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Author | Joseph Campbell |
---|---|
Language | English |
Subject | Mythology |
Published |
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Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
ISBN | 978-1-57731-593-3 |
201/.3 22 | |
LC Class | BL313 .C28 2008 |
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949) is a work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell, in which the author discusses his theory of the mythological structure of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world myths.
Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theory has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. Filmmaker George Lucas acknowledged Campbell's theory in mythology, and its influence on the Star Wars films. [1]
The Joseph Campbell Foundation and New World Library issued a new edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in July 2008 as part of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series of books, audio and video recordings. In 2011, Time named it among the 100 most influential books written in English since 1923. [2]
Campbell explores the theory that mythological narratives frequently share a fundamental structure. The similarities of these myths brought Campbell to write his book in which he details the structure of the monomyth . He calls the motif of the archetypal narrative, "the hero's adventure". In a well-known passage from the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell summarizes the monomyth:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. [3]
In laying out the monomyth, Campbell describes a number of stages or steps along this journey. "The hero's adventure" begins in the ordinary world. He must depart from the ordinary world, when he receives a call to adventure. With the help of a mentor, the hero will cross a guarded threshold, leading him to a supernatural world, where familiar laws and order do not apply. There, the hero will embark on a road of trials, where he is tested along the way. The archetypal hero is sometimes assisted by allies. As the hero faces the ordeal, he encounters the greatest challenge of the journey. Upon rising to the challenge, the hero will receive a reward, or boon. Campbell's theory of the monomyth continues with the inclusion of a metaphorical death and resurrection. The hero must then decide to return with this boon to the ordinary world. The hero then faces more trials on the road back. Upon the hero's return, the boon or gift may be used to improve the hero's ordinary world, in what Campbell calls, the application of the boon.
While many myths do seem to follow the outline of Campbell's monomyth, there is some variance in the inclusion and sequence of some of the stages. Still, there is an abundance of literature and folklore that follows the motif of the archetypal narrative, paralleling the more general steps of "Departure" (sometimes called Separation), "Initiation", and "Return". "Departure" deals with the hero venturing forth on the quest, including the call to adventure. "Initiation" refers to the hero's adventures that will test him along the way. The last part of the monomyth is the "Return", which follows the hero's journey home.
Campbell studied religious, spiritual, mythological and literary classics including the stories of Osiris, Prometheus, the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus. The book cites the similarities of the stories, and references them as he breaks down the structure of the monomyth.
The book includes a discussion of "the hero's journey" by using the Freudian concepts popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Campbell's theory incorporates a mixture of Jungian archetypes, unconscious forces, and Arnold van Gennep's structuring of rites of passage rituals to provide some illumination. [4] "The hero's journey" continues to influence artists and intellectuals in contemporary arts and culture, suggesting a basic usefulness for Campbell's insights beyond mid-20th century forms of analysis.
Campbell used the work of early-20th-century theorists to develop his model of the hero (see also structuralism), including Freud (particularly the Oedipus complex), Carl Jung (archetypal figures and the collective unconscious), and Arnold Van Gennep. Van Gennep contributed the concept of there being three stages of The Rites of Passage. Campbell translated this into Separation, Initiation and Return. He also looked to the work of psychoanalyst Otto Rank and ethnographers James George Frazer and Franz Boas.
Campbell was a noted scholar of James Joyce, having co-authored A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake with Henry Morton Robinson. Campbell borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake . In addition, Joyce's Ulysses was also highly influential in the structuring of the archetypal motif.
The book was originally published by the Bollingen Foundation through Pantheon Press as the seventeenth title in the Bollingen Series. This series was taken over by Princeton University Press, who published the book through 2006. Originally issued in 1949 and revised by Campbell in 1968, The Hero with a Thousand Faces has been reprinted a number of times. Reprints issued after the release of Star Wars in 1977 used the image of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker on the cover. Princeton University Press issued a commemorative printing of the second edition in 2004 on the occasion of the joint centennial of Campbell's birth and the Press's founding with an added foreword by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
A third edition, compiled by the Joseph Campbell Foundation and published by New World Library, was released as the twelfth title in the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series in July 2008.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces has been translated into over twenty languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Turkish, Dutch, Greek, Danish, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Czech, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Russian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Hebrew, and has sold well over a million copies worldwide. [5]
In Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, a book drawn from Campbell's late lectures and workshops, he says about artists and the monomyth:
Artists are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can help us along the heroic journey of our own lives. [...]
The artist is meant to put the objects of this world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, reveal. The hero's journey is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of a fiasco.
But there's also the possibility of bliss.
