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Posts Tagged ‘Joseph Campbell’

Bored or Scared? The Call to Adventure

19 Mar

Years ago, Brad Widstrom of Denver Seminary was volunteering alongside us in a youth ministry while we were in the process of becoming certified to adopt. He shared the story of someone who left a secure and well paying job for a life in full-time ministry. When asked why, he said something along the lines of:

It came down to the choice: would we rather be bored or scared?

Doing the right thing is often scary, uncomfortable, and risky. The choice is the Call to Adventure, which Joseph Campbell pointed out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is the first real step of the hero’s journey.

The Call to Adventure, which happens at about the 10 percent point in movies and anywhere from the 10 to 25 percent point in novels, which can be more loosely structured than movies, is what jars the Hero out of his everyday world and ultimately gets him to cross the Threshold into the Mythological Woods and Initiation and onto the Journey proper.

It’s the red pill or the blue pill in the Matrix, the storm of letters for Harry Potter (and there’s a call to adventure in the other 6 books as well), the electronic help message in The Incredibles, and the death of Peter Parker’s uncle. It’s the conductor calling in the Polar Express, and the open Wardrobe to Narnia.

The Call to Adventure is there every time you read the Bible. You’ll be surprised if you’re open to seeing it, it’s everywhere. Try reading the Sermon on the Mount and looking for the Call to Adventure. It’s full of invitations to reconsider what you believe and how you live – invitations to change everything, and embark on the adventure.

People tend to ignore the Call to Adventure because the prospect of everything changing is uncomfortable, which is why the hero is rare – not everyone accepts the call. Yet we’ve found that the choice of doing the right thing is often a Call to Adventure, a choice with the potential to change the course of our lives and how we live in the world. God is constantly offering us the choice to join into an adventure, large or small.

Today, look for the call to adventure. Look for the choice to do something different, to change your actions and change everything. Even if it’s scary. Doing the right thing often is.

 

The Hero and the God (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Monomyth Chapter 3)

01 Aug

Book cover of The Hero with a Thousand Faces

…the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above described; a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return. – p 35

This is the most basic outline of the rather circular hero story. Unlike the outline of any old story, the conflict, the uncomfortable realm, is supernatural in some way in the hero story.

Everywhere, no matter what the sphere of interest (whether religious, political, or personal), the really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world; and what happens in the interval of the hero’s nonentity, so that he comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative power, mankind is also unanimous in declaring. We shall have only to follow, therefore, a multitude of heroic figures through the classic stages of the universal adventure in order to see again what has always been revealed. This will help us to understand not only the meaning o those images for contemporary life, but also the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom. – p 35-36 (emphasis added)

Campbell lists the steps of the universal hero story, which are also the chapters in his Part I (We’re still in the prologue for this and another chapter):

1 Departure

1.1 The Call to Adventure
1.2 Refusal of the Call
1.3 Supernatural Aid
1.4 The Crossing of the First Threshold
1.5 Belly of The Whale

2 Initiation

2.1 The Road of Trials
2.2 The Meeting With the Goddess
2.3 Woman as Temptress
2.4 Atonement with the Father
2.5 Apotheosis
2.6 The Ultimate Boon

3 Return

3.1 Refusal of the Return
3.2 The Magic Flight
3.3 Rescue from Without
3.4 The Crossing of the Return Threshold
3.5 Master of Two Worlds
3.6 Freedom to Live

– p 36-37

He draws a distinction between a “hero of the fairy tale” and a “hero of myth” : “Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical macrocosmic triumph.” – p 37-38

He writes:

The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is “the king’s son” who has come to know who he is an therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power-“God’s son,” who has learned to know how much that title means… the two-the hero and this ultimate god, the seeker and the found-are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single,self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known.

My thoughts & questions

  1. The story of the hero demands the supernatural. Campbell as an atheist doesn’t believe in the supernatural, yet he believes we must live out the subconscious hero story for our own well-being. His conclusion is thus that we just need to go through the motions.
  2. What if, instead, the repetition of this same hero story in every human heart and in every culture is a story written by an author, directing us to the life we’re supposed to be living and/or to the real ultimate hero of all reality? I don’t think the data drives the conclusion, but the worldview of the author.
  3. Campbell’s desire to go through the motions includes stepping through a stage of rebirth. Isn’t being born something that someone else does to a person? How does one walk through a passive step in denial of the one who births? Or is this just a weakness of language?
  4. One of my ongoing questions is whether the biblical call to discipleship is a call to all to engage in the hero story themselves. The quote above lends itself well, as he is using biblical language of dying the world and being reborn. Biblical Christianity speaks of this being a spiritual reality as well as the symbolism of baptism. In this case, it seems that delaying baptism is putting the breaks on the story, not really engaging with it; being stuck in what Campbell calls The Refusal of the Call.
  5. How does this compare with the list compiled by Lord Raglan I posted yesterday?
 

