Originally presented at the National Gallery of Art’s 1997 Summer Teacher Institute on Mythology. The Mythic Hero an illustrated lecture by Dr. Janice Siegel The “mythic hero” is a particular breed of hero with particular traits. The Greek hero Heracles (Latin Hercules) will stand as our model Mythic Hero, since he exemplifies most of the associated traits, but we shall consider other mythic heroes from an assortment of cultures in our search to understand what exactly we mean by “heroic” in the “mythic” sense. Artwork used to illustrate these myths and heroes is deliberately drawn from a wide range of cultures, artists, periods and media to reveal the viability and popularity of such myths beyond antiquity. Most fanciers of mythology are familiar with the old Pattern of the Hero, an attempt to boil down the main events of a hero’s life and career: for example, he is said to be of elevated parentage, exposed as an infant, adopted by a poor foster family, has marvelous adventures, saves a princess from a dreadful fate, marries her, and eventually meets with a mysterious death. This general pattern has been molded to fit various methodological approaches and there is little distinction, on a thematic level, to be made between the patterns presented by Lord Raglan (myth-ritualist), Otto Rank (Freudian), and Joseph Campbell (Jungian). The pattern works well for the hero of folklore, but not for most mythic heroes, for it doesn’t necessarily include the single most important contribution of the mythic hero: insight into our sacred beginnings from which we have become alienated and with which we strive to reconnect. Mythology opens a door, an access way to what lies beyond our profane reality. The mythic hero can walk through that door and return to our world once again, while we cannot. So we depend on him to take that journey for us, and we hope to learn something about the cosmos and ourselves as a result of it. I. HEROIC CONCEPTIONS Because the mythic hero must be able to cross the boundaries that separate our world from that of the gods, to make accessible to mortals that wondrous but forbidden world, the mythic hero must have a mythic passport, i.e., divine parentage (something the established “pattern” waters down to include “royal parentage”). This commingling of divine and mortal allows him to act beyond the ordinary limits of humanity, an essential characteristic of the mythic hero. Divine conceptions of mythic heroes may be accomplished in several ways. The trickster-god motif is used by a god when he disguises himself as a woman’s husband in order to gain access to her sexually; she then has intercourse with her real husband and eventually gives birth to twins of different fathers. Heracles, the model mythic hero for today’s talk, is the product of such a union between his mother, Alcmene, and Zeus, king of the Greek pantheon. Born Alcides, our mythic hero is the son of Zeus and is therefore half-divine; his twin Iphicles is the mortal offspring of Alcmene’s husband, Amphitryon. Heracles’ paternity will be a never-ending source of pain during his life, for as the bastard son of Zeus he continually suffers in the throes of Hera’s jealousy. Some versions of Leda’s story use the same trickster-god format: Zeus lay with her in the guise of her husband, followed by her actual husband, and she then gave birth to two sets of twins, Helen and Clytemnestra and Polydeuces (Pollux) and Castor, the first of each set being the divine child of Zeus and the other the mortal child of Leda’s husband Tyndareus. But another, more spectacular version of this heroic conception has been popularized by artists ancient and modern: in this telling, Zeus comes upon Leda in the form of a swan, and the children of this union are hatched from two eggs, each bringing forth a set of single-sexed twins. There is a rich tradition of hero shrines dedicated to the sons of Zeus, the Dioscuri, and to Helen. Clytemnestra, of course, earns another form of immortality when she murders her husband Agamemnon upon his return from the Trojan War, standing thereafter as the paradigmatic vindictive wife. Antiope also birthed a set of twins fathered by Zeus, this time in the form of a satyr. Amphion and Zethus become city-founders of Thebes, whose walls were made by stones moved by the music from Amphion’s lyre, a gift of Hermes. City-founding alone is enough to qualify one born of divine parentage for mythic hero status. The story of Danae and her conception of the hero Perseus also offers a great opportunity for artists. Locked away by her father because an oracle claimed her offspring would cause his death, Zeus managed to find a way in to Danae anyway, in the form of a golden shower. II. HEROINES What does it take, then, to be a mythic hero in classical Greek mythology? Does one need to embark on great adventures and be the dragon-slayer of great renown? No, although many mythic heroes do engage in such activities; this, however, is more of a folklore motif than a qualification for mythic hero status. We must be careful to separate our preconceived notions of what