The Olympic Games begin tomorrow in Beijing, and like hundreds of millions of people around the world, I will watch athletes who will amaze with demonstrations of physical prowess, grace, and unprecedented athletic skill–skills cultivated and honed over a lifetime of devotion to a particular sport. New heroes are certain to emerge from this, the XXIX Olympiad. Heroism and the Olympic Games have always been linked together, and not just in the modern era of Olympic sport (the modern Olympic Games were first held in Athens, in 1896). Heroism and the Olympic Games were joined from the very beginning, the first recorded mention of the games were in 776 B.C. but they may have occurred as early as 884 B.C., when the games were called the Olympiakoi Agones. This is in itself a revealing name, and in the name itself is discovered the link between the games and the archetype of heroism.
Olympiakoi—specifically not Olympiachanntes—were properly identified with the worshiped deity, in other words the Olympiakoi were merged or alloyed with the inhabitants of Olympus, they were to be counted among, and as like, the gods themselves. The second word, Agones, is not used to denote games, but rather agones means struggles. Agon is the word from which we derive the word agony. So from a mythological and psychic perspective, the Olympic games are a form of mimesis, an imitation or a reproduction of an aspect of god-like experience, a memorialization of the struggle of the gods through sport.
Mythology tells us that the greatest of Greek heroes, Herakles himself, is the originator of the games. It was after he had completed his twelve labors, a monumental struggle that battered both psyche and physis, and may have contributed to his unexpected descent into madness, that Herakles measured off the stadium on Mt. Olympus by walking in a straight line for 400 paces. This distance was called a stadion and is the basis for the modern track circumference of 400 meters. Sacrifice and ceremony alternated with athletic contests, and the deities honored were, of course, Zeus, and a divine charioteer named Pelops, who myth says once ruled Olympos.
The thing that is often overlooked, the inconvenient fact that is not often conscious in an engagement of the archetype of heroism, is that the hero is often not successful and it is the unsuccessful hero who is often the most compelling. Witness the images of commercial television as the games approach: the images are of the falling runner, Mary Dekker-Slaney, of the lame Kerri Strug, of the track athlete who, shredding a hamstring, is helped across the finish line by his father, tears streaming down both their faces. These are the images that arouse a noble heart, and a victory without some experience of the agon that is unavoidable in life seems shallow and narcissistic. Arthur fails to protect Camelot; St. Joan is imprisoned and executed, and John Wayne “dies” on the beach at Iwo Jima. These narratives, and others like them, are the enduring images of heroism.
But there is another problem frequently encountered by the hero; curiously, perhaps, it often happens that the hero does not want to (or cannot in the case of imprisonment or death) return from the labor or quest, and instead desires to continue to participate in a psychology of one-sidedness and inflation precipitated by some modicum of success and by the unconscious identification with the hero archetype. This means that the hero’s sources of instinct and wholeness, the collective nature of man all the way back to prehistoric times, as well as the seeds of future development and constructive fantasies have been rejected and split off from consciousness, and when this happens, one is all too vulnerable to fall into a situation far worse than the one from which one heroically sallies forth with the intent to alter. Because the unconscious contains the images of wholeness and redemptive psychic energy, a neurotic dissociation from it (by clinging only to the brilliant, successful heroic image) means nothing less than a separation from the source of all life.
The sheer necessity of engaging the agon is the principle voiced in the Olympic Creed which reads: “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well (emphasis is mine).” What is essential is to engage one’s life, and all the elements of it. One may not say, “This experience I like; I’ll have more of this. But this one over here, this is awful, I’ll have none of it.” But functionally, people make these kinds of decisions every day and the cost of such a choice to split off and reject what are arguably the most essential constituents of life is eventually catastrophic.
An unwillingness to experience the agon, the true struggling of life and its darkness, its confusion, and its pain plunge one into a situation from which there is no escape, and the hero, formerly reveling in his success and celebrity, is plunged into chaos, stripped of his honor and humiliated, or worse. In modern stadia one sees this drama enacted any number of times and in any number of ways: Pete Rose, Floyd Landis, Marion Jones, Barry Bonds, and countless others are stripped of their laurel crowns and either are expunged from the record books or have asterisks sewn to their bodices and live out their diminished lives and presumably unrealized longings as contemporary Hester Prynnes, scarlet in symbol and in countenance.
But must that be the end of the story? Mercifully, no. In fact, such a dolorous denouement may just be the beginning. A harsh twist of fate, whether it is precipitated by narcissistic strivings or not, is often the vehicle that delivers one to the door of the alchemist’s laboratory. Psyche is, in my way of thinking, the great alchemist and the materials the alchemist works with–the Prima Materia– are the basic, instinctive drives of the individual personality. Alchemy is not some sort of primitive, proto-chemistry wherein slightly balmy men seek to turn lead into gold. Alchemy is a symbol of the unifying function of psyche in which psychic wholeness is the goal. The subject matter is not literal but symbolic; it is not rooted in the external world but within the human mind.
When I speak of basic, instinctive drives I am talking about the very things that are the uncomfortable, perhaps intolerable, facts of our human existence such as the drive for power and control, for dependence upon or fusion with another, and the drive for glory that seems to underlie most athletic, and I might add, academic, striving. If one has split consciousness off from one’s drives, if one doesn’t know what they even are, you inevitably will enter into a depression in order to meet them. That is why, in the consulting room, I am not to quick to prescribe behaviors or ideas that will ameliorate or eliminate the client’s depression. There is always a point to a depression; the depressive experience is itself goal driven, and its goal is, in most cases, to encounter one’s unconscious drives and motivations. The soul is realized, it is made real, in depressions: the poet John Keats wrote in a letter, “Call the world, if you please, the vale of soul-making.” A vale is nothing more than a valley, a geological depression, and it is in the psychic vale, an emotional depression, that one may encounter the soul and its reality. It is there that one touches it; it is there that one looks for underlying meaning.
Instead of arguing with or dissociating from the drives that carry us away, we need to, as Marie von Franz said, “cook” them and find out what they want; as objectively as possible, find out what the drives are driving at by subjecting them to the alchemical fire which subsequently releases the soul from the clutches of instinct just as subjecting material to fire releases vapor and steam. von Franz notes that “The desire to be something special really comes about through the hunch or intuition of individuation; there is the vague idea of being an individual, and without realization of that uniqueness it is not possible to individuate.” In other words, if one can follow one’s drives and even one’s symptoms back to the point of origin–what von Franz means by “cooking” them–one is lead directly to the Self. For if you are capable of dreaming or fantasizing about the archetype of the hero, that suggests you are capable of incarnating or manifesting the archetype through yourself.
Our culture is on the one hand all too quick to abandon the suffering or failed hero, but on the other hand, that exemplar of failed archetypal heroism is usually the most enduring one. The failed hero–Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Beowulf, Sylvia Plath, Amelia Earhart, Anne Frank, Achilles, just to name a few–is the individual who indelibly marks our consciousness. Often, it is true that the hero is most heroic in her failure; she embodies heroism by living at the edges of herself, by reaching so excruciatingly high and falling; and, it is through the supreme poignancy and beauty of failing when everything is on the line that she experiences an apotheosis of sorts. In her failure she reveals the nobility and the poetry of being a human being. To risk everything in the reaching, in the striving, only to fail cannot be failure at all; indeed such an action transcends ideas of success or failure and secures one a place in the company of the gods. And what’s more is that we all know instinctively that one such act by a lone individual may redeem us all. Joseph Campbell wrote:
It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.
