Humans are a race of storytellers.
Stories are all around us, in every aspect of our society. Some scientists will tell you they’re in our genes. The most effective way we have of transmitting abstract information is through narrative. We think in stories.
Think about your life: you see it as a story, as a linear narrative, whether you realize it or not. It has characters, calls to action, tragedies, triumphs, chapters. You’re the protagonist, other people are allies or antagonists—and they themselves are the protagonists of their own stories. Collectively, all those individual stories are a mosaic of increasingly grand narratives that we to a greater or lesser extent share: the stories of our communities, of our nations, of our species.
This has been the way of things since the dawn of language. Like humans, stories evolved from simple tales that taught us how to avoid predators or find clean water into sprawling epics, striving to explain the experience of consciousness, or the nature of the universe itself. Every religion has at its core a story, or group of stories, on which its adherents agree, from which they draw lessons and a shared identity.
The oldest of these stories we call myths—though that term can be contentious when applied to the stories of living religions, since it has come, perhaps unfairly, to imply untruth. Myths were a vital element in the development of human civilization, possibly in the development of human consciousness. They provided a narrative framework for increasingly large and complex societies to agree upon, to transmit values and beliefs from one generation to the next.
THE MONOMYTH
In the 1930’s and 40’s, literature professor Joseph Campbell was studying comparative mythology and religion at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He began to notice that the myths he was studying shared striking structural similarities, even when separated by vast expanses of time, space, and culture. Heavily influenced by the emerging field of psychology, particularly the theories of Carl Jung, he systematically cataloged and analyzed these similarities.
Over time, he formulated them into a single, grand narrative structure he called the “monomyth,” a term borrowed from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. He claimed that this monomyth structure underlies all human myths in one form or another, regardless of when or where those myths originated. In fact, he went several steps further, arguing that the monomyth underlies human civilization, and the human experience itself.
Campbell believed strongly in Jung’s idea of the “collective unconscious.” In essence, Jung viewed this as a higher psychic realm in which all human beings share a part of their existence, populated by our collective instincts and by archetypes, universal ur-characters exemplifying common traits and motifs that have been with us since the dawn of consciousness. Campbell’s theory was that the monomyth structure was derived from this same source—that myths appeal to us in part because they allow us to touch the divine, to transcend our material world of pain, suffering, and limitation through the power of metaphor.
In 1949, Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, supporting his thesis with examples taken from across the field of his study, and outlining what he believed the structure of the monomyth was. You’ve probably heard of this structure by the name “the hero’s journey.” Campbell’s original version is complex and granular, with seventeen painstakingly detailed stages, their names also replete with metaphor:
The Call to Adventure
Refusal of the Call
Supernatural Aid
The Crossing of the First Threshold
Belly of the Whale
The Road of Trials
The Meeting with the Goddess
Woman as the Temptress
Atonement With the Father/Abyss
Apotheosis
The Ultimate Boon
Refusal of the Return
The Magic Flight
Rescue from Without
The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Master of Two Worlds
Freedom to Live
It can also be boiled down quite simply, in Campbell’s own words. “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.”
Along the way are mentors, challenges, temptations, sacrifices—elements familiar to anyone who’s read an ancient myth. Or indeed, seen a movie. A step-by-step study of the hero’s journey would be interesting, but it would also be its own essay, or series of essays, and that’s not why we’re here. If you want a detailed exploration, and you don’t have time to read Hero with a Thousand Faces, Dan Harmon (creator of Community and Rick and Morty) did an excellent modern-day breakdown of Campbell’s structure, illustrating it using examples from film and TV rather than exclusively from ancient myths. You can find that breakdown here.
That first page contains a very simple outline of the structure that will serve our purposes, but in case you’re really opposed to opening another tab, I’ll paste part of it here:
A character is in a zone of comfort,
But they want something.
They enter an unfamiliar situation,
Adapt to it,
Get what they wanted,
Pay a heavy price for it,
Then return to their familiar situation,
Having changed.
