Hero’s Journey Vs Heroine’s Journey

Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey is still the most well known storytelling pattern in the world. He called it a Monomyth, suggesting that no matter where you look in mythology, this is the storytelling pattern you’ll find. But we know that the outward journey of the Hero, which focuses on a quest for external gain and accomplishment, is one of many mythic storytelling patterns out there. When you explore Hero’s Journey Vs Heroine’s journey, you discover that there are multiple mythic maps, and that there are more than masculine and feminine archetypes out there.

The Heroine’s Journey, which focuses on inner transformation, is a pattern deeply ingrained in many myths. Maureen Murdock published a book about it in 1990. The Heroine’s journey was ignored and overlooked, not because it wasn’t there, but because the feminine was pushed under the ground.

Interestingly, the journey under the ground is the very core of the Heroine’s Journey pattern. The Underworld is an archetypal key to our transformation. She must go beneath the surface. She must release every piece of identity, surrender everything, let go of anything she wants to hold on to. Like Innana, the Sumerian goddess, she must reunite with her dark sister, Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld. She must let her flesh hang on a stick and rot. In order to rise renewed and empowered, the dark night of the soul must swallow us whole. 

We are cyclical beings, creatures of darkness and light, animals that may have been disconnected from instincts, but flourish in the realms of the imagination. Cyclical myths and rebirth stories saturate our lives. 

Beyond Hero’s Journey Vs Heroine’s Journey

There are many alternative storytelling patterns to the Hero’s Journey. It’s time to recognize and emphasize that there’s a multiplicity, a complexity, and a diversity of storytelling patterns. We might need to reimagine ourselves in mycelial ways, in ways that weave intricate connections and branch out into infinite pathways for us to walk, and redefine our culture in ways that include what came before, but expand into more possibilities. Not drop the binaries, but include the variety of ways that a non-binary perspective and storytelling pattern could teach us. 

Why the Hero’s Journey Still Captivates Us

Like Bilbo Baggins, we hear the call to travel with the dwarves into the dark belly of the mountains, to hear the songs of elves, to see what’s beyond the Shire. And like Bilbo we resist the urge. We have responsibilities. We’re not so easily going to give up on comfort. But the call roars loud. It’s part of our nature. 

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is a compelling storytelling pattern that endures to this day, because it carries universal themes that resonate with our human experience. It offers us hope, suggesting that our struggles are not for nothing, that transformation’s arc includes difficulties, pain, and misery, but in the end, there is reward. 

We are enchanted by the powers we collect when we are swallowed by life, because just when we think we’ve been eaten, and we’re in the dark, and there’s no way out, we find a way. Our creativity is our greatest strength. Our creative power emerges from the dark belly of the beast, from the dark cave of our unconscious. 

Campbell’s hero’s journey explained and continues to explain a certain archetypal pattern that dominant culture is rooted in. It offers a map that makes clear connections between myths and psychology. There’s emotional payoff in the hero’s journey, and humans need this message in order to keep going and not give up. There’s meaning and hope that we can derive from believing that our trials and errors are purposeful. It resonates because it taps into primal energy, ushering us through fear, desire, courage, and fulfillment. And it adapts to any genre and medium – you can find this pattern in epics, in blockbuster Hollywood films, in small intimate off broadway plays, and in video games. 

Following the arc of the hero’s journey can be helpful, and there are many reasons why it  endures and still to this day resonates with so many. But there are other storytelling maps we can follow, that carry us through more complex themes, and offer deeper, more nuanced, less obvious patterns within mythology and meaning. And we need those too. Because the twists and turns and curves in the many roads of life don’t always offer such clear rewards, and we may need other ways to draw meaning from life’s struggles. 

Furthermore, many critics of Campbell’s monomyth, claim that the problem with the Hero’s Journey is that this map ingrains further in our unconscious, the patriarchal, capitalistic over emphasis on male and on individualism, that our culture today is still very much rooted in. There are alternative storytelling patterns that can help us reshape the culture. 

Why Myth Still Matters in a Secular or Atheist World 

What is the story of Jesus but a myth? We’re all clear on the fact that people don’t rise from the dead, right? That would make them a zombie. He may have been a historical figure, but the story of his resurrection is based on ancient pagan myths rooted in nature’s teachings. Resurrection was a recurring theme in many ancient cultures and their mythologies. 

