Travelers

The shape of the world we live in is determined by the extent we explore it. We can explore it in many ways, through speculation, artistic creation and scientific experiment, but most of all by traveling to unfamiliar regions.

Humans and their ancestor species have been doing this for six million years, but for most of this time such exploration has been confined to searching for food and water, avoiding predators and finding prey. It was only when humans had settled in cities that they were able to objectify other places, only when they had created a culture they could identify others as ‘foreign’.

The world has taken on many shapes in the last 2,000 years. In the late sixth century BC a geographer belonging to one of the schools of Pythagoras in southern Italy conceived of the world as a sphere, one of 10 such bodies rotating around the sun, a fire which existed in space, and which included the planets and a counter earth which was invisible to our observation (John Parker’s Discovery, quoted in Peter Watson’s Ideas). This was pure theory, but accepted by Plato, and verified by Eratosthenes and Hipparchus at Alexandria in the second century BC at least as far as the shape and size of the earth was concerned. By the sixth century AD the monk Cosmas, by referring exclusively to the Bible, which he saw as the only true source of knowledge, thought of the earth as a rectangle, shaped like a tabernacle, as revealed in the Book of Exodus. This flat earth was joined to heaven at its rim. To the east was Paradise, and the holy city of Jerusalem was at the centre (Watson p.426). Concepts like these were tried and tested by humans who walked, sailed or rode great distances, bringing back travelers’ tales to make men wonder.

The earliest travelers were explorers of the psyche who travelled vast distances in search of answers to the mysteries of life and death. Heroes and gods, like Gilgamesh, Atthis, Osiris and Orpheus, trod the psychic pattern we all must tread, and tried to return some answer to the question we all must ask, the question “why?”

The first and greatest of all travelers who explored the lands about him lived about the twelfth century BC: Odysseus. His journey must have seemed a great one to his contemporaries, though not to us, who fly great distances shielded by inflight video and land in places pretty similar to that where we embarked. Travelers like Odysseus experienced the world through their senses, they felt it, at great risk to their lives. The world was dangerous, and full of wonders. The ancient Greeks possessed a rare gift of wonder, in both meanings of the word: they marvelled at what they saw, and speculated why it was so, often at the same time. I’m convinced by Tim Severin’s book The Ulysses Voyage that Odysseus travelled around the north coast of the Aegean from Troy and was swept southwards at Cape Sounion past Crete and Malta to the coast of Egypt before beating a northern passage back to Ithika. On the way he spent a year with Kirke (falcon), (the sister of Pasiphae, Minos’ wife, and of Aeetes, keeper of the Golden Fleece). Another goddess, Calypso, kept him seven years and offered him immortality. He heard the song the Sirens sang and escaped their lure, outwitted the giant Polyphemus, survived the land of the Lotus Eaters and came home at last to tell his tale to Homer. Homer would also have sung the tale of Jason (healer), Odysseus’ contemporary, whose Argosy covered the northern Aegean, then crossed the Sea of Marmara, and coasted the southern shores of the Black Sea as far as Poti in Georgia (Tim Severin’s The Jason Voyage), an area where as many Greeks settled as at Magna Graeca in Italy, both far more fertile areas than the Balkan mountain slopes. Fascinating to see the faint traces of pre-Hellenic religious rites left behind in both stories, which have become fairy stories for the later cultures who have heard them. Nothing has survived of the tales of great voyages the Greeks made to found Marseilles, or of the stories the Phoenicians told of the settling of Carthage and the journey past the Pillars of Herakles into the Atlantic.

One ancient traveler who did venture into the Atlantic was Pytheas, who lived about 350 BC and whose narrative, The Voyage, survived until the time of Pliny but is now lost. From remarks and quotations from later authors we can gather that Pytheas travelled from Marseilles through the Pillars of Herakles, along the coast of Portugal and France, crossed over to Lands End, sailed along the entire coast of Great Britain, to the Orkneys and across to Norway. He was looking for a source of tin, known to come from Britain. Along the way he entered the Arctic Circle, observed the fact that the sun did not set, that the ocean was frozen, saw icebergs, found a source of amber, and noticed the tides were influenced by the moon. Pytheas apparently observed much about the ancient Britons (a word he first used of these people) including what could be the first description of Stonehenge. Like most travelers much scorn was cast on some of his stories. Although trade was his avowed reason for the journey it is doubtful if it was the main reason, as a trading depot at Lands End or in Brittany would have sufficed for this purpose. Though winds may have blown him off course and ignorance of tides and currents taken him out of his way, the indication is that Pytheas was curious, that he travelled to explore, to find out.

