Understanding The Supernatural Within Ourselves
Understanding mythology allows us to take practical charge of our inner lives.
In our mythic stories, the hero is often set upon their path by supernatural forces, and during their moments of greatest need, such forces reappear to ease the hero’s burden or simplify the path they tread upon.
The renowned mythologist, Joseph Campbell, studied all the mythologies, religious practices, folklore, and fairy tales of the world. He pried into every current of our collective unconscious and discovered a pattern that he termed “the monomyth.” This is an observed framework of mythological story, independent of location, that arises from a Jungian collective unconscious.
Out of this emerges the “hero’s journey,” the cyclical pattern that underpins the journey taken by heroic characters in myths around the world. There are many stages to the hero’s journey, but my focus in this article is on the supernatural force that appears to the hero and offers them aid. This concept, once understood properly, and applied to life, can be a passage into very real personal growth and social change.
“It is not difficult for the modern intellectual to concede that the symbolism of mythology has a…