Nature takes us through cyclical myths and rebirth with the seasons, providing us with a map for our own cyclical nature. We experience death several times in one lifetime. Every breath cycle ends with a little death, which makes room for renewal. A breath of fresh air enters the lungs. A gust of fresh wind enters our lives after a period of dissolution. Our creative power emerges from the depth of the underworld. 

We are Greek Persephone, bringing the flowers of Spring, rising to meet her mother, Demeter, after half a year in the land of the dead with Hades. We are Egyptian Osiris, enlivened by the Magic of Isis, brought back to life by her love and her breath and her wings, so that we can flood the Nile and bring vitality back to the dry desert land. 

Christianity and its oppressive patriarchal rule stripped its myth from the feminine, and emptied it from the cyclical and the natural, which are feminine encoded qualities. It inserted a hero at its core, and hollowed the culture from depth and diversity, as it divorced it from nature herself. 

There is no need to believe in the power of resurrection. All we need is to look at nature and find in its facts, secular mythology to inspire our transformation. Life is filled with archetypal journeys. 

There is no religion without myth – all religions are based on stories that come as an attempt to explain the great mysteries. Religions promise to solve the mysteries with forceful certainty.  Mythology invites us to interpret, to open up more doorways, to keep asking questions. There are plenty of myths without religion. Mythology preceded religion. It gave power to faith, but it holds its own power without it. With modern myth and storytelling we can be empowered to drop faith and still embrace the magic of life, rooted in mythology and its rich soil. 

Mythology helps us understand ourselves, see one another, reflect on the world we’re in. It’s a doorway into history, geography, etymology. Mythology and philosophy are woven together. Myth matters in today’s world because it offers maps, views, and tools for the human psyche – individually and collectively. It helps us make the story about more than ourselves. 

Joseph Campbell and the Monomyth

There’s great value in seeing the similarities between cultures, and finding the universal threads that weave the fabric of humanity. Seeing patterns in stories from different places, and recognizing shared archetypes and themes can be helpful and beautiful – it helps us remember that we’re not separate from one another.

But nothing can ever be a representation of everything and everyone. Diversity is how the universe expresses itself. There’s a relationship between everything, and differences matter. It’s important to recognize the differences between the Hero’s Journey and Heroine’s Journey, and to allow other patterns to emerge and inform us. 

You can find the Hero’s Journey in many stories. But it’s not in every story, and it doesn’t represent every archetype. The point is not to force one map on all the stories. The point is to make more maps so that we can see ourselves as every character, and learn to recognize archetypes within and around us. 

Campbell presented the feminine as the temptress that tries to destroy and lure the hero away from his goal, or as the holy grail; the very wisdom and wholeness that the hero is after. 

But Maureen Murdock Heroine’s Journey claims otherwise. Campbell’s Monomyth ignores the heroine completely. In her book The Heroine’s Journey, Murdock says that when she asked him about the Heroine’s quest, his answer was: “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” 

The Monomyth suggests that there is no need for the feminine to journey anywhere. So what would Inanna say? What would Persephone say? What would her mother, Demeter say? What would Isis say? What would Parvati say? 

The Hero’s journey focuses on external pursuits. The Heroine’s Journey is an internal voyage, a community oriented process, a non-linear, ever unfolding practice of integration. 

The promise and limits of the linear quest

We need to examine Hero’s Journey vs Heroine’s Journey in order to understand where we are. 

One of the greatest issues with the Hero’s Journey is that it is an individualistic journey, focusing on how special the Hero is, and severing the journey from the environment, from the seasons, from an interwoven, intricate reality. When that’s the only map we have, when the hero is glorified, and when this becomes the story that we tell over and over again, we become a culture that damages the environment, places our species on the throne, emphasizing one gender as the more important one, and to top it off, creates a culture where a certain skin color is a preferred one.

Sharon Blackie criticizes the way that the Hero’s Journey is about being better than everyone else, which reinforces the pattern of climbing, rising above, and pursuing more. She suggests an Eco-Heroine Journey, and calls it a Post-heroic Journey. She explains that it’s; “a journey which recognises that the time of the Hero is over – or that it certainly needs to be, and fast. Many of the messes we seem to have got ourselves into as humans arise out of the cultural mythology which tells us that the archetype of the Hero is the most valuable and desirable of all.”