In essence, the hero’s journey is a descent from order into chaos, from life and safety to confront death and danger, from the conscious into the unconscious—then a return to life, to order, bearing the knowledge and experience needed to save the day (or fail to, as the case may be). In myths, this almost always included a supernatural element: the journey into the underworld, sometimes literally, to touch the divine source and return with a fragment of its power. In modern stories, the supernatural element is frequently absent, but the basic structure remains.
Seriously, read the Dan Harmon thing if you’re interested in how this applies to every story you’ve ever seen, read, or heard. It’s pretty fascinating.
Campbell’s work became something of a sensation in the decades following its release, directly influencing legions of writers. Most famously, George Lucas studied Hero with a Thousand Faces and applied its lessons when he was writing Star Wars in the mid-70’s. On the flip side, one of the inspirations for Frank Herbert’s Dune saga was a desire to critique the idea of the hero’s journey, to show how it could all go terribly wrong.
In the years since, there have been criticisms of it as well: that it’s too broad, too vague, that applying it universally is somehow “ethnocentric” or diminishes the “local flavor” of myths. The latter criticism only makes sense if you see the monomyth as essentially Western in character, and allege that Campbell was trying to force it onto non-Western myths where it never fit. That makes the mistake of focusing far too much on the examples Campbell uses to illustrate his point (primarily, though not exclusively, Western myths), and ignores the primeval elements of the structure itself. If you look past his specific examples, it’s very hard to argue that the monomyth doesn’t apply to human stories from across all cultures.
As to its broadness, I think that’s actually one of its brilliant aspects. If it were more specific I might agree with the other criticisms, but its broadness is what lends it so much power. It’s not describing a set of rules that need to be followed; it’s not suggesting that all myths are descended from a single, original super-myth, or from a real event. It’s pointing out a basic structure shared by all myths, by all stories, and by reality itself. It’s a structure that is present in human lives, in our minds and emotions, in our civilizations, in biology, even—to a degree—in physics.
I think some of the critics are, ironically, taking Campbell too literally. It’s male-centric? Of course it is—it was written in 1949. You can replace “hero” with “heroine” and it works just as well. You can replace masculine rites of passage with feminine ones, or have a woman go through the masculine rites, and it works. It might need to be modified—but again, the brilliance is that you can modify it. A good scientific theory (and a good story) is one that is difficult to modify, but this is not a scientific theory. It’s an analysis of a multi-cultural paradigm.
And the criticism that following it makes for boring, samey stories? Nonsense. Only if you follow it slavishly. I would argue that even stories which subvert the structure are, in a sense, following it. Dune subverts it by making Paul Atreides’s hero-journey result in at best a morally ambiguous, at worst a disastrous, outcome. But that still follows the structure. Other stories which attempt to break from it are still bound to it by that attempt. They’re implicitly acknowledging its supremacy by trying to subvert it—in fact, one could argue, the writer/book/film is going on the hero’s journey itself. It is departing from the Place of Safety to delve into the deep, dark Unknown of new narrative concepts, hopefully returning with the New Knowledge that will revitalize the Old World. Take that, cynics!
This is why Dan Harmon’s breakdown is so awesome. He sees beyond the examples Campbell gives, beyond the specific language used, and distills the basic essence of the theory into an easily consumable format. “Atonement with the Father,” for example, doesn’t require an actual father, or a god, or even a person. It can be an entirely personal, entirely internal revelation of one’s failings. It can be atonement with the self—atonement is the key factor. Or it can be expressed by failing to atone—which makes the story a tragedy instead of a comedy (comedy in the traditional sense, meaning a story with a happy ending).
“Supernatural Aid” doesn’t need to be literally supernatural. “Apotheosis” doesn’t require a literal ascent to divinity. The journey can end in success for the hero and doom for society (a la Dune, Lenin), and follow the basic structure. The hero’s journey can end in failure, somewhere toward the bottom of the circle (a la No Country for Old Men), and still be following the basic structure of death and rebirth that, essentially, all things in the universe follow.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the actual universe for a second.