— Joseph Campbell, [6]
The Hero with a Thousand Faces has influenced a number of artists, filmmakers, musicians, producers and poets. Some of these figures include Bob Dylan, George Lucas, Mark Burnett and Jim Morrison. Additionally, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead had long noted Campbell's influence and participated in a seminar with Campbell in 1986, entitled "From Ritual to Rapture". [7]
Stanley Kubrick introduced Arthur C. Clarke to the book during the writing of 2001: A Space Odyssey . [8]
George Lucas' deliberate use of Campbell's theory of the monomyth in the making of the Star Wars movies is well documented. On the DVD release of the famous colloquy between Campbell and Bill Moyers, filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch and broadcast in 1988 on PBS as The Power of Myth , Campbell and Moyers discussed Lucas's use of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in making his films. [9] Lucas himself discussed how Campbell's work affected his approach to storytelling and film-making. [10]
Jenova Chen, lead designer at thatgamecompany, also cites The Hero's Journey as the primary inspiration for the PlayStation 3 game Journey (2012). [11]
Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood film producer and writer, wrote a memo for Disney Studios on the use of The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a guide for scriptwriters; this memo influenced the creation of such films as Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994). Vogler later expanded the memo and published it as the book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers , which became the inspiration for a number of successful Hollywood films and is believed to have been used in the development of the Matrix series.[ citation needed ]
Novelist Richard Adams acknowledges a debt to Campbell's work, and specifically to the concept of the monomyth. [12] In his best known work, Watership Down , Adams uses extracts from The Hero with a Thousand Faces as chapter epigrams. [13]
Author Neil Gaiman, whose work is frequently seen as exemplifying the monomyth structure, [14] says that he started The Hero with a Thousand Faces but refused to finish it:
"I think I got about half way through The Hero with a Thousand Faces and found myself thinking if this is true—I don't want to know. I really would rather not know this stuff. I’d rather do it because it's true and because I accidentally wind up creating something that falls into this pattern than be told what the pattern is." [15]
Many scholars and reviewers have noted how closely J. K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter books hewed to the monomyth schema. [16]
Dan Harmon, the creator of the TV shows Community and Rick and Morty , has used the monomyth as inspiration for his work. [17]
Joseph John Campbell was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's best-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.
Dagobah is a fictional planet and eponymous star system appearing in the Star Wars films The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and Revenge of the Sith, and other media. It is depicted as a world of murky swamps, steaming bayous, and jungles, resembling Earth during the Carboniferous period. Dagobah is 14,410 kilometers in diameter with an orbital period of 341 days. Dagobah's climate and atmosphere consists of two seasons: a dry season, where the uplands become too hot for most life forms to survive; and a wet season, consisting of violent lightning storms, dense fog, and long periods of torrential rainfall. The Tash were a sentient species native to Dagobah.
A story arc is the chronological construction of a plot in a novel or story. It can also mean an extended or continuing storyline in episodic storytelling media such as television, comic books, comic strips, board games, video games, and films with each episode following a dramatic arc. On a television program, for example, the story would unfold over many episodes. In television, the use of the story arc is common in sitcoms, and even more so in soap operas. In a traditional Hollywood film, the story arc usually follows a three-act structure. Webcomics are more likely to use story arcs than newspaper comics, as most webcomics have readable archives online that a newcomer to the strip can read in order to understand what is going on. Although story arcs have existed for decades, one of the first appearances of the term was in 1973 by Time Magazine for a synopsis of the movie The Friends of Eddie Coyle: "He accomplishes this with no sacrifice to the pacing of his action sequences or the suspenseful development of his story's arc."
The Power of Myth is a book based on the 1988 PBS documentary Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. The documentary was originally broadcast as six one-hour conversations between mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) and journalist Bill Moyers. It remains one of the most popular series in the history of American public television.
In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero's quest or hero's journey, also known as the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.
Arnold van Gennep, full name Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep, was a Dutch–German-French ethnographer and folklorist.
John Shelton Lawrence is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, United States. His initial major publication, The American Monomyth, written with Robert Jewett, was published in 1977.
The American Monomyth is a 1977 book by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence arguing for the existence and cultural importance of an 'American Monomyth', a variation on the classical monomyth as proposed by Joseph Campbell.
Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works. As an acknowledged form of literary criticism, it dates back to 1934 when Classical scholar Maud Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.
Christopher Vogler is a Hollywood development executive, screenwriter, author and educator, best known for working with Disney and his screenwriting guide, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers, from 2007.
Jungian archetypes are a concept from psychology that refers to a universal, inherited idea, pattern of thought, or image that is present in the collective unconscious of all human beings. The psychic counterpart of instinct, archetypes are thought to be the basis of many of the common themes and symbols that appear in stories, myths, and dreams across different cultures and societies. Some examples of archetypes include those of the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood, among others. The concept of the collective unconscious was first proposed by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed (TLR) is a television documentary which premiered on the History Channel in May 2007. It was produced by Prometheus Entertainment in association with The History Channel and Lucasfilm Ltd. The executive producer and director was Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Kevin Burns.
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space is a 1986 book by mythologist Joseph Campbell, the last book completed before his death in 1987. In it, he explores the intersections of art, psychology and religion, and discusses the ways in which new myths are born. In writing the book, Campbell drew on transcripts of a series of lectures and conversations that he gave in San Francisco between 1981 and 1984, including legendary symposiums with astronaut Rusty Schweickart and with members of the Grateful Dead.
David Kudler is an American editor and author. He is best known for editing numerous posthumous editions of the books by Joseph Campbell, including Pathways to Bliss and the 2008 edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Paul Rebillot was a member of the human potential movement. He is the author of The Call to Adventure: Bringing the Hero’s Journey to Daily Life.
The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers is a popular writing textbook by writer Christopher Vogler, focusing on the theory that most stories can be boiled down to a series of narrative structures and character archetypes, described through mythological allegory.
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories is a 2004 book by Christopher Booker containing a Jung-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning. Booker worked on the book for 34 years.
In narratology and comparative mythology, the Rank–Raglan mythotype is a set of narrative patterns proposed by psychoanalyst Otto Rank and later on amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan that lists different cross-cultural traits often found in the accounts of heroes, including mythical heroes.
Scholars, including psychoanalysts, have commented that J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth stories about both Bilbo Baggins, protagonist of The Hobbit, and Frodo Baggins, protagonist of The Lord of the Rings, constitute psychological journeys. Bilbo returns from his journey to help recover the Dwarves' treasure from Smaug the dragon's lair in the Lonely Mountain changed, but wiser and more experienced. Frodo returns from his journey to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom scarred by multiple weapons, and is unable to settle back into the normal life of his home, the Shire.