The hero's journey

[idiot_stimpy]

Would anyone like to give their own interpretation on the attached?

 

what is supernatural aid and threshold guardians? The mentor and the helper?

[Earl Grey]

Have you read the book this came from or did you just find the image alone? The book it originates from is quite clear.

[idiot_stimpy]

I just found the image. What book is it from?

[Earl Grey]

Just now, idiot_stimpy said:

I just found the image. What book is it from?

 

“Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell.

 

VERY important reading in the humanities field and historically relevant. I believe that his work is less known by people now for the 21st century, at least in west. It was often cited even in the 1990s and early 2000s by many fiction authors.

[idiot_stimpy]

Thank you I'll have a look for it.

[silent thunder]

lol... extrasensory... synchronicity

[WHITEROOMENERGYMINE1]

The hero's journey is the symbolic path of a recurring theme in multiple myths throughout the world. The underlying symbolic story is the same journey of the archetypical hero as he goes to adventure. Despite different cultures having no connection and even being on different continents the same pattern emerges through their story telling. The hero journeys to mythological worlds to retrieve the solution to his peoples problems. Most usually he brushes over the line of the living and the dead and walks through the afterlife, all after the elixer of life. Fire! Invention! Amrita! The Hero With a Thousand Faces is a really good book, Joseph Campbell has all sorts of examples in the book.

In my opinion, and in my experience, the path of Manhood is journeying through the abyss to find fire again. Some sort of light in the abyss. It gets quite dark out here in the coldest state but fire always seems to replenish, reinvigorate and give light to the mind.

[helpfuldemon]

Its depicted in the tarot- indeed, its the main theme of that tool.  When you think about life, you can imagine that it is just birth, growth, learning and completion- but a hero is something different.  A hero is someone that has a quest for something, and its pretty easy to see that a quest requires a journey, and a confrontation, and a resolution (should the hero be successful).  

 

When applying this to the mystical, you have things like the underworld and spirits/gods.  In this particular diagram there is the theory that the hero is not infallible, having to realize their own imperfections and make atonement for them.  This is life;  we are never perfect in the eyes of the gods, though the highest height of our understanding of perfection led us on the quest, we have made our share of mistakes, especially in retrospect after having learned "the truth" from the journey.