The linear quest of the hero promises a happy ending, a reward, a goal met – often in the form of a feminine character. The world of the hero is a competitive one, a world in which the hero must win, and his winning is always at the expense of someone else. Our world is in desperate need for a collective journey vs lone hero climb to the top. An eco-heroine journey of bio-diversity is necessary for our survival. 

The competitive lens is limited, and as Blackie says, it’s damaging. She writes that the Hero;  “personifies the pursuit of glory, always wanting more, always in the service of ‘progress’. In the face of the challenges facing us today, in which that constant pursuit of ‘more’ has brought us to our knees, and the planet to a state of crisis, I’d say that’s not a particularly great model to be going along with.”

The Heroine’s Journey: A Descent, Not a Conquest

We can see how the Heroine’s Journey offers a different path. While the hero is out there going after the prize, the heroine is engaged in a deep process of inner transformation. Her quest is not of conquering, but of integration. 

The feminine stands for alliance and conversation.

The heroine doesn’t overcome the shadow, she doesn’t slay the dragon, she doesn’t destroy her dark sister, queen of the underworld. She goes down into the basement, deep into the dark spaces of her own consciousness, into the shadowy realms of the unconscious, not to win over it, but to learn to live with all of her parts. She faces the collective shadow within her. She looks into the discomfort of her own demonic characteristics. And she feeds everyone. 

She grieves. She dissolves old forms. She repatterns herself and recreates the world. She licks her wounds. She assimilates the blood of the demons, the way that Hindu goddess Kali does when she’s born out of Durga’s forehead to help battle a demon who multiplies every time a drop of his blood hits the ground.

The Heroine is receptive. She is generative. She learns to live with all her parts. She creates life. Grief is a deep part of her story, because love is at its core. 

The Heroine’s Journey is a continuous process of receiving oneself, of assimilating the shadow, of integrating every piece of who we are, and weaving ourselves through the fabric of the whole. Furthermore, it is the ever going dance of dissolving who we are, so that we recreate ourselves and reinvent ourselves again and again and again. 

Maureen Murdock’s alternative mythic map

Murdock offers a non-linear map, and respects the complexity of reality, recognizing that a person can be in several stages of the Heroine’s journey simultaneously. She sees the feminine journey as a cyclical one. She offers refuge from conquering, and invites us into connection. 

In Maureen Murdock Heroine’s Journey, the heroine is separated from the feminine. We can see it in the culture. Can you see it in yourself? The feminine identifies with the masculine. We can easily see that culturally. Can you see it in yourself? This map reveals that the meeting of ogres and dragons is inevitable, and that the boons of success are an illusion. There’s an awakening to death, and a fierce journey to the underworld, where we meet the goddess, and/or become her. The yearning to reunite with the feminine is urgent and palpable, and it leads to a healing in the rupture between the mother and the daughter. Within her, within me, within you, within the culture, there’s a wounded masculine, and the heroine heals the wound. She weaves and integrates the masculine and feminine. 

But the cycle continues. This is not a happily ever after event. It’s a death and a rebirth, a life and a death, a rebirth, a life lived, and a death, and so on…. 

The feminine will feel separate from the feminine again. You are not climbing a ladder. You are not ascending or achieving a state of perfection. The Heroine’s Journey is cyclical, non linear, and multi dimensional. 

Healing the split between masculine and feminine

The world is full of contrast, contradiction, and conflict. Polarity is part of our nature. Duality is part of what makes us distinctive and different from one another. Difference and individuation are important. We’re not all the same. That’s the beauty. That’s the art of the universe. 

There is a difference between the feminine and the masculine. And we’ll get into the non-binary in a moment. The problem is that under the patriarchal rule of the past 4000-5000 years or so, women have been devalued, diminished and demonized. 

In today’s world, women may no longer believe in the myth of their inferiority as they did a few decades ago. We know our worth, we know we’re not less than – but society still doesn’t offer us the opportunities it offers men. Most mothers today still need to choose between career and raising children; something most men don’t even think about. 

To move beyond the split, Murdock and others suggest that we direct our culture from hierarchical structures of domination and submission, to systems of inclusion, where one person is not more important than the other. 

The model needs to move from vertical to horizontal, from linear progression to cyclical process, from perfection to presence. 

Sharon Blackie reminds us that the post heroic journey is inclusive and community oriented. 

