The NeverEnding Story and the Gates of the Southern Oracle
Passage Through Challenge and the Discovery of Meaning in Our Lives
Challenge is a vital part of human growth.
Without challenge and difficulty, life would honestly be kind of pointless. I don’t even know if I can imagine the sheer state of apathy and apparent meaninglessness that would come from an existence without any form of growth, change, or challenge.
As Seneca once noted, “No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”
We are all forced to confront challenges within our lives. Some things are pretty common in the human experience: physical changes through puberty, meandering complex social situations, learning how to sell our labor so we can pay our bills and our taxes, discovering sex and our sexuality, and eventually coming to grips with our own mortality. Across cultures and through time, various rites of passage have been developed to mark the transition from one stage of life to another, symbolizing personal transformation while also connecting to traditional practices and our communities. From ancient initiation ceremonies to modern tests of endurance, these rituals reflect our universal need to face and overcome challenges together.
But there are also many challenges that are specific to individuals and populations: homelessness, lack of access to clean drinking water, oppression, a constant threat of violence in the home or in the community, the atrocities of warfare, and more. Every one of us is born into a unique situation, where some of the challenges of living we share while others are very specific to our own lives.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl—a psychologist who survived the concentration camps of WWII—presented an argument for why our responsibilities to our own challenges in life are the “very essence of human existence”:
As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
We are responsible for our own lives—we face the challenge of living as we are now, even if there are some things we share in the challenges we face.
Even if we must face our own challenges, we certainly can and should look to the stories and wisdom cultivated through millennia of the human experience to help us critically examine our challenges and find meaningful ways to grow through adversity.
I could write at length here about various stories from human history that explore challenge, but really want to explore one in particular: I just rewatched the film The NeverEnding Story, and it got me thinking a lot more about the concept of challenge presented by the Gates of the Southern Oracle.
The NeverEnding Story and the Southern Oracle
If you’ve never watched The NeverEnding Story nor read the novel it’s based on, you definitely should do so.
Not only is it some fun 1980s fantasy storytelling, but it led to one scene in particular that lives rent-free in the minds of many American-born Millennials due to how it forced us as young children to face the reality of death and the loss of characters in story (other good contenders there are The Land Before Time, My Girl, and All Dogs Go to Heaven).
On a rewatch, the scenes from the Southern Oracle had me re-examining the concept of challenge as portrayed in the film (as well as in the book, which I haven’t read in a very long time).
The NeverEnding Story is presented as a story within a story (and has a larger layer overtop for the audience/reader to consider). In the story, a young boy who is facing his own challenges in life through the recent loss of his mother, dealing with bullies from school, and not feeling connected with his father escapes for a moment into a bookstore, where he learns of a magical book called The NeverEnding Story. He takes the book and reads it—that’s where the story within the story takes place. In the book, the various beings of the fictional world Fantasia (Fantastica in the novel version) are confronting their own challenge: a formless entity called The Nothing is devouring their world, and their key leader, The Childlike Empress, has fallen ill. They call on a brave warrior, a young boy named Atreyu, who is sent out into the fantasy world to seek a cure for the Empress as well as to fight The Nothing.
Now, there is far more symbolism and a lot more of the story to explore, so you should go read the novel and then watch the film to get the whole thing (especially to understand the depth of layering of stories for the audience to discover), but for the sake of considering challenges as posed in The NeverEnding Story, my main focus here are the Gates of the Southern Oracle.
In the story, Atreyu must find the location of an entity called the Southern Oracle (also named Uyulala in the novel). But to get to the oracle itself, he first has to pass through challenges that test his capabilities. In the film there are two gates, while in the novel there are three. Collectively, these gates represent various stages of self-awareness, introspection, and surrender. In exploring them, we can draw connections to mythological traditions, philosophical teachings, and universalities of the human condition.
The Great Riddle Gate: Embracing Our Limits and Self-Worth
The first gate, The Great Riddle Gate, challenges individuals to reconcile their self-worth with the humility of accepting the limits of their knowledge. In the film, passing through this gate requires confidence in one’s value. The book delves deeper, suggesting that true wisdom arises from understanding that no one can solve all of life’s mysteries.
This dual recognition—acknowledging one’s own limitations while affirming self-worth—resonates with the ancient Greek aphorism, “Know thyself”, inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (also brought back into mainstream culture through the film, The Matrix).
This gate parallels the trials of Oedipus, who sought to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. In that story, the Sphinx—which appears very much the same as the statues at the First Gate of the Southern Oracle in The NeverEnding Story (a form with mixed features of human, lion, and bird of prey)—poses the following riddle to Oedipus:
What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?
Oedipus answers the riddle correctly: the answer is a person, who crawls as a baby, stands on two legs as an adult, and walks with a stick in old age.
Answering the riddle showed that Oedipus had great worldly knowledge, and he was rewarded by becoming a king and taking the hand of the previously widowed queen. However, if you know the story of Oedipus, then you might know that the continuation of his life reveals that understanding external mysteries alone cannot shield one from internal blindness (he is unaware that the queen he marries is actually his biological mother).
Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow Self suggests that true self-awareness requires acknowledging both our strengths and the darker, unresolved aspects of our psyche (which can be rather difficult to face—a challenge for our own cognition). This is an approach to dualistic understanding of self, much as with the Great Riddle Gate. For the young warrior Atreyu to pass through the gate, he must know how own self-worth comes through the acceptance of his own limitations of being.
The Magic Mirror Gate: Confronting the Inner Self
The Magic Mirror Gate forces Atreyu to face his true self, reflecting not only his fears but also hidden aspects of his personality. Passing through this gate requires integrating these revelations into one’s identity. This challenge aligns with universal mythological and spiritual themes of self-confrontation.
