The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949)


TL;DR: Stories from all over the world share a common structure; A hero's journey consists of a Departure, Initiation and Return; while stories of the Universe usually encompasses Emanations, Transformations and Dissolutions

This took some getting used to. This comes often and highly recommended, and has been quoted by storytellers such as George Lucas and others. To the uninitiated such as myself, It felt encyclopedic. It represents stories and myths from all over the world. With a barrage of multiple characters and story lines; it was intimidating, overwhelming even. 

It was surprising to know that myths from different time periods and different cultures, share a common structure. Joseph Campbell and others, were able to see these patterns and now the stories created in the modern times seems to show ancestry traces from their work, eg. Star Wars etc.

Prologue

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission.

Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream  are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche.

The Hero's Journey / Monomyth

Departure

1. The call to Adventure
A blunder - apparently the merest chance-reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood.
As a preliminary manifestation of the powers that are breaking into the play, the frog, coming up as it were by miracle, can be termed the "herald"
This first stage of the mythological journey - which we have designated the "call to adventure" - signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of society to a zone unknown.
2. Refusal of the Call
Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or "culture", the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved.
3. Supernatural Aid
What such figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny.
4. The crossing of the first threshold
The hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the "threshold guardian" [...] Beyond them is darkness, the unknown, and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the member of the tribe.
5. 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.
This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation. [...] the hero goes inward to be born again

Initiation

1. Road of trials
Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals.
2. The Meeting with the Goddess
The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the world.
Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. [...]. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. [...] Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to her inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.
The goddess guardian of the inexhaustible well [...] requires that the hero should be endowed with what the troubadours and minnesingers termed "gentle heart".
The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love(charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.
3. Woman as the Temptress
After the first thrills of getting under way, the adventure develops into a journey of darkness, horror, disgust, and phantasmagoric fears.
4. Atonement with the Father
In most mythologies, the images of mercy and grace are rendered as vividly as those of justice and wrath, so that balance is maintained, and the heart is buoyed rather than scourged along its way.
This tale of indulgent parenthood illustrates the antique idea that when the roles of life are assumed by the improperly initiated, chaos supervenes.
The meaning is that the grace that pours into the universe through the sun door is the same as the energy of the bolt that annihilates and it itself indestructible: the delusion-shattering light of the Imperishable is the same as the light that creates. 
The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands-and the two are atoned. 
5. Apotheosis
Peace is at the heart of all because Avalokitesvara-Kwan Yin, the mighty Bodhisattva, Boundless Love includes, regards, and dwells within (without exception) every sentient being. 
Two apparently opposite mythological adventures come together: the Meeting with the Goddess and the Atonement with the Father. [...] And in both cases it is found (or rather recollected) that the hero himself is that which he had come to find. 
The aim of the religious teaching is not to cure the individual back again to the general delusion, but to detach him from delusion altogether; and this not by readjusting the desire and hostility-for that would only originate a new context of delusion-but by extinguishing the impulses to the very root. [...] Buddhist Eight-fold Path:Right Belief, Right Intentions.Right Speech, Right Actions,Right Livelihood, Right Endeavoring,Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration
6. The Ultimate Boon
What the hero seeks through his intercourse with them is therefore not finally themselves but their grace, ie., the power of their sustaining substance.
The agony of breaking through personal limitation is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization.

Return

1. Refusal of the Return
The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now being the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds. 
2. The Magic Flight
The myths of failure touch us with the tragedy of life, but those of success only with their incredibility. And yet, if the monomyth is to fulfill its promise, not human failure or superhuman success but human success is what we shall have to be shown. That is the problem of the crisis of the threshold of the return. We shall first consider it in the superhuman symbols and then seek the practical teaching for historic man.
3. Rescue from Without
If the Christian cross is the most telling symbol of the mythological passage into the abyss of death, the shimenawa is the simplest sign of the resurrection. The two represent the mystery of the boundary between the worlds-the existent nonexistent line.
4. The Crossing of the Return Threshold
A great key to the understanding of myth and symbol-the two kingdoms are actually one. [...] The exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero.
5. Master of the Two Worlds
Symbols are the only vehicle of communication; they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference.
The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.
The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent.
6. Freedom to Live
The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is.

The Keys

Where the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. 

The Cosmogonic Cycle

Emanations

Their figures originate from the same sources-the unconscious wells of fantasy. [...] And their function is to serve as a powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom.
metaphysical realm = the unconscious
The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination-the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death. 
The cosmogonic cycle is normally represented as repeating itself, world without end.
The philosophical formula illustrated by the cosmogonic cycle is that of the circulation of consciousness through the three planes of being. The first plane is that of waking experience: cognitive of the hard, gross fact of an outer universe, illuminated by the light of the sun, and common to all. The second place is that of dream experience: cognitive of the fluid, subtle form of a private interior world, self-luminous and of one substance with the dreamer. The third plane is that of deep sleep: dreamless, profoundly blissful. In the first are encountered the instructive experiences of life; in the second these are digested, assimilated to the inner forces of the dreamer; while in the third all is enjoyed and known consciously, in the "space within the heart", the room of the inner controller, the source and end of all.
The basic principle of all mythology is this of the beginning in the end.
True being, meanwhile, is not in the shapes but in the dreamer.
The first effect of the cosmogonic emanations is the framing of the world stage of space: the second is the production of life within the frame.
The ultimate experience of love is a realization that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwell identity: "each is both"
where the One breaks into the many, destiny "happens" but at the same time is "brought about"

The Virgin Birth

Every one of the major motifs of the typical life of the hero: virgin birth, quest for the father, ordeal, atonement with the father, the assumption and coronation of the virgin mother, and finally, the heavenly triumph of the true sons while the pretenders are heated hot.

Transformations of the Hero

The cosmogonic cycle is now to be carried forward, therefore, not by the gods, who have become invisible, but by the heroes, more or less human in character, through whom the world destiny is realized.
The earlier culture hero of the snake body and bull head carried within him from birth the spontaneous creative power of the natural world. That was the meaning of his form. The man hero, on the other hand, must "descend" to re-establish connection with the infrahuman.
The hero's first take is to experience consciously the antecedent stages of the cosmogonic cycle, to break back through the epochs of emanation. His second, then is to return from the abyss to the plane of contemporary life, there to serve as a human transformer of demiurgic potentials.
The deeds of the hero in the second part of his personal cycle will be proportionate to the depth of his descent during the first.
The child of destiny has to face a long period of obscurity. This is a time of extreme danger, impediment or disgrace.
For the mythological hero is the champion not of things become but of things becoming;
She is the image of his destiny which he is to release from the prison of enveloping circumstance.
A regular alternation of fair and foul is characteristic of the spectacle of time. Just as in the history of the universe, so also in that of nations: emanation leads to dissolution, youth to age, birth to death, form-creative vitality to the dead weight of inertia. Life surges, precipitating forms, and then ebbs, leaving jetsam behind.
The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.
Once it is glimpsed, the entire spectacle buckles: the son slays the father, but the son and the father are one. The enigmatical figures dissolve back into the primal chaos. This is the wisdom of the end (rebeginning) of the world.

Dissolutions

The mighty hero of extraordinary powers-able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe-is each of use: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the king within.

Myths

The image of man within is not to be confounded with the garments.
The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world.
It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal-carries the cross of the redeemer-not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in silences of his personal despair.


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