The Writer's Journey

by Christopher Vogler

  5. Agon can also be used to describe the central debate or issue of a drama. In this sense, what is the agon or main argument of your play, movie script, computer game, short story, or novel? What qualities are being contrasted, and what are the arguments for each side?

  6. Here is the list of pairs of polarized opposites from this chapter. Can you think of a movie or story that uses each polarity as a plot device?

  7. What are the polarities in your family? If your town was the location of a Western, how would a stranger riding into town find it polarized? How does polarity operate at the national level?

  8. Have you ever experienced a reversal of polarity in your own life or in someone around you? Describe this and how it made you feel.

  9. How do polarities work in a half-hour TV show? Watch an episode of a show and identify the polarities and moments of reversal.

  10. Look at two of your favorite teams or athletes competing for a championship. What are their contrasting qualities, their strengths and weaknesses? How does the winner exploit these polarities?

  Several times in this book we have used the word catharsis, referring to a concept found in the works of Aristotle, one of his terms that has survived to become part of the general theory of drama and narrative. It is a critical concept, the point of drama according to Aristotle, and its roots go back to the beginnings of language, art, and ritual.

  We have little chance of ever knowing for sure what Aristotle meant by catharsis. His work has come down to us in shreds. Less than half of what he wrote survives and most of that comes from rotted, jumbled manuscripts found under a building. Scholars disagree vigorously about what Aristotle meant by catharsis and there is even a theory that the word was inserted into the Poetics by an over-eager copyist at a place where the text was garbled, because Aristotle had promised in an earlier book that he would eventually get around to defining catharsis.

  Whatever it meant to Aristotle, the word has come to mean something to us: a sudden release of emotions that can be brought about by good entertainment, great art, or probing for psychological insight. Its roots are deep in our spirits and in the history of our species. If we look back a little into the origins of drama, we might find that catharsis has always been a desired effect and in fact is the mainspring of the dramatic experience.

  To find the origins of drama, narrative, art, religion, and philosophy we have to cast our minds back to the time when human beings were in their earliest stages of development. Through a few miracles of preservation, we have windows into the soul of those times, through the marvelous cave paintings and sculptures that have survived from as early as forty thousand years ago. We know from these breathtaking, life-like rendering of animals and hunters that the people of those times made pilgrimages deep into the belly of the earth, and must have performed some rituals in which they played the parts of the animals they hunted or the forces of nature that they perceived around them. Through these rituals, the beginnings of storytelling and drama, they must have tried to master or appease these powers. Joseph Campbell recognized one figure from the cave paintings with his antlered costume as a shaman, a go-between, embodying the spirit of the animals his people depended on for life.

  A physical catharsis or emotional reaction is hard to avoid when going into a deep cave, even today. If you go as they went, long ago, with only fitful candles to light your way down the narrow tunnels, you can't help but feel the weight of the earth and imagine the forces and beings that might be lurking there in the endless darkness just outside the glow of your flame. There is still a sense of wonder when coming out into a big cavern deep in the earth, especially when its walls are painted with huge animals that seem to leap across the ceiling in the flickering candle light. It would be a perfect stage to initiate young people into the mysteries of the tribe, its deepest beliefs, the essence of its compact with nature.

  I can testify to the still-impressive power of a candle in a dark place to animate things. It is the cheapest but most effective of special effects. I was visiting Hamlet's castle at Elsinore, or Helsing or as the Danes call it, on a tip of Denmark, facing Sweden across a short expanse of water. In the frigid crypts of the castle is kept a brooding statue of Denmark's version of King Arthur or El Cid, shown as a rugged Viking sitting on his throne with a drawn sword across his knees. He is Holger Danske, Ogier the Dane, one of Charlemagne's paladins and Denmark's legendary protector in time of need. Troops of Danish schoolchildren and tourists are marched past the statue to stand shivering before it, marveling at the illusion of life, for at the feet of the statue is a candle, or rather these days an electric imitation of a candle, a small flickering light. In the otherwise darkened crypt, so like a cave, the erratic light casts a nervous glow over the statue's features, and shadows dance and shift on the chamber walls. In an eerie way that makes the hair stand up on your arms and the back of your neck, the stone image seems to your eyes and your Stone Age nervous system to be distinctly alive. You could swear the Viking chieftain is asleep but breathing, about to wake up and surge off his pedestal at any moment. It makes a convincing theatrical illusion that the country's eternal fighting spirit is slumbering but ready to return to action when needed. No doubt the ancient people felt the same awe as flickering torches and oil lamps made the giant horses and bison gallop across the cave walls.

  A feature of some commercial cave tours in the modern world is to turn off the electric lights at some point so the visitors can get a sense of the pure blackness of the lightless cave. Perhaps our ancestors used a similar dramatic technique in their cave rituals, putting out the oil lamps and torches so the young initiates could experience the deep dark. For some it would be terrifying, for others, soul-expanding, and some might be visited with visions that made them feel connected to the animals or the powers that made the world. Perhaps the paintings are memorials of those visions, amended and painted over by successive generations of initiates.

