Rose Baker - The Hero with a Thousand Faces: a font of wisdom reduced to narrative recipe?

    When reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I actually didn't realize that this book was the source of the hero's journey. The perspective it was written from reflected not a technique for storytelling, but an examination of storytelling to understand the reality of human life, transformation, and internal desire. Applying it in the reverse has interesting consequences.
    One thing that I feel changes as a result is the progression, significance, and timing of the stages. In some ways, Campbell's stages can be cycled through, swapped around, or missed entirely in the course of a human life or a myth. But in many of the epics and myths he examines, the entire life of the character is followed, at least until the fail a test or reject the call, which often leads to their death or at least a state of insignificance which signifies narrative death. When transplanted as a storytelling structure for the conscious purpose of telling compelling narratives, the entire life cycle of the hero's journey may be worked through in the course of a single day.
    While contributing to fresh and exciting story styles, this does diminish the comparisons that can be made to a full life lived from a first-person perspective. This would be insignificant, except that the entire useful application of Campbell's theories hinges on storytelling as a facilitation of the transmission of information about life, and how to live it. Are we doing ourselves a disservice by commercializing the hero's journey into a mere recipe, rather than a cultural insight into our deepest needs and struggles as human beings?

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