The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a seminal work of comparative mythology by
Joseph Campbell. In this book, Campbell discusses his theory of the journey of
the archetypal hero found in world mythologies.
Since publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theory has
been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists.
The best known is perhaps George Lucas, who has acknowledged Campbell's
influence on the Star Wars films. The Joseph Campbell Foundation and New
World Library issued a new edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in July
2008 as part of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series of books, audio
and video recordings. In 2011, Time placed the book in its list of the 100
best and most influential books written in English since the magazine was
founded in 1923. Summary
Campbell explores the theory that important myths from around the world
which have survived for thousands of years all share a fundamental structure,
which Campbell called the monomyth. In a well-known quote from the introduction
to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell summarized the monomyth:
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. In laying out the monomyth, Campbell
describes a number of stages or steps along this journey. The hero starts in
the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange
powers and events. If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world,
the hero must face tasks and trials, and may have to face these trials alone, or
may have assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe
challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the
hero may achieve a great gift, which often results in the discovery of
important self-knowledge. The hero must then decide whether to return with this
boon, often facing challenges on the return journey. If the hero is
successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world.
Very few myths contain all of these stages—some myths contain many of the
stages, while others contain only a few; some myths may have as a focus only one
of the stages, while other myths may deal with the stages in a somewhat
different order. These stages may be organized in a number of ways, including
division into three sections: Departure, Initiation and Return. "Departure" deals
with the hero venturing forth on the quest, "Initiation" deals with the
hero's various adventures along the way, and "Return" deals with the hero's
return home with knowledge and powers acquired on the journey.
The classic examples of the monomyth relied upon by Campbell and other
scholars include the stories of Osiris, Prometheus, the Buddha, Moses, and
Jesus, although Campbell cites many other classic myths from many cultures
which rely upon this basic structure. The alleged similarities between these
shared hero legends is one of the basic arguments of the Christ myth theory.
While Campbell offers a discussion of the hero's journey by using the Freudian
concepts popular in the 1940s and 1950s, the monomythic structure is not tied to
these concepts. Similarly, Campbell uses a mixture of Jungian archetypes,
unconscious forces, and Arnold van Gennep's structuring of rites of passage
rituals to provide some illumination. However, this pattern of the hero's
journey influences artists and intellectuals worldwide, suggesting a
basic usefulness for Campbell's insights not tied to academic categories and
mid-20th century forms of analysis. Background
Campbell used the work of early 20th century theorists to develop his model
of the hero, including Freud, Carl Jung, and Arnold Van Gennep. Campbell also
looked to the work of ethnographers James Frazer and Franz Boas and
psychologist Otto Rank. Campbell called this journey of the hero
the monomyth. Campbell was a noted scholar of James Joyce, and Campbell
borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake. In addition, Joyce's
Ulysses was also highly influential in the structuring of The Hero with a
Thousand Faces. = Publishing history=
The book was originally published by the Bollingen Foundation through Pantheon
Press as the seventeenth title in the Bollingen Series. This series was taken
over by Princeton University Press, who published The Hero through 2006.
Originally issued in 1949 and revised by Campbell in 1968, The Hero with a
Thousand Faces has been reprinted a number of times. Reprints issued after
the release of Star Wars in 1977 used the image of Mark Hamill as Luke
Skywalker on the cover. Princeton University Press issued a commemorative
printing of the second edition in 2004 on the occasion of the joint centennial
of Campbell's birth and the Press's founding with an added foreword by
Clarissa Pinkola Estés. A third edition, compiled by the Joseph
Campbell Foundation and published by New World Library, was released as the
twelfth title in the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series in July 2008.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces has been translated into over twenty languages,
including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Chinese, Turkish, Dutch, Greek, Danish, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Czech,
Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Russian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Hebrew, and has
sold well over a million copies worldwide.
The hero's journey and women One of the questions that has been
raised about the way that Campbell laid out the monomyth of the hero's journey
in Hero with a Thousand Faces was that it focused on the masculine journey.
Although this was not altogether true—the princess of the Grimms' "The
Frog Prince" tale and the saga of the hero-goddess Inanna's descent into the
underworld feature prominently in Campbell's schema—it was, nonetheless, a
question that has been raised about the book since its publication.
Late in his life, Campbell had this to say:
Artists influenced by the work In Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and
Personal Transformation, a book drawn from Campbell's late lectures and
workshops, he says about artists and the monomyth:
The Hero with a Thousand Faces has influenced a number of artists,
musicians, poets, and filmmakers, including Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and
George Lucas. Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead had
long noted Campbell's influence and agreed to participate in a seminar with
him in 1986, entitled "From Ritual to Rapture".
