The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell
(The Hero's Journey)
"...(the call of adventure is to) 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, super human deeds, and
impossible delight...
Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled
in boredom, hard work, or 'culture,' the subject loses the power of
significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His
flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels
meaningless—even though...he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire or renown.
Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of
cyclopean walls to hide from him his minotaur. All he can do is create
new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his
disintegration...
For those who have not refused the call,
the first encounter of the hero
journey is with a protective figure...who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces
he is about to pass. What such a figure represents is the benign,
protecting power of destiny...a reassurance—promise that
the peace of Paradise... is
not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as
well as in the past...that though
omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life
awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within or just
behind the unfamiliar features of the world.
One has only to know and
trust, and the ageless guardians will appear.
Having responded to his
own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences
unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side.
Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task. And in so far as the
hero's act coincides with that for which his society is ready, he seems
to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process."