Every age has its hero. When valour was prized above all else, there were Achilles, Hercules, Arjun and Hanuman. When conquerors topped the tables, Alexander, Ashok and Ram were the heroic figures. Today we have Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Angela Merkel and Recep Tayyip Erdogan —strong leaders who believe in the might of the state and their right of way.
Social and cultural analysts have had a field day dipping into the collective psyche to understand why these leaders have been set on a hero’s pedestal. Anxious people look for iron men (or women), say some, while others talk about how globalisation has made narrow nationalists out of all of us and there are those who consider these leaders to be avatars out to rescue people from evil. Let us not get into the merits or fallacies of such arguments, but jump into mythology instead, where stories do all the talking.
Take a run through some of the big heroes down the ages and the times they stood for. Zeus, the towering figure from Greek mythology, commanded complete supremacy. He did not suffer dissenters, had several wives and when a woman refused to fall for his charms, used force. Indra, often seen as his Vedic counterpart, was commander of the heavens. He saw the world as made up of beings that were either with him or against him. Both heroes were feared and revered at the same time. Their heroism, and that of their times, was linked critically to their ability to control the vagaries of nature, provide protection from hostile forces and ensure that food, water and other life-giving forces were in ample supply.
Step further back in time and Garuda is an interesting hero. He represents an age when heroes were not always carved in a human mould. Before he was assimilated into the Vedic pantheon as Vishnu’s vahana, he was a rival to Indra’s power. He managed to steal amrita (the immortality nectar) from Indra. He was feared by the nagas and worshipped by a large group of gods, humans and animals.
Another ancient hero figure (even older perhaps) is Gilgamesh whose quest for immortality is the oldest recorded myth in the world. He is described as two-thirds god and one-third man who crossed the boundaries of kingly behaviour and had to be reined in by the gods. Unlike Zeus or Indra, he did not get away with murder, rape and loot — the gods created the archetypal savage hero Enkidu to steer the king back to the ‘right’ path. Gilgamesh’s quest for the plant of immortality has inspired poets and writers across the world, and for both Garuda and Gilgamesh, while heroism lay in their strength and military prowess; it was also linked to the quest for immortality.
Skip forward several ages to the age of the superhero where comic books, movies and other forms of visual entertainment have become the modern day repositories of mythology. Superman, Batman, Spiderman — these superheroes command the kind of adulation that perhaps Krishna or Odysseus once did. Superman was born in 1932, as America struggled with the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler’s power grew in Germany. Superman, like his mythic predecessors, was not fully human, but unlike them he had to lead a double life to ensure the victory of good over evil. A few years later came the first of the masked vigilante heroes, Batman, who too led a double life.
DC Comics (creator of these mythic characters) says many of these heroes have undergone further change in the present millennium where they grapple with the problems of terrorism, economic slowdown and conflict in West Asia and other parts of the world. This has made heroes and storylines darker. In fact, 2001 was a shocker of a year when Lex Luthor, arch enemy of Superman and representative of all things evil, became president. Sounds familiar?
Before we rush in to interpret these myths and legends, a word of caution from classics scholar Thomas J Sienkewicz who writes in his book The Web of Myth Theory, “Thread upon thread of interpretation is interwoven in myth. As one approach to myth goes out of favour and is unravelled from the fabric, another takes its place. The result is that, like Penelope’s shroud, the cloth of myth interpretation is ever-changing and can never be finished.” Here’s to a New Year of new interpretations.
