This is a summary of the book The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. The book goes over the hero's journey, arguably the most common story arc throughout history. The hero's journey follows the story's hero starting from when the hero was an average person, endures the hero's suffering through the various trials and tribulations that need to be overcome to turn the average into the exceptional, and culminates in the return of the hero and a new homeostasis. The author argues that "mythology is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology" and thus elaborates on what each stage of myth represents psychologically.
And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
The hero's journey is broken down into three sections: separation, initiation, and return.
Separation or Departure
The Call to Adventure - The familiar life pattern is outgrown and the call for change begins.
Refusal of the call - The hero declines the call (not always applicable).
Supernatural aid - A protective figure or guide helps start the quest.
The Crossing of the First Threshold - Coming to the boundary of the known world vs unknown world. Symbolic of stepping beyond psychological rigidity or tradition.
The Belly of the Whale - The magical threshold into a sphere of rebirth. The hero turns psychologically inward in order to be reborn again.
Trials and Victories of Initiation
The Road of Trials - The integration of self. "The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh."
The Meeting of the Goddess - A representation of winning love (via another symbolically), but it's more about developing charity than it is about romantic love.
Woman as the Temptress - The overcoming of the temptress represents the hero's total mastery of life. "For the woman is life, the hero its knower and master."
Atonement with the Father - "The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands - and the two are atoned." In other words, he sees how the bad things of the world are an essential part of a greater whole.
Apotheosis - The coming together of opposites (yin and yang). The overcoming of desire, hostility, and delusion.
The Ultimate Boon - The breaching of the spiritual veil.
Return and Reintegration
Refusal of the Return - The hero has new wisdom to pass on gained through his journey of trials and self-development but doubts that the message will be heard or received.
The Magic Flight - The return either comes with aid or against opposition. Facing the abyss or challenge of the return if applicable.
Rescue from Without - "His consciousness having succumbed, the unconscious nevertheless supplies its own balances, and he is born back into the world from which he came. Instead of holding to and saving his ego, as in the pattern of the magic flight, he loses it, and yet, through grace is returned."
The Crossing of the Return Threshold - "The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless - and here is the great key to the understanding of myth and symbol - the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness. As in the stories of the cannibal ogresses, the fearfulness of this loss of personal individuation can be the whole burden of the transcendental experience for unqualified souls. But the hero-soul goes boldly in - and discovers the hags converted into goddesses and the dragons into the watchdogs of the gods." "How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand times, throughout the millenia of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task." "The boon brought from the transcendent deep becomes quickly rationalized into nonentity, and the need becomes great for another hero to refresh the word."
Master of the Two Worlds - "The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent." Jesus, the Buddha, and Krishna among others have stated this same idea.
Freedom to Live - "The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will." "The hero is champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is." What this means to me is that the hero is the symbol of change and becoming something different, not tying your identity to any manner of being, but instead constantly reevaluating and redefining oneself without fear or threat to one's own perceived self image. The freedom to live and be whoever you want to be in every moment.
The book addresses a couple other patterns in myth:
The idea of the cosmic egg is the world-framing of space which can be found in the myths of the Greeks, Egyptians, Finnish, Buddhists, Japanese, Hindu and Maori. The one that comes from the egg is supposed to represent the self. Oddly, the CIA reported the shape of the universe as an egg in a report they filed on the Gateway project, an experiment they did on human consciousness and meditation, a literal cosmic egg.
Myths about creation present the world as "a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding, and dissolving." The author names this the paradox of dual focus which is to say the juxtaposition of God (or Gods) as both creator and destroyer.
The book ends with a commentary on what the mythological hero actually represents:
"For the mythological hero is the champion not of things become but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo: Holdfast (the dragon/tyrant), the keeper of the past. From obscurity the hero emerges, but the enemy is great and conspicuous in the seat of power; he is enemy, dragon, tyrant, because he turns to his own advantage the authority of his position. He is Holdfast not because he keeps the past but because he keeps." "Transformation, fluidity, not stubborn ponderosity, is the characteristic of the living God." "The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today." "And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silence of his personal despair."
The mythological hero is a representation of facing the dark night of our soul as many times as is necessary, for only in carrying our personal cross and overcoming it can we achieve our own salvation.
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