The universe was born, as we know, out of chaos, a soup of unfathomable heat and energy. Over time, the cosmos trended toward the relatively orderly state in which we now exist. But the universe is imperfect. Over time, it will slide inevitably back into chaos. Entropy will increase. As currently accepted models predict, the expansion of the universe will continue to accelerate. This means that everything in it will get further and further apart. Right now, that’s expressed by galaxies drifting away from one another, which has an effect on our lives of precisely nothing.
Eventually, though (hundreds of billions of years eventually), that expansion will result in stars and planets drifting so far apart from one another that they’re alone in the darkness, which will be a pretty significant bummer, if people of any description still exist to be bummed. After about a trillion years, it will be impossible for new stars to form, because there won’t be enough energy concentrated anywhere in existence. Clouds of interstellar gas will be about all there is, until those too drift apart, and we reach the charmingly named “Heat Death” phase, in which each individual photon in the universe will be about as far apart from one another as galaxies currently are. This would be the nadir of the universe’s journey, when all hope seems lost.
But, as in the hero’s journey, this is not the end. Because at that point, at that scale of emptiness, quantum physics—which currently describes the very smallest, micro-scale things in the universe—will become the dominating force in the universe. Its events will reach the macro-scale dominated today by classical physics. And the thing about that is, stuff happens at the quantum level that we don’t understand. Nobody does. Things happen apparently at random, with no discernible cause. Particles can instantaneously tunnel through things that the standard model says they shouldn’t have been able to. Random fluctuations in the vacuum can produce energy. If you wanted to stretch the definition, you might call that Supernatural Aid.
Currently, these things happen at such a minute scale that they go completely unnoticed unless a physicist is specifically looking for them. But in the Heat Death epoch of the universe, each of these events—phenomenally rare though they are—would have the energy potential of the Big Bang. So a single particle in a Heat Dead universe could at any time be Genesis, the seed of a new universe. And the whole thing would start all over again.
If that’s true, that’s probably where we came from. We were born out of the corpse of the universe that existed before us, and they came from the one before them, all the way down in an infinite regression. Of course infinite regression isn’t an explanation, so we imagine there must have been some first universe. But just as we will never know what the first myth was, we will never know what the first universe was.
The point is: this is the way everything works. This stuff is hard-coded into the fabric of reality itself. No wonder people love it! No wonder it’s a formula that sells books and movie tickets—it’s the formula that builds existence. The universe is born and thrives and then declines, and it has to go on a journey through the absolute most bleak thing anyone could possibly imagine—quadrillions of years of sheer, total, infinite emptiness—in order to rediscover the old knowledge by delving into the fantastical quantum realm—and then it comes back, explodes back into existence, revivified. BANG.
THE PURPOSE OF MYTH
So, that’s the structure. That’s what we’re talking about. Now; what purpose does myth serve? We went into it a little already, but it bears some further examination. Campbell explored that idea himself in his later works, coming up with four essential functions:
THE MYSTICAL/METAPHYSICAL
Campbell identified this as the first and in a way most critical function of mythology—that it grants us the power to touch the divine source. “Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of reason and coercion,” he wrote. “The first function of mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is.”
Our world is difficult; our existence is limited and lonely. Whether we realize it or not, each of us wants to rise above those limitations, to be more than we are; to be united with the rest of humanity, with the cosmos, or to recognize that we already are so unified. Good stories remind us of our common humanity, make us feel less alone. Good myths remind us that we are a part of a divine whole, a grand cosmic story that never ends.
