A Thousand Faces

A follower of this blog brought up an interesting point in a comment on the last entry. She wrote that:

It's sort of funny to think about all of those fantasy shows and novels that are all about rebalancing the forces of light and darkness now...for some reason it's always darkness/death that's upsetting the balance, and the Hero has to fight in the name of Light. I don't think anyone's written about it being the other way around.

Even though there probably are fantasies where Life is upsetting the balance and Death has to step in, this reader does have a point: they aren't the norm here in the West. There're plenty of reasons we don't see this often in present-day America, a large one of which is Hollywood's adopting of Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces as a guidebook for making blockbuster cinema. Hero is strictly about myths centering on an individual confronting Death, and the "Thousand-Faces" part comes from the variety of symbolic ways different protagonists have faced Death in order to claim some prize and take it back to their community, without bringing the Death they faced back too.

But that standard fantasy story, where Light/Life/Good is interrupted by Darkness/Death/Evil flows deeper than Joseph Campbell. For one, it has to do with the Western focus on linear stories that move from a Balance of Powers (Stasis), to a Flux as everyone tries to figure out a new balance (Intrusion), to a new and different Balance of Powers that can never be like the first (New Stasis). But it also has to do with the linear narratives the West hopes are true as it comes up against Death.

Western culture has inherited a conflict of viewpoints that has played out in a variety of ways throughout the centuries. Two early founding cultures expressed these viewpoints in large, profound ways, though they shouldn't necessarily be credited with inventing them, just embodying them in ways we can study, and doing that before anyone else did. Both cultures rely on linear narratives to determine what survives after death, and that becomes the main question.

On the one hand you have the Mesopotamian understanding, which is that death is the ultimate end of life, and there is nothing that continues after it except for the society the individual lived in. So, life should be lived greatly and, dare I say, epically. This is what Gilgamesh ('He Who Saw All') comes to understand at the end of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Towards the climax of the story, Gilgamesh meets with a pair of survivors of the Great Flood, who were gifted with immortality for doing so. However, they prove to be the exception to the rule, as the gods ordained life and death to mortals, while only life to themselves. The husband of the pair makes this clear to Gilgamesh:

Do we build houses forever?
Do we seal (contracts) forever?
Do brothers divide shares for ever?
Does hatred persist forever in the land?
Does the river forever rise (and) bring on floods?
The dragon-fly leave (its) shell
That its face might (but) glance on the face of the sun?

And even when the immortal tells Gilgamesh where to find a fruit that will give him eternal life, that fruit is snatched away by a snake while he isn't looking. Gilgamesh returns to wonder at the walls of his city, Uruk, and concludes it is these walls, and his nation, which will live on after him, walls which, I should point out, only exist now in our imaginations. The walls of present-day Uruk (think of the homonym...) are shelled and bombed and scattered.

On the other hand you have the Egyptian understanding, which is that there is an individual soul that lives on after death, and that soul's implied future has to be taken into account in life. The Egpytians were very clear that one's actions determined whether that soul would live on after death. The Book of the Dead describes the judgment of a soul as a complete court trial, with several stages, and 42 judges working under Osiris, who, after living and dying and living and dying and living, is well acquainted with the matter. The Book describes the outcome of Orsiris's trial, which is the best possible outcome, where a person's heart (considered to be the seat of consciousness) is weighed against a feather:

Thoth, the righteous judge of the great company of the gods who are in the presence of the god Osiris, saith: "Hear ye this judgment. The heart of Osiris hath in very truth been weighed, and his soul hath stood as a witness for him; it hath been found true by trial in the Great Balance. There hath not been found any wickedness in him; he hath not wasted the offerings in the temples; he hath not done harm by his deeds; and he uttered no evil reports while he was upon earth."

And so the linear progression of one's life, and one's choices, culminate in the birth of a soul into, hopefully, paradise, after death, as in the Mesopotamian narrative, except that culminates in the creation or preservation of a society or way of life that will remember those who died to preserve it. In each case, individual death is a milestone along a greater linear narrative of how life and death work. This understanding will create Villains who challenge the linear narratives the artists carry around in life, and might explain why they're so often associated with Death itself. What screws up a linear narrative more than dying at the wrong time?