  Emerging from a cave is another hazardous passage, climaxed with the feeling of relief upon emerging into sunlight and open space once again. For some there is a feeling of transformation, of having died in some sense down there, or having come very close to death and other eternal forces, and now coming to new life on the surface.

  Ancient people undoubtedly had other places that served a similar function of enhancing dramatic experiences and evoking a religious feeling, such as intimate groves of trees, natural amphitheatres, isolated mountain tops like Mt. Olympus, sacred wells and fountains, or arrangements of monumental stones. Trees could be planted in rows or in circles to create spaces that enhanced a group feeling of awe and connection with greater forces. In those spaces rituals were performed that tried to link the world of people to the world of the gods. People played the parts of gods, heroes, and monsters to enact the drama of creation and the stories of the ancestors. The first plays may have been the texts of these rituals, recited at first by a chorus but with actors gradually taking the parts of individual characters.

  As humans made the transition from nomadic hunting to the settled life of farmers in societies like those of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, drama found different theatres of expression and dramatic forms, with a new emphasis on time and the vast calendar of the stars.

  On the fertile, muddy plains on the banks of great rivers, people built civilizations that needed dramatic rituals to bring order, unity, and a shared sense of purpose to a large population. By communal effort they fashioned river mud into bricks and built huge temple mounds that were like artificial mountains, connecting their society to the heavens and providing a stairway to the world of the gods.

  These temple pyramids or ziggurats also served as spectacular backdrops for highly theatrical presentations designed to evoke a healthy religious feeling in a whole population.

  These religious spectacles were staged with exquisite precision to a calendar set by a giant celestial clock, the movement of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky. Lives were short but people ac
cumulated thousands of years of observations that could be passed down by various forms of notation. They paid particularly close attention to the exact turning points of the year, the spring and fall equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices, the four points marking the change of season. The great festivals of the year were held at these times, with a greater festival marking the beginning of the New Year.

  Their interest in the cycles of time was practical, a life and death matter. A delay of as little as a few days in planting or harvesting could mean that a crop would fail and there would be nothing to eat through the winter, dooming most to die. Even in earlier times the hunters knew that the movements of the animals and the fruiting of the trees follow the celestial calendar.

  The dramatic meat of these seasonal turning point festivals was the staging of an elaborate adventure, in which the king or the statues of the gods "disappeared," supposedly having been kidnapped, stolen away, or killed and dismembered by dark forces of chaos. The whole society pretended to mourn them, giving up the pleasures of life for a period of time in sympathy with the kidnapped or dead gods or king.

  In some versions of seasonal festivals in ancient Babylon, the statues of the gods were actually removed from the temples and buried in the desert or destroyed. Later in the festival they would be returned to their rightful positions or replaced with new ones, triggering great relief and celebration by the people.

  Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough persuasively makes the case that many societies pass through an early stage where the office of king is a temporary job, held only for a set period of time, perhaps just one year. In the most primal of these societies the old king is either executed or must fight a ritual combat with the new candidate. The sacrificial death of the old king cleans the slate and pays for the mistakes of the past year. Gradually, popular or very powerful kings managed to extend their rule but the tradition of sacrificing the old king ran very deep and was often represented symbolically in the customs, traditions, and ritual pageants of the mound-building cultures. The literal sacrifice of the king and his replacement with a successor was replaced by a mythological death and rebirth, like that of Osiris. The king was identified with the god who had died and come back to life again, and acted out his death, dismemberment, and rebirth in dramatic rituals rather than by actually dying.

  The scholar Theodore Gaster described four types of ritual in the ancient world of the Near East that followed one another in a seasonal sequence of Mortification, Purgation, Invigoration, and Jubilation, all related to the death and rebirth of the god or king. Sometimes all four elements could be combined in an elaborate ritual drama that involved all the members of society as actors in the play, whose stage was the whole city, and whose subject was the death and rebirth of the god-king. Gaster says ancient ritual drama was of two types, rituals of kenosis or emptying, and rituals of plerosis or filling. Mortification and Purgation emptied the body and mind, cleansing and purifying them while giving a taste of death, and Invigoration and Jubilation rituals filled and satisfied the people while re-invoking the principle of life.

  Performing these rituals at the seasonal turning points was a symbolic but also practical way of allowing the whole society to cool down after a strenuous season of work. As we now grant ourselves frequent holidays to punctuate the year and break our work into manageable, bearable spans of time, so did our ancestors sensibly stop the drumbeat of the work routine from time to time, but very consciously and purposefully.

  In the Mortification and Purgation phases they shut down as many of life's systems as possible, using mourning for the absent gods or king as a pretext to give a rest to all commerce, labor, lawsuits, etc. Shops, warehouses, and factories were closed. The hearth fires that burned in every home were put out, and the great fire that burned eternally in the temple was extinguished too. Even the processes of the body were shut down, and people fasted, stopped talking, and gave up life's pleasures to become more quiet and contemplative for a few hours. It was considered a time out, time outside of time, a grinding down of the giant clock, and in some calendars the festival days were not given numbers or names, signifying that this was sacred turning point time, not subject to the ordinary daily rhythms.

