The Creation of a Hero

I spent the summer reading Joseph Campbell’s famous The Hero With a Thousand Faces and applying Campbell’s theoretical framework to 40 books for the English program’s Comprehensive Exam. Campbell’s book is essentially the Holy Bible for any modern author writing stories professionally or any academic studying mythological stories. Campbell’s influence pervades both modern mythological writing and classical storytelling examination as an essential foundational text. Campbell deconstructs the idea of a hero and analyzes it from a psychological, cultural, and multi-religious lens. Campbell’s hero isn’t one person, it’s a myth of a hero found in all people and cultures. The hero is born from a need for change and in turn changes his/her society’s world, renewing it in turn. None of, or very few of the myths outlined in Campbell’s books, can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be the historical recollection of humanity’s mythological progress, but a realization of the hero as an interconnected being within every person and culture as “The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one” (333). 

I’ve always believed that the stories we tell each other hold a shared human soul, and it’s that soul that we use to make the lessons we want to teach each other. All the different stories Campbell outlined felt like I was reading someone reconstructing a cultural identity similar to a monoculture that dug down deep into why the mythological stories humanity tells matter. Each culture he drew on had uncannily similar lessons using the hero as the ideal vehicle to carry out the ideas to completion. This framework is famously represented as the hero’s journey. The hero answers a call to adventure, receives supernatural aid, crosses the threshold into the unknown with a mentor or helper, fights’ trials to reach the abyss, experiences a death and rebirth that comes with the reward. Afterwards the hero returns to their known world with that reward and enriches it with new knowledge or makes something that was previously impossible, possible. 

The hero’s journey is a framework that gets filled with and differentiated through cultural details, tribal ideals of nurturing the soul, and a primordial understanding of the universe hidden beneath a layer of sophistry. People come together to form tribes and create new worlds where ideas of right or wrong share an ever-shifting cultural identity which gives a comforting lens to view the actions of a chaotic world through. This lens is a hyperreality, a world where we create order from meaningless chaos and it becomes the foundation of the way humanity interprets the Earth. Some examples of what I mean are natural disasters such as tornadoes becoming living beings with evil spirits, people dying in the service of god becoming martyrs and the sites of their remains becoming holy ground, and Oaks for Romans were symbols of Jupiter and were planted in cities to gain his wisdom. Each tribe has its own lens, culture, and values, but they all share that same man-made foundation of fundamental understanding as a human invention. The worlds we’ve created are called being Americans, Europeans, Canadians and all the other tribes. They’re just as human as us because they shift, change, enter new eras, and sometimes die. It’s through our disparate tribes with the same human foundation where we get the different flavors of the same hero.

The hero is born through struggles calling to any who would listen, begging for renewal. A hero rises when the world is stagnating or is threatening to, and the hero that steps up becomes the newest iteration of that world’s ideals. They journey into the primordial unknown abyss and annihilate their ego in the process. Their journey back is one of enlightenment, whether literal or metaphorical. The knowledge they’ve gained through their own self-annihilation helps push their respective world forward, continuing its existence and subsequently breathing new life by achieving previously impossible or unachievable cultural, societal, and religious norms. The hero:

...through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to 

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. (205)

The hero is the universe, he is humanity, perpetuating its own existence through an oral, literary, and digital continuance. Campbell barely covers anything of the modern day deliberately, because our modern human existence is built off of everything that came before. Humanity’s mythological history exists as a beautiful chaotic tapestry of human voices showing the mistakes of the past, how they found a way forward to their goal, and the lessons they learned pursuing their goals.

The advent of the industrial revolution and subsequent technological revolution ended the era of classical mythology. Previously unexplainable phenomena draped itself in mythological rationalization. The new age of information solved the unknown the past drew from for its stories, but that abyss of infinity adapted to our society. As long as humans exist, the fantastical stories we tell will stay with us forever as a part of our identity. Nowadays fables of mythological figures exist through community-run websites like the SCP Foundation or Alternate Reality Games (arg) for no other reason than to tell stories to each other. Almost every modern medium telling a story about a person utilizes Campbell's hero framework and iterates on it to construct a journey that resonates with people past any cultural or systematic barriers. Every movie about a person experiencing the world (ex. Disney, Marvel, Lord of the Rings), every book about people’s struggles (ex. Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia), and anything with a story that’s about people has the core of a hero in it. 

The Hero with a Thousand Faces ironically holds a mythical status now, but it didn’t figure out everything about mythological storytelling. Personally I think he was wrong about 30% of what he’s said. I disliked Campbell’s use of Freudian ideas of ideal man and womanhood as well as linking Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of humanity’s collective unconscious through Jungian archetypes and linking it to the idea of a monomyth. The beauty in telling stories is that there’s always more to learn. The hero and the journey aren’t a solved formula as that would mean the stagnancy and death of writing stories as an art form. The substantive framework the book provided me is an amazing starting point to better learn mythology.