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The Hero’s Journey is a theory that outlines the protagonist’s departure from the familiar to the fantastic, facing trials before returning home. Joseph Campbell proposed the concept, with other analyses simplifying it. The journey has three stages: departure, initiation, and return. The hero faces trials, meets the goddess, and atones with his father before transcending and gaining a reward. The hero must return home, facing the normality of everyday life, and integrate what he has learned, gaining the freedom to live.
The Hero’s Journey is a theory concerning the structural and thematic elements that are usually present in much of the world’s mythos. It highlights the different stages that the protagonist of most myths has to undergo. The Hero’s Journey is a basic outline of the hero’s departure from the familiar to the fantastic, where he must face and pass a series of trials before earning the right to return home.
Joseph Campbell proposed this concept in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The title alludes to the hero model that seems to be present in almost every myth in the world. Not all of the 17 stops mentioned by Campbell will necessarily be included in the monomyth, as Campbell called the journey.
There have been several other analyzes of the hero’s journey since Campbell’s initial proposal. Phil Cousineau simplifies Campbell’s passages from 17 to eight, combining similar passages and rearranging others. David Adamas also produces an eight-step journey based on Campbell’s original.
The stages of the hero’s journey can be divided into three separate stages. These are the departure phase, the initiation phase and the return phase. While some individual stages may not be included in a given story, each of the three stages must be passed through.
The departure phase begins in the normal world, where the hero is summoned by some agent of fate to undertake a task or is called to adventure, as Campbell puts it. This is often followed by an initial rejection by the hero for various reasons. Then the hero gets help from a supernatural guide who sets him on a search for him. This leads to the crossing of the first threshold, where the hero moves away from the normal into the unknown.
The departure phase concludes in the belly of the whale phase, in which the hero is completely detached from everything he knew. He understands that he does not go back. So he has to adapt to this new world.
The next stage of the hero’s journey is the initiation stage, where the protagonist faces various burdens, which Campbell calls the road of trials. These will test the hero and provide much of the needed conflict within the story. It is often during or after the trials that the hero meets the goddess, the stage during which the protagonist realizes pure and complete love, either for someone he has recently met or one he has known for some time.
After this stage, the hero experiences a form of temptation that has the power to turn him away from his mission. So the hero continues to make atonement with his father, to whom he led the whole journey through the fantastic. This step is a necessity in world myths. The father represents the being in the hero’s life which he regards as the most perfect and fundamental force.
Atonement is inevitably followed by apotheosis. The hero transcends the realm of the mortal and the fantastic and attains a greater, or sometimes the greater, insight and knowledge, which leads to bliss. After this stage comes the final benefit. The hero completes what he originally set out to do, gaining this reward as a result of every event that has occurred prior to this moment.
For the hero’s journey to be complete, however, he must return home. He has a tendency to reject his return home, as he now identifies with the other realm. If the gift is to return to the natural world, the hero may face a new set of dangers as he attempts to remove the gift from his fantasy world.
Rescue from the outside is the next step in which the hero again receives some sort of help from a guide, usually another supernatural force. The hero crosses the threshold of return where he will be faced with the normality of everyday life and the people who are part of it. He must strive to retain what he has learned on the journey.
The last two stages of the hero’s journey are the master of two worlds stage and the freedom to live stage. During the master of two worlds stage, the hero has found a way to deal with the normal world and integrate what he has discovered. Having survived each previous stage, the hero has gained the freedom to live. He is freed from fear and is no longer hindered by its hold on the living.
