Preface: From Monomyth to Relational Worlds
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces has long been celebrated for unveiling the “monomyth,” a universal narrative arc underlying global mythologies. Across cultures and eras, Campbell traced a single heroic itinerary: departure, initiation, and return. His work promised a unifying vision of myth as the manifestation of timeless psychic patterns.
Yet this universalising lens obscures a fundamental ontological distinction: the stories themselves are not instances of a preordained archetype, but situated, collective, and contingent acts of symbolic construal. Each myth phases its community into alignment, projects the collective into relational landscapes, and opens possibilities for action and imagination. The patterns Campbell detects are echoes — recurrent solutions to relational tensions — not proof of a singular, eternal monomyth.
This series, Myth as Construal, undertakes a relational rereading of Campbell. Its six posts trace a careful progression:
The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data – distinguishing Campbell’s universalising model from the plural, situated ontology of the myths themselves.
From Archetype to Reflexivity – reframing archetypes not as psychic essences but as effects of collective reflexive alignment.
From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures – dissolving the singular hero’s journey into heterogeneous construals of collective being.
Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process – exploring how each telling stages collective alignment through time.
Symbolic Reflexivity in Mythic Landscapes – showing how myths scaffold understanding across social, ecological, and symbolic horizons.
From Monomyth to Relational Richness — A Synthesis – synthesising the series to foreground myth as the architecture of possibility, and Campbell’s monomyth as artefact.
The guiding move of this series is a relational cut: to treat myth not as a reflection of a timeless inner truth, but as an active, plural, and phasing construal of collective possibility. In doing so, it reframes Campbell’s project, highlighting the richness, heterogeneity, and creative dynamism of myth as it is actually enacted, rather than as it is universalised into theory.
By the end, the series invites readers to inhabit myth not as a static template of the psyche, but as a symbolic instrument, a field in which collectives construct, navigate, and expand their worlds. Campbell’s monomyth is a mirror; relational ontology invites us to step off the mirror and into the plurality of mythic life itself.
1 The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is often celebrated for uncovering a universal pattern at the heart of mythology: the so-called “monomyth,” or hero’s journey. His comparative lens spans continents and centuries, stitching together myths from Greece to India, Polynesia to Sumer. What results is a grand synthesis, a single archetypal itinerary of separation, initiation, and return.
But this ambition conceals a crucial slippage: the ontology of Campbell’s model is not the ontology of his data.
The myths Campbell draws upon are symbolic construals, each situated within its own collective horizon. They are not “instances” of a timeless archetype; they are ways of aligning a community through shared symbolic potential. A Navajo emergence story, a Polynesian voyage tale, and a Greek heroic cycle each construe different relations of collective, individual, cosmos, and possibility. Their meanings are grounded in their social-symbolic contexts, not in an abstract, transcendent psyche.
Campbell’s model, by contrast, is not relational but archetypal. Anchored in Jungian psychology, it treats myth as an expression of timeless psychic structures. Similarities across myths are gathered into a universal narrative sequence, which is then taken as the truth of myth itself. In doing so, Campbell conflates the patterned potential of symbolic construal with the absolutised structure of a monomyth.
From a relational ontology perspective, this is the decisive cut: the data are plural, situated, and collective; the model is singular, universalising, and psychic. Campbell mistakes the resonances of symbolic construal across cultures for proof of an underlying universal form. The relational move is to resist this collapse, and to treat myth instead as a field of heterogeneous construals — each staging possibilities for being-together, none reducible to a single archetypal template.
In this series, we will reread Campbell through the lens of relational ontology. Rather than a monomyth of timeless individuation, myth will be approached as symbolic construal: the staging of ontological possibility, the phasing of collective alignment, the architecture of what a world can mean.
2 From Archetype to Reflexivity
At the core of Campbell’s model lies the concept of the archetype. Myths, in his account, are symbolic expressions of deep psychic patterns: timeless forms residing in the collective unconscious. The hero’s journey is not a cultural invention but a universal structure of the psyche, surfacing again and again in different guises.
This is where Campbell’s ontology reveals its essentialist foundations. Archetypes are conceived as givens — eternal forms that precede and determine symbolic expression. Myth, in this view, is not a situated act of meaning-making but a coded manifestation of an inner truth.
A relational ontology cuts this differently. It denies the existence of timeless, pre-given forms. Instead, it understands meaning as construal: the perspectival shaping of potential into symbolic actuality. From this vantage, what Campbell calls an “archetype” is not a psychic essence but an effect of reflexive alignment.
