The phrase “the hero’s jour­ney” was pop­u­lar­ized by Joseph Camp­bell who employed it to describe a nar­ra­tive motif he repeat­ed­ly found through­out var­i­ous mytholo­gies. The jour­ney has three parts: Depar­ture (on the jour­ney / call to action), Ful­fill­ment (of the quest / acquir­ing knowl­edge), and Return (home or back to one’s peo­ple, with a renewed sense of how to improve life).

“Every sto­ry is a trav­el sto­ry – a spa­tial prac­tice.” — Michel de Certeau, The Prac­tice of Every­day Life

In The Hero with a Thou­sand Faces, Joseph Camp­bell looks to myths from around the world, and ear­ly writ­ten his­to­ry, in order to trace a com­mon struc­ture to bet­ter under­stand the human dri­ve. His work revealed how the major­i­ty of sto­ries that are passed down through gen­er­a­tions con­tain a cen­tral char­ac­ter who can be seen as the story’s arche­typ­al hero.

Camp­bell found that each of these arche­typ­al heroes go through a trans­for­ma­tive jour­ney. Whether its Odysseus’ return home from war, or the sto­ry of Jesus, Bud­dha, or Mohammed being for­ev­er changed by the wis­dom they received from a spir­i­tu­al source, the jour­ney itself reflects a depar­ture from all pre­vi­ous stan­dards, and sig­nals entry into the unknown.

In his book, Camp­bell explains the nature of the mon­o­myth, in which, “A hero ven­tures forth from the world of com­mon day into a region of super­nat­ur­al won­der: fab­u­lous forces are there encoun­tered and a deci­sive vic­to­ry is won: the hero comes back from this mys­te­ri­ous adven­ture with the pow­er to bestow boons on his fel­low man.” 1977’s mega-hit, Star Wars, helped pop­u­lar­ize the notion of the hero’s jour­ney. Film­mak­er George Lucas has acknowl­edged the impor­tance of Campbell’s work in inter­views, cit­ing Camp­bell as a con­stant inspi­ra­tion in real­iz­ing the film’s char­ac­ters, its uni­verse, and the cen­tral theme of the bat­tle between good and evil, light and dark. In fact, so strong was the cor­re­la­tion between Lucas’ sto­ry and Campbell’s orig­i­nal text, that the third print­ing of Campbell’s book fea­tured a pho­to of Mark Hamill as Luke Sky­walk­er on its cov­er. This only helped to fur­ther insert the idea of the hero’s jour­ney into the col­lec­tive consciousness.

We feel it’s time to explore how the hero’s jour­ney can be applied as a way of look­ing at humanity’s evo­lu­tion. How we too are cur­rent­ly on a col­lec­tive jour­ney, and how it is now our time to step up to the demand for change. It’s our time to respond to the greater call for action across our species.