The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [52]
Of course the Temptation has much in common with the Monster, except that the latter threatens the hero by direct confrontation, while the former seeks to lure him to his doom by guile and seduction. The Sirens are only Predators in another guise. While the enchantresses who seek to imprison travellers by their spells, or the arts of love, are another version of Holdfast. Nevertheless, if they are mastered or overruled in some way, these Temptresses may completely change their nature, or rather their relationship to the hero. From being malign, destructive and a hindrance, they can become the most benign of allies. When Odysseus is given the magic herb by Hermes which enables him to withstand Circe's spells, he can persuade her to release all her victims from their enchantment. And though he stays with her, feasting and making love for another year, she in the end releases him with all sorts of aid and vital guidance for his journey. Similarly Calypso, at the behest of the gods, sends him on his way with every kind of equipment and good advice. The Temptresses have in fact been transformed into that other kind of crucially important figure the hero meets on his journey, the `helper, whom we shall be looking at shortly.
3. The deadly opposites
A third familar type of ordeal is the need for the hero and his companions to travel an exact and perilous path between two great opposing dangers. For the Argonauts these are the mighty `clashing rocks, the Symplegades, between which they have to sail at exactly the right moment to avoid being crushed to death. For Odysseus the `deadly opposites' are the great whirlpool Charybdis and the sixheaded monster, the Scylla, which stand on each side of a narrow gulf. To avoid the first Odysseus steers his ship too near Scylla, who seizes six of his men; later he returns on his own and this time has a `thrilling escape' from Charybdis. For Christian, the `straight and narrow way he has to follow is emphasised like this on several occasions, as when he has to pass between two fierce lions, or tread a delicate path through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, avoiding a deep ditch on one side and a treacherous bog on the other. Lancelot, in the Grail Quest, also has to pass between two lions. For the Jews, the journey between the `opposites' is represented by the occasion when the Red Sea rolls back like a great `wall unto them, on their right hand and on their left', leaving a dry passage for them to cross over safely; while, when the armies of Phaoroah pursue them, the `opposites' show their deadly nature by rushing together again, like the Symplegades, engulfing `the chariots and the horsemen and all the host'. And there is no moment more hazardous for Allan Quatermain and his little party as that when, foodless and almost freezing to death, they have to cross the narrow, snowy pass exactly between two great symmetrical mountains, the Breasts of Sheba, which is the only way through from the desert to the lost land of Solomon which is their goal.
4. The journey to the underworld
A final, rather different kind of ordeal which the Quest hero may have to undergo before arriving at his goal is a visit to the underworld, inhabited by the spirits of the dead. In some cases, this is simply a horrific experience, as for Christian on his passage through the Valley of the Shadow of Death:
`we saw there hobgoblins, satyrs and dragons of the pit; we heard also in that valley a continual howling and yelling, as of people under unutterable misery... Death does always spread his wings over it ... dreadful ... utterly without order.'
In other instances, however, the journey through the underworld is not just a harrowing ordeal: it serves