Reminds me of The Hero's Journey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero%27s_Journey (the pattern of separation, initiation, and return common to many hero myths).

Plus one for The Righteous Mind, mentioned below.

Also in the vein of 'not quite psychology of religion, but related', The Hero's Journey, by Joseph Campbell.

Seconded, this is a hell of a read. The guy's mother is the real hero.

EDIT This is a perfect example of the Hero's Journey [1]

Call to adventure: the kid selling tamales in the bar

Supernatural aid: his mother

The threshold: calling round the various suppliers

Challenges and temptations: making the tamales by hand

Revelation: he conceives the machine

Transformation: hiring the machinists, perfecting the machine

Atonement with the father: the patent attorney?!

Return: throwing the Cinco de Mayo party

Perfect, i tell you!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

> Meaning was there; I simply had to stop getting in its way.

You just described the Hero's Journey (Monomyth). The end of the journey is nothing more than the return to the starting point, the world has not changed, the Hero is the one that has changed.

Many people do know this, understand this, and see (their) life as a Journey; what people miss is that not everyone is a Hero.

Welcome home.

The article is about Campbell's book in particular, but I think most writers have never actually read Campbell in the original. They nonetheless follow the Hero's Journey slavishly because it's such a successful style of storytelling that it seems inevitable. Especially for mainstream films, perhaps because the up-front investment is so high that they feel compelled to not risk breaking the formula.

So I don't know that they really need to make a case for chucking Hero with a Thousand Faces simply because we already have, especially outside university lit departments.

Finding ways to ditch the Hero's Journey is more difficult, simply because it's so effective. And arguably we'd still be doing it even if Campbell never existed, since Campell is merely describing the structure of stories rather than inventing it. His formulation of it is surely influential, especially because of Bill Moyers and George Lucas, and that has become so universal it's hard to see any other way. That's the real challenge.

It's a refinement of the Hero's Journey (see Vogler's memo; Joseph Campbell).

The formula itself: http://www.slate.com/content/slate/sidebars/2013/07/the_save...

I guess there are two discussions to be had here. The first is whether, in light of the author's explicit statements that he means the work to be Christian, we are still authorized as readers to abstract his text into a general idea of "the Hero's Journey." The second is whether there is anything distinctively Christian at all about LotR, when considered on its own terms. I would say that LotR objectively differs from the Hero's Journey in that it insists on mercy and the principled refusal of worldly power as its most central ideas.

- The Hero's Journey

the four suits are explicitly tied to the classical elements (swords = air, wands = fire, pentacles = earth, cups = water) and the source material for the cards is drawn directly from Western esoteric traditions, especially Hermeticism and Alchemy.

The Hero's Journey is Campbell's analysis of archetypal themes present in most mythologies, and especially in Ancient Near Eastern and medieval Eureopean hero stories. It maps well to the Major Arcana because they are both archetype maps of the same underlying cultural milieu.