  Mortification meant bringing the body near the point of death by fasting, but also denying oneself any of the little pleasures of the body. They believed the body needed to be humbled or mortified from time to time, so it knows the mind is the master. The absence of things that were normally taken for granted created a renewed appreciation for them. It also focused the minds of the people and reminded them of the possibility of death that was always near.

  Lamentation was an important part of the ritual at this point. People were supposed to meditate sympathetically on the death of the hero-god-king until the tears ran down their faces. Special songs were composed with the aim of triggering the emotions of grief and sorrow. The dramatic form of tragedy was developed from the rituals, chants, and dances of mourning that tried to evoke sympathy for the suffering god or king. Tragedy comes from the word "tragos" or goat, because goats were often used as sacrificial stand-ins for the yearly sacrifice of the king.

  The Purgation phase of seasonal rituals was marked by cleansing the body and the environment as much as possible. People would bathe and anoint themselves with oil to symbolize the shedding of an old skin from the previous season. Houses and temples would be cleansed with water and fumigated. Bells and gongs would be rung to chase out unclean spirits. Fireworks have been used in China for centuries for this purpose.

  Purgation was both metaphorical and literal in these ancient societies. Mentally and metaphorically, people were supposed to purge themselves of sour feelings, resentments, jealousies, and so on. But they were also supposed to cleanse the body of impurities by fasting and even by inducing vomiting.

  Catharsis was a medical term in Aristotle's time for the natural processes by which the body eliminates poisons and wastes. It comes from the word "katharos" which means pure, so a catharsis is a purification, but it can also be a purgation, a vomiting up or violent expelling of impurities. Sneezing is a cathartic reaction to rid the nasal passages of impurities.

  In the Poetics, Aristotle used the term "catharsis of the emotions" as a metaphor, comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities. The Greeks and other ancient peoples knew that life is hard, involving many unpleasant compromises and the eating of much crow. Emotional impurities and poisons build up in the body just as physical ones do, and can have catastrophic effects if not purged at regular intervals. They believed that people who get no emotional release from art, music, sports, dance, or drama inevitably will be overcome by poisonous feelings that will surface as aggression, hostility, perversion, or madness, all things dangerous to the society. Therefore they institutionalized purging and purification of mind and body with seasonal festivals that artificially induced catharsis on a quarterly schedule. Drama was a sacred thing, not available for daily consumption, and confined only to the important turning points of the year.

  The fasting and purging created a condition of extreme dramatic suggestibility in the population. It was then that the whole society gathered in the squares and streets of the city-state to witness a spectacular dramatization of some great event in the mythic history of the culture. The people were not a passive audience, but took an active part in the dramatic presentation. The city itself with its gates, processional avenues, and towering temples became the stage set for an enormous collective re-enactment of creation, a great battle between gods of order and chaos, or the death and rebirth of the god-king.

  The Greeks adopted the general patterns of these seasonal dramatic rituals and made them part of their yearly calendar of religious festivals, built around the doings of gods like Apollo and Dionysos. The great Greek tragedies and comedies evolved slowly from ritual re-enactments and recitations of poems about the gods and heroes, and originally were conceived as religious ce
remonies, sacramental acts designed to have a beneficial effect on the spirit. The magnificent outdoor theatres of ancient Greece were originally built as temples dedicated to the god Dionysos, one of the dying and rising gods. The plays enacted there were intended as the dramatic climax to vast religious pageants, and they were carefully designed to bring about the emotional effect that Aristode called catharsis, a feeling of pity and fear evoked by watching the unfolding fate of a hero. The hero of a Greek tragedy was a stand-in for the old god-king, undergoing a sacrificial death on behalf of all the members of the society, and bringing about a catharsis in the members of the audience through sympathy with his or her sufferings.

  In Athens, along with dramatic rituals honoring Apollo and Dionysos, seasonal festivals were organized around the myth of Demeter and Kore (Persephone), a primal mother and daughter who once ruled over an endless summer of abundance. Their story tells how the seasons began, and its festivals are timed to coincide with the seasonal rhythms of planting, tending, harvesting, and surviving the winter. Their drama's Call to Adventure was the kidnapping of Persephone by Hades, lord of the Underworld. The rituals re-enacted her kidnapping in October, at the Thesmophoria, three days of festivals exclusively for women. This was the emptying, introducing the time of Mortification and Purgation.

  In the myth, Demeter's grief at the disappearance of her daughter brings about a terrible season in which the earth lies barren as the goddess of the harvest neglects her duties in order to mourn and search for her daughter. Demeter becomes the hero of an epic quest, playing many roles as she seeks out her daughter in the Underworld and induces the gods to make a deal with Hades to allow Persephone to return to the world of light and life, at least for part of the year.