The Hero's Journey

In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, his cross-cultural study of the mythology of the hero's journey. In it, Campbell identifies the process and stages of the hero's progress and examines the journey's psychological relevance to our contemporary lives.

The pattern Campbell identifies--the monomyth of the hero's journey--provides an interesting starting point for understanding any number of narratives. Campbell's representation of the journey looks like this:


Campbell's work also has been the inspiration for some lovely graphical representations. One of our favorites is from the University of California, Berkeley's Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS). That site features a beautiful interactive picture like the one below (which is not interactive):

Finally, we recently found a modified hero's journey, a greatly simplified version of Campbell's monomyth translated into modern language: