The Heroic Shift Has Landed!

We’re very excited that the book is now available! This is both incredibly exciting and also surreal, because this was a long time in the works. As I mentioned in my last post, this started during a study/writing retreat. We both went to the same graduate school, and Rebekah was in a different cohort than me but lived locally to the school. Many of us travelled to attend our residencies, so the notion of a “retreat” was really a “we longer have class sessions but still want to hang out together before we isolate into dissertation writing” gathering. We were all hanging around in the living room of the rental house when Rebekah and I started chatting about Avatar: The Last Airbender, and one of us made the mention that it was a different kind of hero because it was a group, and the point wasn’t overcoming evil but more about bringing balance. In that moment, we clicked and knew we were on to something. But, like I said, life happened (including dissertations) so we marinated on the idea perhaps longer than we intended. But that was probably a good thing, since we needed to find some theoretical grounding before we dove too deeply into the research.

The main thing we had to figure out was where we would fit in the field we were both studying. We’re both mythologists and trained in comparative mythology and archetypal psychology, neither field known for being receptive to radical and innovative challenges to established theories. We knew we needed to take our theory in a new direction, but that also meant leaving the older ways behind. That’s why it was essential for us to finish our dissertations first.

For a deconstruction of these theories, including a bold analysis of the limitations of the monomyth and the Campbell Trap, see Chapter 1 of our book.

While we were developing our theory, the idea of a “collective hero” started to enter into the zeitgeist. We started to see posts and presentations appear in the community, which also validated that we were heading in the right direction with our analysis. The main fundamental difference we noticed, however, is that these approaches to “collective hero” try to stay within the confines of Campbell’s monomyth, meaning the collective hero journey is the same as the single hero’s journey.

We challenge that there is even a journey. It’s a convenient story plot, and serves some genres of myth more than others. But the goal of a collective hero isn’t always a journey of place, because the transformation that occurs to the group as a result of the collective might happen locally. The goal is, ultimately, restoring balance, and sometimes that requires one to engage in the local community rather than travel to lands far away.