About the same time as Pytheas another famous explorer, Alexander III of Macedon, was setting out on his incredible career. Although I am doubtful his military prowess is more than a much loved myth – his army and power base was created by his father Philip II, and the Persian empire was disintegrating under the incompetent reign of the usurper Darius before Alexander arrived from Macedon (and in any case the process of ‘conquering’ other peoples has never had the slightest effect on their historical development) – Alexander’s journey to India was the stuff of myth and entered the folklore of many cultures. Following his walkover victories in Persia, Bactria and Afghanistan, Alexander entered the Punjab, and encountered real opposition, virtually for the first time in his career. He won his battles with hill tribes, and with Porus, king of a Punjabi empire, but with great loss of life, and serious personal injuries. When he discovered there were several strong and militant kingdoms further to the east, Alexander was forced to turn back by his rebellious troops. It is usual to credit Alexander with the development of Hellenistic civilization through this exploit, but trade between Persia and Greece had been going on since the sixth century BC, and had already profoundly influenced the development of both cultures.

As the Graeco-Roman culture declined, the empire of Islam expanded with sudden vigour from the seventh century AD, and Muslim traders advanced down the east coast of Africa, and sent ships on trading expeditions throughout south east Asia. The sultan Haroun al-Rashid (763-809) is associated with an equally famous traveler, Sindbad the sailor. Although the story of the seven voyages (and shipwrecks) is thought to have an Indian and Persian origin, and incorporates episodes that seem taken from the Odyssey, it was the knowledge of true exploits of Muslim sailors that gave the tales their great popularity in Arabic culture.

One of the most extraordinary travelers of all time was ibn Battuta (1304-77), who travelled 75,000 miles over the Islamic world, from North Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East. He described his journeys in the Rihla (The Voyage). Ibn Battuta first travelled from Morocco to Alexandria, Damascus and Syria to Mecca, on hajj. But a spirit of wanderlust affected him, for he then detoured, first to Iraq, then Persia. He witnessed the devastation the Mongols had caused in Bagdad, then returned to Mecca for a second hajj. He moved restlessly on, to Aden, Somalia, the Swahili coast, Mombasa and Tanzania, before returning to Mecca for a third hajj. From there ibn Battuta travelled to Turkey and the Black Sea. He made his way to Constantinople in 1332, then on to Bukhara and Samarkand, Afghanistan, then India. After imbroilment in local politics, shipwreck and imprisonment, ibn Battuta ended up in Sri Lanka. Further travels took him to Sumatra, Vietnam, the Philippines and China. Another hajj, then ibn Battuta moved on to Spain, Morocco, then south to Mali and then Timbuktu. Before he died ibn Battuta dictated an account of what he had seen on his travels. He had seen virtually the whole known world of his time, most of it Muslim.

But ibn Battuta had little influence on Western concepts of the world. That world was significantly expanded by the travels of two Italians. Marco Polo travelled with his father and uncle from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan, where they were valued as the first European visitors. His stories were retailed to a cellmate during his brief imprisonment on his return to Italy, and gave birth to the legend of the fabulous wealth of Xanadu. Stories of Chinese inventions such as paper money, the printing press and gunpowder began to circulate. The stories strongly influenced another Italian, the Genoese Cristoforo Colombo (1451-1506), who owned a heavily annotated edition of Marco Polo’s book. Both Polo and Colombo were strongly motivated by the profit motive, and were looking for routes to the eastern spice markets, where fortunes could be made at that time. Colombo, with a significantly imprecise map of the world, succeeded in reaching some of the islands off the east coast of central America, the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, but was convinced these were the islands of Japan, and that the nearby landmass was China, or perhaps India, the sources of spices. His discoveries led to the Spanish kingdom’s colonisation of America and the consequent destruction of native American cultures by disease, the sword and Christianity. It also led to a wealth drain which Spain used to bolster its European empire and which resulted in bankruptcy for Spain and the disintegration of that empire.

An even greater achievement than Colombo’s was that of the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan, Colombo’s younger contemporary. He and his successor in command, the Basque Juan Sebastian Elcano, succeeded in circumnavigating the globe, an incredible achievement for the time and the state of navigation. The 18 survivors were able to note they had “lost” a day when sailing against the earth’s rotation. Magellan’s voyage stimulated cartographers, and led, together with the explorations of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, to the systematic colonisation of the Americas, which would prove a significant power shift in world politics over the next 200 years.

