy and its links to the history of science and technology. These interests evolved to constellate around the larger questions of how humans are related – scientifically, philosophically, and spiritually – to nature. A practitioner of both taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years his academic research is currently engaged in a semiotic analysis of the relationship between explanatory and narrative/mythological accounts of nature and an Aristotelian re-examination of environmental ethics.