Joseph Campbell (1904 to 1987) was an American scholar of comparative mythology whose book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) argued that myths from all over the world share one underlying story, the ‘monomyth’ or hero’s journey: a hero leaves the familiar world, meets wonders and trials, is changed, and returns with something to give their community. Therapeutic Shamanism uses the hero’s journey to show how journeys are co-created, and draws a clear line between the hero’s journey, which is largely an under-worldUnder-world. The realm of our repressed and disowned psychic energies, personal and collective: Jung’s Shadow and the unconscious, mapped shamanically. A part of the middle-world, created by the Fall, not the Lower-World, and psychotherapy’s proper territory rather than shamanism’s. Read the full answer quest, and journeys to the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer.
Who was Joseph Campbell? #
An American writer and teacher who spent his life comparing the myths of the world. He was born in White Plains, New York, in 1904, and taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College for thirty-eight years, from 1934 until he retired in 1972. His best-known book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, came out in 1949. It was followed by The Masks of God, four volumes published between 1959 and 1968 that trace mythology from the earliest peoples to modern times, and by many other books and lectures.1
His widest audience came after his death. The Power of Myth, a series of television conversations with the journalist Bill Moyers, was first broadcast in 1988, the year after he died in Honolulu, and a companion book followed. It was there that many people first heard his advice to ‘follow your bliss’, which he drew from the Hindu idea of being, consciousness and bliss; later he is said to have grumbled that he should have said ‘follow your blisters’. His thinking drew on the psychologist Carl Jung, on the novelist James Joyce, and on his friend the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer.1 See Who was Carl Jung?
What is the hero’s journey? #
The story Campbell found under thousands of myths. He borrowed the word ‘monomyth’ from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for the idea that myths thousands of years old, from all around the world, are versions of one great story. A hero sets off from the everyday world into a world of wonder, meets supernatural forces there, overcomes challenges against the odds, and comes back changed, with knowledge and power to help their community.2
Campbell set the story out in three movements, departure, initiation and return, with seventeen stages along the way. They run from the call to adventure and the refusal of the call, through supernatural aid, the crossing of the first threshold and the belly of the whale, the road of trials and the meeting with the goddess, to the ultimate boon, the magic flight, the crossing of the return threshold and becoming master of the two worlds.2 A simpler telling has four movements: separation, initiation, transformation and return. In more everyday terms it starts with a naive, inexperienced person; an event takes them out of their comfort zone; they set off on a quest, find help and helpers, are tested, meet an adversary, discover things are not what they seemed, pass through love, loss, death and resurrection, succeed at a cost, are changed, come of age, and return to the ordinary world to a happy ending, though not always happy in the way they would have pictured it at the start.3
Not every myth carries every stage. Some carry a few, and some dwell on just one. Along the way the stories share a cast of archetypal characters: the good or bad mother and father, the hero or heroine, the shadow, friends and familiars, a wise helper, the adversary, the betrayer, the non-human beings of forest and fairy, and the ancient powers. Each culture dresses these figures in its own clothes, as kings and queens, beggars, blacksmiths, innkeepers, weavers, woodcutters, fisher folk, hermits, outlaws, wizards and witches, gate-keepers, and so on.3
How does Therapeutic Shamanism use the hero’s journey? #
To show how what we meet in a journey is co-created. In its raw form the hero’s journey lives just beyond our perception, at the edges of what we can grasp. To bring it into consciousness and tell it as a story, people have to fill it in with particular imagery and narrative, and different cultures choose very different content to do that. The pattern is the same; the clothing changes.4
The shamanic realms work in the same way. Their beings and energies exist independently of us, but in their raw form they are too vast and formless to relate to, so we shape them into imagery we can meet and work with. A journey is therefore not simply made up, like a guided visualisation, and it is not a photograph of something fixed either. It is a meeting between what is there and what we bring. This is why it is vital to be as aware as we can of the ideas we carry in with us, since hierarchical thinking brought into a journey shapes what we find there. See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
Is the hero’s journey the same as a shamanic journey? #
Not quite, and the difference is one of the most useful things the comparison shows. The hero’s journey is largely an under-world quest. Its trials, monsters and treasures belong to the realm of the personal and collective unconscious, the under-world, which is part of the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer. Shamanic journeys are not confined to the under-world. They reach the Lower-World and the Upper-World and meet the archetypal energies there, which also exist independently of us and also have to be clothed in imagery before we can work with them.5
So a journey that feels like a hero’s quest, full of tests, guardians and dark caves, may well still be in the under-world, and the Lower-World itself is a place of love, safety and healing. Knowing the difference stops people mistaking the one for the other. See What is the under-world, and how is it different from the Lower-World?