A man of genius associated with this colonisation was Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618), poet, historian, scientist, politician, soldier, explorer and courtier. He helped form two prevalent concepts connected with America. The first arose from the failed colonisation of Virginia at Roanoke Island of 1584 and 1587, underresourced and beseiged by native Americans, which had disappeard by 1590 when further colonists arrived on the spot. This was a basic plot in many subsequent ‘western’ books and movies. Later in the decade, in 1594/5, Raleigh went looking for the Golden City, the legend of El Dorado of the Chibcha people, and was as unsuccessful in finding it as the obsessive conquistadors who came after him.

The heroic voyagers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped create the modern world, and their epitome was Captain James Cook (1728-1779) whom Benjamin Franklin so admired, and who explored the Pacific and Antarctic area through voyages which are a model of careful planning, precise navigation and logging and humane treatment of crew. But the greatest traveller of this era rivals Odysseus. Another shipwrecked mariner: Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719 and has been ever since one of the most popular and influential books ever published. Setting aside any examination of the facts or fictions which form its narrative structure, this popularity exists because the book is essentially truthful to a picture of human nature we need to relate to. Crusoe is a trader who makes money, a shipwrecked mariner as unlucky as Sindbad, a traveler over most of Europe (Part II) and a devotedly religious man (Part III). His adventures answer an important question. Can a man survive when he loses everything? Crusoe does. He does it the same way we do today, living one day at a time, drawing up his lists of good and bad things. Confined to a narrow space, Crusoe travels vast distances in time, re-inventing human culture through his intelligence, resourcefulness and persistence. A savage, he invents agriculture, clothing, society and warfare before leaving the island, and with no resources but his brain and his hands.

The world was almost in the shape we know it today. Little was left unexplored except Africa, and that was where travelers went in the nineteenth century. The traveler par excellence of this period was Sir Richard Burton (1821-90), a linguist who mastered 25 languages and as many dialects, a scholar in many cultures, familiar with many exotic societies but at home in none, whose journey to find the source of the Nile in 1858 was truly an epic. I have written on Burton here: http://phillipkay.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/so-far-from-home-richard-francis-burton/.

By the start of the twentieth century travelers began to look inward. Bram Stoker’s Dracula of 1897 explores the mysterious terrain of Romania, but most successfully its history and mythology. Once again we are on psychic terrain, where the dead come to life and attack the living, where the undead have no mirror reflection, and crawl like bats across castle walls. This is the same world collected in the tales of the Grimm brothers. Dracula is an evil spirit which a shaman might encounter in one of his journeys. He is a defiant proof that despite scientific explanations of the world, there is still mystery and danger there. The basic dilemma of making our way in the world is independent of any knowledge we have, as Kafka’s character K found out: there are demands made on us we cannot understand, and procedures at work around us we only vaguely understand, which make any journey difficult.

To complicate matters even more, around 1900-1913 an Austrian doctor called Sigmund Freud intuitively discovered what he called the subconscious, an infinite space within each human mind where primal forces compel each of us to create the self we are and the world we live in. This was based largely on an examination of his own mind. A rigorous scientist with the mind of a poet, Freud has been attacked by many people, during his lifetime and up to the present, for the many scientific errors he made despite his efforts to be objective, yet he is easily the most influential writer of the twentieth century, someone who can be ranked with Plato in his capacity to change the way people think and act in the world. The space we travel in dreams, the ground we mark out with compulsions, has been forever changed because of Sigmund Freud.

About the same time as Freud a German theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, developed a number of theories, intuition-based ‘thought experiments’, which later scientists were able to verify. As well as virtually founding quantum mechanics, Einstein suggested that space and time were a continuum, and that there were conditions under which time and matter would become aspects of each other. Quantum mechanics were developed partly by Heisenberg, whose famous uncertainty principle suggested quantifiable limits to the practice of exact scientific observation, to the point where only inexact results could be ‘proved’. This led to the introduction of subjectivity in science. The world which had been charted, mapped and explored, settled, exploited and damaged ecologically has now become far less certain than it once was. Freud and Einstein between them have expanded our universe considerably, giving us the freedom to travel anywhere.

