The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. - Joseph Campbell
The ingredients for transformation, and internal alchemy, are woven into the myths and faery tales we read when we were children. Heroic epics that smash records rely on these same ingredients to move audiences. This is because every storyteller understands a formula called The Hero’s Journey.
Decades ago, a professor of literature and mythology identified the common thread that runs through all the worlds myths. He called this thread the Monomyth. The Monomyth is the universal myth of humanity. The professor was Joseph Campbell, and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces was his best-known work. This monumental text discusses the stages of the archetypal Hero’s Journey.
The Hero's Journey is the master key to writing an epic because it resonates in our bones. Books and films that captivate us on a grand scale do so because they speak to our evolution. Joseph Campbell identified an evolutionary link that might explain this.
He discovered that the Hero’s Journey mirror’s a rite of passage. It contains the same elements of the rites of passages of our ancestors, and the ones tribal societies still practice.
Why does this matter?
A rite of passage is as an ordeal that marks a milestone in a person’s life. A true rite of passage transforms the Initiate/Hero like a snake shedding its skin. When the ordeal is done, the Initiate/Hero returns to the Community as their Heroic Self.
Every positive change - every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness - involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception. - Dan Millman
People go through many changes in life. Babies become toddlers. Toddlers become adolescents, and adolescents become young adults. Young adults have children, they transition into middle age, they have grandchildren, and finally they grow old and die. Each stage has its own lessons and roles, even the final one. Without careful guidance from the Tribe’s elder’s the Initiate/Hero has no idea what to make of these changes.
The rite of passage was the traditional method of transforming the individual psychologically, and sometimes physically into their new self. The most important ones were for transforming adolescents into adults. These rites of passages not only transformed the individual, they initiated them into the broader community. The ordeal separated the child from their parents and gave them their group identity.
Societies began to abandon rites of passages at the dawn of the industrial age. The demands of industrialization meant that citizens (mostly men) needed to be free of family/tribal commitments to go wherever the work was. The traditions that still remain, like birthday parties, are devoid of sacred meaning. Therefore, people are adrift without any instruction manuals for making sense of life’s seasons.
Perhaps, the obsession with Superhero’s today reflects our yearning to return to rites of passages.
The Hero's Journey is a cycle that incorporates the following stages. These stages might have slightly different names depending on who's writing about them. I've chosen the following for clarity:
1.Call to Adventure
2.Supernatural aid
3.Crossing the Threshold
4.The Ordeal
5.The Abyss, also known as the Cave, or Belly of the Whale
6.Transformation
7.Atonement
8.Return
In my next series of posts I'll explain how to use the stages of the Hero's Journey for personal transformation. These posts will contain original, and powerful strategies that you can use to become whoever you need to be.
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