The magic circle tropes series#

In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell summarizes the narrative pattern of the monomyth as follows:Ī 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. Cousineau in the introduction to the revised edition of The Hero's Journey wrote 'the monomyth is in effect a meta myth, a philosophical reading of the unity of mankind's spiritual history, the Story behind the story'.

The magic circle tropes series#

The second was Bill Moyers's series of seminal interviews with Campbell, released in 1988 as the documentary (and companion book) The Power of Myth. The first, released in 1987, The Hero's Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell, was accompanied by a 1990 companion book, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (with Phil Cousineau and Stuart Brown, eds.). The phrase 'the hero's journey', used in reference to Campbell's monomyth, first entered into popular discourse through two documentaries. Omry Ronen referred to Vyacheslav Ivanov's treatment of Dionysus as an 'avatar of Christ' (1904) as 'Ivanov's monomyth'. Campbell's singular the monomyth implies that the 'hero's journey' is the ultimate narrative archetype, but the term monomyth has occasionally been used more generally, as a term for a mythological archetype or a supposed mytheme that re-occurs throughout the world's cultures. Campbell was a notable scholar of Joyce's work and in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944) co-authored the seminal analysis of Joyce's final novel. According to Robert Segal, 'The theories of Rank, Campbell, and Raglan typify the array of analyses of hero myths.' Terminology Ĭampbell borrowed the word monomyth from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939). Both Rank and Raglan have lists of cross-cultural traits often found in the accounts of mythical heroes and discuss hero narrative patterns in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis and ritualism. In narratology and comparative mythology, others have proposed narrative patterns such as psychoanalyst Otto Rank in 1909 and amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan in 1936. The study of hero myth narratives can be traced back to 1871 with anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor's observations of common patterns in the plots of heroes' journeys. Background įurther information: Rank–Raglan mythotype More recently, the hero's journey has been analyzed as an example of the sympathetic plot, a universal narrative structure in which a goal-directed protagonist confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and eventually reaps rewards. In his famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), he describes the narrative pattern as follows:Ī 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.Ĭampbell's theories regarding the concept of a 'monomyth' have been the subject of criticism from scholars, particularly folklorists (scholars active in folklore studies), who have dismissed the concept as a non-scholarly approach suffering from source-selection bias, among other criticisms. Campbell used the monomyth to analyze and compare religions. Eventually, hero myth pattern studies were popularized by Joseph Campbell, who was influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology. In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero's journey, or the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.Įarlier figures had proposed similar concepts, including psychoanalyst Otto Rank and amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan.