Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles
available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Joseph Campbell's
term monomyth, also referred to as the hero's journey, refers to a basic
pattern found in many narratives from around the world. This widely
distributed pattern was described by Campbell in The Hero with a
Thousand Faces (1949). An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, Campbell
borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Campbell held
that numerous myths from disparate times and regions share fundamental
structures and stages, which he summarized in the introduction to The
Hero with a Thousand Faces: "A 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." Campbell and other scholars, such as Erich Neumann,
describe narratives of Buddha, Moses, and Christ in terms of the
monomyth, and Campbell argues that other classic myths from many
cultures follow this basic pattern.
