But they are fiendishly fascinating too, for they carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self. These are dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the security into which we have built ourselves and our family. And they may remain unsuspected, or, on the other hand, some chance word, the smell of a landscape, the taste of a cup of tea, or the glance of an eye may touch a magic spring, and then dangerous messengers begin to appear in the brain.

There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives. The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind-whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. But there’s a reason everyone reads Vogler’s book instead of Campbell’s: HWTF is an amazingly dense and tedious read.īelow is a completely normal paragraph from the book, taken from page 5. Christopher Vogler’s popular book on the subject, The Writer’s Journey, doesn’t have to back up its claims that The Hero’s Journey is universal to all stories because it can tell people to go read HWTF. The Hero’s Journey structure retains its credibility with storytellers because it is supposedly based on the rigorous scholarship of Joseph Campbell. But neither of those things are true, and it’s past time we stop worshipping this book. In the storytelling world, it’s not uncommon to hear Campbell praised as a genius and HWTF lauded as the most insightful work on storytelling ever written. A memo on the book by Christopher Vogler influenced Disney movies such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. The book is the basis for the popular structure known as The Hero’s Journey, and it’s influenced numerous storytellers such as George Lucas, Richard Adams, and Stanley Kubrick. Joseph’s Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces (HWTF) has been incredibly influential since it was first published in 1949.

Campbell the hero with a thousand faces