When a collective tells a myth, it symbolically projects itself into form. This projection aligns individual and collective experience within a shared horizon. The figure of the hero, for example, does not derive from an eternal archetype of individuation; it arises as a symbolic construal of how individuation can be oriented within a particular collective. The hero is not an archetype of the psyche but a reflexive articulation of possibility.
This shift matters. Archetype freezes myth into essence; reflexivity restores myth as event. Archetype says: the hero’s journey is eternal. Reflexivity says: this telling stages individuation against the collective whole here, now, within this symbolic horizon.
From a relational perspective, then, Campbell’s archetypes are not the source of myth but its retrospective abstraction. They are second-order readings of recurrent symbolic construals, elevated into timeless universals. Myths themselves do not reveal archetypes; they enact reflexivity.
In other words: myth does not express the unconscious. It constitutes the horizon of the possible.
3 From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures
Campbell’s “hero’s journey” presents a sweeping narrative: separation, initiation, return. Across cultures, he finds the same beats, the same archetypal itinerary. The monomyth promises universality: one path, one sequence, one story of individuation.
From a relational ontology perspective, this is precisely the move that flattens myth into abstraction. The monomyth treats similarity as essence, pattern as law, and recurrence as evidence of universality. It neglects the situated, collective, and contingent work that myths perform within their own horizons.
Relational ontology reframes this: there is no single journey, only plural mythic architectures. Each myth constructs a horizon of possibility for its collective, shaping alignment, scaling individuation, and orienting action. The apparent “recurrences” that Campbell notes are not proofs of a universal plot; they are resonances — structural echoes that arise whenever certain relational tensions are negotiated in symbolic form (life and death, self and collective, known and unknown).
In this view:
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The hero’s journey is not a template but one construal among many. A Polynesian navigation epic, a Greek tragedy, and a Navajo emergence myth do not share a hidden “monomyth” but instead instantiate different solutions to recurring relational challenges.
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Myth is an architecture, not a map. It scaffolds collective experience, guiding what a community can imagine, enact, and align toward, rather than reporting an eternal psychic itinerary.
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Plurality is fundamental. Each telling opens a new trajectory of being-together; the multiplicity of myths is not noise against a universal signal but the terrain of possibility itself.
From the relational vantage, Campbell’s monomyth is a model imposed upon the richness of plural construals. By universalising, it abstracts away the reflexive, contingent, and collective dimension of mythic action. The monomyth dissolves; what remains are heterogeneous mythic architectures — patterned potentials, staged alignments, and symbolic spaces in which collectives orient themselves toward what they can become.
The move from monomyth to plural architectures is thus more than critique: it is a reorientation. Myth is no longer a map of the psyche; it is the scaffolding of collective possibility.
4 Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process
Campbell’s monomyth presents myth as a sequence — the hero departs, faces trials, and returns transformed. Time, in his model, is linear and universal: myths follow a preordained itinerary, regardless of context or culture. In this framing, the narrative is a template, and the story’s phasing is derivative, secondary to the archetype.
Relational ontology cuts differently. Myth is not a static pattern traced over time; it is a process of phasing — an enactment of collective alignment, unfolding within the temporality of the telling. Each telling of a myth does more than recount events: it coordinates the present, anticipates potential futures, and aligns participants to shared symbolic horizons.
Key insights from this perspective include:
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Temporal Relativity of Myth: Myths do not exist outside the moment of their telling. The same narrative can be enacted differently across occasions, emphasising different relational tensions, guiding different alignments, and opening distinct trajectories of collective possibility. The “sequence” of events is not fixed but flexible, contingent upon the horizon it phases.
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Phasing Social Formation: Each telling structures a collective’s experience, scaling individual action against the whole, synchronising symbolic projection, and orienting what the group perceives as possible. Myth thus functions as a temporal scaffold: a way to order experience, not to illustrate an eternal pattern.
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Iterative Reflexivity: Mythical phasing is reflexive. As the collective engages with a story, it adapts and realigns its symbolic horizon, which in turn reshapes subsequent tellings. Myths evolve through practice, not by appealing to a timeless monomyth.
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Staging Possibility: Every act of storytelling is a construal of what could be. Myth does not describe what must occur; it maps potential, showing how the collective might navigate uncertainty, tension, and relational challenge.
From this vantage, Campbell’s linear monomyth becomes a shadow of myth’s real function. It abstracts sequence into universality, freezing temporal phasing into archetypal necessity. Relational ontology restores myth as a dynamic, iterative, and contingent process — a temporal choreography of symbolic alignment that unfolds differently each time it is enacted.
In short: myths are not maps of the psyche or the universe. They are temporal instruments, phasing collectives into alignment with their symbolic and relational possibilities.
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