Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth (Hero With A Thousand Faces)
The standard path of the
mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented
in the rites of passage: separation--initiation--return: which might be named
the nuclear unit of the monomyth.
Stages
of the hero’s journey:
1. Birth: Fabulous circumstances surrounding conception, birth, and childhood establish the hero’s pedigree, and often constitute their own monomyth cycle.
2. Call to Adventure: The
hero is called to adventure by some external event or messenger. The Hero may
accept the call willingly or reluctantly.
3. Helpers/Amulet: During
the early stages of the journey, the hero will often receive aid from a protective
figure. This supernatural helper can take a wide variety of forms, such as a
wizard, and old man, a dwarf, a crone, or a fairy godmother. The helper commonly
gives the hero a protective amulet or weapon for the journey.
4. Crossing the Threshold:
Upon reaching the threshold of adventure, the hero must undergo some sort of
ordeal in order to pass from the everyday world into the world of adventure.
This trial may be as painless as entering a dark cave or as violent as being
swallowed up by a whale. The important feature is the contrast between the familiar
world of light and the dark, unknown world of adventure.
5. Tests: The hero travels
through the dream-like world of adventure where he must undergo a series of
tests. These trials are often violent encounters with monsters, sorcerers, warriors,
or forces of nature. Each successful test further proves the hero's ability
and advances the journey toward its climax.
6. Helpers: The hero is
often accompanied on the journey by a helper who assists in the series of tests
and generally serves as a loyal companion. Alternately, the hero may encounter
a supernatural helper in the world of adventure who fulfills this function.
]7. Climax/The Final Battle: This is the critical moment in the hero's journey
in which there is often a final battle with a monster, wizard, or warrior which
facilitates the particular resolution of the adventure.
8. Flight: After accomplishing
the mission, the hero must return to the threshold of adventure and prepare
for a return to the everyday world. If the hero has angered the opposing forces
by stealing the elixir or killing a powerful monster, the return may take the
form of a hasty flight. If the hero has been given the elixir freely, the flight
may be a benign stage of the journey.
9. Return: The hero again
crosses the threshold of adventure and returns to the everyday world of daylight.
The return usually takes the form of an awakening, rebirth, resurrection, or
a simple emergence from a cave or forest. Sometimes the hero is pulled out of
the adventure world by a force from the daylight world.
10. Elixer: The object,
knowledge, or blessing that the hero acquired during the adventure is now put
to use in the everyday world. Often it has a restorative or healing function,
but it also serves to define the hero's role in the society.
11. Home: The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Alguns detalhes e duas aplicações modernas (sem a mulher como elemento de sedução)
In 1949 Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) made a big splash in the field of mythology with his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. This book built on the pioneering work of German anthropologist Adolph Bastian (1826-1905), who first proposed the idea that myths from all over the world seem to be built from the same "elementary ideas." Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) named these elementary ideas "archetypes," which he believed to be the building blocks not only of the unconscious mind, but of a collective unconscious. In other words, Jung believed that everyone in the world is born with the same basic subconscious model of what a "hero" is, or a "mentor" or a "quest," and that's why people who don't even speak the same language can enjoy the same stories.
Jung developed his idea of archetypes mostly as a way of finding meaning within the dreams and visions of the mentally ill: if a person believes they are being followed by a giant apple pie, it's difficult to make sense of how to help them. But if the giant apple pie can be understood to represent that person's shadow, the embodiment of all their fears, then the psychotherapist can help guide them through that fear, just as Yoda guided Luke on Dagoba. If you think of a person as a computer and our bodies as "hardware," language and culture seem to be the "software." Deeper still, and apparently common to all homo sapians, is a sort of built-in "operating system" which interprets the world by sorting people, places, things and experiences into archetypes.
Campbell's contribution was to take this idea of archetypes and use it to map out the common underlying structure behind religion and myth. He proposed this idea in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which provides examples from cultures throughout history and all over the world. Campbell eloquently demonstrates that all stories are expressions of the same story-pattern, which he named the "Hero's Journey," or the "monomyth." This sounds like a simple idea, but it suggests an incredible ramification, which Campbell summed up with his adage "All religions are true, but none are literal." That is, he concluded that all religions are really containers for the same essential truth, and the trick is to avoid mistaking the wrappings for the diamond.
Lucas had already written two drafts of Star Wars when he rediscovered Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1975 (he had read it in college). This blueprint for "The Hero's Journey" gave Lucas the focus he needed to draw his sprawling imaginary universe into a single story.
This page generates an enormous amount of reader feedback: everyone agrees with the basic structure, but most have a different interpretation of exactly which story elements embody which archetypes. Great! I don't believe there are "correct" and "incorrect" interpretations: the capacity to accomodate multiple viewpoints is part of the secret of Star Wars' incredible ability to connect with people.
Note that the Wachowski Brothers'
wonderful film The Matrix is built with the same blueprint:
Campbell: Star Wars vs.The Matrix Comparative analogy
| Star Wars | Matrix | |
| I: Departure | ||
| The call to adventure | Princess Leia's message | "Follow the white rabbit" |
| Refusal
of the call |
Must help with the harvest | Neo won't climb out window |
| Supernatural aid | Obi-wan rescues Luke from sandpeople | Trinity extracts the "bug" from Neo |
| Crossing the first threshold | Escaping Tatooine | Agents capture Neo |
| The belly of the whale | Trash compactor | Torture room |
| II: Initiation | ||
| The road of trials | Lightsabre practice | Sparring with Morpheus |
| The meeting with the goddess | Princess Leia | Trinity |
| Temptation away from the true path1 | Luke is tempted by the Dark Side | Cypher (the failed messiah) is tempted by the world of comfortable illusions |
| Atonement with | the Father Darth and Luke reconcile | Neo rescues and comes to agree (that he's The One) with his father-figure, Morpheus |
| Apotheosis (becoming god-like) | Luke becomes a Jedi | Neo becomes The One |
| The ultimate boon | Death Star destroyed | Humanity's salvation now within reach |
| III: Return | ||
| Refusal of the return | "Luke, come on!" Luke wants to stay to avenge Obi-Wan | Neo fights agent instead of running |
| The magic flight | Millennium Falcon | "Jacking in" |
| Rescue from without | Han saves Luke from Darth | Trinity saves Neo from agents |
| Crossing the return threshold | Millennium Falcon destroys pursuing TIE fighters | Neo fights agent Smith |
| Master of the two worlds | Victory ceremony | Neo's declares victory over machines in final phone call |
| Freedom to live | Rebellion is victorious over Empire | Humans are victorious over machines |
| Common Mythic Elements | ||
| Two Worlds (mundane and special) | Planetside vs. The Death Star | Reality vs. The Matrix |
| The Mentor | Obi-Wan Kenobi | Morpheus |
| The Oracle | Yoda | The Oracle |
| The Prophecy | Luke will overthrow the Emperor | Morpheus will find (and Trinity will fall for) "The One" |
| Failed Hero | Biggs In an early version of the script | Morpheus once believed that Cypher was "The One" |
| Wearing Enemy's Skin | Luke and Han wear stormtrooper outfits | Neo jumps into agent's skin |
| Shapeshifter(the Hero isn't sure if he can trust this character) | Han Solo | Cypher |
| Animal familiar | R2-D2 Chewbacca The Sentinels are the only metaphorical animals | and Neo hasn't befriended one (yet?) |
|
Personal Myth 1 Chasing a lone animal into the enchanted wood (and the animal gets away) |
Lucas draws on his Personal
Myth Follows R2D2 into the Jundland Wastes; |
Neo "follows the white rabbit" to the nightclub where he meets Trinity |
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1 In 1949 Campbell called this mythic element
"woman as
temptress," but both Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers (as well
as countless others) have managed to imagine compelling temptations away from
the Correct Path which didn't cast woman as the villain. Campbell's idea that
woman represents impurity was probably influenced by his Judeo-Christian upbringing,
which shifts the responsibility for Adam's fall to Eve. Although Campbell's
book is scrupulously cross-cultural, the one exception is his chapter on "Woman
As the Temptress," which draws examples exclusively from Judeo-Christian
myths.
2 Mythic heroes are nearly always lured into the enchanted wood by chasing a single animal, and the animal almost always escapes. I find this one of the most fascinating, difficult-to-understand commonalities of myth. For instance, in Le Morte D'Arthur (the most "official" version of King Arthur), the king chases a stag into a strange forest, his horse falls dead from exhaustion, the stag escapes, and Arthur meets "the strangest beast that ever he saw or heard of," Pellinore's Questing Beast. What the heck are we supposed to learn from that?!?! I'm still not sure, though I've found two clues: One, the hero usually thinks the chase will be easy: Han doesn't consider a single TIE fighter a threat, the White Rabbit Girl implies that she's sexually available to Neo, and Arthur forsees no difficulty catching the stag. But the animal always escapes! Two, if there's a single consistant "moral law" in myth, it's this: "People who are nice to helpless little bunnies are always rewarded." (And people who are mean to helpless little bunnies are always punished.) In fairytales and myth, animals represent the instinctual self (unless they can talk, in which case things get more complicated). So is the hero trapped in the enchanted wood as... punishment for dishonoring his instincts? A reward for following his instincts?
In the case of Joyce's Ulysses, the chief element in the whole story is the "woman as temptress"
Searching For The Hero
Jung and Campbell aren't
the only people who have attempted to map the Hero's Journey! There have been
dozens of less celebrated forays into this area, and just about everyone comes
to slightly different conclusions. Notable works include:
German philologist Max Müller (1823-1900) got the ball rolling with an
influential essay called Comparative Mythology, first published in Oxford Essays
(1856). According to The Columbia Encyclopedia, "Müller did
more than any other scholar to popularize philology and mythology, particularly
in his lectures Science of Language (1861, 1863)." In my opinion
Müller's scholarship was weakened because he proceeded from two basic assumptions
without questioning them: (1) that fairytales were inferior drivel for children,
and (2) that his faith was valid and all other faiths were primitive superstitions.
