As I alluded to in my first post on The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for the book to have any value for us as storytellers we need to separate Joseph Campbell’s study of mythology from his personal beliefs about psychology, religious experience, and spirituality. Unfortunately, Campbell is determined to make this as difficult as possible and weaves the two lines of thought together as though sheer proximity would prove the connection his arguments fail to establish.
I’ve been tempted to just ignore the bizarreness of Campbell’s beliefs. This blog is about learning to write, and I don’t want it to become a polemic against a man who’s been dead for thirty years. It would also be unfair to overlook that the book was published in 1949 and Campbell was very much a product of his times. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s unwise to give Campbell a free pass, because some of his interpretations of myth and symbolism are so utterly absurd that I genuinely believe they’ll damage the storytelling of anyone who takes them too seriously.
So for the sake of clarity going forward, my next several posts will – as much as possible – focus on just the useful elements of Campbell’s work: i.e. his research into the common elements found in myths and legends around the world. Then I’ll address all the problems with the book with a single post, and finally end with a summary or TL;DR post that can serve as a reference for our future projects.
With that out of the way, the next step of the hero’s journey is the Initiation. Let’s get to it.
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After successfully completing the Departure, the character begins the Initiation that forges them into the hero they’re destined to be. Campbell divides it into six sections, some of which can be left out or swapped around depending on the nature of the story. They are:
- The road of trials
- The meeting with the goddess
- Woman as temptress
- Atonement with the father
- Apotheosis
- The ultimate boon
First up is:
1) The Road of Trials
The hero has adventures, meets friends and enemies, develops their skills, and matures into the hero’s role.
Once they’ve left the ordinary world, the hero has a series of adventures where they meet friends who support them, battle enemies that resist them, and develop the skills they will need to complete their journey. This is Harry, Ron and Hermione becoming friends through defeating a troll, Neo learning kung-fu, and the heroes in A New Hope nearly getting crushed in a garbage compactor. The road of trials is the heart of a hero’s journey and begins to define the person that the hero will grow into, so it’s often the longest part of a hero’s journey story.
When you take all this together, it makes Campbell’s lackadaisical chapter on the event all the more disappointing.
Campbell only gives the Road of Trials 12 pages in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and more than half of the anemic chapter is focused on shamanistic rites or Freudian dream analysis. I’d hoped for some investigation into the types of challenge a hero may face, or perhaps how the trials of great heroes shaped them into the legendary figures we all know, but sadly these are near-absent from Campbell’s work. At the risk of being presumptuous I’ll go so far as to say that there’s nothing of real value for an author in this chapter. Campbell is correct that the Road of Trials is an important part of a hero’s journey, but leaves it criminally shortchanged in his analysis.
So if Campbell won’t do it for us, we’ll do it ourselves. As I’m analyzing hero’s journey stories I’ve started taking notes on the types of trials the hero experiences and considering how those trials define them. An example of what I’m looking for is the trial of facing a Rival, where the hero must overcome an opponent who is not quite evil or dangerous enough to be a true villain, but nevertheless hinders, embarrasses, and otherwise obstructs the main character. My goal is to gather a collection of potent challenges so I’ll have ready inspiration while developing a path of trials for my own character to face.
2) The Meeting with the Goddess
The hero meets the ultimate good in their universe and attempts to receive their blessing.
At the end of their Path of Trials, the hero faces a penultimate challenge for the blessing they need to ultimately succeed in their quest. The Meeting with the Goddess marks the end of the Road of Trials, and every joy or triumph that preceded it pales in comparison. The blessing the hero receives can vary in form, but usually manifests as some sort of protection or critical insight during the Atonement with the Father.
As best I can tell, the Meeting with the Goddess should always take the form of a worthiness test. Even if the hero has become strong, smart, tricky, charming, and an all around badass during their Road of Trials, the goddess’s favor can only be attained by proving their virtue. This doesn’t have to be an active test (the goddess may be able to determine the hero’s virtue simply by looking at them) but it’s always a measure of the hero’s moral fortitude.
Campbell says that the goddess often exhibits a dual nature – one terrible, the other benevolent – and the hero must learn to understand both. A hero who faces the totality of a goddess when they are not spiritually prepared is in for a rough time. This makes a bit more sense with an example; the goddess in Star Wars is Princess Leia, and she has quite different reactions to meeting Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. The virtuous Luke earns her good graces in fairly short order, while Han Solo is mocked, derided, and otherwise made miserable until he eventually commits to a higher calling in the rebellion.
