It was 1979. I was finishing a Dip Ed at Sydney Teachers College after briefly considering an Honours Year at Uni of NSW. Spending a year making thin sections of eucalyptus flower buds and researching their morphology under an electron microscope would be interesting enough. Cell biology at the time was as illuminating as as it was elucidating. The first DNA sequencers had come on line at my university and the prospect that these enigmatic molecules would yield up the secrets of their genetic code was tantilising. But I had more pressing matters. My inner world was in turmoil, wracked by fear and a religious melancholy I could not shake.

I caught a bus into the Sydney CBD, with my baby daughter in a Mei Tai. Then on to Mary Martin’s Bookshop, looking for the newly released, “Uses of Enchantment” by Bruno Bettelheim. It hadn’t yet arrived from the publishers, so the serious young man who served me suggested a title by Joseph Campbell. The first Superman movie was screening in cinemas and while I thought it too frivolous, it was still appealing, though what I needed was some altogether practical superpowers not the cinema variety. I was still looking to clergymen rather than artists to salve my troubles and a title something like “Losers, with a mug like mine” might have had more resonance than Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces”.

Well I bought the book and began the journey of my life both into the future and recapitulating those past events that burst into my consciousness uninvited. It is the only book in my collection, that when one copy began to fall apart, I bought a new one. I’m now up to number four.

We started to see its influence in cinema and television, blockbusters like Starwars and TV series more to my taste, like Northern Exposure. Magical realism seemed to me more practical than fantasy, portraying a deeper truth elusive to both fact and fiction. I was sure that there must be structure to the inner workings of the universe, my universe, my mind. Randomness seemed implausible and natural selection too scary to contemplate. I knew from my Genetics studies, there was a code replicated at cellular level that makes us all tick. I revelled in the big ideas and the big words they generated, like a five year old who has discovered their tongue, words like oxidative phosphorylation which describes how cells use electricity in chemical reactions to do what cells do, everything biological. On the other hand, my friends had put me onto the books they were reading, like Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” and Thomas Mann’s “Glass Bead Game”. But these dark Germanic masterpieces left me in a cold sweat, compelling as they were. I craved something with a more lyrical lilt.

Well, Hero of a Thousand Faces wasn’t that. I could make neither head not tail of it to begin with. Yet, unlike the German writers who agitated the fear inside me, Campbell left me buoyant and optimistic, that my flaws, rather than being simply unfortunate, had a kind of sacredness and therefore purposefulness rather than being simply punishing. The call to adventure, magical helpers, road of trials, atonement, mastery of both worlds, freedom to live, realm of amplified being, these words spoke to me. I was learning a new language giving access to a magical world hiding in the interstices of everyday events.

Stories, proper stories that is, are the messenger molecules of the human psyche. The most powerful stories are those we tell ourselves. There are those that encroach uninvited from past experiences and anxieties for the future. Then there are those we craft intentionally to reveal our unique purpose in the world. In times of crisis the structures of our lives becomes fluid, calling on us individually and as a society to hold to what we value most and to change where we must so that we can live life authentically.

The Hero’s Journey is based on Campbell’s discovery that stories from all cultures and peoples share a common structure, a structure that reflects the innate drive of the psyche towards greater awareness. It is not a substitute for meditation or mindfulness in it’s many forms but it is a potent navigation tool that makes sense of confusing and discordant experiences in the moment, allowing the hero to get unstuck and purposefully continue on the path to mastery and freedom.

Comment below if you have answered a call to adventure.

Tags: Storytelling