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This mythblast is not exactly about Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, but it is inspired by the “affects” of this recent film which won the best animated feature category at last year’s Golden Globe and Academy Awards. I suspect audiences are drawn to the film because it demonstrates with uncanny precision (and imprecision!) the encounter with the dream-world (aka: underworld, aka: unconscious) through the agency of the archetype of the trickster figure.
On that note, now is a good time to recall Joseph Campbell’s apt correlation between dream and myth: “Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream” (The Hero[n] with a Thousand Faces, 18). To better suit the following context, allow me to restate: Dream is the expression of the personal unconscious, while myth is the expression of the collective unconscious, within which the archetypes reside.
The weirdness of the dream
Surely there are other, rare films that are also (literally) dreamlike. But as for the rendering of the actual experience of encountering the unconscious via the dreaming state, The Boy and the Heron is, in my opinion, unsurpassed. There are only two things I feel I need to point out to support this claim. The first is the film’s accuracy in recreating that particular kind of imagistic and narrative weirdness that we encounter in dreams—and I emphasize “weirdness” because it is of a sort that is strangely familiar (perhaps having something to do with weird’s etymological source: fate).
The second criterion is the unmistakable duplicitousness of the story’s trickster, the heron, who guides the boy (and us) down a path that begins on ordinary-enough terms, but then transforms into something very different along the way. Furthermore, the transformation (of both environment and guide) proceeds by such negligible degrees that we suddenly find ourselves, late in the game, startled and bewildered, lost deep in unconscious terrain with no real idea of how we got there.
This mini-awakening, this recognition that things have sneakily transmuted without our having noticed (or even questioned) until it is blatant, is common to dream-experience. And guess who’s responsible, so to speak, for shuttling us to and fro, in and out, of these different states of consciousness and perspective, these moments of seeing, moments of blindness, and so on and so forth?
That’s right, as will soon be (partially) seen, the trickster. But for now, note that these mini-awakenings or glimpses into the unconscious indicate that, for a moment, an aspect of the unconscious has been made known to the conscious due to the light, so to speak, that we’ve thrown into it. And note also that this light can penetrate only so far before it is simply stopped, as if at gates specifically designed to preserve the mysteries of the unconscious from our making a mess of them—or, more likely, to preserve us from being annihilated by them.
Either way, this dynamic highlights a central aspect of the archetype (indeed, of all archetypes)—namely, that just as the exception is always inherent in the archetype, likewise there is always that part of the archetype that eludes our knowing altogether. We could call this its depth. And this is kind of a good thing, because when we find ourselves at those gates, gazing into the awesome face of the unknown, we are in that moment subsumed by the beautiful condition of being lost, and hopefully, at a loss for words or thoughts or anything, really. For at last we are capable of pure exploration and discoveries. At last the soul finds itself in the room with its preferred kind of treasure: wonder, novelty, renewal and, of course, experience (which is the soul’s chief currency—both in value and in the flow or direction [cf. “current”] of its evolution).
Get your snake oil here, but maybe don’t drink it
I won’t address The Boy and the Heron’s specifics because that would flatten the experience and waste time. So instead, in signature trickster fashion I’ll just say trust me. Check out the film. You might as well, the risk is small enough, even if I am lying about the whole thing.
And so it is with the trickster, whose scale of severity ranges anywhere from Curly and Mo boinking each other in the eyes to Loki engineering the destruction of an entire pantheon along with its cosmos. Regardless of scale, the trickster jars the ego into a new perspective by subjecting it to frustration, embarrassment, terror, confusion, ruin and sundry other psychologically unpalatable flavors. But the trickster may also ease the ego into new terrain through all kinds of slippery maneuverisms and sleights-of-hand. Either way, new perspectives are rendered in which, for better or worse, we are suddenly not so central or significant as we had formerly presumed, and our power of influence is indeed meagre if not entirely absent.
The trickster jars the ego into a new perspective by subjecting it to frustration, embarrassment, terror, confusion, ruin and sundry other psychologically unpalatable flavors.
The superlative metaphor for this absence of influence is probably death, which we find in the myth of Hades and Persephone. Here, in one fell swoop, we (and “we” are the Persephone-figure in this myth) are simply taken without any say in the matter, without any means of escape or of fighting it off and that, as they say, is that.
Well, the (probably) good news is that another job of the trickster (who, of course, is a moonlighter!) is to guide souls into (and sometimes out of) the underworld. In classical terms this auxiliary role [Gk. psychopomp] is played by Hermes. Furthermore, he is the inciter of dreams through so-to-speak taps on the unwitting heads of all sleeping things with his dual-serpentine helix caduceus staff whose history traces even farther back beyond Greece into ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
And so, this deity, like Miyazaki’s heron, is both the personification of, and the host of, the psyche’s transport to and fro between worlds which are distinguished less by physical contents and more through psychic encounters as the perspectives we inhabit within whichever particular state of consciousness we literally find ourselves. This, I think, is the great value to all the trickster’s antics. It’s just that (as with all things) it comes at a price.
Thanks for reading...
MythBlast authored by:
Craig Deininger has been a regularly featured writer for the JCF since 2018. He has taught at many institutions including Naropa University, Studio Film School in Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he earned an MFA in Poetry. He also earned an MA and PhD in Mythology and Jungian Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. He has balanced his scholarship with a long history of (what he calls) "fieldwork," ranging from commercial fishing in Alaska, building trail for the Forest Service in the Rockies, commercial farming in the midwest, years of construction and landscaping across the country and, of course, countless outdoor misadventures in backpacking, rockclimbing, mountain biking, and the like. He ranks himself in the top 99% of the world population in the art of digging a hole with a shovel and acknowledges his inflation for thinking this. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines including The Iowa Review, and his first book of poetry Leaves from the World Tree, was co-authored with mythologist Dennis Slattery and published by Mandorla Books.
This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Trickster.
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Enuma Okoro, is a Nigerian-American author, essayist, curator and lecturer. She is a weekend columnist for The Financial Times where she writes the column, “The Art of Life,” about art, culture and how we live. And is the curator of the 2024 group exhibition, “The Flesh of the Earth,” at Hauser & Wirth gallery in Chelsea, New York. Her broader research and writing interests reflect how the intersection of the arts and critical theory, philosophy and contemplative spirituality, and ecology and non-traditional knowledge systems can speak to the human condition and interrogate how we live with ourselves and others. Her fiction and poetry are published in anthologies, and her nonfiction essays and articles have been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Aeon, Vogue, The Erotic Review, The Cut, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, NYU Washington Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and more. Her Substack, "A Little Heart to Heart" is a labyrinth towards interiority, exploring the fine line between the sacred and the ordinary in our daily lives. Find it at Enuma.substack.com and learn more about Enuma at www.enumaokoro.com. In this conversation, we explore Enuma’s journey, the ways myth, art, and storytelling shape us, and how we can use them as tools to reimagine both our personal and collective realities.
This Week's Highlights
"The dream is a private myth, and the myth is a public dream."
-- Joseph Campbell
Myth and Meaning, 18