 Heroes are made in the hour of defeat. Success, then, can be described as a series of glorious defeats. Before we get started, have you seen that TEDx video on the hero's journey? If not, we'll link it below for you to watch after this. It's gold. If I was to ask you, what makes a hero? You could probably rattle off some pretty common fantasy tropes, right? Heroes generally come from humble beginnings, go on quests of some kind, have to fight against an evil army or big bad guys, maybe slay the occasional dragon. Although, I much prefer it when the dragon bestows magical wisdom or grants wishes. Oh, and of course we have damsels in distress, magic rings, tricksters, traps, power-ups, and maybe some sort of special wedding at the end, where our hero becomes the next king or queen and ushers in a new era of light, goodness, hope, and whatever else the author can pick up from the idea store. As you can probably tell, this formula is everywhere. Like literally everywhere, and I mean across the whole world. If you're an aspiring author and you take your story to a publishing house and it has this formula, the editor will probably just read the first sentence and bin it. It's probably the most done story structure ever in human history. To quote TEDx, what do Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, and Frodo all have in common with the great heroes of antiquity like Hercules, Gilgamesh, and Achilles? Maybe all those stories are just descended from one original OG hero, whose story got reproduced in every culture across the world throughout history. Now, there's actually a name for this archetype in narrative studies and comparative mythology. It's called the hero's journey, journey, journey, aka the monomyth, myth, myth. It's a style as old as time and no one knows quite where it came from. There's a bunch of different theories though. I've read that the archetype goes back to the late homonym dispersal period, very unlikely, or that it was invented separately by different cultures to help explain local events that happened, or that it's a representative of psychological layers within our own collective unconscious. Basically, it's one of those things that we can see a lot of in stories and myth and is super common, but we have no idea where it came from or who invented it. Historically, while the phrase hero's journey was given to us by historian Joseph Campbell in 1949, the studies of similarities in myth can be traced back to 1871 with anthropologist Edward Burnett Tyler's observations of common patterns in the plots of world religions. And before coming into the hands of Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey had a little brother of sorts known as the rank raglan mythotype that basically listed different cross-cultural traits often found in the accounts of heroes, including mythical ones. But the hero's journey, at least in the modern sense, comes to us from Campbell, who, after reading up on the work of Carl Jung and his view of the myth, borrowed the word monomyth from James Joyce and used it in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Faces. Faces. Faces. Sorry, I'm gonna stop doing that. The monomyth is usually broken down into different stages, but everyone who talks about it uses different names and sometimes groups them together to try and condense it. So it gets a tad muddled. Campbell himself believed there were 17 stages, but not all myths around the world would have all 17. Some might focus hugely on the early parts and ignore the endings, so this formula is really just a general framework. To make it simple, the 17 stages can usually be broken down into acts. Luckily, they're not as generalized as beginning, middle and end, which is a nice change. The three acts, more or less, are departure, initiation and return. Now, we won't be going into a full discussion of each stage here because there's way more individual stages underneath each one, and there's tons of YouTube videos that already do that. And of course, we'll link a few of those below. However, we'd love to explore the outline of this cycle with you, which goes something like this. First is the birth. Basically, there is some special prophecy or spiritual intervention that lets us know our budding baby hero is special or chosen, or at the very least, a key player in the story. After some time passes, we see the call to adventure, where some weird event or messenger calls our hero to start their journey, and they'll sometimes say no, only to be guided, or let's be honest, or like pushed into it anyways. Once on the journey, near the beginning, we'll see the mentor or helper, where our protagonist will get a training montage and meet their teacher, often an entity or supernatural figure who can be a wizard, a retired old hero who became a recluse after a failure, a fairy godmother, or even a god themselves. Think ancient sage with flowing white hair, and you're probably on the right track. A lot of the time, the mentor will give them some artifact or special weapon that they use to save the day, often right before their tragic and probably very dramatized death. With new artifact in hand and new skills at the ready, we reach the threshold arc. This is the part of the story where our hero crosses over from the mundane world into the adventurous worlds beyond. Since most of these are myths and fairy tales, the worlds are pretty literal in the sense that they've actually crossed over into some kind of other world or spirit world that's different from the physical one, and a home to all kinds of entities or beings different from what they might be used to. In Lord of the Rings, there's people and orcs and goblins and trolls and all manner of crazy things, but it's not always a spiritual mystery something or other. It can be as simple as entering into a cave, but the important thing is that it's a departure from your everyday life or world into a new and strange form of existence. Like any good quest, once in the adventure world, we find our hero getting tested. They'll go through a series of ordeals in their new world where they might fight monsters, dragons, or whatever else lives in the new world and each success they have further proving the heroiness of our hero. Now, what's our story missing so far? That's right, a smart mouth, lovable comic relief character or sidekick who helps the hero beat all the tests with the power of friendship. Usually, the hero will have a sidekick who comes to them and helps them somehow or lifts them up when they're about to quit. Sometimes though, they'll meet that person in the other world and oftentimes it's a woman, which is actually one of the biggest critiques of this structure as it's for the most part very masculine dominated and most of the women that are met by the hero are passive or exist solely to serve or help the hero in some way. So, you know, it's a good thing we