Big Idea Daily | The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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The Collected Works of Joseph Campbellby Joseph Campbell |
“The two—the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found— are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single, self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known."JOSEPH CAMPBELL |
BIG IDEA #1
The Monomyth: One Hero; A thousand faces
FROM THE BOOK"Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.
Throughout the inhabited world, in all time and under every circumstance, myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the same basic, magic ring of myth.”
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Brian's Notes
Those are the first words of the Prologue.
Across all cultures across all time, Campbell tells us, you’ll find one, enduring mythical journey. He calls it “The Monomyth.”
Enter: “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”
Establishing this fact and then showing us the universal hero’s journey is, of course, what the book is all about. Let’s take a quick look at what that arc looks like!
Big Ideas
01: THE MONOMYTH
02: THE HERO’S JOURNEY
03: THE VEIL OF DISCOMFORT
04: YOUR ULTIMATE BOON
05: MAKERS OF LEGEND
“For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence ring the inevitable to pass."JOSEPH CAMPBELL |
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