Stanley Kubrick introduced Arthur C. Clarke to the book during the writing of
2001: A Space Odyssey. George Lucas' deliberate use of
Campbell's theory of the monomyth in the making of the Star Wars movies is well
documented. On the DVD release of the famous colloquy between Campbell and
Bill Moyers, filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch and broadcast in 1988 on PBS as
The Power of Myth, Campbell and Moyers discussed Lucas's use of The Hero with a
Thousand Faces in making his films. Lucas himself discussed how Campbell's
work affected his approach to storytelling and film-making.
Dan Harmon, the creator of the TV show Community, has stated that he has used
the monomyth as inspiration for his work.
Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood film producer and writer, wrote a memo for
Disney Studios on the use of The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a guide for
scriptwriters; this memo influenced the creation of such films as Aladdin, The
Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast. Vogler later expanded the memo and
published it as the book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers,
which became the inspiration for a number of successful Hollywood films and
is believed to have been used in the development of the Matrix series.
Novelist Richard Adams acknowledges a debt to Campbell's work, and
specifically to the concept of the monomyth. In his best known work,
Watership Down, Adams uses extracts from The Hero with a Thousand Faces as
chapter epigrams. Author Neil Gaiman, whose work is
frequently seen as exemplifying the monomyth structure, says that he started
The Hero with a Thousand Faces but refused to finish it: "I think I got
about half way through The Hero with a Thousand Faces and found myself thinking
if this is true—I don't want to know. I really would rather not know this stuff.
I’d rather do it because it's true and because I accidentally wind up creating
something that falls into this pattern than be told what the pattern is."
Many scholars and reviewers have noted how closely J. K. Rowling's popular
Harry Potter books hewed to the monomyth schema. To date, however, Rowling has
neither confirmed that she used Campbell's work as an inspiration, nor
denied that she ever read The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The sixth and final season of Lost also recognizes Campbell's theories on the
hero. During one of the bonus features, they discuss the journey of the main
characters and how each is a hero in their own way. Before each little
segment of this particular feature, they quote Campbell and then expound on that
particular quote by discussing the various characters.
Singer Janelle Monáe, in the liner notes of her 2010 album, The ArchAndroid,
cites Hero as one of her inspirations for the track "57821".
Mark Rosewater, head designer of the Magic: The Gathering trading card game,
cites "The Hero's Journey" as a major inspiration for "The Weatherlight Saga",
an epic storyarc that went from 1997 to 2001, and spanned multiple cardsets,
comic books, and novels. Jenova Chen, lead designer at
thatgamecompany, also cites "The Hero's Journey" as the primary inspiration for
the game Journey for PlayStation 3. See also
Bildungsroman Otto Rank
Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need
The Golden Bough The Iron Dream
The Seven Basic Plots Footnotes
References Campbell, Joseph. The Hero's Journey:
Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work. Edited and with an Introduction by Phil
Cousineau. Forward by Stuart L. Brown, Executive Editor. New York: Harper and
Row, 1990. Campbell, Joseph and Henry Morton
Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, 1944.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1st edition, Bollingen
Foundation, 1949. 2nd edition, Princeton University Press. 3rd edition, New World
Library, 2008. Campbell, Joseph. Pathways to Bliss:
Mythology and Personal Transformation. Edited by David Kudler. Novato,
California: New World Library, 2004. Ford, Clyde W. The Hero with an African
Face. New York: Bantam, 2000. Henderson, Mary. Star Wars: The Magic of
Myth. Companion volume to the exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum of
the Smithsonian Institution. New York: Bantam, 1997.
Larsen, Stephen and Robin Larsen. Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind. Rochester,
Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2002. Manganaro, Marc. Myth, Rhetoric, and the
Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, and Campbell. New
Haven: Yale, 1992. Moyers, Bill and Joseph Campbell. The
Power of Myth. Anchor: Reissue edition, 1991. ISBN 0-385-41886-8
Pearson, Carol and Katherine Pope. The Female Hero in American and British
Literature. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1981. Vogler, Christopher. The Writer's
Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese
Productions, 1998. External links
Information on the 2008 third edition from the Joseph Campbell Foundation
Monomyth from UC Berkeley The Archetype of the Hero's Journey from
Web English Teacher A Practical Guide to THE HERO WITH A
THOUSAND FACES at the Wayback Machine The Hero Cycle as seen in the Star Wars
saga Star Wars Origins - Joseph Campbell
The Matrix - Joseph Campbell Monomyth on YouTube