Charles William Dailey explores the enduring impact of heroic figures, such as Achilles and Donald Trump, discussing how their archetypal roles have continuously shaped and defended Western civilization throughout history.

Also read parts one and two.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey ‘Hero’ is the honourable title of chieftains, and also, generally, of all free men.

We may express the matter in this way: in the cult of the ‘Hero’ a still burning spark of ancient belief is kindled to renewed flame — it is not the appearance of something entirely strange and new, but something long past and half-forgotten is awakened to new life.

—Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Ancient Greeks

What I have called in Part 1 and Part 2 of this essay the ‘anti-Trumpian cult’ threatens to overwhelm Western civilization in a fashion much more irrevocable than the ethnic incursions that occurred in the last few centuries of the Roman Empire or the religious invasions that occurred in Europe during the medieval and early modern periods. Western man has, many times, faced his doom and defeated lesser totalizing threats, repeatedly affirming the values of a more actualized human type — the type that has, in Aristotelian terms, actualized thought — i.e., freedom — rather than equated itself to the manipulable mire of animal perception or religious oblivion. What this time will Western man do is the question — or has he already done it? Was the Victory of the West ensured decades ago, prepared in the collective psyche by the rejuvenation in popular books and films of underappreciated myths and long forgotten feelings? Are we, at this seemingly chaotic moment, only temporarily being distracted by the last violent struggles of a rabid animal already put down? Is it not possible that the reemergence of the archetype of the Western hero was long prepared for this moment?

As was recognized by thinkers (humans!) even in ancient times — especially in ancient times — that which is required to quash the inevitable subhuman uprisings which occur in every age are heroes. We have already, in Part 2 of this essay, addressed some of the fundamental differences between a hero in the classical sense and what may be called a brave or courageous person. Previously, I contended that, in modern societies — expressions of archetypally non-heroic civilizations — there is a range of brave actions which are openly encouraged by such societies’ philosophical gatekeepers, but that heroism, specifically, is covertly disallowed. At least as far back as ancient Greece, however, there were individuals who, beyond any particular forms of religious or political indoctrination — unconscious conditioning by the ruling power structure — recognized a healthy society’s need for heroes. Heroes were regarded as somewhat unconscious ‘forces of nature’ which didn’t answer to any particular kings, city-states, or democratic rulings — or if they did, it was only on a whim or because it suited them. They were beings which, like the object which lies behind the glass saying “Break only in case of emergency,” were tools of mayhem that had the capacity to pave the way for sweeping restorations. They were not to be controlled by human institutions once let out of their ‘box,’ nor would they submit to the slave morality of their day, whatever flavor it took. They were a rule unto themselves; but that rule, we perceive, is one which must periodically instantiate in the West at certain intervals in order to save all.

In addition to ancient peoples’ recognizing the need for heroes in maintaining and defending civilization, there was also a recognition by some special individuals, such as certain poets, of the need for the particular emotions that the hero stirs. Wise persons were aware of these needs because they were aware of the existence of a perennial, universal struggle between human and animal elements in persons as well as civilizations. In much ancient discourse, so-called ‘barbarian’ invaders exemplified the specifically animal, or subhuman, element in society and persons: ‘titanic’ forces which constituted a timeless threat to higher forms of human actuality. The hero exemplified the opposite to this: the specifically human element — the total human element, however, that allows for overcoming the subhuman ‘monstrous’ element. The hero-as-slayer-of-monsters, or slayer of giants or dragons, came about because he was seen to be more in touch than others with his own subhuman, unconscious part. He had achieved a higher state of consciousness in which he became aware of the various levels of consciousness available to humans. He understood and accepted his subhuman monstrous aspect. Wrestling with monsters and fighting dragons, the hero had not become but realized more fully the monster that he, and everyone, partly is.

