In 1949 Joseph Campbell published his seminal work Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he outlines a motif he noticed in many myths concerning heroes and heroic quests. This motif of the hero’s journey has become so prolific and disseminated so extensively that it now stands as its own archetype irrelevant to Campbell’s text, so much so that there are a surprising number of people who are totally ignorant that the hero’s journey was invented in the mid-20th century by a professor at Sarah Lawrence College.
Hero with a Thousand Faces is actually a brilliant work, and I would recommend it to anyone, though I have my disputes with Campbell. The text is a step-by-step guide through the motif of heroes and their quests by comparative method. But rather than iterate a bunch of myths in full and then point out where certain elements of the motif line up, he walks the reader through the motif, element by element, and then picks and pulls scenes from a vast variety of myths to demonstrate the motif. As the reader progresses through the text, Campbell builds more and more upon complex ideas and ideologies, so that the reader feels like they went on a quest and returned empowered by it.
However, one criticism I have of Campbell is rooted in his Jungian approach to mythology, namely taking the comparative method a little too far to an improper conclusion. Frequently where Campbell sees similarities between two things in content, he ignores the context, and concludes that they are rooted in the same unconscious archetype. Professor Elizabeth Vandiver makes a similar critique of Campbell. For instance, Vandiver points out that where Wonder Woman is an Amazonian woman, Campbell believes that the Amazonians of the DC Universe are mythologically the same as the Amazonians of ancient Greek mythos. This completely ignores the context in which the two Amazonians are being presented. The Greeks present the Amazons as wild, untamed, unruly feminine nature that needs marriage and men to calm them down and domesticate them; the DC Amazonians are just strong, powerful women of ancient heritage. They are not the same in context.
The Hiramic Legend is similar. At first glance, it does appear very similar to the hero’s journey motif, but there are some critical elements which remove Hiram Abif as any sort of hero. Firstly, and probably the most notable difference is that Hiram dies. This simply is not how the hero’s journey works. The hero must return, and not just return alive, but must bring back a boon to the world. That boon may be a physical object, such as Prometheus bringing fire to men, or it may be more of an understanding and wisdom to the benefit of others, such as Frodo and his three hobbit companions who return to save the Shire from Saruman. Hiram Abif does none of these things. He just dies and rots.
Campbell lays out a series of events that the hero will undertake during their adventure. Not all myths have these elements. The hero’s journey is not really a true mythological motif, but rather a “monomyth,” a sort of template in various myths and legends, and so it has a degree of flexibility. Campbell outlines seventeen elements that are central to the hero’s journey. Now, if the Hiramic Legend checked off the majority of these, then we might have reasonable grounds to say it is or nearly is a hero’s journey, but by my assessment, it checks off almost none of these, if any.
Firstly, there is the “call to adventure,” followed by a “refusal of the call.” Hiram does neither of these. He is accosted and harassed to give up the secrets of a Master Mason, but he refuses. However, this is not the same thing as a call and refusal to adventure. That would mean the call to adventure is to illicitly divulge the secrets of a Master Mason, which isn’t very virtuous, and in fact would defeat the entire point of the legend: the virtue of maintaining the secrets of our fraternity.
Next, the hero receives a helper. Odysseus has the aid of Athena, Luke Skywalker has Han Solo and C3PO et al (Star Wars was directly influenced by Campbell’s work), King Arthur has his knights, et cetera. But poor Hiram is alone. Then there is “the crossing of the threshold,” followed by a point of no return, or what Campbell calls “the Belly of the Whale.” Yeah… Hiram just dies and is dug up later and given a proper burial. Some have argued that Hiram’s death and the raising of his dead body from the grave is like Jesus rising from the dead, or Osiris being revived (briefly) and made king of the dead, and other gods of death and resurrection, but Hiram does not fit this motif (what is called a “vegetable god”). Hiram is not revived. He just dies and his body is exhumed. These are not the same thing.
I could keep going, but there really is no point, because we will repeatedly deal with elements of the hero’s journey that do not fit the Hiramic Legend (e.g. the “temptress woman”), and ultimately we must conclude that Hiram is not a hero in any conceivable way. He is simply a tragic character.
That said, just because the legend is not a hero’s journey, the Hiramic Drama does provide the apparatus for the candidate to experience a hero’s journey. That’s pedantic, but there is a difference between the Hiramic Legend and the Hiramic Drama. It is, first and foremost, a drama, and then later it is a legend. As a drama, it is an experience for the candidate. As a legend, it expounds upon esoteric values and interpretations a posteriori. For the candidate, the drama is a journey. You know you did not want to sit in the South. You knew something was up when you were called to the East. What a ride, and you come out the other end rectified. For me, I truly felt like a new man after the whole thing, and unlike poor Hirma, I was not dead. And you, as a newly raised Master Mason, are a boon to the Craft, because you have become another living stone for spreading Masonic light and growth of the fraternity.
It is pedantic, but it is important to distinguish between the Hiramic Legend and Drama. I personally feel that the scene of the death of Hiram Abif is far more powerful as a drama, because it is a transformative apparatus for each newly made Master Mason. As a legend, it just becomes a jumping-off point for esotery and elaborations (or confabulations) and the proliferation of new degrees. But as a drama, it stands as an experiential program. The drama may be modified, and it has changed over the decades, but the essence of the drama remains: a heroic journey of transformation for Masons.
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