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This, folks, is Campbell's *opening.* It is his 'dark and stormy night;' his 'best of times, worst of times;' his Greek chorus who foreshadows everything that is going to happen in the play; he might not have flat-out compared these cultures to primates in this quote*, but he makes it very clear that not only are they not Western, he finds their stories amusing, bizarre, mystical, and on the whole, "it's all the same."
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This is cultural #imperialism. It is not amusing, it's wrong; and as a white, reasonably middle-class Scottish person, I strive to call it out as I see it. It doesn't matter what Campbell believed - these words have all the cadence of your extremely egalitarian Uncle Greg. He'd never speak ill of immigrants in public - met a few, 'imself - but at family gatherings, he'll regale you with patter like, "they should fuck off back to their own country and see to their own."
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Then there's Campbell's influences. For instance, we know he combined Freudian psychoanalysis with Carl Jung's archetypes and collective unconscious theory. The result, applied to myths and storytelling, is the #Monomyth. Jung, likewise, was a progeny of Freud's work, and, like many conservatives post-WW2, heavily influenced by the works of Irish philosopher Edmund Burke:
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The collective unconscious theory is, in effect, a mystical mirror-world version of #sociology. Among other things, it posits the existence of #archetypes - that is, through the unperceived connections everyone has to everyone else, we inherit common patterns of thought, or images, or symbols. If the collective unconscious is the cause of rhyming stories and history, archetypes are the effect.
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I needn't explain again how the Monomyth, as an analytical tool, prioritises archetypes over the actual texts being analysed. It will not tell you what makes the Aenid and Watership Down different stories, but what it will tell you is that, deep down, they are the same stories, sharing the same archetypes, because of that pesky collective unconscious at work. It's pure tautology.
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When Campbell wrote, "there is no final system for the interpretation of myths," whatever his intention, what has manifested in the #Monomyth is its structural opposite - *"there is no alternative for the interpretation of stories."* You can break or subvert every trope in the Monomyth's cycle, and its photo negative, its afterimage, yet stains your eyelids. It insists upon itself that it's impossible for the psyche to come up with anything different.
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"We are incapable of telling stories any different. It is impossible to imagine new ways of storytelling. There is no alternative." Where have I heard these before? Suffice it to say that, insofar as we're concerned with the success and spread of ideas, the study of myth has continued to let conservative bias go unchallenged, believing this to be apolitical; the left, so we're to believe, has yet to offer a lucid countertheory, a challenger in the same weight class.
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So, come up with something different! But what? And how? McDaniel, as a Greek and Roman historian, writes:
> "If you want to know what the Homeric epics meant to ancient Greek people, you can't find the answer just by reading the epics themselves without any context and coming up with a meaning on your own… You have to study ancient Greek culture and read what other ancient Greek authors wrote about the Homeric epics."
- Spencer McDaniel, "The Hero's Journey is Nonsense"
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Likewise for the ancient Romans; on this, I'd like to aside for a moment and return to Caesar Marcus Augustus #Zuckerberg, who, it's safe to say, has indulged more of the former in his idolisation of Emperor Augustus than the latter:
It's not just Zuckerberg, of course, but there are only so many men with his status, power, and wealth who would, without a shred of irony, say Augustus is 'just like me fr!!!!!':
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We can't understand the nature of this resurgence without also understanding the ongoing discussions about gender roles. Bringing more and more topics to the table to explore why last year's #Tiktok trend was a different historical moment from those that came before is antithetical to the #Monomyth.
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One more time: the #Monomyth would argue it's perfectly possible to understand Darth Vader and a corrupt Roman statesman (as portrayed by an ancient Roman author) as *the same tyranny.* It's not just that it can't tell us the difference - we are taught to willfully ignore how Roman authors portrayed evil, and instead to look for the archetypes and symbols that supersede the text.