Related to this, the goddess may appear different ways to different people. Those who view her with lust, fear, or hesitation cannot progress on their hero’s journey. If the hero is not ready to face her in her totality she may choose to only reveal part of herself, and enlighten the hero bit by bit as they become mature enough to handle steadily greater truths.
All of Campbell’s examples are centered around female characters, but it’s entirely possible (if a bit less common) for the character in the goddess role to be male. In fact, after reading the chapter I’m not even sure the ‘goddess’ needs to be a character at all. I suspect that a power, place or thing could serve the same purpose so long as it tests the Hero’s worthiness and grants a boon.
By way of example, in the Marvel universe Mjolnir may be Thor’s goddess. It has all the key traits – he must prove that he is worthy to wield it, and once he does it grants him the power to overcome his greatest trials. I haven’t yet made up my mind on if this is a correct or viable interpretation, but it’s an interesting possibility that Campbell unfortunately does not address.
3) Woman as Temptress
The hero is tempted to stray from the hero’s path by worldly pleasure.
I have no idea why this event gets its own section. It’s a fairly simple concept: the hero is tempted to abandon their quest in favor of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. While this is a perfectly acceptable challenge for a hero to have to overcome, it seems to me like the Woman as Temptress is just another obstacle a hero may encounter on the Path of Trials. The majority of heroes I know of go through their entire adventure without facing it. If it makes sense for your story then by all means include it, but I don’t think anyone should feel like it’s a requirement.
A quick aside on Campbell’s titles for the last two sections: Campbell is certainly not the most sexist writer I’ve ever read, but The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written in 1949 and it shows. I don’t know enough about Campbell to comment on if it’s a reflection of his source material or him as a person, but it does lead to such uncomfortable quotes as (from the Meeting with the Goddess chapter):
“And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed- whether she will or no. And if she shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes,; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace.” (Campbell 119)
I’m choosing to ignore the discomfort and salvage everything I can from the book, but your mileage may vary.
4) Atonement with the father
The hero has a showdown with the ultimate power in their universe.
This is it, the greatest and most dangerous part of a hero’s journey. The hero has a showdown with the most powerful being in their universe, and either defeats it (in the case of an evil, tyrannical father), or earns its favor (in the case of a benign and just father). As the name suggests, Campbell lets Freud take center stage here, and Freud’s idea that children fight with their father for the affection of their mother guides Campbell’s interpretation of all his source material.
The climax of a story is especially important for us writers because it’s what most readers will remember as the best part of our book. In modern stories the battle with an evil force has become far more common than earning the favor of a benevolent one, so audiences can look forward to the hero ousting an evil dictator, slaying a terrible dragon, and generally overcoming incredible odds to save the world. Because of its importance I thought that Campbell would surely draw on great works of mythology to discuss the many forms such a showdown might take and how a hero can overcome them.
But no. Instead, he’d rather talk about the symbolism behind circumcision and cannibalism.
I’m serious. It’s that or Freud for almost the entire section, and even Freud comes across as bland when contrasted with Campbell’s descriptions of genital mutilation and cannibalistic rites that some tribal peoples used when initiating young men from children into adulthood. It starts out disconcerting, but becomes downright irritating when he shackles these acts to the strongest point he makes in this section, which is that the Atonement with the Father can have strong parallels to the transition from child to adult. I think that’s a valuable insight and can help writers with envisioning the emotional challenges our heroes should face at this stage, but he’s chained the idea to two raving mad men shouting things like:
“The culminating instruction of the long series of rites is the release of the boy’s own hero-penis from the protection of its foreskin, through the frightening and painful attack on it by the circumciser.” (Campbell, 138)
As it stands, everything of value that I got out of this chapter can be summed up in the following sentence: the Atonement with the Father is the event that, by finally overcoming it, toughens the hero enough that they can stand on their own as an individual, ready to become a parent, teacher or leader in their own right.
If we want to find anything more useful than that, we’re going to have to look somewhere else.
5) Apotheosis
The hero ascends to the highest possible version of themselves.
The Apotheosis is the last step of the hero’s personal journey – the final transformation where they reach the pinnacle of their power, wisdom, and purity. The hero may still have work to do out in the world, but the Apotheosis is the end of their internal struggle. It’s Neo realizing he is The One, and Luke becoming a Jedi, like his father before him. This change must occur before the hero can achieve the Ultimate Boon – i.e. Neo must accept that he is The One before he can free humanity from the Matrix.
