In the dark woods: what myths say about leaving home

“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.”-- Joseph Campbell

In this episode we explore the mythic theme of leaving home as a central part of answering the call to transformation. Drawing from myths such as Inanna’s Descent, Valemon the White Bear King, Psyche and Eros, and The Odyssey,  we reflect on the symbolic and literal meanings of “home,” and how leaving it often initiates deep personal change.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Myth Matters an exploration at the intersection of mythology, creativity and consciousness. I’m your host Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide beautiful crazy world of ours, I’m glad that you decided to join me here today.

When have you left home? What meanings surround this leave taking? Or leave takings if you've had this experience more than once.

I want to reflect on leaving home in myths and stories, today. We recently finished a series of episodes on the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna and a potent mythic moment for me in that story, one that I've revisited many times, is the moment that Inanna opens or turns her ear to the ground. The moment that she hears the call and decides to make a journey to the underworld. Today I want to draw your attention to something obvious about the call experience that is easily glossed over but worthy of some thought – to answer the call, you have to leave home. 

This leaving home might involve a literal leaving of your home base in the material world and/or a movement in your inner world away from what you've known and how you've typically operated and understood things. There are some exceptions. There are stories in which answering the call doesn't involve leaving home, of course. And yet the need to leave home to answer the call is so ubiquitous that I want to reflect on some of the implications.

A point that I make with some regularity is the need to examine the common patterns in our myths as a type of canon, so to speak, that reflects human experience. Close work, sitting with a particular story and engaging with it over time is valuable and yet, we also need to zoom out and look at mythology as a collection of overlapping and interlocking motifs. This bird's eye view reveals things that wouldn’t be noticed in a close inspection of only one or two stories. We need to do both and this episode is one of those bird's eye view, looking at the motifs examinations.

I think this is important because we’re living in a time of competing mythologies. Some myths are crumbling and some are shape shifting. Some are clearly identified as "myths" and others are rising to conscious awareness as the guiding metaphors and stories behind our cultural norms. Looking at the big picture helps you to see what is essential, what is at the heart of our myth-making and is likely something that we still need and will do. 

Undergoing transformations, for example. Many myths about this like the myth of Inanna and we need them as transformation is a fact of human existence. And the metaphor of the goddess, that presence, is revealing its utility to more and more of us so, I suspect that myths like Inanna are myths that we're going to want to carry forward, for at least a little while longer.

The language and metaphors of kings and queens in fairy tales, on the other hand, may fade away if we continue to live without actual kings and queens. The image of "king" and "queen" may be replaced by a metaphor that carries more meaning to us today. A creative collective process is underway, one that's more visible if you think about what myths in their current form tend to convey.

Looking at the bigger picture also helps you find your personal place in myth and the mythic context of your current circumstances because it gives you a larger vocabulary. You're aware of the variations in experience in stories. I talked about the part of the pattern of the hero's adventure commonly referred to as "The Call" and some of the variations there in a past episode and will post a link for you to check out if you’re interested after you hear this. 

The Call takes place in all kinds of ways. Some of them are exciting and some of them are scary and there's much in between. It's good to know that there's more than one form, that the call isn't always a bright and shining moment in someone's life. Receiving a call to your life adventure is a recognizable experience, in retrospect at least, and yet it doesn't always happen in the same way for every person. This is also true of leaving home in the stories and in our lives. 

Reflecting on the experience of leaving home with the aid of a range of myths, and bringing this to your personal experience can help you deepen your understanding. And if you're in the midst of leaving a home of some sort right now, it may offer some useful context and direction. I think a collective initiation and transformation is taking place and that many of us need to "leave home" figuratively or literally, or will be required to do this leaving in some sense, to meet the moment and call. 

Significant changes in society like the ones that we're seeing bring about changes in personal lives, and creating your path means leaving home.

Sometimes leaving home is part of answering the call to adventure. You answer the call and so, you have to leave. They're the same decision, basically. Inanna senses what she senses and she answers this by leaving her cities and temples to enter the underworld. In other circumstances leaving home is the precipitating event, one that makes the call possible, that puts you where you need to be in order to hear it. The walls of the familiar can be pretty thick. They can muffle the sound of what is rising up and then you've got to step outside to hear what needs to be heard because the adventure, your adventure, lies beyond your home turf and what is familiar. What is safe or seems safe. 