THE COSMOLOGICAL FUNCTION
Myths can also explain the nature of that cosmos in a more literal way—describe where the universe came from, who or what brought it into being, who or what created humanity, and what our place in that cosmos is. Typically, this function was more important in pre-modern myths, before the discovery of science allowed us to make a more systematic analysis of our universe. Sometimes, this has led to conflict between scientific and myth-based views of the world. However, these conflicts are not always irreconcilable, and this function still has a place in modern religion and mythology. The Catholic Church, for example, has officially accepted the reality of evolution, of the age of the universe, etc, folding these ideas into their religious cosmology and adapting their core myths to fit reality rather than rejecting it.
THE SOCIOLOGICAL FUNCTION
We referenced this function earlier: the ability of myth to transmit values and moral beliefs from one generation to the next. Traditionally, the purpose of these myths was to uphold and validate existing social orders—to explain why monarchy was the wisest form of rule, why the roles of men and women were the way they were, why it was the lot of peasants to work the fields, and so on. Campbell referred to these conservative myths as “Right Hand Path,” in which social orders were often divinely ordained.
He also identified another form of myth, which he called “Left Hand Path.” These stories, which in modern parlance we might refer to as “revolutionary” in character, required the hero to transcend existing social orders in service to a higher divine truth. These myths were rarer than their “Right Hand Path” cousins in the long eras of human history where social change was extremely gradual, but they still served a vital purpose.
THE PEDAGOGICAL/PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION
The most personal of myth’s functions is to guide us as individuals through the stages in our own lives. Sometimes this could be literal—a story might dramatize real rites of passage, for example—and sometimes they could be metaphorical or allegorical. This is a function served by most stories to this day, even non-mythical ones. College and other coming-of-age movies are essentially (more or less realistic) stories about real-life rites of passage; on the metaphorical side, we identify with heroes in action films not because we expect to go through the same literal battles, but because we can see our own more mundane struggles mirrored in theirs.
Campbell also tracked the evolution of myths throughout human history, the way their focus and purposes changed across time. He classified four ages of myth:
THE WAY OF THE ANIMAL POWERS
This was the earliest known form of myth, originating in hunter/gatherer societies tens of thousands of years ago. The religions of these societies were animistic, meaning they believed that all things in the natural world, from plants to rocks to storms, had souls just as humans and animals did. The myths of these societies were based around the belief that all souls, all life, came from a single divine source separate from the material world, and that in death, these souls would return to the source, often being re-born in the future. Rituals, such as those performed over the body of a hunted animal, could allow humans to communicate with the divine source.
THE WAY OF THE SEEDED EARTH
The religions and myths of early agrarian societies began to focus more on the cycle of life on the material plane, being particularly influenced by the death-rebirth cycle that fueled crop growth. Imagery of seeding, coupling, tilling and sowing became common. Veneration of spirits persisted, but gradually came to focus more on higher divine figures, particularly Mother Earth and God the Father-type deities.
THE WAY OF THE CELESTIAL LIGHTS
This period, encompassing the first high civilizations, was characterized by a greater focus on the cosmos and man’s place within it. Study of the movements of stars and planets became more common, as did sky-god imagery in myths. Over time, the balance between the divine feminine and the divine masculine that existed in previous civilizations was disrupted, in almost all cases with the feminine being subordinated to the masculine. Campbell attributes this process to invasions by barbarian tribes who venerated male warrior gods above all others. Though the historical evidence for this theory is thin, the fact that the process occurred is undeniable. The most pronounced example Campbell gives is from Judaeo-Christian mythology; he believes that Eve and the Serpent were based on venerated fertility gods from a previous religion, only becoming sinful or demonic figures as a result of this process.
THE WAY OF MAN
This final period of myth Campbell identifies with the European Middle Ages, leading into the modern era. Myth in this era tended to focus even more on the material world; while supernatural creatures such as monsters and spirits still featured prominently, God (the divine) tended to be an indirect influence, rather than appearing in person to guide events. The focus, as the era’s name suggests, had become man.
In European Medieval myths at least, romantic love also became a central feature (think of Tristan and Isolde, the Arthurian myths, etc). Along with devotion to God, love was the primary method by which humans could interact with the divine—thus making their interaction with the divine a material and interpersonal one, rather than a solitary spiritual one.
