Toward a Universal Myth – 1
At the turning of the New Age, after WWII and before the hippie era, Joseph Campbell authored The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a book chronicling many of the world’s mythic heroes and illustrating parallel truths between them. Myths, he asserted, often share a fundamental structure, that of “the hero’s journey.” For instance, a young knight might go out to fight a monster to protect a virgin princess and save the town. Or little hobbits, with the help of brave allies and mentors, might have to travel far and wide to fight the evil armies of Mordor and destroy the ring of power for the sake of all Middle Earth. Although I have not myself yet read through the book, I’ve listened to a fair number of Campbell’s recorded lectures, especially when they were free on Spotify—he is a delightfully eloquent and jovial speaker, by the way—and this is the gist of it. There is a sort of archetypal hero lurking in the shadows of most powerful stories, and it grips our attention, even if we’ve heard different versions of the same narrative structure over and over. It’s as if there is one big story that humans have been telling each other for all time.
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