makes a hero heroic from what the ancient cultures themselves demanded. Our list of classical Greek heroes might include the courageous Heracles, Perseus, and Theseus, but a Greek’s would also have included city-founders, eponymous heroes (those who give their name to a region or people), and others as well. This is an important distinction, for few women fit the paradigm of the “dragon-slayer,” yet there were actually as many female mythic heroes in the Greek tradition as male. To paraphrase Tristram Coffin, it is certainly more glamorous to grab a tiger by the tail than to pluck the feathers from a dead duck, and women simply did not have the opportunity (with few exceptions) to seek adventure in the manner of male heroes. Although the events of his life did not qualify a hero for mythic status, the circumstances of his birth (divine parentage) and the reaction to his death are the qualifying factors: some form of immortality must be gained by the hero, usually manifested in classical lore by the hero achieving cult status after death. Archaeological and epigraphical evidence can be very helpful here; even today you can travel to Sparta and visit the Menelaion, a cult shrine dedicated to the worship of both Menelaus and his wife Helen. The many classical Greek female mythic heroes tend to operate differently from their male counterparts, partly because of biology and partly because of social constraints. One premier difference: men travel to places to establish themselves as heroes; women do it at home. Men found cities; women save them. Sacrificial heroism is grounded in the true historical evidence that human sacrifices were made to save cities, and the art and literature of antiquity provides details of particular instances. In some versions of her story, Iphigenia willingly goes to her death, sacrificing herself in return for a Greek victory in the Trojan War. In other versions, this child of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra is rescued at the last moment by Artemis and becomes her priestess in Tauris; Artemis decreed that the clothing of women who die in childbirth would thereafter be dedicated to Iphigenia, affording her the cult status necessary for mythic hero status. Andromeda offers to die to appease a sea monster that threatens to destroy her father’s kingdom, conjured by Poseidon in punishment for her mother’s rash claim of beauty beyond the gods’. She is, of course, rescued and married to Perseus. Andromeda stands as a good example of how a sacrificial heroine’s actions generally gain our attention because she provides a man with an opportunity to prove his heroism (witness Perseus), rather than through her own show of heroism. The difference between male and female heroism in classical mythology is most clearly shown in the story of Alcestis. She willfully sacrifices her life for what she considers a greater good: the life of her husband. At the end of Euripides’ play, Heracles rescues her from her doom. While she is deemed heroic for submitting to Death, Heracles proves his heroism by wrestling Death himself. In the end, female heroes are less active and more reactive than their male counterparts, yet they were no less effective or celebrated in antiquity. III. FEATS OF STRENGTH But it is the male heroes who give us the edge-of-your-seat, action-packed adventure stories we so like. In Heracles, we have a figure who enjoys cult status after his death, but who also earned his reputation through many glorious and wondrous adventures. The twelve Labors of Heracles and his parerga (side-adventures) form the bulk of the Heraclean corpus. Again, his connection with divinity is significant: Heracles becomes enslaved to his uncle Eurystheus, a favorite of Hera, in a rite of purification for the murder of his first wife and children, a madness said to have been caused by Hera herself. The great hero, performing these labors at Hera’s instigation, will henceforth be known as Heracles, literally the “Glory of Hera.” The ubiquitous use of Heracles’ labors in monumental sculpture proves their great significance in antiquity. Perhaps most famous are the metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Another Panhellenic shrine whose buildings sport Heraclean motifs is Delphi. Even on the Athenian Treasury (505 BC), the metopes depicting Heracles’ feats are outnumbered only by those depicting Theseus, the great Athenian hero (whose story was rewritten in the 6th century to be more Heraclean, universalizing the Attic hero). Labors of Heracles are also depicted on the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, and a Heraclean frieze from the Theater of Delphi’s proscenium was dedicated to Nero, who identified himself with Heracles. The first six of Heracles’ Labors all take place in the Peloponnese and are more folklorish than mythically heroic. The first labor, killing the Nemean Lion, is well-known because it is here Heracles acquires his most famous attribute, the lionskin cloak; the labor demonstrates his great strength, for he must strangle a lion whose skin cannot be penetrated by