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How Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth Tells Us Who the Badguys Are
All the problems of our world can be summed up in one sentence: a theme found in every myth across the world.
Our culture is obsessed with heroes, and this obsession is nothing new. For thousands of years, human beings have invented devils and the gods that fight them. We have placed kings and prophets on pedestals of gold, bowing down in supplication.
But, everything a hero represents exists in counterbalance to a darker drive. Within every hero, there is a villain waiting to be born. It is the choice to strive against the inner desolation that creates a hero, just as it is the choice to accept subsummation to our destructive instincts that bears a villain into the world.
The animal brutality of life bears down on us with an atomic weight. There is only a narrow window in reality through which you and I have but galactic seconds to gaze before we are forever snuffed out like candles, forever gone.
In the face of this knowledge, how do we decide right from wrong? How do we choose our own inner hero over our secret villain?
The renowned scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, had a few suggestions.
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.”
Chances are, you’ve heard this before, so I won’t rehash old information. Campbell’s work is fascinating, but it’s actually one tiny piece of his work that interests me today.
How is a villain made?
Early in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell writes that, “the figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same” (Campbell, 14).
