Tag: Joseph Campbell

The 17 Stages of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth

The 17 Stages of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth

 

If you ever wonder what really is fascinating about the whole Star Wars epic – it is the fact that it was a labor of love for a guy that loved doing exactly that kind of stuff, he was into his work, a perfectionist. Just like any other work of art – the important part of the epic was not the dollar amounts it brought but its genesis, the genesis of the story is closely aligned with George Lucas’s sensibility, and his desire to bring archetypal stories to the screen. The same exact themes he explored in his first film THX 1138.

Th major themes of Star Wars have been around for 2.5 thousand years starting with Greek mythology. Joseph Campbell and his work – The Hero with a thousand faces – explored these themes and connected the dots between myths and stories from different cultures. George Lucas, in his developing of the Star Wars story, was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s work.

Below – Kurt Vonnegut on a similar topic.

“Someone gets into trouble, gets out of it.
People love that kind of story”:

What do Joseph Campbells’ The Hero with a Thousand Faces and George Lucas’ Star Wars have in common?

In 1949 Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) made a big splash in the field of mythology with his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. This book built on the pioneering work of German anthropologist Adolph Bastian (1826-1905), who first proposed the idea that myths from all over the world seem to be built from the same “elementary ideas.” Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) named these elementary ideas “archetypes,” which he believed to be the building blocks not only of the unconscious mind, but of a collective unconscious. In other words, Jung believed that everyone in the world is born with the same basic subconscious model of what a “hero” is, or a “mentor” or a “quest,” and that’s why people who don’t even speak the same language can enjoy the same stories. Read more …