tues 8 readings: MENTOR (group 2)

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“May the force be with you!”
from Star Wars by George Lucas

An archetype found found frequently in dreams, myths, and stories is the Mentor, a usually positive figure who aids or trains the hero. Campbell’s name for this force is the the Wise Old Man or Wise Old Woman. This archetype is expressed in all those characters who teach and protect heroes and give them gifts. Whether it’s God walking with Adam in The Garden of Eden, Merlin guiding King Arthur, the Fairy Godmother helping Cinderella, or a veteran sergeant giving advice to a rookie cop, the relationship between hero and Mentor is one of the riches sources of entertainment in literature and film.
“Mentor” comes to us from The Odyssey. A character named Mentor guides the young hero, Telemachus on his Hero’s Journey. In fact it’s the goddess Athena who helps Telemachus by assuming the guise of Mentor.
Mentors often speak in the voice of a god, or are inspired by visons. Good teachers and Mentors are enthused, in original sense of the word. “Enthusiasm”” is from the Greek en theos, meaning god inspired, having a god in you, or being in the presence of a god.
PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION
MENTOR
Mentor figures, whether encountered in dreams, fairy tales, myths, and screenplays, stand for the hero’s highest aspirations. They are what the hero may become if she persists on the Road of Heroes. Mentors are often former heroes who have survived life’s early trials and arc-now passing on the gift of their knowledge and wisdom.
The Mentor archetype is closely related to the image of the parent. The fairy godmother in stories such as “Cinderella” can be interpreted as the protecting spirit of the girl’s dead mother. Merlin is a surrogate parent to the young King Arthur, whose father is dead. Many heroes seek out Mentors because their own parents are inadequate role models.
DRAMATIC FUNCTIONS:
TEACHING
Just as learning is an important function of the hero, teaching or training is a key function of the Mentor. Training sergeants, drill instructors, professors, trail bosses, parents, grandparents, crusty old boxing coaches, and all those who teach a hero the ropes, are manifesting this archetype. Of course the teaching can go both ways: anyone who has taught knows that you learn as much from your students as they do from you.
GIFT-GIVING
Giving gifts is also an important function of this archetype. In Vladimir Prop’s analysis of Russian fairy tales, Morphology of the Folktale, he identifies this function as that of a “donor” or provider: one who temporarily aids the hero, usually by giving some gift. It may be a magic weapon, an important key or clue, some magical medicine of food, or a life-saving piece of advice. In fairy tales, the donor may be a witch’s cat, grateful for a little girl’s kindness, who gives her a towel and a comb. Later when the girl is being chased by the witch, the towel turns into a raging river and the comb turns into a forest to block the witch’s pursuit. Examples of these gifts are abundant in movies, from the small-time Puttynose giving James Cagey his first gun in The Public Enemy to Obi Wan Kenobi giving Luke Skywalker his father’s lightsaber. Nowadays the gift is as likely to be a computer code as the key to a dragon’s lair.
GIFTS IN MYTHOLOGY
Giving, the donor function of the Mentor, has an important role in Mythology. Many heroes received gifts from their Mentors, the gods. Pandora, whose name means “all-gifted”, was showered with presents, including Zeus’ vindictive gift of the box which she was not to open. Heroes such as Hercules were given some gifts by their Mentors, but among the Greeks the most gifted of heroes was ideal of heroism was expressed in Peruses.
PERSEUS
The Greek ideal of heroism was expressed in Perseus, the monster-slayer. He has the distinction of being one of the best equipped of heroes, loaded down with gifts from higher powers that it’s a wonder he could walk. In time, with the help of Mentors such as Athena, he acquired winged sandals, a magic sword, an invisibility cloak, a magic sickle, a magic mirror, the head of Medusa that turned all who looked on it to stone, and a magic satchel to carry it in. As if this were not enough, the movie version of the tale, Clash of the Titans, gives him the flying horse Pegasus as well.
In most stories, this would be overdoing it a bit. But Peruses is meant to be a paragon of heroes, so it’s fitting that he should be so well provided by the Gods, hs Mentors in the quest.
GIFTS SHOULD BE EARNED
In Prop’s dissection of Russian fairy tales, he observes that donor characters give magical presents to heroes, but usually only after the heroes have passed a test of come kind. This is a good rule of thumb: The gift or help of the donor should be earned, by learning, sacrifice, or commitment. Fairy tale heroes eventually earn the aid of animals or magical creatures by being kind to them in the beginning, sharing food with them, or protecting them from harm.
MENTOR AS INVENTOR
Sometimes the Mentor functions as a scientist or inventor, whose gifts are his devices, designs, or inventions. The great inventor of classical myth is Daedalus, who designed the Labyrinth and other wonders for the rulers of Crete. As the master artisan of the Theses and the Minotaur story, he had a hand in creating the monster Minotaur and designed the Labyrinth as a cage for it. As a Mentor, Daedalus gave Adriane the ball of thread that allowed Theses to get in and out of the Labyrinth alive.
Imprisoned in his own maze as punishment for helping Theses, Daedalus also invented the famous wax-and-feather wings that allowed him and his son Cirrus to escape. As a Mentor to Cirrus, he advised his son not to fly too close to the sun. Cirrus, who had grown up in the pitch dark of the Labyrinth, was irresistibly attracted to te sun, ignored his father’s advice, and fell to his death when the wax melted. The best advice is worthless if you don’t take it.
THE HERO’S CONSCIENCE
Some Mentors perform a special function as a conscience for the hero. Characters like Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio or Waller Brennan’s Groot in Red River try to remind an errant hero of an important moral code. However, a hero may rebel against a nagging conscience. Would-be Mentors should remember that in the original Collodi story, Pinocchio squashed the cricket to shut him up. The angel on the hero’s shoulder can never offer arguments as colorful as those of the devil on the opposite side.