For instance, Müller was one of the first people to introduce Hindu scripture
into Europe, by translating the Rig-Veda. It was of course unthinkable
that the Veda could actually be older than The Hebrew Bible, and anyway the
King James Bible says right there in black and white (in a margin note
new to the 1611 edition) that the Earth was created in 4,004 BCE, so Müller
changed all the Vedic dates to suit that "historical fact." Eeek!
(It turns out parts of the Veda seem to have been composed before 4,004 BCE.
So the Vedic faith began before the King James version of the Earth even existed.
Müller also wrote disparaging essays about German folktales, which tend
to revolve around an idea called poetic irony.) Müller wrote that the Vedas
are mostly "childish in the extreme, tedious, low and commonplace."
Can a translator really do justice to a work he holds in contempt? Müller's
two-volume Contributions to the Science of Mythology (1897) argued that
mythology is "a disease of language." J.R.R. Tolkien, in his 1938
essay On Fairy-Stories, countered "It would be more near the truth to say
that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology."
In all fairness it's a bit petty to make fun of Müller for his religious
intolerance, particularly since the other 19th-century German academics he hung
out with considered him bizarrely respectful of the "silly superstitious
beliefs" of non-Christians. Müller was a brilliant man who laid the
foundations for modern Linguistics and Mythology, and he's still worth reading.
Englishman Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), sometimes called the "father of cultural studies," wrote a book called Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom (1871). His idea was to demonstrate that all religion began with animism (the belief that everything has a soul), followed by polytheism, followed by monotheism. Tylor's book became a bit of a scandal because it provided scientific support for the idea that "primitive" peoples weren't inferior to white Europeans. His work was partially a counter-argument to Müller.
Austrian scholar Johann Georg von Hahn (1811-1869) mapped out a few common elements he found in the Greek and Albanian fairytales he had translated, in his book Sagwissenschaftliche Studien (roughly "Fairytale Sudies," 1876).
Alfred Nutt (1856-1910) observed a few underlying commonalities of myth from his studies of the Celts, in his The Aryan Expulsion-and-Return Formula in the Folk and Hero Tales of the Celts (1881). He also wrote The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare (1900).
Viennese psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1884-1939) created an influential Freudian interpretation of the Hero's Journey by analyzing 34 European and Near-Eastern hero stories, in his book Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909). As you might guess from the title, Rank didn't think much of myths and fairytales.
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1911-1915), by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941). Draws parallels between mythic beliefs of cultures from all over the world. Frazer's book is outdated in a few small ways, but is still considered one of the great books of the twentieth century, and for excellent reason: Frazer was the first person in the world to map out the mechanics of what we might call "magical thinking", the essential building block of mythos ("sacred story," Greek). The book makes an excellent argument that magical thinking is one of the primary keys to understanding human consciousness. Frazer was an enormous influence on Joseph Campbell, Ursula Le Guin and Frank Herbert. If you nurture ambitions to write, especially to write "mythic" fiction, Frazer's brilliant book is without question on the short-list of recommended reading.
Russian professor Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) published an extremely influential analysis of Russian folktales called Morfologiia Skazki ("Morphology of the Folktale", 1928), which identified 31 steps on the hero's journey.
Lord Fitzroy Richard Somerset Raglan (1885-1964) wrote a very influential book called The Hero (1934), in which he identified 22 steps on the Hero's Journey. His work drew heavily on Frazer's Golden Bough.
Dutch folklorist Jan de Vries identified ten common elements in the Hero's Journey, in his Forschungsgeschichte der Mythologie (1961, published in English as "Heroic Song and Heroic Legend" 1963). His ideas seem to be strongly influenced by von Hahn's work.
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-) was one of the chief proponents of structuralism (the academic vogue which immediately preceded postmodernism). His Mythologiques is based on an exhaustive analysis of Native American myths, written between 1964-1971. Lévi-Strauss's efforts to isolate the "atomic elements" of myth are well-considered and interesting, though his writing style is extremely dense, self-referential and oblique, so you might need to read this book several times to understand what he's trying to communicate. I can't say I fully understand his points, but there are many fans of this book who report that all the hard work it requires is worthwhile.
Joseph Campbell often noted that while mythic structure is universal, myth itself must be kept fresh through reinterpretation. Every generation must recontextualize myth to suit their times, to create their own road map for how to fit best into the world.
After the release of Star Wars, Campbell and Lucas became friends. Campbell credited Lucas with reinvigorating the mythic force in the modern world. In return Lucas reignited worldwide interest in Campbell's ideas, which have had profound repercussions on world culture in general and Hollywood in particular. Lucas once called Campbell "my Yoda."
One of the Campbell's messages is that "mythic structure" is more than the underlying archetype of a good story; myth teaches us how to live well. If George Lucas were to create a mythic map of his life, it might include these elements:
Same comparison for Lord of The Rings.