Hero’s journey

In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero’s journey, or the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.

Earlier figures had proposed similar concepts, including psychologist Otto Rank and amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan, who discuss hero narrative patterns in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis and ritualism.

Eventually, hero myth pattern studies were popularized by Joseph Campbell, who was influenced by Carl Jung’s analytical psychology. Campbell used the monomyth to deconstruct and compare religions. In his famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), he describes the narrative pattern as follows:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.[1]

Campbell’s theories regarding the concept of a “monomyth” have been the subject of criticism from scholars, particularly folklorists (scholars active in folklore studies), who have dismissed the concept as a non-scholarly approach suffering from source-selection bias among other criticisms.

The study of hero myth narratives can be traced back to 1871 with anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor’s observations of common patterns in the plots of heroes’ journeys.[2] In narratology and comparative mythology, others have proposed narrative patterns such as psychoanalyst Otto Rank in 1909 and amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan in 1936.[3]

Both have lists of different cross-cultural traits often found in the accounts of heroes, including mythical heroes.[4][5] According to Robert Segal, “The theories of Rank, Campbell, and Raglan typify the array of analyses of hero myths.”