I’ve finished the Departure chapter of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and I’m ready to give it my seal of approval. But before I analyze the chapter as a whole, let’s finish looking at the last three stages of the arc: Supernatural Aid, the Crossing of the First Threshold, and the Belly of the Whale.
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3) Supernatural Aid
Once the hero commits to their journey, they receive assistance from forces within the world of adventure.
Campbell says that this aid usually comes directly after the hero accepts the call to adventure, and writes:
“Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, our hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task.” (Campbell, 72)
There seem to be three main forms the assistance can take, and the hero can receive them in any combination.
The first form is a direct mentor, someone who’s been down the hero’s path before and can guide the young adventurer. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Morpheus are good examples.
The second is a benevolent, usually supernatural or otherwise powerful being who does not directly take the hero as an apprentice, but has a vested interest in their success. This is the role of the Fairy Godmother or Dumbledore.
The third form is the granting of talismans, weapons, or other objects of power that will aid the hero. This is Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, and the string that allowed Theseus to escape the labyrinth after defeating the Minotaur.
Campbell is correct that the hero nearly always receives aid before trying to cross the first threshold, but I’ve noticed that heroes can receive aid later in the story, usually just before tackling additional difficult tasks. Harry Potter leaps to mind; his first supernatural aid is granted in Diagon Alley, where he receives a wand, Hedwig, books on magic, and other useful tools before crossing the first threshold on platform 9 & 3/4. But later on, when he faces a new challenge that his current boons are unable to overcome (namely sneaking around the school), he’s given additional aid in the form of the invisibility cloak.
This suggests to me that the Supernatural Aid and Crossing a Threshold events may exist as a pair, and their appearance in the Departure arc of a hero’s journey is simply the first instance of a more fundamental narrative building block. I’m going keep an eye out for this as I explore other hero’s journey stories, and try to get a measure of how often receiving supernatural aid immediately precedes overcoming a major obstacle.
4) The Crossing of the First Threshold
The hero must cross the barrier between the known and unknown worlds.
The barrier between the ordinary world and the world of adventure is not easy to navigate. There may be a test, obstacles, or enemies that Campbell calls the Threshold Guardians which bar the hero’s way. There’s no avoiding these challenges: to continue on their adventure, the hero must earn the right to pass into the unknown.
The most interesting point Campbell makes in this section is that the barrier should be a test of the hero’s character. The hero will face tests of skill, strength, and cleverness later – the point of the first ordeal is to prove they have the grit and determination to survive in the world of adventure. It’s an easy point to overlook, and I’m sure I’ve made this exact mistake in the past. The first thing that every hero must have is will, and this is where they prove it.
The threshold guardians don’t have to be evil or malevolent, and often serve as representatives of the established order. An overprotective mother could easily fulfill this role, as could a police officer determined to keep things quiet in his little town. Their attempts to keep the hero in the ordinary world may be understandable or even justified, but to become heroes our characters must overcome them all the same.
5) The Belly of the Whale
The hero undergoes a transformation, changing from the person they were into a nascent version of the hero they will become.
I have a somewhat tense relationship with symbolism, so I found this final part of the Departure tricky because it’s almost purely symbolic. As best I can tell a belly of the whale event does not need to happen for a story to make sense; the narrative could skip this element entirely and the hero’s journey would still be completely coherent. However, it’s a good way of indicating to the audience that the hero has severed their connection to the ordinary world – or to say it another way, that the hero’s old self has died and been reborn in the hero’s role. Campbell says:
“The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died. (Campbell, 90)
And adds on the next page:
“This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation…. But here, instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again.” (Campbell, 91)
Can we ground this with any practical examples? Well, in Star Wars I believe the Belly of the Whale happens when Luke and everyone else in the Millennium Falcon hide in Han’s smuggling compartments. Luke’s still a farm boy when he gets into those compartments, but from the moment he climbs out all his actions take on a heroic character.
The Hogwarts Express in Harry Potter is a less stressful example. It’s a transition from the muggle to the wizarding world, where Harry is given a crash course in wizard culture and his entire social group is replaced by wizards. From that moment on, the Dursleys and the rest of the muggle world are literally not mentioned again until the final two pages.
Neither of these events had to happen to keep the story moving forward. There were other ways for Luke to get aboard the Death Star, and the Hogwarts Express could have been a brief and uneventful train ride. But they’re a great pivot point for the reader, and I think it would have been unwise for George Lucas or JK Rowling to skip over them. Because symbolism comes unnaturally to me the Belly of the Whale will probably be a weak point of mine, so I’m going to give it some extra attention in my studies going forward.
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The Departure: Conclusions
Throughout the chapter on the Departure, Campbell draws examples liberally from dreams, myth, religion, and psychoanalysis, and makes an unspoken assertion that all of these are essentially interchangeable. While I think this thesis needs a great deal more support than Campbell provides, the structure he describes for the Departure part of a story is tangible enough that I accept most all of it as correct. The steps he describes can be found, in order, in almost any heroic story one would care to name, and at the risk of dipping into psychoanalysis myself, this implies to me that the structure reflects a genuine component of the human experience.
Here’s what I mean: anything which disrupts our daily lives can be viewed as a call to adventure, and we see so little of the world that there will always be unknown lands of adventure we could potentially cross into. Going to college, changing careers, even just starting a hobby can take the form of a tiny adventure, and will likely contain most or all of the elements Campbell describes. The call to adventure occurs when a new opportunity first attracts our attention. Then we have to decide if we will accept the call or turn away in favor of the safe and familiar. Deciding to pursue the opportunity will often put us in touch with allies we would never have met otherwise, but we may need to overcome obstacles or threshold guardians that work against the change. Finally, committing to the new opportunity will transform us, and with any luck we’ll end up slightly more heroic than when we started.
If you accept this portrayal then readers will find the structure of the Departure intimately familiar, and I think an author should only risk changing it if they have an extremely clear idea of why they are doing so. A master of the storytelling art may be able to create a truly memorable story by twisting or shattering a reader’s expectations for the Departure, but I’m certainly not there yet. For the time being I’m going to treat it as established fact that this is how a hero’s journey story should begin.
Up next, we’ll look into the second stage of the hero’s journey: the Initiation. Thank you for reading, and if you have any comments about this post or the Practice Write project in general I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment below or send me a message through the Contact page.