In July 1969 Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. His remark “that’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” hasn’t been listened to by any subsequent human government, who have all preferred to squander fossil fuels in futile battles to gain more fossil fuels, destroying thousands of lives and threatening the environment with total destruction. A reminder that we don’t have to travel anywhere: we can remain stationary.

Two observations come to mind. Tobias Smollett’s 1766 Travels notes that many people travel merely to confirm that the world they are familiar with is preferable, that other societies, in so far as they are different, are wrong. These people move from place to place, but they don’t travel. The other observation is made by Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote in an essay I awoke from school daze to hear and remember, “to travel in expectation is better than to arrive”. The author of the immortal Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Weir of Hermiston is right (probably, and relatively).

©2010 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. Images and other material courtesy Creative Commons. Thanks to Wikipedia. Please inform post author of any violation.

Gilgameshiad

When the people first came here to the land of the two rivers from the north they found little but desert, but the rivers were swift, and they traded their goods along their shores. They built forts at the trading places along the rivers, learned to make canals, and slowly reclaimed the desert land into fertile crop allotments. The people grew in numbers, and here it was they first formed large groups of dwellings, and built walls around them. This was a people whose origins were unknown, and whose language was unlike that spoken by other peoples. Many kings reigned over their cities. This is a story about Gilgamesh, the mightiest of all these kings.

He strode over the plains like a mountain. He swept away his foes like a river in flood. There were none who could stand before him. He was Gilgamesh, the son of the son of god, Anu the king of heaven, given long life and more than mortal strength, but mortal still, and so doomed to die.

Mighty in war, potent in peace, Gilgamesh was a great builder, and the walls of his city Uruk stood taller and wider than that of any other city. Uruk was a great city, halfway between Babylon where Hammurabi was to rule, and Ur, the home of the patriarch Abraham who made another epic journey, to the land of milk and honey. All three cities were on the western bank of the Euphrates river.

He lived at the time when the great pyramids were being built in Egypt, when Babylon was yet a village, before the Assyrians and the Hittites built their empires.

Many tales were told of Gilgamesh. They are not about building, nor about war. Just as Odysseus is known for his travels, and his shrewdness and intelligence, rather than for his kingship of Ithika or prowess in battle, so Gilgamesh is known for his epic journey to gain immortality for the race of men – the quest also of the priestess Eve in her Garden at Eden.

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Enkidu was dead. He had been a mighty hunter and warrior, and he first met Gilgamesh in battle. So evenly were they matched, that their battle could have no end. Instead, they formed a pact, and became friends. They journeyed to the Cedar Mountains, and fought with the hideous monster Humbaba, whom they killed. They were young, and they were proud, and they made enemies. The great Goddess Ishtar/Inanna, one of the most powerful of the gods, fell in love with Gilgamesh, but he spurned her. In anger she sent the Bull of Heaven to destroy Gilgamesh. He fought a great battle with the Bull, and defeated and killed it, but he made an enemy in heaven by this. Ishtar sent a woman to seduce Enkidu, who fell into dissolute ways. No longer was he able to live in the wild. He was made of the clay by god, like Adam, and weakened by a woman, like Samson. His strength slowly ebbed. Soon he came to die. Gilgamesh was laid low by grief.

“Where is the man who can clamber to heaven? Only the gods live forever with glorious Shamash, but as for us men, our days are numbered, our occupations are a breath of wind…If I fall I will leave behind a name that endures. Here in the city man dies oppressed at heart, man perishes with despair in his heart. I have looked over the wall and seen the bodies floating in the river, and that will be my lot also. I will go to the country where the cedar is cut. I will set up my name where the names of famous men are written”. (tr. Sandars pp 69-70)

There was a story told in the city about Utnapishtim. The cities of the two rivers knew what floods were: in times of war the canals were neglected, and the rivers overflowed and covered the plains, and did much damage in the lower reaches of the cities. In ancient times there had been a flood greater than any other. Utnapishtim lived before this Flood, and the gods had preserved him and made him immortal. Gilgamesh, laid low with sorrow for the death of Enkidu, resolved to make a journey to the underworld, to find Utnapishtim where he dwelt in the Land of the Blessed, and ask him how man could gain eternal life. He wanted to bring his friend Enkidu back. This was a journey made by other heroes, Orpheus the musician god from Thrace who founded the first of the mysteries, Herakles the great king of the Dorians, who bought back the beast Cerberus, the guardian of Hades. All these journeys were to prove unfortunate.