Professor of Classics at Harvard University Gregory Nagy notes in The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours the ‘extreme’ nature of the ancient Greek hero, stating of Homer’s Achilles, for example, “He is extreme, mostly in a positive sense, since he is ‘best’ in many categories, and ‘best of the Achaeans’ in the Homeric Iliad; occasionally, however, he is extreme in a negative sense, as in his moments of martial fury.” In much ancient art and literature, the Greek hero Herakles also is represented as defeating, as well as being, manifestations of animalistic or monstrous behavior, revealing in his mythic actions the synthesis of extremes that determines the hero’s path. Like Achilles, Herakles is merciless and cruel in the destruction of his enemies, depicted and described as wielding in battle the most brutish of weapons, the club, yet defeating with it the most brutish of monsters. He is from a young age shown defeating serpents of various kinds — symbols of chaos, indefinite or purposeless cyclicity, and that state of consciousness that can be transcended only by the type of the actualized human. Like Achilles’s defiant and incomparably bold actions in The Iliad, Herakles’s heroic ‘labors’ can be interpreted as a long process of initiation into the divine (higher human) potential, which Herakles, as well as Achilles, recognized in himself.

An incongruent truth to modern humans and their sense of morality is that the ancient hero was as capable of great destruction as he was of great creation or ‘good.’ He was free and his characteristic freedom is what allowed him to be a leader of men — all men, if he so chose. Only as such could the hero fulfill the role of exemplar or archetype. One of the nineteenth century’s most accomplished classical scholars, Erwin Rohde (1845-1898), stated in his classic Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality Among the Ancient Greeks, “In [Homer’s] the Iliad and the Odyssey ‘Hero’ is the honourable title of chieftains, and also, generally, of all free men.” ‘Hero,’ as Rohde implies, indicated in ancient Greece a state of being/consciousness which most humans never enjoy, especially in modern times: freedom. In ancient times, intermittently, those individuals called heroes were thought to hold a resolve that allowed them the freedom to deny the constant intrusions of animal, or monstrous, elements. They could do so for themselves or for their entire people. The hero, uniquely, could bear the level of endurance and toil required to defend his civilization. We have mentioned Herakles, but the Norse Thor also is an example. Thor fights giants and world-threatening serpents and yet is the ‘god’ of farmers and common men, the fundament of civilization. Unlike in the common understanding of ‘god,’ however, Thor, like Herakles, could be defeated and killed — and will be at the end of the age. Both are, thus, more accurately described as higher human types — New Men, I called them in The Serpent Symbol in Tradition — which alone are capable of crystallizing the power and principles characteristic of their people in order to defend them from their greatest threats.

Many humans today, as was the case in previous eras, act civilized — that is, they appear able to control their subterranean, ‘monstrous,’ influences. Under this façade of peer pressure and taboo, however, one often finds naught but amorphous, unactualized beasts. Their sum of violent energy comes out, typically, only in petty, bizarre, or unhelpful ways. It is not so, however, with the hero, who instead chooses, on occasion, to give reign to his more insatiable-than-average passions — for fighting, sex, bragging, and productive labor. He also chooses, however, to sometimes simply shut these off. This action is not due to any submission to external discipline, something which might be open to all persons having the requisite ‘dedication’ — like the aesthete Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) or other such world-historical ‘world-deniers.’ It is, instead, an innate capacity for marshalling and crystalizing such powers into a particular project, a particular discipline. This is the heroic: the capacity which gives to the hero, through the divine aid of ‘the gods,’ the means to express the essential character of his culture, as well as the traits necessary to defend it. Rohde illustrates this principle when he relates the ancient truth, “[I]t is to the gods and Heroes of Greece that the pious attribute the victory over the Barbarians.” Since ‘barbarians,’ however, were in ancient Greece considered not to be a part of proper — i.e., Greek — society, they were not really human. As the Philosopher Aristotle noted in a later era in his Politics, the man who can live separate from the rules of other men (stateless or tribe-less), outside of all proper society, is likely a beast (‘below humanity’) — if not, he is a god (‘above humanity’). A proper culture, however, requires one who can be either god or beast at certain times, in order to defeat forces that manifest the darker elements of human, and heroic, nature. Although the hero sometimes comes to a bad end, he is still perennially victorious because he epitomizes the whole human being, one which has the capacity to both out-act and out-think his opponents, although not in some overly intellectual fashion. While his opponents are essentially unbalanced — one-sided, or ‘left-sided’ to be specific — and can see only one side of vital issues, the hero naturally sees the whole picture.

