Heroes and Mystics 2026

In Joseph Mali's Rehabilitation of Myth , he examines how human authority allows people to be 'authors' and 'creators' of their own lives and humanity. With this, we as humans understand the life world through stories that we are given over time. As archaic myths are true narrations of history, our knowledge about the world is actually not a primordial experience, but instead a collection of various perspectives that we have adopted as a culture throughout centuries. Furthermore, this information alludes to the fact that wisdom is not the same as knowledge as wisdom often comes others' perspectives and experiences. An example of this is Jesus teaching through parables. Instead of teaching laws directly, Jesus gives his disciples stories and examples for them to apply to their own lives, thus promoting the acquisition of wisdom.  When Dr. Redick mentioned this in class, I found it interesting to highlight how teaching with examples and stories could make an impac...

  In Somewhere I Have Never Travelled , Thomas Van Nortwick develops the concept of the “second self” as it relates to the journey of the protagonist in The Epic of Gilgamesh . Specifically, he looks to Enkidu as representative of what Gilgamesh lacks and discusses the role his death plays in Gilgamesh’s journey. I find it interesting that Enkidu is sent as a sort of “divine intervention” intended to play this exact role, and yet is taken away by similar “divine intervention” for his action in harming the natural world. It would seem that both the bestowal of the second self and its removal is commonly connected to a gift (or rather, curse) from the mystical powers-that-be, as in perhaps “The Frog Prince” or “Beauty and the Beast” where the image of the “second self” is clearly that of a wild creature, given to the respective princes of those tales as a means to learn some higher reality than they had considered in their prior self-centered lives. Divinely gifted as payback, the “s...

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces describes the concept of the monomyth as a series of steps a hero takes on their journey to self-discovery and “apotheosis.” I find it interesting that Campbell chooses to provide so many steps, and yet it does not seem any myth actually follows every single step in the delivery of its narrative; even in providing specific examples, he jumps back and forth between myths as he expands upon the themes of each step. It would seem, rather, that the monomyth is so versatile in what it encompasses that almost any story could fit into its structure. Two prime examples of this are in the steps marked “Woman as Temptress,” “Atonement with the Father,” and “Meeting with the Goddess,” which all inevitably involve the Freudian connections children have to their parents Campbell is so keen to mention and in the final steps of the journey, between the “Magic Flight,” “Refusal of the Call,” “Rescue from Without,” and the more general “Crossing of the ...

  In his essay “Myth Became Fact,” C. S. Lewis argues for an understanding of the Christian narrative as a simultaneous myth and fact, in that it conveys transcendental realities through what he considers to be a fully historical reality. I find this approach to religion to be especially compelling, because it does not diminish the belief systems of adherents, yet maintains the deeper mythological sense which is intrinsic to human nature. His revelation that myth is the container for reality rather than truth is further developed by the notion that any piece of writing that attempts to explain reality, whether it be through a strictly scientific lens or an ancient mythological system, is by necessity overtaken by man’s desire to tell a story; without narrative, nothing presented as fact would be kept as entirely important or desirable to remember, but with some basic internal reasoning through the process of developing a story, such facts become ingrained as part of our perception ...

  In his work Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art , Scott McCloud provides a lens into the innate storytelling nature of humanity. By broadly defining comics as “sequential art,” he is forced to give an explanation of the concept that begins with cave paintings, which are probably some of the earliest myths we have access to, since they were put into artistic form rather than left as oral tradition. Further along in his work, McCloud discusses the concept of the “icon,” which holds a special place in all of our artistic work. The icon is some simple set of lines that we assign unnecessary meaning to, for example, we consider a circle, two dots, and a curved line to be a smiley-face. Because we can make such associations, “iconic” drawings, that is, those that are less realistic, give rise to the “masking effect,” where we begin to see ourselves in the indicated figures, because they do not have their own particular distinctions which make them individuals. This human identifica...

