Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, claims that the hero myths of the world are versions of one story. He called that story the monomyth, a word he took from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The book changed how films and novels are planned, and it is still the first thing most people mean by "the hero's journey". As an account of myth it is weaker than its reputation suggests. Both of these are true, and the second is easier to see once the first is clear.
The claim
In Campbell's account, a hero leaves the ordinary world, crosses into a region of wonder, faces forces there and wins a decisive victory, then comes home with something that helps the people left behind. The book divides the journey into three parts, the departure, the initiation and the return, and those into seventeen stages. Among them are the call to adventure, the refusal of the call, the crossing of the first threshold, the road of trials and the return as master of two worlds.
Campbell drew his examples from Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Native American, Celtic and many other traditions, and read them through the psychology of Freud and especially Jung. For him the pattern recurred because it came from the human psyche itself: the myths were the mind describing its own path from childhood dependence to adult responsibility.
He was not the first to see a pattern. Otto Rank, a student of Freud, had published The Myth of the Birth of the Hero in 1909, and Lord Raglan listed recurring features of hero tales in The Hero in 1936. Campbell's version was broader and more ambitious, and it was the one that lasted.
For a stage-by-stage summary of the book, see my summary of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
What it gets right
The pattern is real. A great many stories, ancient and modern, do send someone away from home, test them and bring them back changed. Leaving, struggling and returning is a shape that human lives often take, so it is no surprise that human stories take it too.
The pattern is also useful, which is why it spread. George Lucas said Campbell's work shaped Star Wars. In 1985 Christopher Vogler, then a story analyst at Disney, circulated a memo applying Campbell's stages to screenwriting, and later expanded it into the book The Writer's Journey. For a writer, the stages work as a checklist of moments an audience has learned to expect, and that is worth having.
For a reader, the book trains a kind of attention. Once you know the shape, you notice it, and noticing it lets you compare stories from places that never met. That is the book at its best: a way of seeing resemblances you would otherwise miss.
What it leaves out
The stories that do not fit. Campbell chose his examples, and he chose them to illustrate the pattern. Episodes that did not fit were often left out, and stages were described loosely enough that very different events could fill the same slot. A pattern with seventeen loose slots can be found in almost any long story. When nearly everything confirms a theory, the theory is telling you less than it seems.
The differences. In The Dichotomy of the Self I put it this way: a resemblance may be real while the differences remain decisive. A Buddhist story of liberation from the self and a Greek story of a hero winning glory can both be cut to fit the departure, the initiation and the return. What each one is for, what it values and what counts as success in it are close to opposite. Arranging them in a common structure makes the resemblance visible and the difference disappear. You should be as wary of a universal story that absorbs every exception as of a psychological theory that can never meet a counterexample.
Whose journey it is. Campbell's heroes are mostly men, and the women in the stages are mostly goddesses, temptresses and prizes. In 1990 the therapist Maureen Murdock published The Heroine's Journey, arguing that the pattern did not describe the lives of the women she worked with. Whatever you make of her alternative, the objection points at something real: a pattern drawn from one kind of hero may be offered as the shape of everyone's life.
Why the pattern recurs. Campbell's answer was the psyche, and behind it Jung's idea of shared archetypes. Recurrence has other explanations that are at least as plain. People everywhere are born, grow up, leave home, face danger and grow old, so their stories may share a shape because their lives do. Stories also travel between cultures, so similar tales may share an ancestor. And some of the similarity is supplied by the interpreter who sorts the material into categories. These explanations do not exclude each other, but their existence means recurrence alone cannot prove a collective unconscious.
The danger in your own story
The hero's journey has become a way people describe their own lives, in therapy, in business books and on stage. That use deserves the same care.
A story can organize an experience of loss or renewal and give it a meaning that a plain description leaves untouched. It can also narrow what you see. Once you have cast yourself as the hero, you may become very efficient at casting everyone who gets in your way as the villain. A colleague who disagrees becomes a threshold guardian, a partner who wants something different becomes a temptation to refuse, and the people who might have been right become obstacles to be overcome. The shape that makes a film satisfying can make a life harder to see clearly.
The book is worth reading as a map of resemblances. It is a poor guide to what any single myth, or any single life, is about.
Further reading
The chapter notes on this site follow the book in order, from the prologue through the departure, the initiation and the return to the epilogue on myth and society. For Jung, whose ideas sit underneath the book, see How to Read Carl Jung.
The Dichotomy of the Self takes up Campbell in its discussion of myth and the collective unconscious: what recurring stories can show about human nature, and what they cannot prove.
Sources
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949.
- Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, 1909.
- Lord Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, 1936.
- Christopher Vogler, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 1992.
- Maureen Murdock, The Heroine's Journey, 1990.