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At the ends of the earth are the twin peaks of Mashu, guarded by creatures half men, half scorpion. After a long and weary journey, in which Gilgamesh battled assassins and ferocious beasts, he came to Mashu. The scorpion men stood in his way. No-one before had passed them by. But they realised Gilgamesh was divine, and let him pass. Now Gilgamesh was in the territory of myth. He was on the Road of the Sun, the path that Osiris also walks. Here the sun passes under the earth to rise in the east each day. The Way is dark, and each hour is as two. Behind him was the devouring and scorching sun, but Gilgamesh completed the Way unharmed, and arrived in the Blessed Land, Dilmun. In this garden there was a sea, called the Waters of Death, and in that sea was the island where Utnapishtim lived. Gilgamesh must cross the Waters of Death, and went to the ferryman, Urshanabi. Here he made his first mistake. With Urshanabi were the stone giants, and Gilgamesh fought with them and slayed them, only to learn they alone could cross the sea to Utnapishtim’s island. But Urshanabi was a humble figure, like Charon in Hades, and Gilgamesh prevailed on him to row him over the Waters of Death.

“At the gate the Scorpions stand guard, half man and half dragon; their glory is terrifying, their stare strikes death into men, their shimmering halo sweeps the mountains that guard the rising sun. The Man-scorpion opened his mouth and said, speaking to Gilgamesh, ‘No man born of woman has done what you have asked; no mortal man has gone into the mountain; the length of it is as twelve leagues of darkness. In it is no light, but the heart is oppressed with darkness’”.

When he came to the land of Dilmun, “Gilgamesh said to Urshanabi, ‘Enkidu, my brother whom I loved, the end of mortality has overtaken him. Because of my brother I am afraid of death. His fate lies heavy upon me. If it is possible I will cross the waters of death’”. (tr. Sandars pp 95, 101)
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Utnapishtim was not pleased to see Gilgamesh. When he heard his story, he said: “Your journey is futile. You cannot fight the decree of fate. Man is born to die, and knowing that, has the means of learning much from life. Eternal life is useless to him”. Gilgamesh was not satisfied with this, and asked Utnapishtim why he was made immortal. He learnt that in ages past mankind had left the way of the gods, and was lost in wickedness. The gods were angry, and resolved to punish men. First they sent 12 plagues, which destroyed many. But still men persisted in their wickedness. The gods then resolved to destroy mankind entirely. They sent a flood which covered the whole earth, and all men were drowned. Relenting at the last moment, they saved Utnapishtim, because he was a good man who had honoured them. They set him apart, in the Land of the Blessed, and gave him immortal life. Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh this was a gift, and could not be taken by force.

However he offered to help Gilgamesh. But first Gilgamesh must pass a test. He must stay awake in the Garden for seven days and seven nights. And Gilgamesh could not: he fell asleep.

It seemed Gilgamesh’s journey had been in vain. Yet he had one more chance. He learnt from Utnapishtim of a plant that would give him eternal youth and freedom from sickness. He must dive under the sea to gather it, and he set it on a rock to dry. While he slept, the wise serpent came to the rock, and stole the plant. Gilgamesh had nothing at all from his journey.

But when Gilgamesh met Utnapishtim, he told him, ‘When the Annunaki, the judges, come together they decree the fates of men. Life and death they allot, but the day of death they do not disclose’. But Utnapishtim’s own story was different. He said, ‘The lord Ea warned me in a dream. Tear down your house and build a boat. These are the measurements. Take into the boat the seed of all living creatures’. Utnapishtim sent out a bird each day, until one did not return, then offered sacrifice to the gods. Utnapishtim was rewarded with eternal life, but alas this was a gift denied to Gilgamesh. (tr. Sandars pp 104-110)

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He made his way back the way he had come, and finally returned to his city of Uruk, of the great walls and thronging streets. There he was revered as a hero, one who had bought the arts of civilisation to mankind, as had Prometheus. And then Gilgamesh died.