had Final Fantasy XIII mixing things up. With the test conquered and nearing the end of the other world arc, we reach the most important stage, the boss fight. You know how this goes? This is where that training montage from earlier comes in handy and the hero and the big villain duke it out to the death. A lot of times, this is also the nadir, lowest point for the hero and the first time around they often lose. In some cases, they might even die. But fear not. We're not at the end just yet. So they're often saved by plot magic. Hooray! While unconscious or dead, the hero will often go through a spiritual rebirth and meet the ghost of their master, our god, or get some kind of supernatural assistance or Deus Ex Machina leading to a rebirth that makes them resurrect stronger and more OP than ever before. With this newfound knowledge of themselves and probably some kind of new superpower magic, or maybe just, you know, the power of friendship, they defeat the villain. Ooh, ooh. With the villain defeated or the magic potion or elixir taken, we reach the flight stage. This is where the hero, having conquered the other world, begins the journey back to the threshold from earlier. If they fought a bad guy or monster, this section can add a bit of dramatic flair. But otherwise, if the hero just gets a potion or something, it's an all-around chill experience. Nearing the end, we reach the return arc. This is where our hero crosses that threshold again and transitions back into the normal world or reality that they started in. And like earlier, this return to the physical world can sometimes take the form of a rebirth, resurrection, or spiritual awakening. Having returned home after their big journey, we reach the final stage, the elixir or homecoming. This is when that object, blessing or knowledge that the hero acquired in the other world, maybe by defeating the boss, is put to use in the physical or everyday world. A lot of the time, it serves some kind of healing function, helping to heal old wounds and trauma in society and the world for the better. But most importantly, it defines the hero's role in the world and why they went on the journey at all. Now, for us, and of course, that's the whole reason we made this video, I think the whole idea of entering a profound spiritual world and bringing back a new sense of knowledge is important as it reminds us that even though we can experience amazing things during meditation, plant medicine experiences, or even just key stages of our lives where there is much growth, part of the purpose of those experiences are to help heal the world as well as ourselves and that by bringing that knowledge and understanding back to society and grounding it in is just as important a part of the journey. The trick in returning then is to retain the wisdom gained on the quest, to integrate that wisdom into a human life and then maybe figure out how to share that wisdom with the rest of the world. Interestingly, Campbell thought that the return arc had another component. For a human hero, it may mean achieving a balance between the material and the spiritual. In a successful return, the person will have become comfortable and competent in both the inner and outer worlds, perhaps that the protagonist has the freedom to pass back and forth across the world divisions and exist in both worlds at once. To quote Campbell himself, the individual through prolonged psychological discipline gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears and 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 mint, 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. A great example of this is in Star Wars. By the time of return of the Jedi, Luke has become a Jedi Knight and former Jedi Knight Anakin sheds his alter ego as Sith Lord Darth Vader, spoilers, but I mean, come on, it's Star Wars, when he yeets the Emperor down the shaft and in doing so returns as a force spirit after his death. I think part of the reason why we can't find a distinct origin for this story archetype is because maybe there isn't one. It doesn't belong to a single culture or group. As much as people might argue that it has its origins in the early spread of humans or the proto-Indo-Aryan-Semitic-Australaisian ethnic groups, I think part of the reason that it's endured this long is because it simply is a human story. Whatever form it takes at its heart, it's the same narrative. It's the story of a person overcoming a hardship in their life through their own effort. Sure, you can embellish it with drama and supernatural and paranormal stuff to make it interesting, but at its core, it tells the story of a human experience, a story of adventure, a journey into the unknown and a return to normality with a new, more mature, spiritually evolved perspective. In a way, it's a metaphor for our own journey of growth, whether physically into adulthood or spiritually into a higher understanding. Now, there have even been some organizations like the mythopoetic movement that sees a kind of self-help potential with the story archetype. You know, the whole idea of facing a problem or your demons and going on your own quest of discovery and enlightenment and eventually returning to solve your problems and experiencing your own inner growth. Movements like this have a tendency to retell old tales and stories and engage in their insights as a tool for personal growth and awareness. A lot of the time, people in this line of thought will engage in storytelling with music, images, and acts, all of which could arguably be seen as a modern extension of the New Age shamanism popularized by Michael Harner around the same time that the mythopoetic movements came out to the public. Now, don't get us wrong. There are some pretty valid criticisms of the hero's journey, aside from it being super formulaic and overdone. For one, historically, the hero has always been male and the role of women in stories are often relegated down to some simple helpers with no real character, partly because most of the myths studied were from ancient cultures where a patriarchy was the go-to societal structure and even Campbell himself has been argued to be sexist in some of his interpretations. So there's definitely a room for improvement of the formula to bring into modern day. But the bottom line is, anyone can use it to better themselves regardless of who they are. The best heroes have character, not gender. So to finish up, I encourage you to employ the stages of the hero's journey in your own life and to become the hero of your own tale. You are the lead protagonist of your life. So what monsters are you facing? And what can you gain by defeating them? And most importantly, what kind of knowledge and enlightenment can you bring back in the process? Please let us know in the comments below and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already. Until next time, Toodles!