Joseph Campbell made his name by identifying the monomyth cycle, otherwise known as the Hero's Journey. The stages goes as follows: Departure The Call to Adventure (Refusal of the Call) Supernatural Aid (Threshold Guardians) The Crossing of the First Threshold Belly of The Whale 2.2 Initiation The Road of Trials The Meeting With the Goddess (Woman as Temptress) Atonement with the Father Apotheosis The Ultimate Boon Return (Refusal of the Return) (The Magic Flight) (Rescue from Without) The Crossing of the Return Threshold Master of Two Worlds Freedom to Live This is a powerful framework which describes much of myths and dreams. It also describes initiatory experiences, such as shamanic healing journeys and quests in which informs oral and written myths. It also describes greater cycles, such as the transmigration of the soul and multi-lifetime reincarnation cycles. Contemporary, pop creators have used this to good effect. Dan Harmon, showrunner for the American TV show, Community developed a subset cycle. It makes for a suitable vehicle for writing episodic stories: A character is in a zone of comfort. But they want something. They enter an unfamiliar situation. Adapt to it. Get what they want. Pay a heavy price for it. Then return to their familiar situation. Having changed. Ever since reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, I've been studying stories, folklore, myths, and the Hero's Journey with an eye towards embedding skill knowledge within teaching stories. The idea was to write what otherwise seem like pop urban fantasy ... but maybe with some real stuff hidden within. I didn't know what I was getting into. Dan Harmon's interpretation is very good for writing stories accessible by people at large. It's when I started adapting it into a template for teaching story that I found some interesting things. For one thing, characters are not in the state of rest (likened to Newtonian physics; objects at rest tends to stay at rest). Rather, it is an illusion of rest, clouded by Maya (likened to Einsteinian physics; apparent rest is within the context of an inertial frame that's moving). The stages I've identified currently looks like this: A character in a delusional state of comfort. ? ? ? ? Glimpsed a moment of their naked Self. Then return to their familiar delusion of comfort Having changed. In other words, Harmon's cycle describes the normal karmic loop. A teaching story requires an interrupt in the comfortably familiar karmic loop.
I've been a fan of Campbell's outline of the monomyth/Hero's Journey cycle for a long time and really his work in general. I've found the basic cycle structure he gives in the chapter "The Keys" in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces (where he supplies that cyclic diagram of the adventure) particularly useful for designing certain ritual cycles I've put to use. Some of the most powerful magical workings I've performed have derived from it. I dig this subject but I'm not sure what you are wanting to discuss about it exactly Qaexl. Could you maybe elaborate on what you want to focus on?
I'm mainly rambling, though I figure other people will put their variations in here. When I first encountered Campbell's work, I was following up on Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Stephenson's book centered around a primer created to teach young girls the inner mysteries of worldly society. The initial three editions were created by fathers who wanted to give their daughter or grand-daughter an edge. The book, like many technology in that novel, was intelligent enough to bind to one primary owner and create teaching narratives based on what's going on in the environment. It drew from the entirety of human folklore, myths, and teaching stories. The idea of distilling folklore, myths, and teaching stories into narrative that a computer can generate appealed to me. I did not know what I was getting into when I discovered the Hero's Journey. Harmon's variant is interesting to me because it makes it easy to write episodes. This fits into the kind of short stories I want to write -- the sort Charles de Lint has out. Ensamble cast of characters going from one adventure to the next, and I can sneak in some things in there. Or so I thought. My recent experiences is rewiring this. Harmon's variant feels familiar for people not fated to pierce through the veil. As such, it starts with being comfortably at rest, and it ends with being comfortably at rest. A real teaching story, though, starts with a student in an illusion of being comfortably at rest. Then you poke your head through the clouds. Then you come back down. Maybe after having learned something. I'm still working out the details. -Qaexl
I read the Heroes-book long ago and *some* other book drawing parallels between various Hollywood-film-plots and that story scheme; maybe it even was the book by Harmon. I remember that one fairy-tale that fitted the pattern of various folktale-theories and the heroes journey extremely well was this one: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/russian/russianwondertales/frogtsarevna.html It can be very inspiring to consider oneself- the human being- as an intersection of two eternal 'traditions': the genetic one going back the whole evolutionary gamut to the beginning of life or the cosmos itself and the mythical-personal one that is ones own life-story going back to the eternal past of the chaotic all-one state of the uterus, the state of paradise united with ones mother/parents, the shock of being thrown into life and/or self-dependency, the trickster and Fool state of the child (unaware of danger, riding the whale-traveling the whole universe in imagination) up to work, wedding and wizened, kingly old age. One excellent book about this -which is unfortunately only available in German as far as I know- is Das Kraftfeld der Mythen (~The Forcefield of Myth) by Norbert Bishof.