any weapon, then use the lion’s own claws to skin it. The second labor, slaying the Hydra of Lerna, is a typical dragon-slayer motif. The remainder of the first six showcase other talents: his endurance and speed in chasing for a year the Cerynean Hind, sacred to a virgin goddess; his strength in capturing the Erymanthian Boar; his wit over brawn in cleaning the Augean stables by re-routing a river; and his cleverness in routing the dreadful Stymphalian Birds by making more noise than they do. His fight against the giant Antaeus, who derived his strength from his mother, Earth, further proves his strength: Heracles had only to hold him off the ground and wait for his strength to ebb; later ages, such as the Renaissance, tend to see this as an allegorical victory of the sublime over the base. IV. THE THREAT OF LIMINALITY While Heracles’ first six labors showcase the attributes of the hero within a circumscribed area of the mainland, the next six involve far-ranging geographies and pit Heracles against metaphorical threats to culture and humanity, common themes in Greek mythology. True mythologies, and therefore true mythic heroes, are products of pre-historical and pre-literate societies, serving alongside religious ritual as the primary method of communication and instruction for the community. Liminal thresholds work both ways, and heroic victories over such forces underscore a double message: such behavior will not be tolerated from without or from within, separating acceptable behavior from that considered dangerous to society. Males and females had rigidly defined roles in Greek society, and aberrations such as the Amazons, neither male nor female, civilized Greek nor true barbarian, caused great anxiety. Each of the most prominent Greek heroes had a tumultuous encounter with an Amazon: Heracles retrieved the Golden Belt of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, killing her in a battle instigated by Hera; Achilles fought Penthesilea on the battlefield at Troy, said to have fallen in love with her even as he thrust his sword into her body; and Theseus abducted the Amazon queen Antiope, with whom he had a son, Hippolytus, destined for ill, perhaps because of his mixed parentage. The Centaurs constitute a similar threat, similarly liminal creatures, neither beast nor man but qualities of both. Like the Amazons, they were seen as a primarily single-sexed society hostile to institutions such as marriage, and have also been identified with the Persians, whose defeat ushered in the Golden Age of Greece to which most monumental sculpture belongs; scholar Page duBois rightly perceived them as “anti-culture personified.” The most famous Centaur story, the Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs (Centauromachy), appears in the sculpture of the East Pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia and in metopes of the Athenian Parthenon: the Centaurs, invited to the wedding of the local Lapith king, cannot hold their liquor, and drunken revelry escalates into combat when one tries to abduct the Lapith bride. Heracles, too, has a run-in with a centaur, killing Nessus after he tries to abduct Heracles’ wife Deianira; Nessus’ dying words convince Deianira that his blood carries the power to engender love in her husband, when in fact it is a deadly poison, one that will eventually kill Heracles himself. Other hybrid, threatening creatures fail to conform to the paradigm of Greek society in the same way. Bellerophon earns his reputation as mythic hero by killing the Chimera (a triform of lion, goat, and serpent) while riding the winged horse Pegasus. Odysseus cannot resist hearing the Sirens’ song, and acknowledges his own inability to resist temptation by lashing himself to the mast, while his men wear wax earplugs. The Sphinx, another hybrid creature (woman’s head, bird’s wings and chest, lion’s body) strikes fear into mortals until Oedipus answers her riddle, upon which she kills herself. V. THE THREAT OF ANTHROPOPHAGY The sphinx’s habit of feasting on those who could not answer her riddles bridges to another common threat faced by mythic heroes: anthropophagy, the eating of human beings, perhaps the paramount fear of humankind across mythologies worldwide. One of Heracles’ labors is to subdue the man-eating mares of Diomedes, tamed by feeding them their own master. Japanese mythology tells of heroes vanquishing the man-eating spider Kumo and the serpent Uwibami, which swallowed men on horseback. In Crete, the Minotaur, killed by Theseus, feeds on young Athenians offered in tribute, and stands as a warning against illicit desire, being the monstrous product of a princess’ unnatural union with a bull. Homer’s Odysseus struck a victorious blow for Greeks and humanity by besting the anthropophagic Cyclops Polyphemus, yet in his very next adventure nearly falls prey to the same threat among the cannibalistic Laestrygonians. On his way home from one of his labors, Heracles faces a similar cannibalistic killer in Italy, Cacus, son of Vulcan, who characterizes his cannibalism by nailing his victims’ faces