In the East, however, the narratives of Death tend to be cyclical. Look at a Taoist account of creation:

There was something formless yet complete,
That existed before heaven and earth;
Without sound, without substance,
Dependent on nothing, unchanging,
All pervading, unfailing.
One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven.
Its true name we do not know;
'Way' is the by-name that we give it.

And by understanding that hidden working of the 'Way,' beyond our being able to speak it, one approaches that formless-yet-complete self and achieves peace. Similarly, Yama, the god of Death, explains to Nachiketa, a Hindu sage who seeks him to ask him whether a person lives after death or not, that:

This wise one is not born nor dies;
From nowhere has He [sprung] nor has He anyone become;
Unborn is he, eternal, everlasting and primeval, -
He is not slain when the body is slain.
Should the killer think "I kill,"
Or the killed "I have been killed,"
Both these have no [right] knowledge:
He kills not, is not killed. ...
The Self is hidden in the heart of creatures [here]:
The man without desire [all] sorrow spent, beholds It,
The majesty of the Self, by the grace of the Ordainer.

In Hinduism, you don't get out of samsara, the cycle of cycles of life and death, until you realize the Atman (Supreme Self), through meditation and grace. As Eastern artists carry these cyclical narratives around in life, they see challenges to these narratives in the form of Separation and Illusion. Significantly, the word "dukkha," translated as "suffering" from Sanskrit, has in it a built-in reference to the sound of a squeaky wheel.

Each of these narratives, Eastern and Western, collects enemies like silt collects in a river. I've tried to mention some general ones above. Sometimes artists set them up like straw men to be knocked down, which is cheap art. But when artists take a breath and step into that question: "what if these opposing beliefs are actually right? What if my narrative won't survive?" that is the birth of good fantasy. Adherents of each narrative daily face challenges holding it up in the real world, where their narrative of life and death is constantly assaulted by challenges, doubts, and, ultimately Death. They need to work out how to cope with these challenges, so they attend the artists' stories, to see how the Hero does it. And so, I'd assert that the best Villains are the ones that threaten not only to send the Hero down to Death, but also whatever the Hero (and the Audience) believes will live on. They challenge the audience's beliefs. This push towards doubt and oblivion is so unsettling that it simply must be dealt with, as epically as possible, to illuminate all the times that the adherents of each narrative walked away unsure, in real life. Agents of Separation could easily lead a practicing Hindu into another three or four reincarnations before he undoes the damage they did. A crazed dictator threatens to destroy the world in Avatar: The Last Airbender, not because he is evil, but because he is attached to his one Element (Fire), and to Power, so it takes someone who knows all four Elements, and who is a child, to re-balance the world. A scientist hero reminiscent of Gilgamesh is on the verge of a new discovery, until her experiments are threatened by some Lovecraftian Egyptian mummifiers who thought her practices were amoral (and vice versa, some Egyptian mummifiers could have their totally-beautiful-and-not-Lovecraftian-at-all eternal life jeopardized by some idiot materialist who cared nothing for their values). Actually, that's almost the movies Contact and Avatar, respectively.

So it's more than the forces of Light, Goodness, Right stereotypically being on the side of Life, it's that they're always on the side of the author's idea of what survives after death, even in anti-hero movies where what survives is endless cycles of pain, suffering, and torment. What distinguishes one from the other comes from where the adherents find doubt about their narrative of what survives after death being right.

And so, the fun of fantasy like that is that it provides imaginary and symbolic ways to confront our own fears of death that those Villains embody: that we will not be remembered, that the things we fought for in life will be destroyed by piggish people, that we will leave the world worse than we found it only because we didn't have a chance to make it better. Also, once their fight is through, their narrative either affirmed, enhanced, or changed, Heroes tend to die with a surviving narrative in toe, bringing about a reassurance that we will, for whatever reason, find peace when we die. In bad stories, we walk away suspecting that peace is a paper moon. In good stories, we think we've at least got a shot at it.