How Greek Myths
Inspire Us to Be Heroes
I
fell in love with Greek myths in the eighth grade, when I read Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology. Later, after studying Carl
Jung and Sigmund Freud, I better understood why most people are drawn to myths:
They help us to project and symbolically play out our own fears and desires.
Carl Jung wrote of universal archetypes—such as the Madonna, the soldier, and
the rogue. Sigmund Freud wrote that art was the opportunity for adults to
continue childhood play in a socially acceptable way. Joseph Campbell built
upon the works of both Jung and Freud to describe The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which inspired George Lukas in the
creation of Star Wars.
As
a writer, I, like Lukas, wished to tap into that universal consciousness where
fears and desires are shared. Myths make it possible to project universal
fears, or what we often call our inner demons, into monsters that can be
externally fought and defeated. The most universal fear is death. I created a
trilogy for young adults in which death is not only faced and, in some ways,
battled, but also embraced and transcended.
In
the first book of this contemporary fantasy, The Gatekeeper’s Sons, fifteen-year-old Therese Mills meets
Thanatos, the god of death, while in a coma after witnessing her parents’
murder. She feels like the least powerful person on the planet and is ready to
give up on life, but the story forces her to fight. As she hunts with the
fierce and beautiful Furies to track down her parents’ murder and avenge their
death, she falls in love with Thanatos and symbolically accepts her parents’
and her own mortality.
In
the second book, The Gatekeeper’s Challenge,
Therese has the opportunity to transcend death by accepting five seemingly
impossible challenges issued by Hades. All five challenges represent the
universal fears of rejection, culpability, disorientation, death, and loss in
the forms of a box not allowed to be opened, an apple that shouldn’t be eaten,
a labyrinth meant to confuse, a Hydra that wants to destroy, and the allure of
bringing back the dead. These same myths are recycled again and again through
the centuries because they help us to recognize our inner demons and inspire us
to defeat them.
As
I finish the trilogy with The
Gatekeeper’s Daughter, which will be released on December 1, 2013, I’m
holding a contest from January 1, 2013 to October 1, 2013 for my readers.
