The Story of Star Wars as taken from the Journal of the Whills Part I

By: Bryan Ricardo Marini Quintana

What is The Hero’s Journey? What is Mythology? What is Anthropology? 

How did these mould The Modern Myth set A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far away …?

The Story of Star Wars revolves around The Mythical Hero’s Journey of father and son, being Anakin and Luke Skywalker. This Monomyth is a Story Structure that embarks the protagonist on an adventure to traverse the depths of the unknown, face challenges along the way and achieve Destiny by confronting the peril outside and the fear within. Growing up fascinated by mythology and anthropology, George Lucas studied how societies, in their search for meaning, developed into civilizations by sculpting an identity that became a symbol of their culture, in which they embedded fantastical stories revolving around heroic figures. From these myths, George Lucas derived The Hero’s Journey, applying it to Star Wars by recounting a story that adhered to an old tradition of characters that through fulfilling Destiny they embraced their Doom. Ultimately, drawing from the work of Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, George Lucas moulded The Skywalker Tragedy set A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far away …

The Mythologist

Raised as a Roman Catholic and intrigued by Native American Culture from an early age, Joseph Campbell showed a profound fascination with how religion and mythology shaped civilizations. This innate inquisitiveness lead Joseph Campbell to study in the humanities field, graduating from Columbia University with a bachelor’s in English Literature in 1925 and a master’s in Medieval Literature in 1927. Alongside, in his master’s thesis, Joseph Campbell wrote a comparison between Arthurian Legends and Native American Myths. Further on, The Mythologist studied Medieval French Literature at the University of Paris along with Sanskrit and Indo-European Philosophy at the University of Munich. The previous academic experience prepared Joseph Campbell to be a college professor of literature and an expert in comparative mythology that merged differing fields of study such as archaeology, anthropology, psychology, history and art to make a theory on the origins along with meanings of mythological themes across the globe.

This theory manifested into The Hero’s Journey, a key pattern identified by Joseph Campbell in various civilizations across history, which he explored in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Through this renowned work, Joseph Campbell presented how myth and plot were interwoven. Meaning that heroes of various cultures shared a common sequence of events, with the plot being a basis of their myths found across civilizations. Therefore, Joseph Campbell defined myth as the journey into the unknown, a new path that branched into the uncharted world in which heroes must traverse its depths, leaving behind the safety of home to rediscover themselves and seek Destiny.