  In our discussion around the perception of the world as a whole, we talked about three major systems for viewing reality: the biotransformative, that takes an anthropomorphic view of the natural world; the historical, which focuses on socio-political structures; and the scientific, which attempts to provide rational explanations for reality. Of course, in many ways, even the strictly scientific is still necessarily related to the human conception of reality as a story in which we directly partake, even if it is farther removed from our primordial experience of existence. I find it interesting that these three mythological systems of explaining what is correspond so closely to the three areas of academic discipline into which we categorize our scholarly approaches. The most obvious is the interrogation of the natural sciences, which is basically identical to the scientific myth in its approach at determining the rational cause of existence and manipulating what we maintain to be u...

In Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology , John Walton describes the theory of being which permeated the cultures of the Ancient Near East. I thought his exploration of the idea of the “cosmos” made for an interesting connection to our in-class discussion about the primary and secondary worlds as described by Tolkien; the secondary world concerns the arc of narrative whereas the primary world is what we might call the “cosmos,” as it encapsulates the whole universe. Within the context of Ancient Near Eastern myth, the “cosmos” can be described as “created order”; in those stories of creation, things come into being by the bestowing of a name and a related purpose, whereas what has no purpose is that which came before, as it might be called, “chaos”. For the cultures of the Ancient Near East, the “cosmos” did encompass the whole world and everything in existence, but they made a distinction for those things that have no purpose, and in their conception therefore did not exist. Thus, even as we...

      As I forced my way through Campbell's heavy chunk of text, characteristics of gender essentialism seemed to escape from between the lines like fleas at every opportunity. Universal concepts such as birth and death obviously must contain some mention these biological realities, but gratingly Campbell seems to fixate endlessly on his own cultural conceptions of male and female. Multiple others also expressed this frustration when brought up in discussion, and some even reported it made them unable to finish the assigned reading. Did anyone else struggle so thoroughly with this man?         These understandings, including the repeated references to Freud's musings on psychosexual frustration, oftentimes make the reading absolutely agonizing. I don't blame them! In the section on  Woman as the Temptress,  to make his point about how Heroes must gather control on the simultaneously beautiful and ugly of the world, Campbell literally des...

  Page 4 Michael Taussig would suggest Juan's understanding of the meaning of a place emerges out of the process of an imitation of all the “differences” that we discern there. We mimic (in language and action) the full range of sounds, movements, and other sensory perceptions that come to us from the more than human world.” It’s hard to put a place that strikes us as sublime into mere words; we can try to describe it as a feeling and try to put language to that feeling, but sometimes the feeling of the beauty of nature or the power of a sacred space is too big to try to translate or make sense of. Would every place and experience be subjective, and would the discourse be the same? Would the mountain top make me feel the same as another? Or does my personal experience with the natural world and divine keep it intimate/ unique, or would my experience be relatable enough? The author uses the messiness, ambiguity, and mystery of people's deeply personal experience o...

  I just had a few thoughts on what "wilderness of the soul" meant. In class we discussed that it meant uncharted territory within yourself and I thought of Freud's Iceberg analogy where most of the hidden unconscious is the part of the iceberg that remains underwater. There had always been a debate between psychology and religion in regards to what exactly a soul is. Some would say that the soul is the consciousness of the human brain, while others argue it is something spiritual linking us to God. But in response to the wilderness aspect, I do wonder how much of ourselves do we not actually know? I have always thought of myself as someone who knows exactly who I am, but since this class discussion I'm not so sure. Don't get me wrong- I am not upset about this, but I am certainly more curious. It's almost exciting to think about what else I could learn about myself, but also slightly nerve-wracking. What if I learn something new that I don't ...

 Welcome to the Heroes and Mystics blog for 2026. Make sure to start the blog with your name and the subject of the entry (Just as I have done with this post). . Blog entries will be considered informal writing assignments and as such will be graded more in relation to content than style. Blog entries will contain questions and answers to questions, as well as reflections that relate to daily classroom discussions, completion of exercises, and reading assignments. Any questions the student has while reading or completing assignments should be written in their blog. Reflections may relate to connections the student makes between discussions in this class and those in other classes, between arguments raised in the readings in this class and those raised in other classes or from informal conversations. Students are encouraged to apply the ideas learned in this class to activities that take place outside of the class. These applications make great reflections. The studen...