A friend recently introduced me to a YouTube culture analyst Maggie Mae Fish. She did a two part analysis of Joseph Campbell, who really is a sexist and biased person with a very limited view of people. He’s famous for the too-present “Hero’s Journey” map with the usual Call To Action, Ordeal, etc. stuff we’ve seen everywhere from psychology to writing class. It will not surprise you that Maggie effectively points out, with humor, that Campbell’s “heroic pattern” is not universal.
And in fact, I don’t think it’s that heroic. I was never enchanted by Cambell, largely because of when I grew up. It always seemed sort of generic and washed-out to me, a psych major in the 80s, where we had weird Neo-Jungianism, high strangeness, and 60’s leftovers.
First, Campbell’s idea of a generic hero’s journey for all of humanity really doesn’t stand up if you have any awareness of world culture. In my own interest in Taoist culture, many of the Taoist hero stories don’t fit Campbell’s model – the call to “heroism” is often one of withdrawal, really screwing up, midlife crises, or become a point of regret in life. Just because he got George Lucas to pay attention to his ideas doesn’t mean they’re right.
And honestly, the idea that this is some common universal map is annoying. I’m tired of seeing it as a map of how to do fiction, how to do psychology, etc. It ignores a lot of human culture, experience, and models. Plus it doesn’t seem that damn heroic if someone handed you a checklist.
But Maggie Mae Fish’s channel really drove home to me that this model isn’t that heroic.
The “Hero’s journey” is all about the hero and their realization but it doesn’t seem like there’s much heroic being done. It always seems to be about them and their issues and so on, the world or princess or whatever existing only to be saved. The world is a prop to our so-called Hero, and needing the world as your stage doesn’t seem really freaking heroic.
(Just hearing about Campbell’s take on World War II was, well, not heroic.)
We can’t exactly call people heroes when it’s all about them. Perhaps at best they’re protagonists, but are they making the world better? Are they achieving great things greater than themselves? Looking back, Campbell’s model and his take on it seem selfish, so small.
Campbell turns our mythical heroes, clever tricksters to bloody combatants in mythology, into some kind of simplified self-realization therapy. I mean even some jerk of a monster slayer at least left you with less monsters around. Sure you kinda wanted him to move on thanks but he wasn’t waxing philosophic about his daddy issues.
As I seem to note repeatedly in my own meditative and mystical experiences, the map can become shackles. In the case of these heroic maps, maybe it even keeps you from being the hero it promises you can be. Then again, maybe “real heroes” are willing to get off the map and face the real unknown.