to his door. Similar metaphors for threats to civilization and order recur across world mythology, from the Cyclops and Laestrygonians to the West African epic Sundiata’s villain Sumaoro. VI. FIGHT AGAINST MORTALITY Typically, the mythic hero reveals his connection to the “other side” by ignoring the limits death sets on mortals, generally illustrated across cultures by a successful nekyia, or descent to the underworld. Heracles visits the underworld several times, once as the fulfillment of a labor: to bring back Hades’ three-headed watchdog, Cerberus. The underworld visits of Odysseus and Aeneas, chronicled by Homer and Virgil, yield important knowledge unavailable elsewhere – another example of mythic involvement, and one not restricted to classical Greece or Rome. The Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, “two-thirds divine,” embarks on a journey to learn the secret of eternal life after the death of his companion Enkidu, successfully passing the fearsome Scorpion Men who guard the way. With the guidance of the goddess Ur-shanabi, he harvests a life-giving plant from beneath the sea, only to have it stolen by a serpent; in the end he abandons the pursuit of eternal life, reconciling himself, in various tellings, either gloomily to mortality or with the consolation of achieving fame through his monumental walls of Uruk. Immortality, or escape from mortality, can be sought in other ways too. Odysseus faces this temptation at every turn: the Lotus-Eaters, Circe, and Calypso all offer him oblivion, a gift he rejects in favor of a familiar love and a lost life. In the Chinese myth of Sun Wukung, the Stone Monkey seeks immortality by removing his name from the Underworld’s Register of the Living and the Dead, eating the Immortal Peaches, and stealing pills of immortality, before being overpowered by the immortals and, in a climactic confrontation, failing to escape even the palm of Buddha’s hand. His desire for the Peaches of Immortality echoes both Adam and Eve’s exclusion from the Tree of Life and Heracles’ labor to collect the Apples of the Hesperides, guarded by a dragon in a garden at the ends of the earth, known only to the Titan Atlas. VII. THE UNHEROIC HERO Heracles and other mythic heroes often surprise us by performing selfish or dastardly deeds, or acting in remarkably unheroic ways. A hero is not simply a do-gooder searching for damsels to save; he is a semi-divine being who continually seeks the glory he considers his due, and is therefore not necessarily a paragon of virtue. The mythic hero is just as often “guilty of striking departures from the morality of his society” as he is a savior. We revel in the hero’s exploits because he mirrors ourselves: our great potential and the great limitations set on us by nature, society, and each other. Heracles’ glory lies in his continual effort to overcome the limitations set on him by Hera, by Eurystheus, by the very laws of the universe, and his refusal to give up. As one scholar puts it, his exploits are “strange mixtures of beneficence and crime, of fabulous quests and shameful betrayal,” a testimony to the greatness of a man who is almost a god, a greatness having less to do with conventional goodness than with the transforming energy of the divine spark – his arete, the conquering spirit that permeates everything he does, making him “an odd combination of terrifying excesses and superb self-mastery.” Heracles’ reputation for drinking (he is shown in one ancient mosaic engaged in a drinking contest with Dionysus himself) was a favorite theme for playwrights; Euripides portrays him as a drunken buffoon in Alcestis before he acts heroically to save the title character from death. After murdering his first wife and children in a Hera-induced madness, Heracles seeks purification and is assigned the Twelve Labors by his uncle Eurystheus. Later, the unjustifiable murder of Iphitus, a violation of xenia (guest-host relations), forces him to seek purification again; denied it by Apollo at Delphi, Heracles oversteps his bounds trying to wrestle away Apollo’s sacred tripod, and is punished with a year’s servitude to Omphale, Queen of the Lydians – depicted by artists in a state of feminized humiliation, apparently part of his punishment. Such apparently unheroic behavior does not cause us to lose faith in mythic heroes who prove themselves both wonderful and terrible; their faults simply magnify our own, and highlight the limitations of those of us born merely mortal. VIII. IMMORTALITY ACHIEVED Although the mythic hero enjoys victorious battles against death now and again, in the end he must lose the war. Death is a necessity: the mythic hero must suffer the same limitations regarding mortality that we do, or his appetites become vulgar excess, his pride hubris, his single-mindedness egotism. Just as important as the exploits of a mythic hero’s life is the hero worship that follows his death – ritualistic religious cult, of which Heracles had more than his share. But Heracles is unusual in that he actually undergoes apotheosis, becoming a god outright; other