“O Gilgamesh, this was the meaning of your dream. You were given the kingship, such was your destiny. Everlasting life was not your destiny. For Gilgamesh, son of Ninsun, they weighed out their offerings. Bread for Neti the Keeper of the Gate. Bread for Ningizzida the god of the serpent, lord of the Tree of Life. For Dumuzi, the young shepherd, for Enki and all the ancestral gods. O Gilgamesh, great is your praise.” (tr. Sandars pp 116-8)

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Gilgamesh is not another Conan the Barbarian, a sword wielding warrior of gigantic strength who slays enemies in piles. He is a Promethean figure, a hero who stole the arts of civilisation for mankind. When the Sumerians talked of where their culture had come from, it was said that buildings and customs had originated with Gilgamesh. He was the name that was used for origins. As a hero he is an unruly, unsanctified Saint George, and is reminiscent of a later contemporary figure such as Ramses the Great, both great conquerers and boastful of it. In his quest he becomes something akin to the Fisher King, he reaches the end of all heroism only to find we are but mortals. His is a story of defeat, of how even the mightiest of kings, even the son of a god, can not prevail against death. What better place than Mesopotamia, which is a Greek word for ‘between the rivers’, and which has been the battleground for rival empires for 3,000 years as it still is today, to have the first realisation that life is fleeting. The people of Sumer, of Akkad, of Ninevah, of Babylon, of Aramea, the Hittites, the Persians, the Macedonians and many other peoples, all have come here, all have flourished, all have gone.

The rejection of Ishtar could be an instance where the old, prevalent rite of early man, of the Sacrificial King, wed to the Mother Goddess for one year, who died to bring life and fertility to the people, was displaced by a patrilineal kingship.

Gilgamesh is the longest living of heroes, and the one who has been vital to most cultures over the millenium. Sumer, Akkad, Babylon all listened to his story. He entered the Tale of Alexander and the Shah Nameh. The writers of some of the books of the Jewish Torah heard stories about him. For people today he is of interest because several gifted poets told his story, and we can see how several tales have come together to form an ‘epic’ which is the first surviving work of that kind. But was there an epic? Were the fragments we have part of a unified poem, or were they poems linked together by a poet in a way that might have lead to a unified epic in the future, or were they disparate works gathered together by a librarian in Assurbanipal’s library because they were on the same subject? As so often is the case, we don’t know. The epic as published in modern translations is certainly a fabrication of modern scholars, and may be accurate, but to what extent? Here is an indication of how the poems of Homer might have been composed. We can see how stories, such as that of the flood, which once were separate tales, were eventually woven into the Gilgameshiad. Only fragments of his tale remain, full of mysterious references we don’t understand, and there are lost episodes of the story. The fragmentary state of the cuneiform texts, surviving in three different languages, produces some distortion, as some episodes are treated at length, others not. Somehow this has made him more potent in our imaginations, and Gilgamesh has survived also in SF novels, comics, children’s books and computer game versions. Like Gilgamesh, we still mourn our mortality, and wish for eternal life.

©2010 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. Images and other material courtesy Creative Commons. The Epic of Gilgamesh, English vercion by N K Sandars, © N K Sandars 1960. Please inform post author of any violation.

Heroes: what they do for us

Cultural heroes come and go but the qualities they stand for often remain the same. Just as ancient societies purged themselves of contamination by discharging it upon the body of a scapegoat driven from the community (an act itself the genesis for a cultural hero, Jesus) our heroes often stand for qualities we admire but find hard to achieve in our own lives. By discharging these ideals on cultural heroes and driving them to our imaginative realm we give them some kind of ability to endure.

Think of a cultural hero. Too late, I’ve thought of one first: Sherlock Holmes. The value we celebrate here is reasoning power. We, like all humans, respect the ability to reason, yet we know our ability to do so is impaired by strong, primitive emotions that interfere with the reasoning process. So we like Sherlock. He’s single, which we should be in order to think clearly, but can’t manage to be. He doesn’t do much except play the violin and take cocaine, and occasionally fire pistol shots at the living room wall (he never misses either). And collect information. All those newspapers and the clippings from them! How he would have loved the internet! Sherlock was always very clear about how he worked. He observed. He both looked and saw. And then he deduced from his observations. Nothing hard about that, surely. But as Dr. Watson makes obvious, we can’t do it. Not a chance. Mood swings, pressure of work, interruptions, kids, too much to drink, indigestion, that new thriller we just have to finish, our spouse feels neglected, the resentment we feel at unfair comments from friends, family or colleagues… on it goes. So we like Sherlock. He shows us that deducive reasoning is possible, and we need to know that (even research scientists who of course are too busy competing with one another to exercise the skill). At least we’re not such duffers as Dr. Watson, so there is hope.

