Joseph Campbell's Hero Journey is Gnosto-Hermetic Satanism (HA! Got your attention)

Part 1: I'm Being Upfront Here Because We're Dealing with Dangerous, Treacherous Subjects

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Hello all! This is my first blogging page. Woo-hoo! I hope you are all doing well and have a sane grip on reality, because parts of this blog will be me explaining bonkers things while making sure you come away alive and well.

Otherwise, this blog is my first step to getting an Internet presence, chit-chat with people here or elsewhere, and to build up a fanbase to be a successful author. I will be going all over the place here, thinking crazy thoughts so that you don't have to! (At first.)

I want to be an author. Plain and simple. I want to create until my creative faculties stop working.

(The mind, imagination, emotion, intuition--all the stuff that goes away if you have Alzheimer's. But your body remains, huh?)

I've been in, or observed, the 'ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY' long enough to know what I want to write--stories that are silly, dark, goofy, and fantastic. There's...really a lot of bad sh*t out there and people make money from it. Bad sh*t in the sense that 'this stuff is schlock' and 'this stuff is torture porn' and 'this stuff is built on very dangerous philosophical/theological lies'. And people pay for it! I don't want to make money from such things. ...But yeah, I'm still a sci-fi and fantasy writer, so I'm going to make weird stories and things. Just, you know, honest weird stories and things. If I can write with the logic of Star Trek: TNG, the wonder of fairy tales, and the wordplay of Shakespeare, I'll call it a win.

BUT, what I want to be famous for, controversial, infamous, nay, offensive towards, is Joseph Campbell's monomyth. The Hero's Journey.

I know, right? An author who hates the entire foundational narrative structure of life, philosophy, metaphysics, and Hollywood.

Except it's not. And Campbell's not the first bozo to claim to have found the origin of all stories, everywhere, all at once, for all time.

That honor, as far as I know, belongs to Hermes Trismegistus, who lived around 100 B.C., and was the effective...founder? Codifier. Definitive codifier of Hermeticism, a branch of esotericism--read, MAGIC--that has some overlap with Gnosticism, another branch of magic that has plagued the Western world as far back as the Greeks--and according to them, it existed since the dusty foundations of Egypt. They even know the port city where they (the Greeks) got it from, Alexandria.

Now, Hermeticism and Gnosticism and Hermy-Termy--what do they have to do with storytelling? Well, as with Campbell, the whole hellish quartet is based on syncretism--which in one form is the mixing-and-matching of different but similar things, in another a deliberate but logical hybridization of abstract systems (commonly in religious practices), and in a third and very dangerous sense, the proclamation 'all things are the same at the deepest level, they merely appear different on the surface.'

This will get spooky later, but for right now, understand that Campbell is firmly in the third example. Now, who is Joseph Campbell himself? A bad anthropologist, but more importantly, a fallen away Catholic. The quick version is that Campbell (b. 1904 -1987) grew up in a time when the Church was trying to figure out how to relate to the forces of modernism in the world. Campbell wrote his famous book, "The Hero with a 1000 Faces" in 1949. Post-modernism was not quite a force in the world, yet, and the likes of Freud, Nietzsche, and Jung were very influential still, and they did influence Campbell. In addition, Campbell himself became disillusioned with the Church, for his own reasons, and tried to replace the mysticality of Church ritual with something else. Welp...a new mysticality found him. "Seek and ye shall find" can apply to bad things, too!

But how the heck does all that relate to Campbell giving us a bastardized understanding of stories, and in turn narrative, and in turn has produced so much crappy entertainment today?

Check that in part 2!