by Marie-Claire Gould, Contributor

The Willow series is one of the most mythically important pieces of media that has been produced in recent years. In the words of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Creative Director, John Butcher:

From Lucasfilm, it continues the story from the original 1988 movie with a view to the future. The show is produced by Ron Howard, the original director, with showrunner Jon Kasdan, the co-writer of Solo: A Star Wars Story. Willow is refreshed and revitalized for a new generation, including an openly lesbian knight/princess romance, modernized jokes and costumes, and poppy catchy soundtrack songs. But that doesn’t mean it also doesn’t understand the importance of character or a fully orchestrated composed score. In fact, in the ways that make a story resonate with our psychology, to stick with us in the ways that Star Wars became a mythopoeia–a culturally significant touchstone–this little-show-that-could  has it where it counts. 

When we talk about Willow, we must explore it through several layers; first, what the Text tells us: a group of adventurers go on a journey to rescue a lost prince. Second, the Symbolic layer, which involves the revelation of the hidden Goddess, Elora Danan (Ellie Bamber), and the quest for wholeness through the missing feminine coming into her own power, with masculine also represented by our missing prince Airk (Dempsey Bryk). Lastly, there is the Mythic structure, which helps the story speak to our psychology, as Joseph Campbell reminds us, “Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.” We must understand how Willow works mythically to grasp the power of the show, and how significant it is. 

When we speak of Mythic importance, people naturally go to Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth as presented within The Hero with a Thousand Faces. There are many steps–symbolic elements, dragons to fight–which all help to indicate where the characters are in their journeys and what they might be facing next. This lens for Willow is valuable, as is The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock, which takes a feminine-internal focus of this adventurer's journey. Joseph Campbell often talks about how the steps are optional, and how they may not be in the order typically presented. In fact, the only important aspect of the journey is that the character leaves the ordinary or known world and enters the unknown. The Line in the Circle diagram represents the separation in our knowledge and metaphorically stands simultaneously for a journey into the darkest, scariest places we can explore as well as into our own subconscious. This is represented in Willow as the Dark Forest, an underground cave, the dungeons of Nockmaar, the troll-infested mines of Skellin, or even the endless Shattered Sea. Our motley crew of Quest Best Friends not only journeys into the unknown multiple times, the underworld symbolically, but then experiences rebirths of who they are. It is hard to interpret the constant need for this repeated exploration using Campbell or even Murdock, as they keep going in and out of the unknown. 

To complicate things, the journey is not as nice and easy as some people mapping the journey make it. When you map it, Willow fits Campbell or Murdock over the course of the season, but it almost becomes sterilized in the academic process of applying a template to the story. These Willow characters are messy, have desires, wants, and needs that are explored in the course of the first season. This quest, that would easily fit in as an 80s road trip movie, is filled with tears, screams, goo, worms and psyche-breaking depression. All of the characters explore the lies they tell themselves by continuously going to their lowest point symbolically and metaphorically multiple times.

The series is packed full of these katabasis moments; Elora flees into the Dark Forest, which functions like a cocoon. She transforms into a butterfly where she must confront her denial and who she will become, Kit (Ruby Cruz) confronts the truth about her father through Alagash in Wigglheims tomb, dispelling the lies she maintained about Madmartigan. Boorman (Amar Chadha-Patel) realizing he is not the hero of the story and instead, he must support others, this realization in the Shattered Sea is his ego death and rebirth. Jade’s (Erin Kellyman) worldview being dismantled by the Bone Reavers and finding out she is not only one of them, but the child of General Kael who she had blamed for her suffering her whole life. The Ceremony in the wildwood welcoming her home is her rebirth. Jade is born anew. All of the characters experience this repeated journey in and out of the underworld, some multiple times. They are alive…and then symbolically they are dead. Alive. Dead. Alive. This cycle sounds like a different mythological journey presented by another Jungian psychologist and storyteller, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the author of Women Who Run with the Wolves. 

Estés explores the Wild Woman archetype as it relates to stories, especially folklore, and fairytales. There is wisdom passed down in these stories that relates to these characters, and through them, our interpretation of ourselves. She calls this the Life-Death-Life cycle. You are either alive, or dead waiting to be reborn. Throughout our lives, we experience emotional dismemberment and death that we need to be reborn from. Collecting the pieces of ourselves is important as they contain the wisdom of our ancestors and of our own experiences. In Estés's work, this wisdom is represented by our bones, they are the seeds of our new selves, full of potential, ancient wisdom that knows what to do when the circumstances are right, and we must sing to them. When we do, the flesh grows back on them and we are reborn. This is deeply symbolic, but in short, we need to experience symbolic death to grow. Death and rebirth are fundamental, and allow us to heal, grow and transform. In our culture, we are often so afraid of darkness, death and depression. In truth, we are like plants that start as seedlings. We must be in the dark experiencing rain so we can grow and release more seeds, be planted again, to grow again. This is the way of life. We need the moist dirt, we need the darkness, we need the rebirth. It also needs to be messy, it should be covered in vermicious goo and darkness, like real birth–or as Kit was pulled forcibly from the vermicious Creme Brulee Lake of the Skellin Mines, violent and surprising. We need to be allowed to be messy as humans, we are not sterile, plastic automatons. We bleed and suffer, and so our symbolic transformations should be messy and gross.

The Life-Death-Life Cycle helps us understand how all the characters in Willow are not only heading into the unknown and experiencing symbolically resonant character growth, but how it is important for us to be allowed to do the same. One of the most significant moments for Elora was when she descended to the dungeons in Nockmaar Castle. In the place that represents the death of her mother and her own birth, she reaches her lowest point as a character symbolically. The old her who thought she was normal dies. Her mother sees her at that moment through the magic that is the bloodstream of the universe and tells Elora that “She is powerful….”. A piece of her was found in her darkest place, and Elora was reborn in a new version of herself. She must again face the darkness two episodes later in the Mines of Skellin. The journey is messy like birth, like growth, and like life. The most amazing thing happens when we watch Elora’s exploration of the darkness of her birth. We go on the journey with her and get to experience the apotheosis of her experience within ourselves. We go along for the transformational journey. This is the power of story. This is the power of this story, Willow.

Fans of the show talk about how it speaks to them. It resonates with them. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés talks about singing to the bones of what we were, the story sings us back together when we experience it. When we watch and engage with the story, we are also transformed. This is the mythic resonance coming to bear. When a story uses a mythic structure, and symbolic engagement that is backed up by the text of the story, like this series, it has all the things to be a culturally significant touchstone. “Love is the most powerful thing in the universe” and that our darkness is part of us, as Willow (Warwick Davis) reminds us, “Your doubt, jealousy, pride, hunger. Accept those parts of yourself because it's the only way you will ever master them.” This allows space for the messiness of living and accepting that our need for symbolic death is required for us to become whole. For those of us that watched and engaged with Willow, we know how important it is. It is the Myth, and elixir we need right now. Defiantly anti-patriarchal, the details of the story can be used as shorthand language to describe complex ethical and moral situations as well as to analyze ourselves. It is essential because both it touches the surface of and dives deep into our collective unconscious. Willow resonates so much with those of us who have heard what it is saying that we have become protective of this little mythopoeia.

Now, we must wait for more Willow. But worry not, the most amazing thing happens on rewatch of a resonate story like Willow, it works deeper, and it sings to us again and again. We will wait for Willow because it is worth it, and frankly we need it. 

Marie-Claire Gould is the Mythologist and Podcaster of What the Force? Obsessed with figuring out why story works and how myths are dreamed forward into today.