To move beyond the split, we need to expand beyond the binaries of masculine and feminine. We need to include them, but open up the passageways to other possibilities. We also need to expand beyond the anthropocentric lens through which humans have viewed everything. We need to be more inclusive. We need more mythic patterns.

Other Mythic Patterns We’ve Forgotten

The lone hero who gets the prize at the end of his journey is not what our world needs. The Hero’s Journey must give way to more complex, nuanced, and layered patterns of storytelling, so that our reality can become less focused on external gain and individual achievement, and re-root itself in healthier soil.

We are living with multiple mythic journeys, and it’s time that we uncover the more inclusive storytelling in mythology. 

Our collective journey needs to inhabit a larger domain in our psyche. The journey of community, such as the one portrayed in the Persian story about the mythic bird – The Simorgh – is an important one to weave into the culture. We don’t need a big daddy god/leader. We need the community to come together and become the leading force that glows like gold in the sun. 

Nonbinary Archetypes and Inclusive Storytelling

There are many important differences between the Hero’s Journey and Heroine’s Journey, and this mythic exploration invites us to look beyond masculine and feminine archetypes, to see that there is more inclusive storytelling in mythology than we’ve been told, and to embark on mythic journeys beyond gender binaries. This doesn’t only happen in modern myth and storytelling, it has been there all along, waiting for us to notice.

We can embrace characters like Dionysus, who is a gender fluid archetype. He is raised as a girl. He wears women’s clothes, and part of the rituals in Dionysus cults was cross dressing. As a god of ecstasy, he flows like the wine in his chalice between gender identities, unwilling to fit into one or another. He, or shall I say they, are the embodied image of challenging the narrative of the Hero’s Journey.

Dionysus isn’t on a quest, he shows up, as Sophie Strand writes, with his cup already full, overflowing, and ready to give instead of to gain. 

Dionysus is not only crossgender, they are cross-species. Their wand is flowering. They are a bull, a hive of bees, god of wine, turning men to vine, god of the grapes, of mead, turning women into leopards in need of their wildness. 

The Greeks were not the only ones with gender-expansive myths and archetypes. While it isn’t as overt, when you turn toward the Hindu pantheon, particularly toward the complex mythic narratives of Tamil Nadu, you discover nonbinary spiritual archetypes, such as the elephant headed god, Ganapati, who is not only anthropomorphic, but also non-binary.

Ganapati, or Ganesha, along with his brother, Subramanya, or Skanda, are characters that challenge gender identities. They belong to a class of characters who arrive in the stories to create a new world. The world that they inherit from their parents is deeply problematic, and they are born, not to fix the problems, but to cultivate new ways, to generate more possibilities, to break the patterns that need a good shake up, and rewire, reintegrate, and recreate. 

They have another brother, Ayyappa, whose story is rich, complex, and gorgeous, full of shadows and trauma. He is less known because the shadow is where things hide, and he is well hidden, because his story is not comfortable to tell. I promise to get into it another time. 

The three brothers together share the seat of power. They alternate sitting on the throne. Each with their gifts and problems. All three with the shadow of their parents. Each with their own set of traumas and complexities. Each with a sister hidden in their form. And we need all three – we need a community. We need not the hero who gains the seat of power as a reward. We need to untangle from outdated structures, and reweave the world in a post heroic manner. 

Moving Beyond Hero’s Journey Vs Heroine’s Journey

When we see myth as a map for life, we see how myths transcend gender roles in more than one way, in more than one tradition. We are supported by a rich tapestry of characters that teach us about inclusion, and archetypes that break the patterns of the over culture. 

When we go beyond the Hero’s Journey Vs Heroine’s journey, we end up with a stack of mythic maps of life, with a large toolkit, with different lenses, with alternative storytelling patterns. We are a multitude, a complexity, a diversity. Our lives need more than a monomyth. 

I will write more about this soon, as there is so much more to unpack. In the meantime, if this speaks to you and you want to learn how to turn mythology into ritual, I created a ritual guide for the secular soul. It’s beautiful and it’s free, and you can get it here.  

If you’re into this, let’s embody myth as map for life in this video; explore the Hero’s Journey Vs Heroine’s Journey and mythic journeys beyond gender binaries through breathwork, and contemplative, meditative movement. 

Stay on this non-linear journey with me, and subscribe to my Substack for weekly Muse Medicine. 

If this essay speaks to you, you’ll also appreciate this one about why myth matters.

Thank you for reading! 

Much love,

Hagar