Abstract:

Carl Gustav Jung says that the individuals record everything about the society they live in within their memory, which is a concept he refers to as collective unconscious. The elements of the collective unconscious are the product of all humanity's past experiences and have been inherited from generation to generation. Joseph Campbell, one of Jung's followers, analyzed mythical and legendary texts from different nations focusing on the hero archetype within the concept of the collective unconscious; As a result, he concluded that the hero experienced a similar adventure in all the mentioned texts. This adventure, known as the hero's journey, represents the circularity of the path that the main character travels, both figuratively and literally. As a matter of fact, after certain repetitive stages, the hero returns to where they started; Even in stories whose plots seem to be different, the basic adventure of the hero includes similar stages. It is seen that the stages that the hero goes through in his cyclical journey, which Campbell calls the Monomyth Theory, are common not only in various narrative genres but also in the masnavi genre. In this context, Lamiî Çelebi's Vamık u Azra Masnavi, one of the 16th century love masnavis, was examined based on the stages of separation, initiation and return, which are considered core units of the monomyth.

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