Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949. 40 years earlier, one of the seminal texts in anthropology had been published by Arnold van Gennep. It was called The Rites of Passage. There are two general facts about that book that are key to our analysis.
Firstly, van Gennep had proposed an identical underlying pattern for rites of passage that Campbell would later posit for the Hero’s Journey: the cycle that ends with transcendence. Since van Gennep was an anthropologist, the transcendence he was primarily concerned with was social in nature. Although rites of passage can and should have an Esoteric dimension, the analysis of them focuses on the Exoteric since the transcendence that occurs at the end is a change of social status for the person who has gone through the rite.
Campbell saw the Hero’s Journey as a state change from consciousness into the unconscious and then a return to consciousness. Van Gennep saw the rites of passage as a transition out of profane status, into sacred status, and then back to the profane. However, the rites of passage pattern is just as valid in secular settings. A modern job interview or a modern parliamentary or presidential election are just as much rites of passage as any overtly religious ceremony.
Since the underlying pattern is identical, we can state that the Hero’s Journey focuses attention on the Esoteric dimension of the journey while the rites of passage are about the Exoteric dimension. Rites of passage are ceremonies. They are action-based and outward-facing (Exoteric).
The Hero’s Journey and the rites of passage are two sides of the same coin. However, it often happens in life that the Esoteric and Exoteric get out of balance. When we have the Exoteric without the Esoteric, we have the phenomenon of the empty ceremony. People are just going through the motions. This happens when rites of passage are done not because one believes in them anymore but because tradition requires them to be carried out.
Conversely, it’s possible to have the Esoteric with no corresponding Exoteric component. This means that there has been an important event from the point of view of the individual that is not recognised by society. The story of Romeo and Juliet is a classic case in point. The two are in love (Esoteric), but their love is not Exoterically recognised by the society in which they live. Shakespeare reinforces this fact by having the couple married in secret by Friar Laurence.
Imbalances between the Esoteric and the Exoteric are at the core of many great works of literature and myth. Loveless marriages vs. torrid love affairs, unjust political institutions vs. rebel fighters, corrupt religious bodies vs. persecuted prophets—all of these are about situations where the Esoteric and Exoteric are not in alignment.
Given that both Campbell and van Gennep based their scholarship on extensive cross-cultural studies, we can state that the distinction between Esoteric and Exoteric is one that appears to be a universal of human society. This is not surprising since myths, stories, and rites of passage are also universals of human culture. It is for this reason that the Exoteric – Esoteric distinction is a core concept in the Archetypal Calculus.
There is a second feature of van Gennep’s analysis which is central to the Archetypal Calculus. About half of van Gennep’s book is dedicated to the rites of passage that demarcate the major phases of life. Thus, van Gennep devotes a chapter to birth and childhood rites, to initiation rites, marriage rituals, and finally to funeral rites. Such rites appear in practically every human culture.
These rites of passage mark the transition points between the archetypal phases of life that we have denoted by the four primary archetypes of our analysis: the Child, the Orphan, the Adult and the Elder. Almost all societies will denote these changes with ceremonies of various sorts. Even the modern West, which is relatively devoid of formal rites of passage, still has ceremonies around the attainment of a driver’s license, first job interview, high school and university graduation, etc. We don’t tend to think of these as rites of passage, and yet they all follow the pattern identified by van Gennep.
The reason why societies implement rites of passage at such important points of life is precisely because of the heightened importance attached to the change from one archetype to the next. That is what van Gennep denoted by the concept of the sacred.
What this shows is that the archetypal phases of life are not mere conveniences of analysis. They are built-in to myth, literature, and rites of passage and appear to be universals of human culture. It is this fact which allows us to posit that these phases make up the archetype of the Human. Cultures may show significant variation on the timing and nature of the archetypal phases of life, but all cultures recognise them in story and in ritual.
Moreover, the archetyal phases can be analysed from their Esoteric dimension (the Hero’s Journey) and their Exoteric dimension (the rites of passage). Thus, the Archetypal Calculus can integrate the extensive scholarship of comparative mythology and anthropology as well as theology and psychology. As we will see in the next post in this series, we can also add biology to the list.