The Call to Adventure
- The chapter opens with a retelling of the famous fairy tale "The Princess and the Frog."
- A princess drops her golden ball in the water, where it sinks deep down to the bottom.
- A frog asks if he can help and the princess promises him anything if he can get the ball back.
- The frog returns the ball, and asks to be her companion in exchange.
- She's grossed out by him, but what's a girl gonna do? (Don't worry. As you may suspect, he turns into a handsome prince when she finally decides to kiss him.)
- The frog returning the princess's golden ball to her is an example of the call to adventure.
- The call is a crisis: something that spurs the hero or heroine into action.
- The call involves danger, peril and dark places like a forest (or the bottom of a pond, to follow the princess and the frog).
- A herald is involved, announcing the danger or the task to be undertaken.
- More examples follow, including King Arthur and the story of an Indian woman from North America.
- The hero belongs to an ordinary community when the call arrives, and his or her energy is realigned from inside the community to outside of it.
Refusal of the Call
- Sometimes the hero doesn't answer the call or want to take up the task.
- The story makes it very clear: refusing the call is a bad idea.
- Why? Because it leads to stagnation and a refusal to advance forward in life.
- The divine being linked to the hero harasses him or her constantly, trapping him or her in a symbolic labyrinth.
- Example? We got one! How about the story of Daphne, who flees from the loving arms of the god Apollo and gets turned into a laurel tree as a result? Check out the full story here.
- Campbell notes that the philosopher Carl Jung believes that psychoanalysis finds patterns and fixations very similar to the story of Daphne.
- Campbell relates the stories of Sleeping Beauty and Kamar al-Zaman from Arabian Nights to demonstrate what happens when the hero refuses the call.
Supernatural Aid
- For heroes who don't refuse the call, their first encounter with the outside world and the challenges they need to face is with a mentor.
- This is a wizard, dwarf or some similar figure who provides protection for the hero on the first stage of the journey.
- This could be the Blessed Virgin in Christian stories, the Spider-Woman in African stories, a wizard, a god like Hermes, or others.
- The mentor represents destiny and serves as a comfort and a reassurance for the hero on his or her adventures.
- In some cases, the mentor is also the herald who starts the whole thing rolling with the call to adventure.
The Crossing of the First Threshold
- With destiny having taken a friendly (and usually bearded) form, the hero moves forward until meeting a "threshold guardian."
- Beyond this guardian lies the unknown: darkness, danger, the general "Here Be Dragons" thing.
- The guardian is usually tricky and deceitful, not what he or she first appears….but s/he holds wisdom about the darkness too: two key aspects in the figure.
- Another avalanche of examples from all over the world follows: Pan in Greek mythology, the Russian "Water Grandfather," and others.
- The guardian can be protective, warning the hero from venturing past the known world; yet, only by passing the guardian can the hero gain the knowledge and the power that he or she needs.
- By passing or defeating the guardian, the hero enters a new stage of existence, leaving his or her old life behind.
The Belly of the Whale
- Having passed the first threshold, the hero enters a womblike state called "the belly of the whale."
- We know what you're picturing—this always makes us think of Pinocchio, too.
- He or she is swallowed up by the power of the threshold – symbolized by a sea monster or something similar – and seems to have died.
- Crossing the threshold can be seen as a kind of self-annihilation, or – less gruesomely – a transformation into another state of being.
- And, as usual, Campbell wraps up with some more examples.
- So many examples.