What if every story you’ve ever heard has a common structure to it, that each story is an echo of the same ancient universal myth? Learn about the common structure of this monomyth, and you’ll start to see it in your favorite novels, movies, and maybe even in your own story as well.

Whether we’re listening to a shaman in Central Africa retelling a famous piece of local history, mulling over  Lao-Tzu’s mystical musings about Nature, or reading a dense theological treatise by Thomas Aquinas, we are encountering a universal story that, though always changing form across time and culture, remains staggeringly constant. Myth is the magical portal that opens up the depths and significance of the universe to the human experience. The symbols and archetypes of mythology are not simply fabricated at a particular time—they transcend but also animate the stories we find so affecting and inspiring.

This shape-shifting but ever constant story deeply embedded in the collective human psyche is the monomyth. All stories and mythologies participate in this monomyth. This source is ancient yet ever new, a spring too deep to be exhausted.

At the center of every myth is a hero on a journey.  The most basic elements of the hero’s journey are departure, initiation, and return.  

Departure is the call to adventure that the hero hears and either runs from or embraces.

Initiation is the daring feat he must accomplish. The stories and any truly creative acts therein inevitably entail the hero dying to the world in some form or another.  

Return is a necessary part of the hero’s journey because it closes of the loop: he has to integrate all that was learned during the journey.

The myths and epic stories with which we are all familiar contain these elements. Once you see the common structure of these hero myths, you can’t “unsee” it. The carriers of the universal myth may vary, but these parts inevitably show up.

The hero’s story always begins with a call to adventure, in which it is made clear that the status quo existence within society is no longer enough, and he must move from the familiar zone to what is uncertain and unknown. The realm of the unknown can be a far-off place, a dark wood, a journey underground or underseas, a remote island, a mysterious mountain, or a deep-dream state. Whatever the place, there’s a mysteriousness which operates by rules other than those to which the hero is accustomed. It’s filled with strange beings, dangers, suffering previously unknown to the hero, great deeds, and deep joy.

The call can be of the hero’s will, like Theseus who goes to take on the Minotaur, or by a powerful outside force, like Odysseus, compelled into adventure after being blown across the Mediterranean by Poseidon’s fury. Other times the call emerges from a mistake or a happenstance deviation from well-trodden paths.  

Sometimes the hero refuses the call. The busyness of life, the comfort of routine, and culture keep him cloistered. He refuses to give up his smaller interests and thus remains untransformed. In these anticlimactic cases, the hero becomes a victim to be saved. Satan is a paragon of the being who vigorously clings to self, and in so doing chooses hell, when he could have died to self and become one with God. King Minos is another example from ancient Greek mythology. He builds an amazing empire, but each new building becomes a house of death; he continually builds walls to keep his Minotaur at bay. Jonah flees the divine call to Nineveh, but adventure finds him anyway, as he encounters storms at sea and the belly of the whale as he attempts to flee. Ultimately, this path is drab and disappointing. The would-have-been hero experiences decay and regret.

The hero that answers the call instead of fleeing from it usually encounters a divine presence and receives supernatural aid. In European fairy tales, it’s a fairy godmother. For the Navajos in the Southwestern United States, it’s a kind, grandmotherly Spider Woman who redirects the sun’s trajectory to assist the hero. It’s the Virgin who asks the Father for mercy on behalf of the saints among Catholic Christians. In other traditions and mythologies, it’s Mother Nature herself who helps the hero.

The helper can also be masculine: an old man, a hermit, a smith, a wizard, or a shepherd. They usually provide advice or some charm or tool that the hero will need before the end. In grander mythologies, this figure often becomes a guide as well. In Greco-Roman mythology, this is the Hermes-Mercury messenger. For the Christian, it’s the Holy Ghost. In Dante’s comedies, Virgil guides the protagonist through the post-mortem realms.

Guarding the threshold to the unknown realm is usually some kind of guardian. His presence marks the end of the horizon of familiarity.  Beyond lies danger and mist and darkness. Popular beliefs in towns and villages encourage people staying within the known bounds and fearing what lies beyond. This is why the sailors who came with Columbus had to be tricked and strong-armed into joining the voyage and sticking with it: they were all convinced that beyond the familiar horizon were deep-sea monsters, mermaids, and other cosmic beings waiting for them as they neared the world’s edge.

Like the European sailors, most of the world’s villages have fables about half-human or supra-human creatures at the borderlands beyond the beaten paths. The Hottentots of South Africa believe that an ogre lurks at the village’s edge in the dunes. In Central Africa, it’s a half-human figure who, when encountered, will demand a fight. If the person wins, the half-human will plead for his life and promise the powers of medicine. If the half-human wins, the person will not come back alive.

The struggle at the threshold usually ends with the hero transported to the new realm, not victorious but in the belly of the beast. For the Bering Strait Eskimos, their hero is the Raven who ends up in the belly of a whale. In the Zulu tradition, a mother and her two kids are swallowed by an elephant. A wolf swallows Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. In Greek mythology, all of the gods except Zeus are swallowed up by Kronos.

