Two stories about Joseph Campbell, the influential American comparative mythologist, and outer space. The first story, relayed by an acquaintance of his in a letter to the New York Review of Books: on the occasion of the first moon landings in 1969, Campbell mentioned to a student, apropos of nothing, that the Moon would “be a good place to put the Jews.” The second story is Star Wars.

Campbell is chiefly famous as the originator of the “Monomyth,” as laid out in his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. A kind of cod-structuralist, he thought that all human myth across all recorded culture had the same basic structure. Campbell argued that what all worthwhile cultures have in common is an admiration for the Great Hero, and the story of his Journey.

The Hero’s Journey is this: our protagonist starts out in an ordinary, humdrum world; he (and it’s usually a he) leaves to seek adventure, falls into a vast and strange world in which he discovers surprising new abilities, faces his father, defeats evil, fulfills his great destiny, and returns home a changed man. It’s not just that the original Star Wars films display some of this structure: George Lucas was an avid reader of Campbell’s, actively gambling on his theory, reasoning that if that narrative were as universal as he claimed, a film that cleaved tightly to its progression could only be a box office juggernaut.