archetype.guide
archetype.guide

A framework · an authored list

Campbell’s monomyth

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)

Comparative mythology that reads world myth through Jung, Freud and van Gennep’s rites of passage.

In the void, Jung’s archetypes are galaxies. This is a planet: one author’s list, with a name and a date. It has no moons in the void yet; its names are listed below.

The list

The list, in the author’s order

17 names, 1949

The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, The Crossing of the First Threshold, The Belly of the Whale, The Road of Trials, The Meeting with the Goddess, Woman as the Temptress, Atonement with the Father, Apotheosis, The Ultimate Boon, Refusal of the Return, The Magic Flight, Rescue from Without, The Crossing of the Return Threshold, Master of the Two Worlds, Freedom to Live.

Who wrote it, and when

Campbell’s monomyth: the record

Campbell’s book is not a list of archetypes but a claim about narrative: that the hero myths of many cultures share one underlying sequence, which he called the monomyth, a word he credits in a footnote to Joyce. The count of seventeen is Campbell’s own. The first part of the book sets out the adventure in three movements, Departure (five stages), Initiation (six) and Return (six), each stage with its own heading, and he describes the whole as an enlargement of the separation, initiation and return of van Gennep’s rites of passage. Campbell drew on Jung for the psychological reading of the figures the hero meets, and on Freud and Rank for the family drama beneath them, but the sequence is his synthesis of 1949, not Jung’s. The seventeen are the source of every later “journey” model, including Vogler’s twelve stages for screenwriters. The only empirical work near it is Rogers and colleagues (2023), who tested a seven-element reduction of the sequence as a way of seeing one’s own life story; that tests narrative framing, not Campbell’s comparative claim. Campbell died in 1987, the text is in copyright, and the Joseph Campbell Foundation asserts its rights actively.

Sources

  • Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series XVII. Second edition, Princeton University Press, 1968. ISBN 978-0-691-01784-6. Part I, chapters 1–3 (the Prologue “The Monomyth”, the seventeen stage headings, and note 35 on Joyce).
  • Rogers, B. A., et al. (2023). Seeing your life story as a Hero’s Journey increases meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000341
  • Joseph Campbell Foundation. HERO’S JOURNEY, US Reg. No. 4246622, class 41. https://trademarks.justia.com/852/52/hero-s-85252681.html

What this site may say about it: Name the stages, tabulate them, and describe or diagram them in the site’s own words; quote briefly with acknowledgement; no extracts. “Hero’s Journey” is a registered US mark of the Joseph Campbell Foundation (Reg. No. 4246622, class 41), used here only to refer to Campbell’s idea and never as a section, feature or product name.