The Hero’s Journey And The Archetypes Of Migration

The creator of analytical psychology, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, suggested that we can understand mythical tales of travel about new beginnings. Examples are Marco Polo, Ulysses or Hercules,  as symbolic expressions of a mental change  that all people will go through in life. Jung called this process the  hero’s journey , or the process of individualization.

The hero or heroine’s journey tends to start with a calling or need to leave the ordinary, familiar world.  It is a calling that will reveal the hero’s true life and potential.

In mythology  , heroes tend to appear in unstable times,  such as when social norms collapse or during political or religious crises. In the same way, we may feel that we are stuck in a circumstance, stagnant and perhaps anxious. This is when life can force us to take a transformative journey.

The hero’s journey is a symbolic journey; it is possible to do so without moving. Life can call for a journey by giving you a job offer or a scholarship. Life can give you a chance to improve financially, educationally or socially.

The treasure hunt

The hero’s journey is mythically represented as a search. For a treasure, a promised land, they appear stone, the Holy Grail, a marriage between a prince and a princess. Each person has an ideal or object that they are searching for. But  the traveler comes across treasures they had never imagined. 

Sometimes, before the journey begins, the hero stumbles into a situation (perhaps through people, books, movies). A situation that, little by little, helps them choose their final destination.  For Jung, these coincidences were synchronities. He regarded them as an expression of the existing relationship between the physical and the mental world.

This journey usually results in a figurative new birth. We now have new courage and humility that we developed by overcoming obstacles along the way. The hero’s journey is a process  that involves moving from certain stages of life to being reborn in others. We can understand moving between stages as moving from one archetype to another.

Archetypes or stages of the hero’s journey

Archetypes are  characters in myths  that go through typical human situations.  The experience is necessary for the hero to go through their journey to fulfillment.

A person on a hiking trip can go through these 4 archetypes or stages:

The innocent archetype

This stage refers to safety and knowledge of where we start. It is an environment that at some point becomes too small and suffocating, and pushes us into our transformative journey.

Here we also find  idealized expectations about ourselves or the goal of our journey.  For example, we may assume that our foreign language is better than what we find out later. Maybe we believe in the imagination that something or someone will give us. Or maybe we think the job we need is going to fall from the sky.

This is a period of false illusions. They are the story that we tell ourselves about how things would be if we followed our dreams. If we knew what it would really be like along the way, it would be far more difficult to motivate ourselves to take the first steps. This stage is also like a “honeymoon”.  We fall in love instead of going to.

When we finally confront the concrete reality of what is needed now comes the end of our journey,  the curtain that kept us from seeing negativity falls down. From here we move on to the next archetype, the orphan, where much of what we imagined at the innocent stage disappears.

The orphan archetype

At some point in the journey, it is normal to be forced to do things we had never imagined doing. We have to come to terms with people and customs that surprise us. Here  is a kind of autumn, a descent  that the Greeks called catabasis.

To a foreigner, a new culture can be like a disorienting maze. Our held faith can fall. We can begin to question many things that we once considered “normal.”

It is a stage of longing. A feeling that what we do may not matter. At this stage,  we usually idealize the memory of where we came from.  We are strongly tempted to give up on our journey.

Here is another important part: When we are in a foreign land (either physically or symbolically), the people there have never seen us before. This gives us flexibility in our identity. It gives us the opportunity to explore  new facets of ourselves  and to live off the change.

We can go through this stage with a high degree of uncertainty, almost as if we had to jump into a bottomless chasm. Sometimes we have moments where we feel completely lost. But this is exactly the kind of primordial chaos that encourages new attitudes and principles.

The warrior archetype

After traveling through feelings of helplessness and orphanhood, the warrior type emerges from the dark night of the soul. This gives us energy to get up after we fall. It encourages us to find the strength that our new context demands and gives us our hope back.

Little by little, with perseverance, patience and help, we leave the maze. Our new environment will be a home where we will distribute our new skills.

The magician archetype

Finally, we have the magic ark type. This is where we  get the meaning of the journey we were on.  It gives us wisdom to be grateful for both the good and bad times we went through, since they helped us find the treasure.

The treasure translates into a greater understanding of ourselves and humanity, better knowledge of our own complexity, weaknesses and potential. The path we took also gave us a chance to see how flexible our identity is and taught us to exist along with life’s insecurities, trials and tribulations.

The symbolic homeland: The end of the hero’s journey

After this transformation process, it feels strange to return to the starting point. It is as if everything has been “frozen in time” while we changed.  This feeling of alienation is also a reason and an incentive for us to continue to look for our homeland.  A symbolic homeland that consists of an infinite realization of ourselves and our potential.

We can see that being a migrant, a foreigner, is just an intense version of a human emotion : an unfulfilled desire. These are emotions that motivate us to look inside and rediscover ourselves.

Great artists and philosophers gave us masterpieces that they created from this feeling of alienation. For us  , the hero’s journey is an opportunity to be more aware of the need to carry out the purpose of our own life, which is to have a dignified, deep and enriching life.

This search, both fortunately and unfortunately, is endless. There is no place on earth that can satisfy that.