The call to your adventure can come in a variety of ways and this dictates the circumstances of your leaving home and there's variety there also. Sometimes opportunity presents itself and you go with varying levels of enthusiasm. For example, in the Norwegian fairy tale of "Valemon the White Bear King,"  a young princess has a dream of a golden wreath and this image of the wreath haunts her, completely occupies her heart, mind, body, and soul. 

One day, she meets a white bear in the forest and this bear has her wreath. She agrees to go away and marry him in exchange for the wreath and although her father the king tries to prevent this from happening, in the end the princess rides off into the sunset on the back of the white bear. 

Climbing onto the bear's back is not the end of her story. In a sense, this is the beginning of her story. Her life, the one meant for her, begins with that ride. The first bit was a preamble. Back at the palace she was and would have continued to be the "youngest princess," the daughter of the king living under his rules in his house. Or castle. In this story, the princess was safe, loved, and well cared for and yet, the nature of the "home" that she needed changed. She was ready to be more than her father's daughter. 

Many of us need to leave an inherited home of safety and dependency to make a new home for ourselves based on belonging to who and what we choose and our sovereignty. This happens to most young people, at the outer level at least. You get to a certain age and you move out, right? Leaving the inner "home" of inherited rules, beliefs and certainties is a different project, one that far too many people avoid. But it's crucial to establishing a true inner authority. You've got to question what you've been told at some point if you're going to grow up, own your life, and make a real home in the world. 

Kind of like the young princess with the wreath, and the bear. Dad didn't want her to go but she'd said "yes" and she went when she was able.

You've got to question what you've been told and you need to find out where you belong. A "home" is more than the physical place where you live, right? You can live in a lace that isn't "home." Home is a center, one that includes many things: family, comfort, safety, organization, or sanctuary, for example. I think what distinguishes "home" from other places, in the physical world and in psyche, the inner world, is belonging. Belonging to a group, to a place, to myself. Belonging to the right someone or something is a form of homecoming. 

Many of us leave home more than once. The need to find and create a new home, outer or inner, happens in adulthood as we're called to re-invent ourselves or undergo a transformation. We need to change and in important ways, who or what we belong to or where we belong also changes. As Dante says in his famous poem The Inferno: “When I had journeyed half our life’s way, I found myself in a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray…”

Someone alone in the shadowed forest is not, metaphorically speaking, in the familiar comfort of home enjoying a cup of tea. This person is lost. They are looking for where they belong.

This reminds me of the Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnell. King Arthur is out hunting when he sees a white stag at the edge of the forest. This leads him to an encounter with an incredibly ugly woman, a loathely lady in the language of the story. This encounter begins an inner process for him and his knight  Sir Gawain. Both of them are changed by what they learn about power, virtue, and sovereignty from this woman. She's transformed also. 

In the story, no one literally moves to a new castle and yet "home" is left and transformed as they step into new and challenging territory and are changed. And what got this whole thing, going the call, was that white stag, and that white stag was at the edge of the forest. Not taking a seat at the king's table.

Sometimes you leave home because you’re forced to go. You escape with your life or you get sent away. In Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Wild Swans," the princess, a younger sister to eleven brothers, is driven away and into the woods by a malicious stepmother who tricks the king into believing that the young girl is an imposter. This cruel act could be the end of the sister but it's actually the beginning of her adventure. She awakens to her desire to find her brothers and this gives purpose to her solitary wandering and hardship. She learns that they were turned into wild swans by that evil stepmother and commits to saving them. 

The younger sister's quest to break the spell and restore her brothers to human form takes her very far away from her original home and familiar world and yet, she hears the call and understands it because she's been turned out. And in the end, everything that she does becomes part of the new home she ultimately enjoys, the new form of belonging she discovers with people she loves. I'll post links to the episodes in which I tell these stories, by the way.

Sometimes your leave taking appears temporary based on the actions you take and your intention. You literally return to the place that you left that you once called home. But you know the saying, "you can never go home again." Things change or you change or both. That home may be gone for good or a new form of home, of belonging, may arise in that old place. 

A famous myth about returning home is the Odyssey, the story of the Greek hero Odysseus. Odysseus spends twenty years trying to get home after the Trojan War and eventually succeeds but the home that he returns to is very different from the one that he left. His infant son is now a man, for example, and his wife Penelope has been fending for herself for decades. His mother has died. And a large group of noblemen have been ravaging his storehouse and eating up his wealth while they try to convince Penelope to stop waiting for Odysseus and marry one of them.

