The reason that the monomyth is the monomyth in the first place is because of the psychological pattern of development that shamans and mystics endure. In a nutshell, there is a going from the known state to the unknown, a trial and fulfillment, and a return to the known. For tens of thousands of years tribal shamans have gone through their own inner monomyth as their psychology develops, and the stories of myth and religion spring from that. They aren't just yarns developed around the campfire to explain things like thunder and lightning. They reflect a psychological process that only the tribal shaman knows, and that process has found expression through myth for tens of thousands of years. It is part of human experience.
Are you sure that mystical or shamanic narratives are the original source? Consider common life experiences in a stone age society. You go out hunting, into less familiar land (where the game is, because the game has learned to avoid your settlements); you endure trials (traversing hazardous ground, living with minimal shelter, finding your way, locating and killing the game which might also be quite capable of killing you); you experience success (or not) and return home, ideally with meat. Or: you go on a raid or a war party against some other tribe, traveling into hostile land; you fight, likely experiencing the deaths of companions and injury to yourself; you win (or escape) and return home, ideally with victory trophies or loot.
Now imagine you're tasked with training adolescents to prepare for those experiences. Any kind of practice or simulated hunt or raid is going to contain representations of those same elements: departure, trials, times of doubt or fear that test ones resolve, the moment of violent crisis, navigating your way back to normal life.
All in all, doesn't it seem more likely that the monomyth and the path of shamanic development derived from those real-world experiences, instead of the other way around? Try describing a hunt or raid (or a sea voyage, or a trade mission to obtain a needed resource, or a migration to escape an invader or natural disaster, or being cast out of ones birth tribe as a young male to seek a mate from another tribe—a practice that probably pre-dates the differentiation of the human species) in a narrative that makes logical sense but
doesn't evoke the monomyth. Not so easy, I'd say.
With a little less literal interpretation of the journey, even more real-life experiences fit. Illness and recovery, for instance. Bearing and delivering a child. Sexual initiation. (Present-day too. Consider the elements of the boring medical stories old people tell. The mysterious symptoms. The numerous tests. The terrible hospital food. The helpful (or mean) nurse. The wise doctor. Being anesthetized. Complications. "They say my heart stopped for thirty-seven seconds." The painful rehab exercises.)
Why would only a tribal shaman know these experiences? If searching for the origin of narratives about journeys, I'd look first to people who went on actual journeys.
So, for a story to have the monomyth as skeletal structure, there should to be a journey into the unknown geography inner or outer, or a transformation from one state of being to another. A death and resurrection, so to speak. There should be recognizable archetypes of the collective unconscious, and relationships between them. That is why sci-fi is so accomodating of the monomyth, because there is a 'to boldly go where no one has gone before' element readily available. We have pretty much explored and conquered the planet... there is little room here for the unknown frontier. Space is the unknown where we can stretch our imagination into, and space is the domain of sci-fi. Not every kind of story from every genre can accomodate that.
Okay, there's some validity to that.
It's often pointed out that for a lot of space SF, space is really just substituting for the ocean. Often complete with nautical traditions and terminology, whether it makes sense ("space storms") or not. Before there was a Space Odyssey there was, after all,
The Odyssey. Moving certain kinds of story from strange unknown seas into strange unknown star systems is partly a side effect of having mapped ("shrunk") the earth.
Other genres can accommodate the same things, though. For instance: simply back-date the story to when there were unknown frontiers, and you have, among others, Westerns and high seas adventures. Or set the story on an invented world with alternate rules, and you have fantasy. (Fantasy and SF are often lumped together, but you can't really do so because you've asserted that SF's connection to science is important, and fantasy has no such connection.)
One such archetype is mana. It can be thought of as spiritual power, as psychic ability, or as alien technology so advanced it may as well be magic. That brings us to the paranormal. Now, since you are here at JREF, I think it's safe to assume you doubt that the paranormal is real. Shamans don't have that luxury. The archetype of mana is encountered by the shaman during his inner monomyth. So stories that use the monomyth closely will contain that archetype, and the most obvious example I think is Star Wars and the Force.
The paranormal, or encounters with the unknown forces of reality, are a universal part of the shaman experience. They don't just make it up, and they don't trick themselves into beleiving in it. Shamans use their psychic abilities on behalf of the tribe... whether it be remote viewing animals to hunt, psychic healing, or weather manipulation via pk. They aid in our survival. So spiritual power or mana is a universal part of world religion and myth, because shamanism is the root of it all. And now it is a part of sci-fi and comic books... whether it be a super-power or a UFO.
