Job’s Journey

Mythology. Sun, Apr 3rd, 2011 at 8:24 am

[This weekend’s assignment is after the recap.]

We last left off at “The Crossing of the First Threshold.” We spent this week discussing Campbell’s analysis through the hero’s “Apotheosis.” To sum up our hero’s progress thus far:

I’ll let Campbell, through our readings from this week, take it from here.

The Belly of the Whale

The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died (83).

The Road of Trials

Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials (89).

The Meeting with the Goddess

[S]he is the incarnation of the promise of perfection; the soul’s assurance that, at the conclusion of its exile in a world of organized inadequacies, the bliss that once was known will be known again: the comforting, the nourishing, the "good" mother—young and beautiful—who was known to us, and even tasted, in the remotest past (101-2).

Woman as Temptress

The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero’s total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father’s place (111).

But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul (112).

Atonement with the Father

[T]he ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim’s own ego—derived from the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind, but projected before; and the fixating idolatry of that pedagogical non-thing is itself the fault that keeps one steeped in a sense of sin, sealing the potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of the father, and therewith of the world. Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster—the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id) (119-20).

Apotheosis

Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance. "When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change." This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain—through herohood; for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things"; or again (and this is the other way of making the same statement): "All beings are without self" (139).

We are taken from the mother, chewed into fragments and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were (149).

Your Mission

This week we read and discussed the Book of Job through chapter 33, stopping to compare passages to other stories we’ve come across. On Friday you found connection between Zophar’s argument, “The Wicked will Suffer,” and a number of Ovid’s stories, including Tantalus, Minos, Midas, Oedipus. We connected these individuals to what Campbell calls the “Tyrant Holdfast”—the evil ruler who will starve his people to maintain his riches (see “The Hero as Warrior” under “Transformations of the Hero”).

Your goal is to finish reading The Book of Job (here’s where we left off) and record connections between the biblical work and Campbell’s. As I said on Friday, you can write this from any perspective you like (comparing the search for wisdom espoused in Job and Campbell, tracing Job’s hero’s journey, the temptations of each, etc.). Here are the parameters of the assignment:

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