THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES INTRODUCTION
Have you seen any of the Star Wars movies? Picked up a comic book? Read Harry Potter or The Hunger Games? Participated in pop culture at all in the last few centuries?
We're betting you said "yes" to at least one of these…unless you're somehow reading this from the recesses of your hermit's cave, where you do nothing except cook over an open flame and meditate. (In which case, how did you get hold of an internet connection?)
And that means you've already been exposed to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which was originally published in 1949 and now coming pretty close to swallowing pop culture whole. It's a work of philosophy, but you can see its impact every time you turn on the TV or buy a ticket to a movie theater.
Smarty pants philosophers like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud have had their moments, but Joseph Campbell, who wrote the book, was interested in more than politics or religion or even human identity.
He figured out a way to connect with the cosmic awesomeness of the universe that didn't involve locking yourself in a monastery and contemplating your bellybutton lint.
So what did it involve? As you may have guessed, it involved storytelling: myths, legends, and tales of heroes that started in caves around campfires. Every culture on the planet had its own stories, and yet Campbell picked up common themes in each one: details that go way beyond the merely cultural and could be found littered all over the pop culture landscape going back to the dawn of civilization.
From stories of the Buddha to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to Anansi the Spider in Africa and Native American legends of all varieties—all of these myths share not only the same DNA, but pretty much the same skeleton.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces presents a single "monomyth," usually called the Hero's Journey, which covers the key details of all those stories and their common roots. Through them, he argues, we can get in touch with the basic Bigness of the universe and our understanding of who we are and how we fit into it.
Whoa, man.
They may seem like just stories, but they do so much more than just entertain us. They become the foundations of religions in some cases, and in all cases help us look beyond our day-to-day lives and into some serious Big Picture stuff.
The Hero's Journey is basically one big story: the story that all other stories come from. A threat arises, a hero is called, and through the quest to deal with the threat, the hero (or heroine) realizes his or her power and wisdom. At the end of the story, s/he realizes that the universe is made of up countless tiny pieces like him or her, and that s/he's ultimately an embodiment of that single all-encompassing connection.
Minds are blown, enlightenment is gained, and the hero returns home to share the good word with all the people he or she left behind.
And, as you can tell if you've picked up more than one book or watched more than one movie, you can apply ye olde Hero's Journey in some way to almost every story ever written.
And, bonus: through these various Hero's Journeys, we can begin to understand how our own lives match the Hero's Journey…and in fact how those Journeys connect us with life, the universe and everything.
It turns out that the answer to all our questions isn't the magic number "42." It's every comic book ever written.
We're not going to lie: Campbell lays down some pretty heavy stuff, and he lays it down in pretty academic language. Luckily, most of us have seen Star Wars, which – to paraphrase one of its characters – represents the first steps into a larger world. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is there to take us the rest of the way.
