The Road of Trials

II - Initiation
     1 - The Road of Trials

"Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.  This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure.  It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals.  The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region.  Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage."

"....And so it happens that anyone - in whatever society - undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolic figures (an one of which may swallow him) .... In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the 'purification of the self,' where the senses are 'cleansed and humbled,' and the energies and interests 'concentrated upon transcendental things";  or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past.  In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

His quotes in this passage are from
Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism, A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness