The Hero's Journey

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

The Lady of Shalott Oil J. W. Waterhouse 1888

We have been re-watching Bill Moyers’s wonderful 1988 series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth. Filmed at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch over the last two summers of Campbell’s life, they are a wonderful introduction to his life-long study of myth and religion. The connection with Lucas is important because Lucas credits Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero’s Journey, as the inspiration for the story of Star Wars. Lucas adopted Campbell’s discoveries about the world-wide universality and similarity of the hero story in creating the story line and characters of the Star Wars movie trilogy.

Campbell was such a genial and interesting teacher that the interviews, peppered with illustrations and other graphics, flow along like a wonderful historical novel, but with one very important difference. The novel Mr. Campbell relates is the story of humanity through the ages - literally, the story of us. Why…