Herald (Vogler)

Definition

Vogler’s Herald is the function that announces. Something arrives from outside the hero’s settled life, a messenger, a letter, a summons, a stranger with a warning, a telephone call, a death, and with it the knowledge that things cannot stay as they are. The Herald does not have to be a person, and it does not have to mean well. Vogler allows heralds that are friendly, hostile or neither, and he lets other functions borrow the role: a Mentor may deliver the challenge, a villain may issue it, an event may simply happen. What makes something a Herald is the job it does at the start of a movement in the story, which is to make the call and so give the hero a reason to act.

Vogler adds an inner reading in which heralds voice a need for change already stirring inside the hero. As with the rest of his list, that reading is a storyteller’s analogy. The Herald has no counterpart among Jung’s archetypes, and the classical entry nearest to it, the hero, is about something else.

History

The word is Joseph Campbell’s. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) the frog that rises from the spring in the Grimms’ “Frog King” is the first example: as an early showing of powers about to break in, it “can be termed the ‘herald’”, and the crisis of its appearance is the call to adventure (part I, chapter I, section 1). Campbell adds that the herald is often dark, loathsome or frightening, judged evil by the world. For Campbell the herald belongs to one stage; it is a feature of the call, not a character that returns.

Christopher Vogler’s studio memo, “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (Walt Disney, dated 1985 on the copy he later posted), describes the call to adventure through Princess Leia’s holographic message to Obi Wan Kenobi, but names no Herald. The Writer’s Journey (1992) made the Herald a character archetype. In the second edition (1998), the earliest text checked for this entry, its section (pp. 61–64) likens the figure to the heralds of chivalry who carried challenges and proclamations, and offers Hermes as the god of mythology devoted to this function. Under its psychological function, which Vogler heads “Call for Change”, heralds announce that change is needed; under its dramatic function, “Motivation”, they give the hero a challenge and set the story going. He then turns to types:

The Herald may be a positive, negative, or neutral figure. — Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), “Herald”, pp. 61–64

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Book Two returns to the figure at the call to adventure, where the Herald’s work is to knock away the supports of the hero’s ordinary life (p. 101). The summary of the archetypes once posted on Vogler’s site reduces the role to its core: one who brings the call, whether a person or an event. The third (2007) and 25th-anniversary (2020) editions keep the figure under the same name.

Vogler’s claim to have taken the Herald from Campbell holds for the word and for its tie to the call. What he added is the idea that the herald is a mask any character or event can wear at any point in a story, and the reading of the function as an inner call for change.

The debate

There is no classical figure to compare with. Jung’s archetypes personify psychic contents; the Herald names a position in a plot. The nearest Jungian idea is the psychopomp, the guide between conscious and unconscious that Jung associated with Hermes and with the anima and the wise old man, and Vogler’s choice of Hermes as the Herald’s god points that way. But Vogler’s Herald does not guide; it delivers a message and is done, so the resemblance stays at the level of the god’s name.

The published criticism bears on the Herald through its place in the sequence. Every telling of Vogler’s model begins with an ordinary world and a call, so the Herald is the function most exposed to the charge that the model makes stories alike. Vogler met that charge in his 1998 preface, acknowledging the suspicion of artists and critics that the approach was formulaic and replying that it should be a form, not a formula; in the same preface he warned that standard story methods could hammer local differences flat. David Bordwell (2006, p. 34) lists the Herald among the archetypes Vogler devised to fill out his structure, derived from Campbell, Jung and Vogler’s own imagination, and judges the mythic template less influential than the three-act pattern, whose opening disturbance does the Herald’s work without the name. Steven Maras (2017) questions the universalism that treats one story shape, opened by a call, as found in all cultures.

Empirical status

None. The Herald is a craft category and has not been studied as a psychological construct.

Appearances

Connie Neal (2007), building on Vogler’s framework, notes after him that a herald need not be a person. Stuart Voytilla’s Myth and the Movies (1999) applies the function across fifty films, and the New York University course page drawn from Voytilla labels Professor Kantorek in All Quiet on the Western Front as Mentor and Herald together. Final Draft’s guide to the archetypes (2024) gives R2-D2 carrying Leia’s message in Star Wars, and Leonardo Schwartz (2025) Hagrid arriving with Harry’s letter. Story Grid’s page on the herald, which does not name Vogler, adds Gandalf, the White Rabbit and Jacob Marley. All are readings made with Vogler’s term, not the authors’ own categories.

Sources

• Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press edition, 1968. ISBN 978-0-691-01784-6. Part I, chapter I, section 1, “The Call to Adventure”.
• Vogler, C. (1985). A practical guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces (studio memo, Walt Disney). Text and Vogler’s summary of the archetypes as posted on thewritersjourney.com, archived 14 December 2017: http://web.archive.org/web/20171214034841/http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero%27s_journey.htm
• Vogler, C. (1992). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-13-5.
• Vogler, C. (1998). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2nd ed.). Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-70-8. Preface; Book One, “Herald”, pp. 61–64; Book Two, “Call to Adventure”, p. 101. Read via the Internet Archive full-text search: https://archive.org/details/writersjourneymy00vogl
• Vogler, C. (2007). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (3rd ed.). Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-1-932907-36-0.
• Vogler, C. (2020). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (25th-anniversary ed.). Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-1-61593-315-0.
• Bordwell, D. (2006). The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24622-5. P. 34.
• Maras, S. (2017). Towards a critique of universalism in screenwriting criticism. Journal of Screenwriting, 8(2), 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.8.2.177_1
• Neal, C. (2007). Wizards, Wardrobes and Wookiees: Navigating Good and Evil in Harry Potter, Narnia and Star Wars. IVP Books. ISBN 978-0-8308-3366-5.
• Voytilla, S. (1999). Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films. Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-66-1.
• Myth and the movies: Hollywood’s latest craze and oldest inspiration (course page applying Voytilla 1999). New York University. https://pages.nyu.edu/keefer/TimeSpace/myth.html
• Miyamoto, K. (2024, 24 April). Breaking down the character archetypes of the hero’s journey. Final Draft blog. https://www.finaldraft.com/blog/breaking-down-the-character-archetypes-of-the-heros-journey
• Schwartz, L. (2025, 4 July). Leveraging character archetypes. Flawlessly Human. https://flawlesslyhuman.substack.com/p/leveraging-character-archetypes
• Story Grid. The herald archetype. https://storygrid.com/herald-archetype/