Spiritual Education Gets a Lot Easier When Your Spirit has a Physical Form

When I was in elementary school, I started to read The Golden Compass, but put it down halfway through and never finished it. This week, I thought it would be a good opportunity to finally read the book the entire way through.

            The most interesting and immediately apparent aspect of this novel is the concept that a person’s soul takes on a physical form outside of his body. In the case of The Golden Compass, the soul takes the shape of an animal (referred to as a daemon), and is a reflection of the person’s soul and of their innermost desires. This fascinated me when I was younger, and I remember trying to come up with what my own daemon would look and act like.

            This concept of an outside soul provides a canvas for some interesting commentary on real-world issues. For example, in the world of The Golden Compass, it becomes impossible to hide one’s “true self.” Such as in the case with Ms. Coulter, she has the appearance and mannerisms of the “ideal” woman, but her daemon is cruel and ruthless. Thus, even before Ms. Coulter’s true nature is revealed, it is apparent that she too has a cruel and ruthless side that she can’t hide. This application of the daemons idea conveys how someone’s true nature may be very different from the nature they project to the world. Although in reality there is no easy way to expose someone’s true nature, the moral of this example is not to be so blinded by someone’s surface (as Lyra was) that you neglect to consider what might lie underneath.

            This book also followed (more or less) the Hero’s Journey, although since it is the first part in a three part series the Journey does not reach true conclusion in this novel. There is a call to action, a prophecy,  a road of trials, acquirement of boons (the compass), “magic” flight, recognition of sorts by both Lyra’s mother and father, mastery of two worlds (human and polar bear), and so on and so forth, not necessarily in this order. The “symbolic death” aspect plays an especially important role in the story, as a main point of the plot involves separating children from their souls and essentially killing them. Although this doesn’t happen to Lyra, it 1) almost does and 2) happens to several of her friends and serves as the main evil action that the antagonists perform, and is essentially why the antagonists are the antagonists. This symbolic/literal death plays such a big part in the story, especially the reveal that it is occurring, that I count it as part of the Hero’s Journey. The only part missing in the Hero’s Journey cycle is the “freedom to live,” which assumedly comes in the later books. This use of the Hero’s Journey allows the characters in the novel to fall into familiar archetypes, which further highlights the goodness of Lyra and her allies, and the evilness of her enemies, her mother, father, and the Oblation Board. This allows the novel to use this good vs. evil dichotomy to make commentary on religion, morals, and so forth.

The Hero's Journey

This week, I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the first time. While I had seen both the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies, as well as read the original trilogy, I had never read the prequel before. Luckily, I had the opportunity to do so this week.

It quickly became apparent to me that the tone of The Hobbit is much different than that of The Lord of the Rings, despite the similar tones between the movies. The Hobbit book is much lighter in tone. Although aspects of The Hobbit continue on into the main trilogy, such as the ring and Gollum, The Hobbit lacks the sense of urgent and all-encompassing darkness that the main trilogy had. Reading The Hobbit after already being acquainted with the main trilogy, The Hobbit seems to have a sense of blissful naiveté, kind of like the calm before the storm. Bilbo and his company cannot possibly have any idea of what their journey will eventually lead to.

This aspect of The Hobbit— that it is a prequel to a much larger and darker series— makes it an interesting and different example of the Hero’s Journey. Just as in the traditional Hero’s Journey storyline, there is a call to action (from Gandalf), a road of trials one after another, acquirement of “boons”, a gradual change in the main character, and ultimately a victory and the “freedom to live” for Bilbo back in the Shire. However, this “freedom” turns out to be very short lived, since Bilbo’s original Hero’s Journey sets in motion a series of events which threaten to plunge the world back into darkness. This, of course, necessitates the beginning of a second Hero’s journey, which can be read in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Since a large part of the Hero’s Journey trope is the total resolution—of plot, of character development, of loose ends—the fact that The Hobbit leaves much unresolved (until the main trilogy) sets it apart from a typical, by-the-book Hero’s Journey tale. While Bilbo’s journey is certainly resolved at the end of The Hobbit, the overall Hero’s Journey cycle of Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories is still just in the beginning, in the “innocent world of childhood.”

Witches -- an Age-old Conflict of Age

The concept of the witch is an interesting trope within the horror genre, both because the witch is one of several commonly (exclusively?) female magical entities, and because she can be either good or evil in nature. This nature of witches has been shown throughout literature; some memorable examples include the witches from The Wizard of Oz and the Harry Potter series. The witch in Black Mariah is an example of an evil witch. Recently, the good witch has been becoming more standard than the evil witch in popular media, as seen in installments such as Harry Potter (again), the Maleficent reboot(in which the title character actually possesses traits of both good and evil witches),  and Kiki’s Delivery Service (which we watched in class.) Although the evil witch can serve as a convenient villain, her motivations often seem to come across as two-dimensional at best and misogynistic at worst. It can be hard to pull off a purely evil witch nowadays. Despite these potential setbacks, a witch character can be used to provide commentary on these aspects of the evil witch trope, or commentary on the human characters.

            This week, after a partial viewing in class, I finished watching the movie Suspiria. In this film, the witch characters had some very hard-to-comprehend motivations. Essentially, the evil witch coven in this movie would kill anyone that got in their way, had the potential to get in their way, made them angry, or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The way I interpreted it, they were so evil that normal viewers couldn’t begin to understand their motivations.

            Although the motivation of the head witch of the coven was not to gain/regain youth, there was definitely a conflict of age in the movie. The head witch was centuries old, while her victims were (mostly) young girls. In fact, as I found out later after watching the movie, the script originally called for 12 year old girls rather than 20 year old young women. That idea was scrapped but much of the original dialogue remained, resulting in the young women having very child-like “voices”. In addition, the actors were placed in a larger-than-normal set to give the illusion that they were small and weak. Altogether, this movie fits into the witch trope of old women preying on young girls. And, following another witch trope, the young triumphs over the old, and the evil is vanquished.

            The witch trope of associating old age with evil puts old women in a negative light, which is only reaffirmed by the triumph of the young and beautiful characters over the old witch. This treatment is much more rarely seen in old male characters, as the old wizard character is usually shown to be wise and helpful (ex. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter). The fact that the old woman witch character is shown in such a negative way shows how society values women only for their beauty. Once that beauty is gone, and they have nothing left to offer society, they can only burden and leech from others. Luckily, this trope seems to be dying out, and more good witches are being shown in stories. The good witch is unfortunately usually a young character (because youth attracts audiences—ironically playing into the witch trope again) but that will hopefully change over time.