THE MODERN MYTH?
What has the character of myth become in our present modern/postmodern/metamodern age? According to Campbell (writing in 1949), it’s debatable whether myth still exists at all. At that time he believed that the work of artists had partially supplanted the role of myth in society. However, even if stories in novels and films conformed in some broad sense to the monomyth structure he’d identified, they almost always fell short. Myth held a sacred position in society, and in Campbell’s mind. To him, only a handful of great artists—novelists like Joyce and Thomas Mann, visual artists like Picasso—could match that depth of meaning, that ability to touch the divine. These artists he characterized as the last of a dying breed, whose kind was likely never to be seen again. Myth, Campbell believed, was dying.
He feared that civilization might die with it. In Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell discusses what Western civilization has lost through its increasing rejection of myth—without connecting that to a loss of the values of a specific religion—and I, to an extent, agree. The book argues that there are important psychological lessons imparted by seemingly primitive rites of passage, or on a grander level by the acceptance and embracing of the wider whole of the universe, and the role of the individual within that cosmos. If we lose those lessons, and others like them, we may lose all the things that bind us together and make civilization possible.
The question is: was Campbell right? Did myth die?
The easy answer is no. We already know that George Lucas was heavily influenced by Campbell in writing Star Wars, which many favorable critics have characterized as a modern myth. Campbell’s monomyth structure, and variations on it like Harmon’s, are taught today in film schools and literature courses, giving aspiring screenwriters and novelists the tools to craft their own latter-day myths. Any fan of Marvel’s MCU will likely tell you that myth might have been dying in the mid-20th century, but it’s alive and well in the 21st.
However—like most easy answers, this one isn’t telling the whole story. We can identify the basic monomyth structure in everything from the life cycle of microscopic organisms to episodes of Two and a Half Men. That doesn’t mean these things are myths. Studying the structure and applying it to your screenplay about a talking dog that solves crimes doesn’t make that a conduit to the discovery of transcendent truths.
Remember that in Campbell’s formula, a myth must fulfill four basic functions: the mystical, the cosmological, the sociological, and the psychological. Almost every single modern film or novel that adheres to the structure falls short in, or is completely missing, one or more of those functions. The aforementioned college sex-romp movies fill the psychological function, but none of the others (arguably the sociological). Lifetime movies about porn addictions leading to murder ham-fistedly fill the sociological and psychological functions, but not the cosmological or the mystical.
Even outwardly very mythic properties, particularly superhero films like those of the MCU, fall short. The Avengers movies are a great ride; they even include some very strong emotional moments and moral lessons with the action. But is there a truly metaphysical dimension to them? Aside from the surface-level mysticism of Doctor Strange waving his hands around to make glowing portals, I would say no. The cosmological dimension is also entirely absent, and while this is the least important dimension in the post-scientific revolution world, it’s still a dimension. I’m a big Batman fan, but even sweeping epics like Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy or Matt Reeves’s 2022 film fall short in these dimensions (though I think Batman in general comes as close to modern myth as you can get without fulfilling those essential functions).
So what does that leave us with? Was Campbell right in 1949 after all?
I don’t think so. But modern myths are a much rarer breed than they at first appear. In the world of science fiction and fantasy literature, myth might seem to be our bread and butter. George Lucas was not the first, and would by no means be the last to try his hand at creating a modern myth. Almost all of them fail for one reason or another.
Perhaps it’s just that they’re all trying too hard. There is one work of SFF that I think has the strongest case for being considered a modern myth. And the interesting thing is, though it wouldn’t be published until 1954, its author finished writing it in 1949—the same year that Hero with A Thousand Faces was published. Campbell’s work didn’t influence it at all.
I’m talking of course about J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Lord of the Rings. It’s to that mighty work that we’ll turn next week.
Wonderful..looking forward to next week?