Cultural heroes also tell us something about our times. Take Tarzan. Pretty clearly he represents the ability to stay in tune with one’s environment. A basic survival skill. This is even clearer if we look at Tarzan’s source, Mowgli. For thousands of years humans have been spectacularly successful at adapting to their environment, staying alive as the Bee Gees would say (even though these insist in singing against a strong breeze and risk catching a cold). Then yesterday we invented the Industrial Revolution and lost the plot. For a while the First World made itself feel better by lecturing the Third World about the dangers of deforestation and industrial pollution (the First World are experts on both these problems, having invented them). But the bigger our cities, the more artificial our food, the less we came in touch with natural phenomenon like sunrise and sunset, the more we needed a hero who could do it for us. Mowgli wasn’t quite right; he was a character in a children’s book invented by a writer we dismissed as an offensive imperialist (and poor Rudyard’s the greatest short story writer who’s ever lived!). When Tarzan came along he really took off. A kind of all purpose natural man, a Superman without the threat of kryptonite. But Tarzan’s retired now, gone back to find the last remaining bit of jungle and commiserate with the last few gorillas. No Jane to rescue, just tractors and logging saws which drown out his warcry. Have we given up on rejoining our environment or is it that Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t swing from a vine?

Another cultural hero who has had his time and wandered off is Charlie Chaplin. During the Great Depression he represented resilience. He took the blows we all suffered in life, but no matter how hard they were, eventually he would shrug his shoulders, twirl his cane and clump off with his outsize boots, and every now and then give a jump for joy at how good life was despite it all. We needed to know that. We always will of course, and there’s many a figure to take his place, but none so universally accepted. Perhaps this is because the problems we face are so radically different from society to society now that no one figure can seem relevant to all. Or maybe it’s just that there has never been so universal a medium as silent film.

Some cultural heroes are one trick ponies. Gilgamesh was a demi god who went looking for the plant of immortality. He speaks for every person who’s ever lived (and died). Bilbo Baggins takes a stand against injustice threatening his world, just as his predecessor St George took on the Dragon. He speaks for everyone who regrets the passing of the good values in our society. Marilyn Monroe stands for the hope that sexual allure can co-exist with innocence, something we’ve never been very sure about because we feel so damn guilty about sex.

And there are what you might call negative cultural heroes. To enter into the spirit of this investigation you have to stop your identification with the hero for a moment. It would be great to be a Dirty Harry for a while, and take out all those idiots who insist on cutting lanes without an indicator flash. “Go on”, you say as you pull level, “make my day”. But aside from this vicarious satisfaction, it looks like Dirty Harry helps us deal with the sheer frustration of living in a high speed, ugly and extremely selfish urban environment. I guess things are even more desperate for you if you’re a standin for Charles Bronson or Bruce Willis.

This is a great argument to use if you get criticised for watching too many action movies. When the girls get home after watching Thelma and Louise they can be very assertive. “It’s cool” you explain, “watching guys with seven foot pistols blow holes in each other helps keep me sane”.

This brings up the interesting question of female heroes. Not heroines, they’re for men. They exist, but don’t serve a purpose for most women because they’ve been created by men. What woman needs another sexy blonde goddess with large breasts to live up to? One could almost imagine that women don’t need heroes, until you read the novels of Jane Austen and realise that the psychoplay occurs on a more modest, feminine dimension. Jane’s heroines don’t need a sword, they can kill with a word. I’m a man, and so too modest to speak about a woman’s fantasy life, except to deplore mere copies of what men come up with, like Xena.

I’m talking, if you hadn’t realised it, about mythology, and also about religion, of which myth is a part. The indications are that myth (and religion) are therapeutic and necessary for the normal functioning of the mind (like dreams). That is why everyone is religious, even atheists. But people think they know too much about religion. They confuse knowledge and faith. Somehow conveying the joy of your faith turns into a heated and sometimes violent argument as to whether there are seven million or eight million angels able to stand on the end of a needle. Looking at our heroes is a lot simpler than that.

So already we have discovered there are heroes who stand for qualities we admire but don’t exercise enough (Casanova, anyone?); heroes who help us cope with life outside the Garden of Eden in all its frustration. And there are heroes who exorcise qualities we have but wish we didn’t (how about Adolf Hitler – no, let’s not go there).

This calls for a list. Heroes, and what they really do for us.

©2009 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. Images and other material courtesy Creative Commons. Please inform post author of any violation.