The Monomyth
The idea of the monomyth, also known as the hero’s journey, is so massively important as a method of storytelling across the globe and so completely integrated into our cultural consciousness, many writers create stories that fit into its norms without even realizing they’re doing it. We have seen this story layout hundreds of times, and yet it seems new with every retelling. The monomyth is so ubiquitous as to be universal while still rooting itself deeply into us as a story that each individual wants to be told.
If you’re a storyteller, the monomyth and its components are worth learning, so dig in!
THE DEPARTURE
1.) The Call to Adventure: The hero starts off in a mundane situation of normality from which some information is received that acts as a call to head off into the unknown.
2.) Refusal of the Call: Often when the call is given, the future hero first refuses to heed it. This may be from a sense of duty or obligation, fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, or any of a range of reasons that work to hold the person in his or her current circumstances.
3.) Supernatural Aid: Once the hero has committed to the quest, consciously or unconsciously, his guide and magical helper appears, or becomes known. More often than not, this supernatural mentor will present the hero with one or more talismans or artifacts that will aid them later in their quest.
4.) The Crossing of the First Threshold: This is the point where the person actually crosses into the field of adventure, leaving the known limits of his or her world and venturing into an unknown and dangerous realm where the rules and limits are not known.
5.) Belly of the Whale: The belly of the whale represents the final separation from the hero’s known world and self. By entering this stage, the person shows willingness to undergo a metamorphosis.
THE INITIATION
6.) The Road of Trials: The road of trials is a series of tests, tasks, or ordeals that the person must undergo to begin the transformation. Often the person fails one or more of these tests, which often occur in threes.
7.) The Meeting with the Goddess: This is the point when the person experiences a love that has the power and significance of the all-powerful, all encompassing, unconditional love that a fortunate infant may experience with his or her mother. This is a very important step in the process and is often represented by the person finding the other person that he or she loves most completely.
8.) Woman as Temptress: In this step, the hero faces those temptations, often of a physical or pleasurable nature, that may lead him or her to abandon or stray from his or her quest, which does not necessarily have to be represented by a woman. Woman is a metaphor for the physical or material temptations of life, since the hero-knight was often tempted by lust from his spiritual journey.
9.) Atonement with the Father: In this step the person must confront and be initiated by whatever holds the ultimate power in his or her life. In many myths and stories this is the father, or a father figure who has life and death power. This is the center point of the journey. All the previous steps have been moving in to this place, all that follow will move out from it. Although this step is most frequently symbolized by an encounter with a male entity, it does not have to be a male; just someone or thing with incredible power.
10.) Apotheosis: When someone dies a physical death, or dies to the self to live in spirit, he or she moves beyond the pairs of opposites to a state of divine knowledge, love, compassion and bliss. A more mundane way of looking at this step is that it is a period of rest, peace and fulfillment before the hero begins the return.
11.) The Ultimate Boon: The ultimate boon is the achievement of the goal of the quest. It is what the person went on the journey to get. All the previous steps serve to prepare and purify the person for this step, since in many myths the boon is something transcendent like the elixir of life itself, or a plant that supplies immortality, or the holy grail.
THE RETURN
12.) Refusal of the Return: Having found bliss and enlightenment in the other world, the hero may not want to return to the ordinary world to bestow the boon onto his fellow man.
13.) The Magical Flight: Sometimes the hero must escape with the boon, if it is something that the gods have been jealously guarding. It can be just as adventurous and dangerous returning from the journey as it was to go on it.
14.) Rescue from Without: Just as the hero may need guides and assistants to set out on the quest, oftentimes he or she must have powerful guides and rescuers to bring them back to everyday life, especially if the person has been wounded or weakened by the experience.
15.) The Crossing of the Return Threshold: The trick in returning is to retain the wisdom gained on the quest, to integrate that wisdom into a human life, and then maybe figure out how to share the wisdom with the rest of the world.
16.) Master of Two Worlds: This step is usually represented by a transcendental hero like Jesus or Gautama Buddha. For a human hero, it may mean achieving a balance between the material and spiritual. The person has become comfortable and competent in both the inner and outer worlds.
17.) Freedom to Live: Mastery leads to freedom from the fear of death, which in turn is the freedom to live. This is sometimes referred to as living in the moment, neither anticipating the future nor regretting the past.
These are Joseph Campbell’s 17 steps to the “hero’s journey”, or the monomyth. This is not a checklist, nor is it a blueprint. It’s…a guideline, if anything.
(Yes, yes, I’ve started reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Not to help me with my writing, but to look inside the human desire to go on adventures. It’s fascinating and is filling me to the brim with wanderlust.)
A few links for further research:
- TV Tropes’ Article on The Hero’s Journey
- Wikipedia’s Article on Monomyth
- ThinkQuest’s Article on The Heroic Monomyth
- Changing Minds’ Article on Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ Monomyth
- TedEd’s Video “What Makes a Hero?”
- Another Video on the Hero’s Journey/Monomyth
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
-C
Somewhere, someone must have written a critique on this as the MALE hero monomyth.
I’m not trying to go feminist critique on this. I mean it as a writing critique, because the idea of these stages is that they symbolise the coming of age of a young man. They do not symbolise the coming of age of a young woman because historically she didn’t NEED an externalized ritual or rite of passage. She shed her first blood and bam, there you were. First threshold crossed. So her story followed an entirely different pattern.
But as of this point in time, we still don’t really have the ‘quintessential female story.’ I find it an interesting exercise to try to imagine what that might look like. The meeting with the Goddess would go differently, for certain.
I imagine somebody would try to throw childbirth in there, but that is in fact the stereotypical female story, not the quintessential one.