The Hero with a Thousand Faces Good vs. Evil Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Page.Paragraph)

Quote #4

What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance—a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. (66.1)

This is the first person the hero meets on his or her journey: a mysterious helpful person who isn't quite what he or she appears to be, but is definitely working for Team Good Guy. Modern examples include your garden variety wizard (your Gandalfs, your Dumbledores, your occasional Obi-Wan Kenobis), your average super spy (Nick Fury in the MCU), or just some friendly folks who don't want to see you get butchered in a futuristic arena (like every member of Team Katniss from The Hunger Games).

Quote #5

The regions of the unknown (desert, jungle, deep sea, alien land, etc.) are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. Incestuous libido and patricidal destrudo are thence reflected back against the individual and his society in forms suggesting threats of violence and fancied dangerous delight—not only as ogres but also as sirens of mysteriously seductive, nostalgic beauty. (72.2)

Campbell gets a little meta here. Those scary parts of the map on the Hero's Journey? The Death Star? The witch's castle in The Wizard of Oz? They're scary because the hero doesn't know what's in them, and that lets him project all his subconscious fears onto that place.

Quote #6

But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul. (112.1)

Good turns to evil so quickly here. But notice also that the trigger to that transformation isn't something external: it's the way the hero feels inside that makes it evil.