Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

72 The Heroic Journey
diagram below. 60 Among other things, it involves a dangerous trial
of some kind, psychologically analogous, writes Jung, to “the attempt
to free ego-consciousness from the deadly grip of the unconscious.”
61 It is a motif represented by imprisonment, crucifixion,
dismemberment, abduction—the kind of experience weathered by
sun-gods and other heroes since time immemorial: Gilgamesh,
Osiris, Christ, Dante, Odysseus, Aeneas, Pinocchio, and Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz. In the language of the mystics it is called the
dark night of the soul. In everyday life, we know it as a feeling of
deep despair and a desire to hide under the covers.
Typically, in myth and legend, the hero journeys by ship or
braves dark forests, burning deserts, ice fields, etc. He fights a sea
monster or dragon, is swallowed, struggles against being bitten or
crushed to death, and having arrived inside the belly of the whale,
like Jonah, seeks the vital organ and cuts it off, thereby winning
60 Adapted from Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 245.
61 Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, par. 539.