Jim Morrison - Journey of the Hero

The hero’s journey is well-documented in mythology throughout history.

The Universal Journey of the Hero

Morrison:
Let’s reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages. Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests.

Joseph Campbell: Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.

MOYERS: Why are there so many stories of the hero in mythology?

CAMPBELL: Because that’s what’s worth writing about. Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

MOYERS: So in all of these cultures, whatever the local costume the hero might be wearing, what is the deed?

CAMPBELL: Well, there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed, in which the hero performs a courageous act in battle or saves a life. The other kind is the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then
comes back with a message. The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there’s something lacking in the normal experiences available or permitted to the members of his society. This person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a going and a returning.

Get here and we’ll do the rest

The End, The Doors

Kurt von Meier had discovered in him rich “suggestions of sex, death, transcendence.”

What transcendence did he have in mind, death through sex or sex through death?

“The first on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, the second on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays.”

Bernard Wolfe, Esquire, 1972

This Commandment is from The End, the most important Doors composition. The song is a priceless prescription for salvation emanating from deep spiritual knowledge, not “nebulousness passing for depth,” as Robert Christgau mistakenly claimed. Prior to the line “Get here and we’ll do the rest,” Morrison has told us to head West. It might seem like the West is California, but Morrison is actually referring to the mythological West.

The hero’s journey consists of three main elements: the hero, the dragon, and the treasure. Each of these elements has numerous variations across time and culture. The most widespread version has the hero venturing West in order to confront and defeat a dangerous obstacle such as a dragon. When the hero is triumphant, he is reborn at midnight in the East, attaining the treasure. “Get here” is Morrison’s command to join him in overcoming the dragons, which he once called the “dark forces.”

“The End” contains an explicit command to undertake the journey of the hero, to achieve self-knowledge.  The journey involves a transformation of consciousness and is not for the faint of heart.

There’s danger on the edge of town

Ride the king’s highway

Weird scenes inside the gold mine

Ride the highway west, baby

Ride the snake

To the lake …

Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers speak of the trials one must undergo on the way to achieving self-knowledge:

MOYERS: In this culture of easy religion, cheaply achieved, it seems to me we’ve forgotten that all three of the great religions teach that the trials of the hero journey are a significant part of life, that there’s no reward without renunciation, without paying the price. The Koran says, “Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?” And Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew, “Great is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth to life, and few there be who find it.” And the heroes of the Jewish tradition undergo great tests before they arrive at their redemption.

CAMPBELL: If you realize what the real problem is — losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another — you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way.

MOYERS: How is consciousness transformed?

CAMPBELL: Either by the trials themselves or by illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.

Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth is one of the best “guides” to what The Doors were all about. The journey of the hero plays a central role in Morrison’s life and work.  The Doors wanted all of us to experience our hero nature.

MOYERS: And poetry gets to the unseen reality.

CAMPBELL: That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought. The myth puts you there all the time, gives you a line to connect with that mystery which you are.

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, “The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.”

Ray Manzarek:

“What the shaman was was a medicine man, sort of, of a lot of primitive tribes mainly in Siberia is the last ones that we know about. Primitive tribes up in Siberia. The shaman was the medicine man who wasn’t necessarily in charge of healing but who was the visionary, the seer, of the tribe, the tribe’s visionary leader. He would go into trances. The people would, they’d have special days, special feast days and ceremonies, where all the people would sit around and play on drums and rattles. And play rhythms And the shaman would stand in the middle of this circle of people and go into a trance. And his spirit would leave his body and he’d go on these psychedelic voyages, psychedelic journeys in which he would see what might be wrong with somebody in the tribe, what the weather is going to be like next year, what the harvest is going to be, what kind of psychic crisis this tribe might be going through. He was a spiritual guide, and Jim Morrison was that same kind of guide. On stage, a Doors concert became a shamanistic rite. I tripped out all the time. I’d be playing and trip myself out on what I was playing. And Jim would be gone in the first five minutes. John and Robbie and I would start the rhythms going and five minutes after we’d start, Jim would be gone, man he’d be off. And we’d be following him. Sometimes we’d lead him, other times, he’d lead us. We’d follow him, he’d follow us. And the audience would follow the four of us. And we’d go on these little voyages, little excursions into the dark side of the soul, and into the light, into the weird side, into sex, into violence, into the boogeyman, into God. They’d just be journeys, swimming, swimming through the void.

“The rhythm was a very fundamental part of it. He had to have that rhythm around him in order to trip out. And he was just tripping out, that’s what he was doing. Tripping out in a very ancient way. And that’s nothing different than what Jim Morrison was doing.”

~ excerpts from http://doorsgoldmine.com/