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In the long run, one of the most influential books of the 20th century may turn out to be Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The ideas expressed in Campbell's book are having a major impact on storytelling. Writers are becoming more aware of the ageless patterns which Campbell identifies and are enriching their work with them.
Inevitably Hollywood has caught on to the usefulness of Campbell''s work. Filmmakers like George Lucas and George Miller acknowledge their debt to Campbell and his influence can be seen in the films of Steven Spielberg, John Boorman, Francis Coppola and others.
It's little wonder that Hollywood is beginning to embrace the ideas Campbell presents in his books. For the writer, producer, director or designer his concepts are a welcome tool kit, stocked with sturdy instruments ideal for the craft of storytelling. With these tools you can construct a story to meet almost any situation, a story that will be dramatic, entertaining, and psychologically true. With this equipment you can diagnose the problems of almost any ailing plotline and make the corrections to bring it to its peak of performance.
These tools have stood the test of time. They are older than the Pyramids, older than Stonehenge, older than the earliest cave paintings.
Joseph Campbell's contribution to the tool kit was to gather the ideas together, recognize them, articulate them, name them, organize them. He exposed for the first time the pattern that lies behind every story ever told.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces is his statement of the most persistent theme in oral tradition and recorded literature: the myth of the hero. In his study of world hero myths Campbell discovered that they are all basically the same story, retold endlessly in infinite variation.
He found that all storytelling, consciously or not, follows the ancient patterns of myth and that all stories, from the crudest jokes to the highest flights of literature, can be understood in terms of the Hero's Journey: the 'monomyth' whose principles he lays out in the book.
The pattern of the Hero's Journey is universal, occurring in every culture, in every time. It is as infinitely varied as the human race itself and yet its basic form remains constant. The Hero's Journey is an incredibly tenacious set of elements that springs endlessly from the deepest reaches of the mind of man; different in its details for every culture, but fundamentally the same.
Campbell's thinking runs parallel to that of the Swiss psychologist, Carl G Jung, who wrote about the archetypes: constantly repeating characters or energies which occur in the dreams of all people and the myths of all cultures. Jung suggested that these archetypes reflect different aspects of the human mind and that our personalities divide themselves into these characters to play out the drama of our lives. He noticed a strong correspondence between his patients' dream figures and the common archetypes of mythology. He suggested that both were coming from a deeper source, in the collective unconscious of the human race.
The repeating characters of world myth such as the young hero, the wise old man or woman, the shapeshifter, and the shadowy antagonist are the same as the figures who appear repeatedly in our dreams and fantasies. That's why myths and most stories constructed on the mythological model have the ring of psychological truth.
Such stories are accurate models of the workings of the human mind, true maps of the psyche. They are psychologically valid and emotionally realistic even when they portray fantastic, impossible, or unreal events.
This accounts for the universal power of such stories. Stories built on the model of the Hero's Journey have an appeal that can be felt by everyone, because they well up from a universal source in the shared unconscious and reflect universal concerns.
They deal with the child-like universal questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where will I go when I die? What is good and what is evil? What must I do about it? What will tomorrow be like? Where did yesterday go? Is there anybody else out there?
The ideas embedded in mythology and identified by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces can be applied to understanding almost any human problem. They are a great key to life as well as a major instrument for dealing more effectively with a mass audience.
If you want to understand the ideas behind the Hero's Journey, there's no substitute for actually reading Campbell's work. It's an experience that has a way of changing people.
It's also a good idea to read a lot of myths, but it amounts to the same thing since Campbell is a master storyteller who delights in illustrating his points with examples from the rich storehouse of mythology.
Campbell gives an outline of the Hero's Journey in Chapter IV, The Keys, of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I've taken the liberty of amending the outline slightly, trying to reflect some of the common themes in movies with illustrations drawn from contemporary films and a few classics. You can compare the two outlines and terminology below.
The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Departure, Separation
World Of Common Day
Call To Adventure
Refusal Of The Call
Supernatural Aid
Crossing The 1st Threshold/
Belly Of The Whale
Descent, Initiation, Penetration
Road Of Trials
Meeting With The Goddess
Woman As Temptress Atonement
With The Father
Apothesis
The Ultimate Boon
Return
Refusal of the Return
The Magic Flight
Rescue From Within
Crossing The Threshold
Return
Master Of The Two Worlds
Freedom To Live
The Writer's Journey
Act One
Ordinary World
Call To Adventure
Refusal Of The Call
Meeting With The Mentor
Crossing The 1st Threshold
Act Two
Tests, Allies, Enemies
Approach To The Inmost Cave
Supreme Ordeal
Reward
Act Three
The Road Back
Resurrection
Return With Elixir
I'm retelling the hero myth in my own way, and you should feel free to do the same. Every storyteller bends the mythic pattern to his own purpose or the needs of her culture.
That is why the hero has a thousand faces.
More on the Writer's Journey
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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