Odysseus is not the same man either. Transformation was the point of his long struggle and journey. So yes, he was back on Ithaca but he was not in his previous "home."

Now, you might be thinking "This is all well and good for some people. They have a home and they leave and find another one but I didn't have that home sense of belonging when I was a child." And maybe, you're still looking for that home. Feeling that you don't fully belong in your family of origin or with the people who raise you is difficult. It's difficult. 

That lack is very often something that we carry for a long time as we search for "home." Your sense of why you didn't fit there provides clues for where to look and the purpose of your early estrangement. Something about who you are and what you need to do here, what you have to develop and offer, is actually clarified through the experience of not fitting in.

The myth of "Psyche and Eros" speaks to this situation. This old story first appeared in The Golden Ass by Apuleius in the 2nd century AD and probably has roots in much older Greek myths. I love this story and have worked with it a lot. It begins with Psyche, a sweet and fantastically beautiful daughter of a king. 

Psyche's beauty is a problem. 

People admire her and are also too much in awe to really connect with her so, she's lonely. This worsens as she gets older. Her sisters get married but no one proposes to her. People begin comparing her to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and this makes Aphrodite angry. Psyche is a mere mortal folks, not to be compared to a goddess. So, Aphrodite decides to ruin Psyche's life and at the same time, her father makes a trip to the oracle at Delphi. The oracle tells him that he must abandon his daughter on a mountaintop, where she will meet her destined husband-- who by the way, is not a human.

Psyche and everyone around her assume that she is going to die. This is a very sad and frightening moment in her story. But it's the beginning, not the end. Psyche's beauty connected her to Aphrodite and her initiation by the unwilling goddess is her destiny. In the end, Psyche has a great love and marriage to the god Eros, a child named "Pleasure," and an immortal home of Mount Olympus. Complete fulfillment, in other words. And this is the result of not fitting in because she was too much, too beautiful. If you know this experience of not belonging, there is something about you, your nature, needs, or concerns that is a clue to your true home and where you can find it.

I've talked about "Psyche and Eros" and "Valemon the White Bear King," and these stories have a common element that pertains to home, belonging, and the need to leave home. In both of these stories, the young woman leaves home to begin life with a very unconventional husband, the god Eros and a white bear. These husbands offer comfort, safety, and love to the women. They chose them and they care for them. But. Neither of these husbands allow the young women to see them. They arrive and depart in the dark and won't permit her to light a light. Which means that they don't see her either, not up close.

This is a very limited form of intimacy. In both stories, the young women become pregnant and this new life stirs up loneliness and homesickness and a desire for a broader and deeper sense of belonging. Of family. Although it's forbidden, they light those lights. They look. They see. And their lamps and candles drop burning oil and wax on their husbands and these guys leave immediately, in a mix of sorrow and disappointed anger. And yet that glimpse in the light has deepened the love of these young women for their husbands.

Did Psyche and the princess destroy their wonderful homes? Or did their desire for home in the complete sense motivate them to take a chance and risk what they had?

Lighting the light is a metaphorical move toward greater consciousness. The light reveals the shadow, and the shadow must be acknowledged and integrated. There are problems. That's why those husbands left. The light however, makes real love and home possible. It seems like a mistake when the lover leaves and all the good things, the castle and the garden, disappear and you find yourself alone in a forsaken place and yet, this is the way home.

When we belong to ourselves and our dream of fulfillment, we have a home in our hearts that can't be taken from us, one that will guide us toward home in the outer world as well.

I have one final piece for you, a poem by Rumi, but first, a big welcome to new email subscribers: Bonnie, Pamela, Candace, Stephen, Beth, Gurucharn, Paula, Gita, Marion, and Martin. Welcome! to Myth Matters

If you're new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website. You'll find a transcript of this episode with the links I mentioned as well as information about the mythic mentorship and creativity coaching that I offer 1:1. And you can also join the email list if you'd like to receive links to new Myth Matters episodes when I drop them, in your inbox.

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Unfold Your Own Myth by Rumi

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob, blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his son and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down 
and brings up a flowing prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.
Now there's a pearl.

A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he's wealthy.

But don't be satisfied with stories, how things

have gone with others. Unfold 

your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you. 

Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.

From The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.

If we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world. A world where everyone has a home, where each of us belongs.

And that's it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Take good care of yourself and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.