classical mythic heroes so honored include Ino, who becomes the goddess Leucothea, and the Roman Psyche. Heracles’ death on the funeral pyre he himself builds – to escape the agony of the centaur Nessus’ poisoned blood, unwittingly given to him by his wife Deianira – represents humanity’s almost frantic desire to break free from mortal constraints. After his body was burned, Zeus proclaimed that only the mortal part of the hero had been consumed, while his immortal part traveled by chariot to Mt. Olympos, where he was proclaimed the twelfth Olympian, reconciled with Hera, and married to her daughter Hebe, goddess of youthful beauty, who gave him a drink of the gods’ immortalizing nectar. A mythic hero from a later tradition earns a similar immortality by destroying a poison-belching monster threatening an innocent community: in the story of St. George and the Dragon, townspeople sacrifice their children daily to a monster in hopes of forestalling destruction (echoing the Athenians’ tribute of children to the Minotaur), until the Christian soldier St. George arrives just as the king’s daughter is about to be offered up, and defeats the dragon “through the power of Jesus Christ,” inspiring 20,000 townspeople to be baptized at once. For his sanctity, St. George was beheaded under Diocletian’s edict of AD 303 persecuting Christians, and his cult, beginning in the East, reached similar heights in Europe centuries later during the Crusades. The bestowal of mythic status can also work in reverse: historical leaders have often adopted heroic, and in the case of Augustus, divine, personae in the desire to achieve prestige, power, and ultimately immortality beyond that afforded ordinary mortals. Alexander the Great and Napoleon both had themselves depicted in official portraiture with the attributes of semi-divine heroes, a practice common among Chinese political leaders as well. Even George Washington, a genuine American historical figure, gained mythic status in folklore, from tales of superhuman strength (throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac) to tales of noble character (the cherry tree). This transformation, beginning with the idea that he was simply a better-than-average man, culminated in the actual suggestion of apotheosis, as depicted in Constantine Brumidi’s fresco The Apotheosis of George Washington, which decorates the dome of the US Capitol Rotunda, in which Washington takes his place among the immortal Olympians, flanked by the figures of Liberty and Victory and encircled by thirteen maidens representing the original states – divine approval, the painting suggests, of both the man and his vision for America. Six surrounding groups combine classical gods with figures from American history: Ceres rides a reaper through golden grain while Young America looks on; Hephaestus stands among cannons; Hermes offers gold to financier Robert Morris; Poseidon and Aphrodite emerge from the sea holding the Atlantic cable; and Athena imparts wisdom to Franklin, Morse, and Fulton. I conclude with some words about the recent explosion of pop culture treatments of classical mythology. Several mythology-based productions – from Disney’s Hercules to Xena: Warrior Princess to the Star Wars trilogy, purposely modeled after the mythic hero and company – speak to our society’s yearning to reconnect with that other, lost world. But we are so removed from our mythic beginnings that we cannot conceive of a hero who can simply walk among us, existing at once in both the sacred and the profane. In a kind of misguided mythic striving, we create superheroes instead, who function above the level of humanity. Every twentieth-century American mythic superhero schizophrenically sports a double identity, hero and “cover”: Batman owes his existence to Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man to Peter Parker, Wonder Woman to Diana Prince. They fear exposure, for their power lies in their mystery as much as in their abilities and moral codes. All superheroes transcend our ordinary reality at will, and when we engage with their stories, for a while, we can too. It is this sense of wonder and mystery, and the glimpse it offers of a nobler, more profound existence, that we most cherish – a reminder of why heroes exist in the first place: to stand as models of courage and persistence on our own journey through life, a journey fraught with perils and pitfalls, as we remain determined in our own pursuit of that missing mythos. Select Bibliography Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Princeton UP, 1949. Coffin, T. P. The Female Hero in Folklore and Legend. Seabury Press, 1975. DuBois, Page. Centaurs and Amazons. University of Michigan Press, 1991. Kirk, G.S. The Nature of Greek Myths. Penguin, 1974. Lyons, Deborah. Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient Greek Myth and Cult. Princeton UP, 1997. Morford, Mark and Robert Lenardon. Classical Mythology. Longman, 1995. Lord Raglan. The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama. Methuen, 1936. Slater, Philip. The Glory of Hera. Beacon Press, 1968.