What kind of hero do we need? #
A different one from most of the heroes our culture offers. It is human nature to need stories about heroes and heroines, whether a grandmother we looked up to, Nelson Mandela, Luke Skywalker or Hermione Granger. Their role is to inspire us beyond our selfish urges, fears and doubts, and to show us how to serve and save the community. Since the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, though, many hero stories are about conflict and violence, and the hero inspires through conquest and battles won.6
In the golden-age stories of hunter-gatherer peoples, the heroes are different. They are heroic for showing people how to live well, and how to serve not just themselves but the community, including, crucially, the wider-than-human community, by living as an interconnected part of the web of life. And good heroes are flawed. That is the point of them. Like Human Lower-World GuidesHuman Lower-World Guide. A face put on the human Oversoul: the Ancestors met through an individual form, genuinely other than us, chosen from pre-Fall hunter-gatherer humanity. Related to as a teacher, never a master. Read the full answer, they are there to show us not how to be flawless gods but how to be a human being.6 See What is the Fall? and What are Human Guides?
What did Campbell say about peak experiences? #
Something more interesting than people expect. In The Power of Myth, asked about the peak moments of his life, Campbell did not name anything obviously spiritual. He named two races he ran as a young athlete, beautiful because he was completely immersed in doing something wholly competently.7
Read in Therapeutic Shamanism’s terms, the point is not that life is about seeking out such experiences. It is not their thrill that matters but their message. They are telling us that when we are true to our Soul, to what we are meant to be, something comes through us: a sense of being part of something bigger, and a deep feeling of rightness, a ‘harmony of being’. Athletes, mountaineers, musicians, painters, mathematicians and philosophers all describe it, and it can come around a campfire, in dancing or listening to the ocean. And the more a life is shaped around Soul, the less the peak experiences matter, because what grows instead is a quieter, more constant and grounded rightness. This is also where the difference between Soul and Spirit, and the equal importance of each, becomes clear.7 See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body? and Who was Abraham Maslow, and what did he get right and wrong?
What do critics say about the monomyth? #
Campbell’s pattern has been loved by storytellers and questioned by scholars. Folklorists were amongst the sharpest critics. Barre Toelken wrote that Campbell could build the monomyth “only by citing those stories that fit his preconceived mold”, and Alan Dundes called him a non-expert in folklore and the idea of the archetype harmful to its serious study. Others, such as the anthropologist Muriel Crespi, found the model too abstract, stripped of the cultural setting that gives each myth its meaning. Feminist writers noted that the journey is centred on a male hero; the therapist Maureen Murdock answered with The Heroine’s Journey (1990), and others have proposed journeys of their own. The science-fiction writer David Brin, who has used the pattern himself, warned that it can lend support to tyranny.8
On the other side, Campbell himself wrote that many tales take up only one or two elements of the pattern and enlarge on them, so he never claimed that every myth holds every stage. The writer Phil Cousineau, introducing a revised edition of Campbell’s conversations, calls the monomyth a ‘meta myth’, a pattern behind stories rather than a rule they all follow. And psychologists have found something in it. A 2023 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology reported that people who saw their own life story as a hero’s journey felt more meaning in life. Filmmakers and writers have found it workable too. George Lucas read Campbell whilst drafting Star Wars, and the screenwriter Christopher Vogler turned the pattern into a guide for storytellers.9