As two of the character in the film discuss as Atreyu approached the second gate:
Engywook: Next is the Magic Mirror Gate. Atreyu has to face his true self.
Falcor: So what? That won’t be too hard for him.
Engywook: Oh, that’s what everyone thinks! But kind people find out that they are cruel. Brave men discover that they are really cowards! Confronted by their true selves, most men run away screaming!
In Greek mythology, Narcissus is a figure with striking physical beauty and yet overly contemptible egotism (the depth of foolish pride of Narcissus is where we get the term narcissism from). In one story, the goddess of retribution, Nemesis, sees how prideful and cruel Narcissus is in his behaviors and leads him to a magical pool with a perfect mirrored reflection. Narcissus is so egotistical that he sees the reflection of himself and falls maddeningly in love with, only later to realize he was only in love with himself—in the end being driven to tragic despair. The reflection leads to his downfall because he cannot look beyond his own surface beauty.
Jung referred to the type of introspection faced at the Magic Mirror Gate as individuation, the process of unifying conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche and becoming truly aware of oneself. The gate also mirrors some meditative practices (such as in some Buddhist and Hindu approaches), where practitioners face the impermanence and interconnectedness of their inner and outer worlds.
Interestingly, within The NeverEnding Story, Atreyu facing the Magic Mirror Gate brings him to noy only face himself in the mirror but to learn that he is no brave warrior on a quest—he is himself the young, scared boy who is reading the book about Atreyu (the story takes on some fun tones of exploring how we see ourselves through the characters portrayed in the stories we enjoy). In turn, the young boy reading the book must discover that there is a brave warrior inside who is on a quest to save the fantastical realms of imagination within himself while embracing the challenges of his real life.
The No Key Gate: The Paradox of Surrender
The third gate, The No Key Gate, doesn’t appear in the film version of the story (only in the novel). This gate introduces an intriguing paradox: the more one desires to pass, the more the gate resists (hence, there is no key). Only by releasing desire and ambition can the gate be crossed. This resonates with teachings in Eastern philosophies, particularly the Buddhist notion of non-attachment.
In the Tao Te Ching, Laozi/Lao Tzu writes:
“By letting go, all gets done”.
The third gate embodies this principle, illustrating that the absence of ego and desire allows one to progress effortlessly.
There are various Zen koans and practices that serve to explore the concept of letting go of ego and desire. Many people are familiar with the koan “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”, but there are many that present challenges to how we think of the concepts of self, awareness, and our own perspectives (such as “when you meet the Buddha, kill him”).
This gate also echoes the renunciation stage in Hinduism, where one detaches from material pursuits to embrace spiritual liberation (moksha). It also mirrors the archetypal hero’s relinquishment of personal glory in favor of a higher purpose, a recurring theme in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In that book Campbell articulates his concept of the Hero’s Journey, something we see arising as the facing of challenges in mythology and personal stories. Some attributes in many representations of a hero’s journey are moment of resurrection, ego death, and/or apotheosis where the hero faces their greatest challenge—often in the form of having to let go of some attribute, tool, belief, way of being, or even to die and be reborn so that they can pass into their new life.
In The NeverEnding Story novel, Atreyu at first was confused about how he could ever pass through such a gate as one that required him to not want to pass through it. It appeared as a paradox (very much in Zen koan fashion): the only key to open the gate that you must pass through is to not wish for passing through the gate in the first place. The solution to this in the story is that by facing his true self—the scared young boy—in the Magic Mirror Gate, he has already led himself into a state of no self. The individuation, to use Jung’s terminology, that he’s discovered through facing his shadow self has led him to be a somewhat open being—he has momentarily lost his state of awareness of self and forgot why he wanted to pass through the gate in the first place, thus allowing him to pass through the gate without even realizing it (kind of easy to see why the filmmakers thought that might be hard to portray in the movie version).
Archetypal Journeys and Personal Growth
Atreyu’s journey through the three gates takes him through true self-awareness to a dissipation of self and then back again so that he can meet with the Southern Oracle. The Oracle itself is presented almost as a nature deity—something that is so grand and vast that it transcends an embodiment and requires that Atreyu lost himself in order to truly learn from it (remind me very much of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn and concepts from other stories of opening windows into greater realms of consciousness).
The gates of the Southern Oracle, much like the trials faced by heroes in ancient myths, reflect key stages in the journey toward the self. They serve as powerful metaphors for the inner challenges we all may face. They remind us of the need for self-awareness (both in knowing our own value as well as our own limitations), the courage to confront our inner truths (facing what we fear of ourselves), and the wisdom of letting go of the self to better see who and what we consciously are.
By examining these gates in light of mythology, psychology, and philosophy, we uncover timeless lessons that speak to our collective journey as seekers of truth and meaning. There are concepts about facing these challenges that we all share, even if we must face them individually and come to them as representations of ourselves (to be responsible for our own lives such that we can respond to the challenge, as Viktor Frankl mentioned).
In his novel, The High Road, Terry Fallis writes:
A life without challenge, a life without hardship, a life without purpose, seems pale and pointless. With challenge come perseverance and gumption. With hardship come resilience and resolve. With purpose come strength and understanding.
In the challenges we face in our lives and our passages through such challenges, we may come face to face with our own limitations, our own fears about ourselves, and the limits of the very concept of self. Much as in The NeverEnding Story, passage through those challenges—passing through the Gates of the Southern Oracle—may be part of our Hero’s Journey and our discovery of our meaning in life.