Monomyth in NBC’s Community

27 Jul

The universal story, the monomyth, that exists in every human psyche, is Dan Harmon’s tool for mapping out nearly every aspect of the NBC TV show Community. Harmon has distilled the monomyth into a handy guide for tv writers.

I wonder – is it because of our cultural lack of mythology and/or because of our secularism (a denial of every claim of a real myth), that we have to deconstruct and bullet-point what a story is?

Here’s an excerpt of a very interesting article about Harmon, creator of Community, with multiple charts displaying the Monomyth in various levels of detail.

The circles are everywhere, if you know to look for them. They’re on the whiteboards around Dan Harmon’s office, on sheets tacked to his walls, on a notepad on the floor of his car. Each one is hand-drawn and divided into quadrants with scribbled notes and numbers sprouting along the edges. They look like little targets.

Harmon, 38, is the creator of Community, a sitcom about a group of community-college study buddies and the most giddily experimental show on network TV. He began doodling the circles in the late ’90s, while stuck on a screenplay. He wanted to codify the storytelling process—to find the hidden structure powering the movies and TV shows, even songs, he’d been absorbing since he was a kid. “I was thinking, there must be some symmetry to this,” he says of how stories are told. “Some simplicity.” So he watched a lot of Die Hard, boiled down a lot of Joseph Campbell, and came up with the circle, an algorithm that distills a narrative into eight steps:

1. A character is in a zone of comfort

2. But they want something
3. They enter an unfamiliar situation
4. Adapt to it

5. Get what they wanted
6. Pay a heavy price for it
7. Then return to their familiar situation
8. Having changed

Harmon calls his circles embryos—they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story—and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on Community, from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see if the theory is airtight. “I can’t not see that circle,” he says. “It’s tattooed on my brain.”

 

Hero With a Thousand Faces: Tragedy and Comedy (The Monomyth, chapter 2)

25 Jul

Book cover of The Hero with a Thousand FacesThe happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.  p 25-26

Again Campbell’s worldview provides the driving source behind and the limitations of his research into the Monomyth. His religion (a term which G. K. Chesterton defined as one’s basic understanding of everything) leads inevitably to hopelessness. To Campbell, every story with a happy ending is a deception.

Campbell reasons that since even “the envied of the world” “know what bitterness of failure, loss,” etc. (p 27-28), we value tragedy higher than comedy, unlike the Greeks. It’s more true to life.

But was comedy – a life of happy endings – more true to life for the Greeks? We’ve got advancements in science, medicine, philosophy, and more. We don’t tend toward tragedy because it’s true to our lives, but the Greek life was somehow characterized by happy endings. We tend toward tragedy because of our worldview.

Campbell says that we shouldn’t read comedies – stories with happy endings – as contradictions to reality, but “as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man…because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, [the objective world] is beheld as though transformed.”

That is – don’t let this challenge your hopeless worldview, your instructions are to pretend. To behold the world as though it is transformed, knowing all the while that it isn’t, and all is damned. His proof? Myths that have happy endings are dream-like:

Even when the legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are rendered, not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figurations; for the point is not that such-and-such was done on earth; the point is that, before such-and-such could be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams. – p 29

It’s true, myths are primarily about conveying truths, rather than true stories. It’s brilliant that values have been conveyed through human history through story.

A brief example of truth through untrue stories: One can learn about bravery from Spiderman or sacrifice from Superman much more than you can learn about bravery from the dictionary definition of those terms.

My questions:

  1. Tolkien’s comment to Lewis about the story of Jesus being the ultimate myth because it was the best, but also was actually true. The “deeds of victory” in the story of Jesus would primarily be the passion – his death, crucifixion and resurrection. These are recorded by multiple gospel writers in very earthy, lifelike, gory detail. It’s not make believe language, and the details that are there don’t fit in a fairy tale story. Is Jesus’ story an outlier the his rule? Are there others?
  2. How much of Campbell’s views of mythology are driven by his religion/worldview? In both chapters so far we’ve seen his worldview limit the discussion. Alternatively, Ecclesiastes sets a similar tone about all being meaningless/hopeless.
  3. With Campbell’s direction in the last chapter to take up the hero story as a necessary tool for human psychological health and now in this chapter as a way to pretend things are different (beholding the world as though transformed), it’s feeling like this book is largely a mental health manual for atheists, how to use stories when they have no stories to believe in.
  4. In the lack of a story to believe in, where do people turn? Is this why politicians become larger than life? (I’m reminded of how Obama promised the sea levels would lower just because he was nominated instead of Clinton.)
 

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Chapter 1

10 Jul

This is the first in a series of notes about research into The Hero Story. I’m taking these notes as I seek to explore connections between Joseph Campbell, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Jesus and Batman.