Entering the belly of a whale shows that there is some form of self-annihilation to the hero’s venture through the threshold. No one can achieve a new level of greatness without ceasing to exist in some fashion. The leap into the creature’s jaws leads to renewal of life.

Departure is the first of the basic elements of the myth. The second is Initiation. This is the portion of the story that people often enjoy the most. It’s here that the hero, in a new and unknown realm, must face harrowing ordeals or challenging tasks.

One famous example would be the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. It reverses the typical roles of man coming after his bride by making the bride the pursuer rather than the pursued. She pleads with Cupid’s mother Venus, the angry would-be mother-in-law who jealously hides her son. Venus gives Psyche a series of seemingly impossible tasks, but at every turn, she receives the divine aid she needs to complete them. Venus tasks Psyche with sorting heaps of seeds, beans, and grains according to their kind. An army of ants comes to assist her. She then has to gather golden fleece from a flock of venomous sheep in a deep valley in a dark wood. After that she has to retrieve a bottle of cold spring water guarded by a dragon. Her fourth and final task is to bring back a box of beauty ointment from the realm of the dead.

The dangers and ordeals at the threshold are usually precursors to some ultimate challenge, which leads to a reward when accomplished. In some stories, this reward is some form of mystical union with the mother-goddess (or marriage), receiving the approval of the father-creator (atonement), becoming divine himself (apotheosis), growing wisdom or consciousness (illumination, freedom) or some boon—a token of the gods’ favor.

The hero is never the same for what he experiences.

The three stages of the myth (departure, initiation, and return) should be viewed as points on a straight line but parts of a cycle. Return to society is the final part of the hero’s journey. The hero must bring back what he attained when he passed beyond the familiar horizon into the unknown and successfully endured a monumental ordeal. Whether that attainment be fire, a life-restoring elixir, the golden fleece, enlightenment, or some other life-altering accolade, it is not merely for himself, but for the benefit of a loved one, the community, the country, the world, or the cosmos.

This is often the most difficult task of all for the hero. It’s not uncommon for the hero to refuse to return. Upon reaching Enlightenment while sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, a blissed-out Buddha forgets all that was and the continued suffering of the world.

Some who bring it back do so by flight. Prometheus steals fire from the gods and is doomed by Zeus to be chained to a rock, where he is to get his liver eaten out by an eagle every day. Theseus cuts off Medusa’s head, but, like Prometheus, must flee the mysterious realm he’s braved to escape the nether-worldly Gorgons snapping at his heels. The Maori of New Zealand have a tale of a magical fisherman who flees with his two sons whom his evil wife had swallowed and then regurgitated.

Other heroes come back with the continued aid of gods and otherworldly beings. For the escape artists, they preserve their ego as they fight and flee for their lives. Those who avail themselves  of divine assistance allow their egos to be lost, but then saved by grace of the gods.

The hero’s reintegration into society is not always received well. He’s different for what he’s been through and must do what Friedrich Nietzsche called a “Cosmic Dance”: balancing and sometimes vacillating between two worlds: knowing that the rules and values of each realm—that of the familiar and the formerly mysterious realm—differ and cannot be easily blended.

Furthermore, the elixir full of ego-shredding, life-restoring power with which the hero returns is often met with resistance, suspicion, hatred, and the bewilderment of many. Still, the hero’s story is incomplete until he closes the monomyth loop, continuing the cycle of spiritual renewal, until such time as another hero is needed.

Like most things, myths are susceptible to damage and distortion. Tales may augment some elements and diminish others. Other times characters and stages are blended. Those parts of stories that seem outmoded or cause cultural chagrin get muted or removed all together.

One of the most powerful castrating forces is secularism. Secular forces downplay the less palatable elements of myth by papering over the primal mythological power with secondary details that appear more rational, scientific, or morally acceptable. The key elements of the monomyth become as hidden as needles in a haystack.

It happened in the ancient Greece and Rome. Mount Olympus became little more than the setting of soap operas with a superhuman cast. The gods became mascots and decorations for homes, and their stories became bereft of power.

It happened in China, when Confucius drained Chinese myths of their key elements and ancient majesty. Local princes and their petty concerns have supplanted more ancient mythological figures in Chinese lore.

The same has happened with modern progressive Christianity. The Christ—the eternal Logos in the flesh, the Redeemer of all—is just a kind, admirable rabbi from the Near East who was unjustly killed.

Whenever a culture begins to interpret its myths as biography, history, or science, the myths have already suffered death. They become a set of impersonal facts about a time and place remote and irrelevant. Temples become museums, and ancient rites become quaint superstition. The Christian cult has been particularly impoverished in this regard.  

Recovering the power of myth is not about finding applications to contemporary matters, but rediscovering those illuminating intimations of a rich past and allowing them to reveal their timeless human message.