Campbell makes a couple good points here. The Apotheosis often, though not always, involves the hero regaining something from the past. He earns bonus points if that something was thought lost forever. Luke becoming the last Jedi is probably the best popular example, but Harry Potter also reclaims a magical heritage, and Neo becomes the latest in a long line of ‘The Ones.’ The enlightenment found in the Apotheosis event is more often reclaimed than discovered for the first time.
The hero may also become a bit otherworldly, as they have ascended so far past everyday experience that it’s difficult for normal people to relate. I know where Campbell is going with this, and I think you’ll understand what I mean when I say there’s something ever so slightly uncanny about people who have achieved the highest possible mastery in their chosen field. In stories this sensation gets magnified for dramatic effect, so a hero who’s gone through the Apotheosis may become an actual magical being or even a god.
Which brings us to the most significant weakness of this section, which is that Campbell spends nearly all of it focusing on a very specific kind of religious enlightenment. He talks, at great length, about the merits of transcendent Buddhism and various divine religious figures, but almost completely ignores more modest heroes who did not set out to become world saviors. Unless you’re writing a story about a saint, this bias towards religious figures makes it a bit difficult to directly apply most of the chapter.
That’s why I’ve taken the liberty of slightly broadening Campbell’s conception of the Apotheosis. Rather than the hero reaching enlightenment or ascending to godhood, I think the key point is that the character becomes the best possible version of themselves. A trickster becomes supremely devious, a fighter becomes the ultimate warrior, and so on. But keep in mind, the personal acceptance and understanding that comes with the Apotheosis is much more important than any power our characters attain. A trickster character may accept that they are a bit of a liar, a bit of a cheat, but also realize those traits don’t mean they have to be evil. This self-acceptance is what allows them to finally attain the Ultimate Boon.
6) The Ultimate Boon
The hero achieves the ultimate goal of their quest.
At long last, the hero has overcome all the challenges that barred their way and finally completes their destiny. Like Campbell’s writing on the Apotheosis he does his best to hide his insights in a sea of strangeness, but with a bit of work we can fish them out.
The most valuable point I found was this: the hero’s challenges aren’t necessarily over just because they’ve completed the Atonement with the Father. Campbell says that if the hero is a god, saint, chosen one or otherwise perfect being they may reach the Ultimate Boon with little to no struggle, but everyone is going to have one final test. The Ultimate Boon is often held or guarded by someone or something, and an imperfect hero will have to trick, appease, or slay them.
I think this will generally be a less climactic challenge than the Atonement with the Father, and is instead a demonstration of how far the hero has come since they started on their journey. Luke Skywalker battling Darth Vader in the Return of the Jedi was definitely the more dramatic scene, but the true holder of the Ultimate Boon was not Vader, but the Emperor. Even after Luke bested his father (George Lucas was nothing if not literal in applying Campbell’s ideas) he still had to defeat that final foe. This last test took a radically different form than the one before; rather than a direct and violent battle, it’s a moral victory where Luke convinces Vader to turn on his former master.
If the hero manages to achieve the Ultimate Boon without fully maturing during their journey, the boon they seek may ruin them. Campbell points to the story of king Midas and his wish for everything he touched to turn to gold. As an author I see two ways we could apply this concept: either the hero attains the boon before they are ready, experiences disaster, then has to re-achieve the boon after maturing, or another character that was ruined by premature access to the boon serves as a warning to the hero.
Campbell makes a big deal of the fact that in mythology the ultimate boon often takes the form of food and drink. He has strong opinions about the symbolic importance of this commonality, and likens it to the Freudian image of a child yearning for a return to its mother’s milk. I am, probably predictably by now, not terribly impressed by the Freudian link, but I still thought this point was worth noting in case we ever needed to develop a mythology for our stories or wrote a novel that was deliberately mythological in tone.
The Initiation: Conclusions
While this chapter has a few useful gems, I can’t quite bring myself to say it was worth the time I spent reading it. With the exception of the Woman as Temptress section – which still strikes me as entirely superfluous – the structure Campbell presents does a decent job of describing the middle-to-end of the archetypal hero’s journey story. But once we go looking for more than a general outline there’s little to recommend. Sections like the Road of Trials, which would have greatly benefited from additional examples and analysis, are sadly undernourished. Conversely, the Atonement with the Father and Apotheosis are almost grotesquely bloated with symbolic interpretation and religious fetishism that bury what I believe is the real value of Campbell’s work.
The problem could be that I’m approaching the book as a storyteller, and hoped for a much more practical study of myth and legend than Campbell seems interested in providing. The signal to noise ratio has become steadily worse as I progress, which is not encouraging sign. With any luck Campbell’s ship will steady a bit as we head into the next chapter of The Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Return.