Stage 1 - Call to Adventure
Information:
Some examples of the ‘Call to Adventure’ in film and text can be found here. The hero starts off in a mundane situation where information is received that acts as a call to head off into the unknown.
Joseph Campbell: ”This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the ‘call to adventure’—signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight. The hero can go forth of his own volition to accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus when he arrived in his father’s city, Athens, and heard the horrible history of the Minotaur; or he may be carried or sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent as was Odysseus, driven about the Mediterranean by the winds of the angered god, Poseidon. The adventure may begin as a mere blunder… or still again, one may be only casually strolling when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from the frequented paths of man. Examples might be multiplied, ad infinitum, from every corner of the world.”
Call to Adventure:
On the morning of May 10th, 2012 we found the following package in our driveway. It had no address or marks of any kind.
inside the package we found the following items:
- a bow
- a bow string
- an arrow
- a bandana
- a clothes hanger
- 2 rotten bananas
- calipers
- a 26’length of pink string
- a colander with one handle
- a pinwheel
- 48 cents in nickels and pennies
- a silver bell
- a pyramidal candle
- a chicken
and the following diagram:
