The Hero with a Thousand Faces

This assignment invites you to respond to one of the following questions. Respond with a carefully considered essay, in which you develop your ideas clearly, supporting the ideas with concrete examples. The essay should be about 1000 words long, though you may find you have to write more in order to explain background material.

Submit the assignment as a Word attachment in the Assignment Folder by Saturday, July 26.

A. In the final section of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell insists that the modern hero must move away from the contemporary “democratic ideal of the self-determining individual” (333), whose conscious ego-driven self tries to solve all the world’s problems. We must reacquaint ourselves with the traditional hero our study of myths has made us familiar with. “The modern hero-deed,” he says, “must be that of a questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul” (334). He says we must look at a global perspective, beyond the narrow perspectives of local patriotism, religious denominations, and business ethics.

“And this is not a work that consciousness itself can achieve” (335). In the end, Campbell says, we will find our clues not in moments we can be proud of, but in the moments of failure and pain, the Belly of the Whale, or, as he puts it, “not in the bright moments of [our] tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of [our] personal despair” (337).

In the world of 1949, when Campbell wrote the book, just moving out from the devastation of World War II, it seemed very daring to utter such a call for a less ego-driven view of the world and an openness to the dark mysteries of the heavens and of our unconscious. And here we are, well over half a century later, perhaps in a different world. Perhaps not. We now have New Age movements, an awareness of the global environment, and multiculturalism. But we also still have countless wars, intense hatred between political parties, and religious fundamentalism in all parts of the world. What kind of world are we living in?

One way we can judge the state of our society is by looking at our heroes. This question asks you to assess one hero popular in our culture over the past five or ten years. Identify your hero, provide some background if necessary, and then discuss whether this hero enacts the “democratic ideal of the self-determining individual” (a hero triumphing through the use of initiative, technology, will power) or whether the hero draws upon some kind of universal compassion and wisdom, attained through submitting to a transformative journey through darkness, confusion, and mystery, culminating in the loss of ego and Apotheosis.

B. In the preface to his book on Ecstasy, Robert Johnson says:

Because we consider only our immediate needs, and not the needs of the whole system, we have no idea what unconscious forces we are setting into motion and what the long-term consequences of our actions will be.

To remedy this error, we must bring myth back into the realm of subjects suitable for adult consideration. We must learn to accord the inner world described in myth the same respect we give the outer world described by science. When we can understand and accept myth as a living picture of our inner world, we will be on our way to effecting real change.

Use this passage to help you review your experience of this class, HUMN 351. In what ways has the work you have done here helped you “bring myth back into the realm of subjects suitable for adult consideration”? Choose a moment when a myth or a mythic concept was altered for you, from “apparent nonsense” (Campbell, 5) to what Johnson calls “a living picture of our inner world.” Explain your views before this moment and then the process by which you came to see new things about the myth, about the world around you, and/or about yourself. Draw upon our Conference discussions and readings to help you find language to speak about this moment. Do not just retell a mythic tale or a series of events that happened to you in this course, but assess the way these events demonstrated the kind of change Johnson is asking of us. (If you have experienced no such change this term, you can still write an intelligent response, showing you understand Johnson’s concepts but did not happen to connect with them.)

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