The word "real," like the word "believe," is one of those words that's all the more troublesome because everyone thinks they have a very clear and consensual sense of what it means. When a rationalist says that something is real, it generally means that that thing can withstand a certain amount of empirical poking and prodding, including verification by others. However, when push comes to shove, most will admit that we do not have any grip on absolute reality, but instead, various (though often extremely reliable) models. Something that's not real, then, is something that is unnecessary in the best available models of the world.
The world does include subjective experiences. If I dream of an elephant, that dreamed elephant might be more immediate and important to me than a living breathing elephant in some zoo a hundred miles away. So, why when children have bad dreams about monsters do we tell them, "it's not real?" That's just slightly lazy shorthand for, "it does not have the property of persistence that physical creatures have" or "it cannot hurt you in the ways that a physical animal could hurt you."
When it comes right down to it, though, a devoted physicalist must acknowledge that the dream elephant must indeed be just as real as the elephant in the zoo. Both are composed of dynamically changing elements (neural impulses in one case, molecules in another) interacting in extremely complex ways; both are transient; both are applied the descriptor "elephant" based on meeting socially agreed upon descriptive criteria. To say that the mental image of an elephant that my brain really did form is some special category of thing that doesn't really exist materially would actually be a vestige of the Cartesian dualism that a physicalist rejects. But, its acceptable, and in fact quite expected, that the zoo elephant and the dream elephant will have some very different properties. One of them, for instance, tends to persist for many orders of magnitude longer than the other. Only one can eat material peanuts. Only one can be observed by several different people simultaneously, barring some very sophisticated instrumentation that might be developed in the future. Neither of them can necessarily fly, but if one is observed to fly (or talk, etc.), we know which one it must be.
I have no objection to your claim that the paranormal and the unknown forces of reality are part of many shamens' experience (I'm less certain about that being "universal"). Just as my dream elephant is part of my experience. All things paranormal seem, in fact, as far as I can tell, to be matters of various people's experience.
But having acknowledged that, as with the elephants, we can then ask about the properties of those experienced things. Can the shaman's experience of seeing animals by remote viewing help the tribe hunt?
Yes! Hunting is an inherently uncertain venture requiring cooperation and some degree of enthusiasm, and hunters who have a shaman's assurance that game has been remote-viewed in some place or another are more likely to be able to work together on a course of action conducive to hunting success,
whether or not the shaman's assurance is accurate. It's even more helpful if the shaman actually has an intuitive perception of the patterns of movement of game animals that, when elicited by the mental exercise or ritual of remote viewing, actually does produce better than chance accuracy of predicting where to find game.
Does any of this mean that the shaman can see physical game animals at a remote physical location without visual line of sight? No. No observation of the world to date requires a model in which that is the case. A shaman (or anyone at all) actually passing a test of remote viewing ability such as the JREF conducts on claims of paranormal ability would require such a model (and therefore the rethinking and recasting of a great many existing models), but the shaman's
experience of remote viewing and the tribe's
experience of it being helpful does not accomplish that, any more than my experience of seeing my dream elephant fire cannonballs from its trunk means that the elephants at the zoo can fire cannonballs from their trunks.
So, I don't really care if you call remote viewing, or other paranormal experiences, "real" or not. What matters is that properties you claim the things have, and whether there's evidence those claims are true. (Most rationalists, though, resist calling subjective experiences "real" because too many people assume a bundle of properties to follow automatically from them being called "real," which ain't necessarily so.) The properties of a shaman's remote viewing, to summarize the above, line up thus:
Is experienced: yes.
Can help the tribe hunt: yes.
Can locate game with better than chance reliability: maybe (if associated with shaman's ability to deduce or intuitively perceive patterns of game movement).
Can see physical objects or places beyond the scope of vision: no.
We can tell stories about shamans (or Jedi) who can see physical objects or places beyond the scope of vision, just as I can tell stories about a talking elephant that saved the circus from invading Mongol hordes by firing cannonballs from its trunk. They're stories, so their characters can have whatever properties the author wants to give them. That's not evidence, though, of any property of any other elephant in any other story, or zoo.
