Heroes and Heroines – Where Are We Going?
The Hero’s Journey: Traveling in Disguise
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, anthropologist Joseph Campbell described the eighteen stages of a journey that a hero like Jason must take to retrieve the Golden Fleece.1 Theories abound as to what the fleece symbolize; according to Antoine Faivre’s esoteric study of alchemy, the fleece may have been a parchment-like ram’s skin on which was written the secret of transforming a base metal like mercury into gold.2 Christopher Vogler applied these hero’s journey stages to screenwriting structure in his famous book, The Writer’s Journey, which has become the template for a great many Hollywood films, especially the ones on which he’s served as a ...
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