Notes

Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. – page 3

So begins Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell ( 1904-1987 ) believed in the Monomyth as part of what he saw as  “the unity of human consciousness and its poetic expression through mythology.”

Campbell begins his work by delving into the human psyche.

For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.

What is the secret of the timeless vision? Fro what profundity of the mind does it derive? Why is mythology everywhere the same, beneath is varieties of costume? And what does it teach?

Most remarkable of all, however, are the revelations that have emerged from the mental clinic… In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream. – page 4

He speaks much of Freud, Jung and their followers who record dreams. Many of these dreams are remarkably accurate depictions of mythologies of other cultures to which the dreamer has never been exposed. He gives many examples of such dreams and the parallel mythological stories.

He also writes something that connects with what I thought was a completely unrelated topic: the apparent inability for most young men in America to grow up:

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effectual spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood. In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from Mother, but to cleave to her. And so, while husbands are worshiping at their boyhood shrines, being the lawyers, merchants, or masterminds their parents wanted them to be, their wives, even after fourteen years of marriage and two fine children produced and raised, are still on the search for love–which can come to them only from the centaurs, sileni, satyrs, and other concupiscent incubi of the rout of Pan, either as in the second of the above recited dreams, or as in our popular, vanilla-frosted temples of the venereal goddess, under the make-up of the latest heroes of the screen. – pages 11-12

He writes about the universal villain:

Wherever he sets his hand there is a cry (if not from the housetops, then–more miserably–within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero… The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what?

Only birth can conquer death–the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. – page 16

He writes about the power of the reality within our subconscious with this story within us:

If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life. We should tower in stature. Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day–a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C.G. Jung has called “the archetypal images” – page 17-18

He quotes

  • Jung’s Psychology and Religion from Collected Works, Vol 11
  • Ethnische Elementargedankenin der Lehre vom Menchen, Berlin 1895
  • Sir James G Frazer’s The Golden Bough :

We need not, with some enquirers in ancient and modern times, suppose that the Western peoples borrowed from the older civilization of the Orient the conception of the Dying and Reviving God, together with the solemn ritual, in which the conception was dramatically set forth before the eyes of the worshippers. More probably the resemblance which may be traced in this respect between the religions of the East and West is no more than what we commonly, though incorrectly, call a fortuitous coincidence, the effect of similar causes acting alike on the similar constitution of the human mind in different countries and under different skies

He writes:

Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.

The archetype idea is associated with the Stoic concept of the Logoi spermatikoi. (John 1?)

He says he disagrees with a Professor Toynbee, as Toynbee draws the myth back to the Catholic church. No doubt, as Campbell is an atheist. And yet largely because of the atheism of himself and others, he writes that his plight is truly desperate:

It is only those who know neither an inner cal nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and with-in the heart. – page 23

But there’s a solution! Campbell is here to deliver to the secularist a solution to this truly desperate plight:

… we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And 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.

My Response

This book (in this chapter and others) makes a well documented case for the theory that The Hero Story is embedded within the soul of humans near and far, modern and ancient. Campbell says that the universal story is just the outplaying an epic story embedded in the  psyche of every human. Now that we have Freud and Jung, we know that’s all it is.

That’s all it is?!

How can one be satisfied with that? It’s a huge answer begging even larger questions. Where did it come from? How did a full and complete hero story get into every human psyche? Who put it there? Does he believe the process of matter and energy through the predestined laws of cause-and-effect put together the human psyche in random order and suddenly the full and complete hero story jumped out?

Campbell’s atheism may have limited his freedom to pursue this, as the presence of a story begs the question of an author.Perhaps Campbell deals with this later or in other writings.

There is one story within every human.

  • Does this correspond with Ecclesiastes 3:11 which includes “…He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
    • In a parallel to Campbell’s point about the psyche-engrained myth helping us through stages of life, this line in Ecclesiastes follows the lines that inspired the Byrds “Turn, Turn, Turn” about there being a season for everything.
    • Clarke’s commentary says the best translation would read: “Also that eternity hath he placed in their heart, without which man could not find out the work which God hath made from the commencement to the end.” God has deeply rooted the idea of eternity in every human heart; and every considerate man sees, that all the operations of God refer to that endless duration. (my thought: what if he not only placed the idea of eternity in our hearts, but the entire story of eternity?)
  • How does this compare with what is proposed by Don Richardson in Eternity in Their Hearts?
  • Is the church doing a disservice by not focusing on story, putting Christians in the same truly desperate plight he speaks of for secularists?
  • Given that the understanding and living out of the story is, per Campbell, essential to healthy life transitions, what should I do differently for myself, my children, and others I lead?
  • Tolkien’s point about Jesus’ story being the best myth – is that true according to the monomyth taught by Campbell?
 
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