The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Particularly in Part 2, Campbell assigns the “folk stories” label to certain storytelling traditions. Folk tales describe oral traditions in mythmaking—which Campbell also calls “popular tales” (312)—as opposed to a more formal mythology passed down in written form. Exploring folk stories, Campbell uses examples from tribal cultures like the Blackfeet of Montana and Tongans of the Pacific Islands.

In the Prologue, Campbell discusses the Roman myth of the Minotaur. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Minotaur, a murderous half-man and half-bull, was imprisoned inside a labyrinth. The archetypal hero of world myth will enter a dangerous mystical world like Theseus enters the labyrinth, which Campbell uses to symbolize the human unconscious. As Theseus finds his way through the labyrinth with a simple spool of thread, so, Campbell states, “we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path” (25). The labyrinth is any unknown world where dangerous monsters lurk, one the worthy hero can navigate and emerge victorious.

The monomyth is the “universal mythological formula” (21) Campbell finds throughout world history and culture. One of these formulas is the hero’s journey, which follows a man or woman on a quest through a magical series of trials. The other mythological formula, which is related to the hero’s journey, is the story of the universe’s creation and dissolution, or the cosmogonic cycle. Campbell explains the myth’s common images and narrative framework as mimetic of human psychological processes, which similarly defy language, geography, and time period. He takes the word “monomyth” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

In Euripides’s Oedipus Rex, the hero Oedipus leaves home after a prophecy foretells that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Later, he returns to his kingdom, kills the king, and marries the queen, who are revealed as his parents. This famous Greek story, in addition to following the monomyth of the hero’s journey, also informs Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories about primal fears and desires. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell frequently invokes the Oedipus story to further his theory that many mythical tropes spring from Oedipal impulses embedded in the human psyche.

Campbell introduces his theory of the monomyth by discussing dreams and their overwhelming similarities with ancient myths. In sleep as in myth, the human unconscious manifests a common set of symbols to reach new stages of life. He also likens the cosmogonic cycle with a mind passing from dream into wakefulness, through dreaming and back to sleep—just as myth depicts the world beginning and developing, followed by decay, destruction, and return to the void. Two myths in particular use slumber as a metaphor: the Irish story of the Queen of Tubber Tintye and Grimm’s fairy tale about Sleeping Beauty. Campbell reflects on their symbology in Part 2: “God, however, is but a convenient means to wake the sleeping princess, the soul. Life is her sleep, death the awakening” (260).

The archetypal hero will likely receive magical aid throughout his journey. These helpful figures will, like the Spider Woman of Navaho legend, instruct and guide the hero toward success in his quest. Not only does the supernatural aid appear before the hero crosses the magical threshold, but they also assist the worthy hero during his trials in the mystical world and may even rescue him if needed. At times these helpers are not people or magical creatures but magical objects or amulets.

The “threshold of adventure” (245) is the boundary between the hero’s everyday existence and “the zone of magnified power” (77). Campbell identifies the obstacles that will likely meet the hero as he crosses this threshold, which include threatening figures such as the monster Sticky-hair of Buddhist tradition and the Greek god Pan.