Heroes are everywhere in myth. They slay monsters, found cities, travel to the edge of the world and sometimes into the land of the dead. Scholars have long noticed that hero stories share a family resemblance, and some tried to boil them down to a single pattern. The attempts are illuminating, and their failures are just as instructive.

Patterns in the hero's life

In 1909 the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank published The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, comparing figures such as Moses, Oedipus, Romulus, Cyrus and Sargon of Akkad. Rank found a recurring birth pattern: a child of high birth, threatened by a prophecy, is abandoned, often in water, rescued by humble people, and later returns to claim his place. In 1936 Lord Raglan listed twenty-two typical incidents in a hero's life and scored heroes on how many they matched; Oedipus scored very high. Raglan concluded that hero stories grew out of ritual drama, not history.

Campbell's monomyth

The most famous pattern comes from the American writer Joseph Campbell, whose The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) borrowed the word monomyth from James Joyce. In paraphrase, Campbell said that heroes everywhere leave the ordinary world, win a decisive victory in a realm of wonder, and come back with a power to help others. He grouped the journey into three phases, departure, initiation and return, with steps such as the call to adventure, crossing a threshold, trials, a supreme ordeal and the return with a boon, or gift. Campbell drew on Jung and believed the pattern reflected universal structures of the human psyche.

Campbell's influence on modern storytelling is enormous. George Lucas credited him with shaping Star Wars, and in 1985 the Disney story consultant Christopher Vogler wrote a memo condensing Campbell into a guide for screenwriters, later expanded into the book The Writer's Journey. As a result, many modern films fit the monomyth because writers built them using Campbell's pattern. Their fit is not independent evidence that the pattern is universal. (See FILM for more on genre and story.)

The critics

Folklorists and anthropologists have been sharply critical. Campbell chose examples that fit and passed over those that did not, smoothing away local detail. Many cultures tell hero stories that do not end in triumphant return, or whose heroes are tricksters, communities or women whose journeys differ. In 1990 the therapist Maureen Murdock proposed a "heroine's journey" in reply. Critics also note that the pattern is so general, leave, struggle, come back, that it fits nearly any story, including a trip to the grocery store. Defenders answer that broad patterns can still be illuminating, as long as we do not mistake them for the meaning of every story.

Maui of the Pacific

Across Polynesia, from Hawaii to Aotearoa New Zealand, the demigod Maui is part hero, part trickster. Born early and cast into the sea by his mother, he survived and returned to his family. Using a magic jawbone from his grandmother, he fished up the North Island of New Zealand, which Maori call Te Ika-a-Maui, the fish of Maui. He snared the sun with ropes to slow it, so that days would be long enough for work, and he tricked the fire goddess Mahuika into giving up fire. His last exploit was his boldest: to win immortality for humans, he tried to crawl through the body of Hine-nui-te-po, the great lady of night and death, while she slept.

Mwindo of the Congo

The Mwindo epic of the Nyanga people of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo was recorded in 1956 from a bard named Candi Rureke and later published in English. Mwindo is born already speaking, after his father, a chief, has ordered that any son be killed. He survives, journeys through the underworld and the sky, and defeats his enemies. Yet the ending is unusual. Mwindo forgives his father and shares power, and the epic closes with precepts for good rule and respect for others. The hero's journey here leads not to individual glory but to a healed community.

Worked example: the death of Maui

As Maui crawled into Hine-nui-te-po, his companions, small birds, were told to stay silent. But the fantail, piwakawaka, could not hold back its laughter. The goddess woke and crushed him, and so humans remain mortal. Through Campbell's lens, this is an ordeal in the realm of death that fails: a monomyth without the boon.

On its own terms, though, the story says something else. Death is not defeated by heroism; even the boldest trickster cannot cheat it, and the goddess who receives the dead is to be respected, not conquered. The story is also funny, which keeps it humane and keeps listeners from worshiping the hero. A pattern can guide our questions, but the details, a laughing bird and a sleeping goddess, are where a culture's own wisdom lives. The best comparative reading moves back and forth between the broad shape and the particular telling.