How we cite our quotes: (Page.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Wherever he sets his hand there is a cry (if not from the housetops, then more miserably—within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence, will liberate the land. (14.2)
Good doesn't tend to rise up until there's an evil to rise up against. Even in the early stage of the Hero's Journey, Campbell is showing us how both sides are connected.
Quote #2
Typical of the circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny. (47.2)
This is the central challenge of the Hero's Journey: if you want to save everybody, you gotta go out into the dark and scary parts of the world.
Quote #3
The disgusting and rejected frog or dragon of the fairy tale brings up the sun ball in its mouth; for the frog, the serpent, the rejected one, is the representative of that unconscious deep ("so deep that the bottom cannot be seen") wherein are hoarded all of the rejected, unadmitted, unrecognized, unknown, or undeveloped factors, laws, and elements of existence. (48.1)
This is important: evil here is really just an expression of the deepest parts of ourselves, the parts we don't like to think are there. By diving into them and understanding them, we know more about who we are and can move forward with a little wisdom.
Quote #4
What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance—a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. (66.1)
This is the first person the hero meets on his or her journey: a mysterious helpful person who isn't quite what he or she appears to be, but is definitely working for Team Good Guy. Modern examples include your garden variety wizard (your Gandalfs, your Dumbledores, your occasional Obi-Wan Kenobis), your average super spy (Nick Fury in the MCU), or just some friendly folks who don't want to see you get butchered in a futuristic arena (like every member of Team Katniss from The Hunger Games).
Quote #5
The regions of the unknown (desert, jungle, deep sea, alien land, etc.) are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. Incestuous libido and patricidal destrudo are thence reflected back against the individual and his society in forms suggesting threats of violence and fancied dangerous delight—not only as ogres but also as sirens of mysteriously seductive, nostalgic beauty. (72.2)
Campbell gets a little meta here. Those scary parts of the map on the Hero's Journey? The Death Star? The witch's castle in The Wizard of Oz? They're scary because the hero doesn't know what's in them, and that lets him project all his subconscious fears onto that place.
Quote #6
But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul. (112.1)
Good turns to evil so quickly here. But notice also that the trigger to that transformation isn't something external: it's the way the hero feels inside that makes it evil.
Quote #7
For the ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim's own ego —derived from the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind, but projected before; and the fixating idolatry of that pedagogical non-thing is itself the fault that keeps one steeped in a sense of sin, sealing the potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of the father, and therewith of the world. (119.1)
Again, good and evil here are just flip sides of an interior debate within the hero. He sees dad as a monster, and instead of revising that opinion and letting go of those childhood impressions, he keeps fighting. He has to let go of that idea in order to reconcile with the father figure and get his hands on the great Whatsit he's after.
Quote #8
He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he's competent, consequently, now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from the infantile illusions of "good" and "evil" to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being. (125.5)
We've touched on this time and again, but this is the crux of it: good and evil are just sides of the same coin. Together, they keep the universe running in an endless cycle of change: creating, thriving, declining and destroying, only to create something entirely new and starting the cycle all over again.
Quote #9
The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. (221.2)
Myth, he says, is supposed to help see and understand: defeating evil isn't the goal. It's understanding the role evil serves and transforming that energy into something possible and happy.
Quote #10
The world of human life is now the problem. Guided by the practical judgment of the kings and the instruction of the priests of the dice of divine revelation, the field of consciousness so contracts that the grand lines of the human comedy are lost in a welter of cross-purposes. (285.1)
Evil, true evil, doesn't come from the universe. It comes from our own limitations, and our willingness to get caught up in petty things like money and power that blind us to the true nature of the universe. It's heavy stuff…but man, does it make sense.