The belief in heroes, as well as in gods, was not in ancient Greece merely a product of popular belief or superstition. Professor Rohde notes that during the time of the Persian wars (c. 499-449 B.C), as well as for several decades thereafter, period literature expresses “with overwhelming distinctness how strong at that time was the belief in the existence and potency of Heroes even among men of education who had not been too much influenced by the fashionable enlightenment of the time.” Sometimes incorrectly, scholars under the influence of modern values and sensibilities (especially academic guardians of the ‘brave new world’ being rolled out) look back and see the period of the Sophists’ emphasis on intellectual combat in place of real combat, especially Plato’s teacher Socrates’ disdain for the Homeric ethos, as progress towards a less masculine culture and, so, ‘progress’ period. And this is the case if one believes that rationalism and science are the highest human pursuits. In a way, this now-prevalent telos is the fault of the previously mentioned Aristotle, although the Stagirite knew better than his many imitators its limitations. He knew, for example, the difference between axioms and methods, First Principles and mere logical or rhetorical tools, which today’s worshippers of abstract social critique and holy science seem to have forgotten.

The ensuing hypertrophy of the rational faculty, as others have noted, stoppered up many lines of human potential which are alluded to either directly or indirectly in Greek myth and poetry. Many uncorrupted souls think fondly of Nietzsche’s insights here and his tireless attacks on the ‘slave morality’ which Socrates and his kind prepared the way for. But a hero is not a sophist, nor a philosopher, nor a scientist — he need not explain the concepts that he bases his actions on to the legion of non-heroes who rely on him for providing the very space within which their anti-heroic concepts can be pondered. From this observation we see that, in whatever form it took — whether as a living person or a soul from the past — the Greek hero was, above all, a force for civilizational preservation. He was not one of those sorts who bases his life on the good will of others who clearly could end him if they chose to. That is, the sophist, the philosopher, and the politician all base their lives and methods on the system — even the philosopher. The hero, however, goes beyond the system and really, actually, despises it. Thus, the hero, temporally and metaphysically, comes before and allows for the sophisticate — whether as sophist, philosopher, or politician. His mode of being is more profound than — beyond — the concepts of philosophers and the rhetoric of statesmen, partly because he pushes his entire being, not just his intellect, into the unknown. Some philosophers and statesmen — perhaps most — fear the hero, even if they mask their fears in edifying language or prolix speeches. And how, do you think, does that fear manifest? For, there is something to be said for the widespread belief in ancient Athens, among the people, that what Socrates was really engaged in was sorcery. And what else can be involved when strong and healthy men suddenly decide that that which made them strong and healthy needs to be daily questioned?

Over several centuries, the ancient Greek idea of hero went through several transformations. For a time, as Rohde notes, the term referred to “the souls of great men of the past, who have died but have not been deprived of conscious existence,” and to “spirits of the dead…[but] not a species of inferior deities or ‘demigods.’” The hero was never a god per se, but — although this was common for a time — neither was he always a disembodied soul or spirit. In the so-called ‘worship’ of heroes which sometimes obtained, what we often see was “not a general cult of the soul but a cult of ancestors.” The hero, that is, was an ancestral force — which was sometimes incarnate. As a cult, this worship of ancestors was the central focus of a particular cult-ure. In ancient Greece especially, whether as a disembodied soul or a living chieftain, the hero exemplified a greater past, a greater Tradition. And those Greeks who had not yet been mystified by rhetoric and dialectic still recognized the hero’s capacity to instantiate these realities as of the highest importance, an unrivaled power in withstanding and defeating the inevitable assaults by forces of chaos (‘barbarians’ and ‘monsters’). When Rohde writes of the veneration of the ancestors in ancient Greece that was expressed by means of the hero cult, what is implicit in that veneration is the respect for an ancient power that sometimes slumbers and, as a consequence, requires individuals who have the capacity to awaken it in times of crisis. Rohde states, “We may express the matter in this way: in the cult of the ‘Hero’ a still burning spark of ancient belief is kindled to renewed flame — it is not the appearance of something entirely strange and new, but something long past and half-forgotten is awakened to new life.” What is awakened to new life, explicitly stated, is the sustaining-of-Tradition heroic spirit that, in every age, selects one or a few individuals to house itself in for its revelation. This revelation is accomplished in order to lay bare and defeat the triviality of all other cults. Such is the manifestation of the ancient archetype of the hero of which I wrote in Part 2 of this essay — manifested, for those with eyes to see, in Donald J. Trump.