Hero's journey

More recently, the hero's journey has been analyzed as an example of the sympathetic plot, a universal narrative structure in which a goal-directed protagonist confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and eventually reaps rewards.

[15] The 17 stages may be organized in a number of ways, including division into three "acts" or sections: In the departure part of the narrative, the hero or protagonist lives in the ordinary world and receives a call to go on an adventure.

According to Campbell, this region is represented bya distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight.

The hero can go forth of his own volition to accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus when he arrived in his father's city, Athens, and heard the horrible history of the Minotaur; or he may be carried or sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent as was Odysseus, driven about the Mediterranean by the winds of the angered god, Poseidon.

The adventure may begin as a mere blunder... or still, again, one may be only casually strolling when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from the frequented paths of man.

Campbell explains thatOnce having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.

Campbell proposes thatThe ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World.

The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.

It is in this ordeal that the hero may derive hope and assurance from the helpful female figure, by whose magic (pollen charms or power of intercession) they are protected through all the frightening experiences of the father's ego-shattering initiation.

This is the miraculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, Yahweh, and the Supreme Buddha, the fertility of the rain of Viracocha, the virtue announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of the ultimate illumination of the saint and sage.

Campbell continues:When the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy.

The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.

Campbell argues thatIf the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron.

On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero's wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit.

If the hero ... is unwilling, the disturber suffers an ugly shock; but on the other hand, if the summoned one is only delayed—sealed in by the [deathlike rapture] of a perfect being ... an apparent rescue is effected, and the adventurer returns.

Campbell demonstrates thatFreedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back—not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other—is the talent of the master.

[38]Discussing this stage, Campbell cites the Apostles of Jesus, who had become selfless in their devotion by the time of their master's transfiguration, as well as the similar orthodoxy presented by Krishna, who said, "He who does My work and regards Me as the Supreme Goal ... without hatred for any creature—he comes to Me.

"[39] Campbell goes on to illustrate that 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.

Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood film producer and writer, created a 7-page company memo, A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,[41] based on Campbell's work.

[46] Numerous literary works of popular fiction have been identified by various authors as examples of the monomyth template, including Spenser's The Faerie Queene,[47] Melville's Moby-Dick,[48] Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre,[49] works by Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Somerset Maugham, J. D. Salinger,[50] Ernest Hemingway,[51] Mark Twain,[52] W. B. Yeats,[53] C. S. Lewis,[54] J. R. R. Tolkien,[55] Seamus Heaney[56] and Stephen King,[57] Plato's allegory of the cave, Homer's Odyssey, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, amongst many others.

[60] Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story common in Victorian fiction, also referred to as an apprenticeship novel, that shows moral and psychological development of the protagonist as they grow into adults.

[62] She enters into a world of the unknown as she is instructed by an oracle to head up a rocky crag in funeral attire, where she is taken to a seemingly divine location by the west wind.

Psyche is given four seemingly impossible tasks by Venus to get him back: sorting seeds, fleecing the golden rams, collecting a crystal jar full of the water of death, and retrieving a beauty cream from Hades.

[62] Despite the difficulty, Psyche is able to achieve each task and complete her ultimate goal of becoming an immortal goddess and moving to Mount Olympus to be with her husband Cupid for all eternity.

Poet Robert Bly, Michael J. Meade, and others involved in the mythopoetic men's movement have also applied and expanded the concepts of the hero's journey and the monomyth as a metaphor for personal spiritual and psychological growth.

[64] Advocates would often engage in storytelling with music, these acts being seen as a modern extension to a form of "new age shamanism" popularized by Michael Harner at approximately the same time.

To illustrate his point, Toelken employs Clarissa Pinkola Estés's (1992) Women Who Run with the Wolves, citing its inaccurate representation of the folklore record, and Campbell's "monomyth" approach as another.

Toelken traces the influence of Campbell's monomyth theory into other then-contemporary popular works, such as Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), which he says suffers from similar source selection bias.

[68] This attitude is illustrated by Consentino (1998), who remarks "It is just as important to stress differences as similarities, to avoid creating a (Joseph) Campbell soup of myths that loses all local flavor.

Campbell's ethnocentrism will raise objections, and his analytic level is so abstract and devoid of ethnographic context that myth loses the very meanings supposed to be embedded in the 'hero'.