MOTIVATION
Another important function of the Mentor archetype is to motivate the hero, and help her overcome fear. Sometimes the gift alone is sufficient reassurance and motivation. In other cases the Mentor shows the hero something or arranges things to motivate her to take action and commit to the adventure.
In some cases a helo is so unwilling or fearful that he must be pushed into adventure. A Mentor may need to give a hero a swift kick in the pants in order to get the adventure rolling.
PLANTING
A function of the Mentor archetype is often to plant information or a prop that will become important later. The James Bond films have a jury scene in which the weapons master “Q”, one of Bond’s Mentors, describes the workings of some new briefcase to a bored OO7. This information is a plant, meant for the audience to note but forget about until the climactic moment where Bal becomes a life-saver. Such constructions help tie the beginning and end of the story together, and show that at some point, what we’ve learned from our Mentors comes in handy.
SEXUAL INITIATION
In the realm of love, the Mentor’s function may be to initiate us into the mysteries of love or sex. In India they speak of the shakti— a sexual initiator, a partner wo helps you experience the power of sex as a vehicle of higher consciousness. A shakti is a manifestation of God, leading the lover to experience the divine.
Seducers and thieves of innocence teach heroes lessons the hard way. There may be a shadow side to Mentors who lead a hero down a dangerous road of obsessive love or loveless, manipulative sex. There are many ways to learn.

TYPES OF MENTOR
Like heroes, Mentors may be willing or unwilling. Sometimes they teach in spite of themselves. In other cases they teach by their bad example. The downfall of a weakened, tragically flawed Mentor can show the hero pitfalls to avoid. As with heroes, dark or negative sides may be expressed through this archetype.
DARK MENTORS
In certain stories the power of the Mentor archetype can be used to mislead the audience. In thrillers the mask of a Mentor is sometimes a decoy used to lure the hero into danger. Or in an anti-heroic gangster picture such as The Public Enemy or Gödel’s, where every conventional heroic value is inverted, an anti-Mentor appears to guide the anti-hero on the road to crime and destruction.
Another inversion of this archetype’s energy is a special kind of Threshold Guardian. A example is found in Romancing the Stone, where Joan Wilder’s sharp-tongued agent is to all appearances a Mentor, guiding her career and giving her advice about men. But when Joan is about to cross the threshold to adventure, the agent tries to stop her, warning her of the dangers and casting doubt in her mind. Rather than motivating her like a true Mentor, the agent becomes an obstacle in the hero’s path. This is psychologically true to life, for often we must overcome or outgrow the energy of our best teachers in order to move to the next stage of development.
FALLEN MENTORS
Some Mentors are still on a Hero’s Journey of their own. They may be experiencing a crisis of faithin their calling. Perhaps they are dealing with the problems of aging and approaching thethreshold of death, or have fallen from the hero’s road. The hero needs the Mentor to pull himself together one more time, and there are serious doubts that he can do it. Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own plays a former sports hero sidelined by injury and making a poor transition into Mentor-hood. He has fallen far from grace, and the audience is rooting for him him to straighten up and honor his task of helping the heroes. Such a Mentor may go through all the stages of a hero’s journey on his own path to redemption.
CONTINUING MENTORS
Mentors are useful for giving assignments and setting stories in motion. This is the reason they are often written into the cast of continuing stories. Recurring Mentors include Mr. Waverly on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”, “M” in the Bond pictures, “The Chief” on “Get Smart”, Will Geer and Ellen Corby as the grandparents on “ The Waltons”, Alfred in “Batman”, James Earl Jones’ CIA official in The Hunt for Red October, etc.
MULTIPLE MENTORS
A hero may be trained by a series of Mentors who teach specific skills. Hercules is surely among the best trained of heroes, mentored by experts on wrestling, archery, horsemanship, weapon-handling, virtue, song, and music. He even took a driver-training course in charioteering from one Mentor. All of us have learned from a series of Mentors, including parents, older brothers and sisters, friends, lovers, teachers, bosses, co-workers, therapists, and other role models.
Multiple Mentors may be needed to express different functions of the archetype. In the James Bond movies, OO7 always returns to his home base to confer with his Wise Old Man, the spymaster “M” who gives him assignments, advice, and warnings. But the Mentor function of giving gifts to the hero is delegated to “Q”, the weapons master. A certain amount of emotional support as well as crucial information is provided by Miss Moneypenny, representing another aspect of the Mentor.

COMIC MENTORS
A special type of Mentor occurs in romantic comedies. This person is often the friend or fellow office worker of the hero, and is usually of the same sex as the hero. She gives the hero some advice about love: go out more to forget the pain of a lost love; pretend to have an affair to make your husband jealous; feign interest in the beloved’s hobbies; impress the beloved with gifts, flowers or flattery; be more aggressive, and so on. The advice often seems to lead the hero into temporary disaster, but it all turns out right in the end. These characters are a feature of romantic comedies, especially those of the 1950s when movies like Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back gave plenty of work for character actors like Thelma Ritter and Tony Randall who could portray this wise-cracking, sarcastic version of a Mentor.
MENTOR AS SHAMAN
Mentor figures in stories are closely related to the idea of the shaman the healer, the medicine man or woman, of tribal cultures. Just as Mentors guide the hero through the special world, shamans guide their people through life. They travel to other worlds in dreams and visions and bring back stories to heal their tribes. It’s often the function of a Mentor to help the hero seek a guiding vision for a quest to another world.
FLEXIBILITY OF THE MENTOR ARCHETYPE
Like the other archetypes, the Mentor or donor is not a rigid character type, but rather a function, a job which several characters might perform in the course of a story. A character primarily manifesting one archetype —the hero, the shapeshifter, the trickster, even the villain - may temporarily slip on the mask of the Mentor in order to leach or give something to the hero.
In Russian fairy talks,the wonderful character of the witch Baba Yaja is a Shadow figure who sometimes wears the Mentor mask. On the surface she’s a horrible, cannibalistic witch representing the dark side of the forest, its power to devour. But like the forest, she can be appeased and can shower gifts on the traveler. Sometimes if Prince Ivan is kind and complimentary to her, Baba Yoga gives him the reassurance he needs to rescue the Princess Visalia.
Although Campbell called these Mentor figures Wise Old Men or or Women, they are sometimes neither wise nor old. The young, in their innocence, are often wise and capable of teaching the old. The most foolish person in a story might be the one we learn the most. As with the other archetypes, the function of the Mentor is more important than mere physical description. What the character does will often determine what archetype is being manifested at the moment.
Many stories have have no specific character who can be identified as a Mentor. There’s no white-bearded, wizardly figure who wanders around acting like a Wise Old Man. Nevertheless almost every story calls on the the energy of this archetype at some point.

INNER MENTORS
IN SOME Westerns or film noir stories the hero is an experienced, hardened character who has no need for a Mentor or guide. He has internalized the archetype and it now lives within him as an inner code of behavior. The Mentor may be the unspoken code of the gunfighter, or the secret notions of honor harbored by Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe. A code of ethics may be a disembodied manifestation of the Mentor archetype guiding the hero’s actions. It’s not uncommon for a hero to make reference to a Mentor who meant something to him earlier in life, even if there’s no actual Mentor in the story. A hero may remember, “My mother /father / grandfather /drill sergeant used to say...”, and then call to mind the bit of wisdom that will become critical in solving the problem of the story. The energy of the Mentor archetype also may be invested in a prop such as a book or other artifact that guides the hero in the quest.

PLACEMENT OF MENTORS
Although the Hero’s Journey often finds the Mentor appearing in Act One, the placement of a Mentor in a story is a practical consideration. A character may be needed at any point who knows the ropes, has a map to the unknown country, or can give the hero key information, all the right time. Mentors may show up early in a story, or wait in the wings until needed at a critical moment in Act Two or Act Three.
Mentors provide heroes with motivation, inspiration, guidance, training, and gifts for the journey. Every hero is guided by something, and a story without some acknowledgement of this energy is incomplete. Whether expressed as an actual character or as an internalized code of behavior, the Mentor archetype is a powerful tool at the writer’s command.
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