The “Hero’s Journey” Is Nonsense

In 1949, an American author named Joseph Campbell published a book titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he claims that, fundamentally, all the great stories that human beings have ever told follow the exact same pattern, which is innate in the human consciousness and therefore present in every culture during every time period. In his book, he usually refers to this supposed pattern as “the monomyth” or “the hero’s journey.”

Campbell’s theories have now become thoroughly entrenched as orthodoxy in high school English literature classes all over the English-speaking world. Whenever teachers introduce students to mythology, the first thing they usually talk about is Joseph Campbell and the so-called “hero’s journey.”

Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

How Joseph Campbell’s theories became so popular

Joseph Campbell first published The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, but it did not immediately become influential. In fact, his work remained fairly obscure until 1977. That’s the year when the epic space film Star Wars (later renamed Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope) was first released.

George Lucas, the filmmaker who wrote and directed the film, drew most of his inspiration from the pulp science fiction works he had consumed as a child. Most of the people involved in the making of the film didn’t expect it to be particularly successful or significant and it was initially only ordered to be shown in forty theatres across the entire United States. Nonetheless, to the filmmakers’ own surprise, it became a record-breaking blockbuster success and is now seen as one of the most iconic films of the twentieth century.

It is unclear how much of an impact Joseph Campbell’s work actually had on George Lucas while he was working on the film. In fact, it is unclear how much of Campbell’s work Lucas had even read before the film came out. Nonetheless, after the film proved commercially successful, Lucas became desperate for it to be seen as “classy,” so he began publicly crediting The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a major source of inspiration. This naturally led Campbell’s work to receive much greater public attention.

ABOVE: Promotional poster for the 1977 film Star Wars. George Lucas’s claim that the series was inspired by Joseph Campbell did more to popularize Campbell’s theories than anything else.

In June 1988, PBS aired a six-episode documentary miniseries titled The Power of Myth, which was entirely composed of a series of six hour-long conversations between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. It has since become one of the most watched series ever aired on PBS and has thereby proved wildly successful at popularizing Campbell’s theories with the general American public.

The Power of Myth led many Americans who weren’t professional folklorists to check out Campbell’s work. Consequently, many of them came to regard Campbell as a genius and his theories as definitive. One person who became particularly influential in promoting Joseph Campbell’s theories was the Hollywood screenwriter and development executive Christopher Vogler, who published a book in 1992 titled The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters, which promoted Joseph Campbell’s work as a model for screenwriters to imitate.

Over the course of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, English literature teachers in the United States at the middle and high school levels increasingly came to embrace Campbell’s theories. Thus, nowadays it seems like nearly every lesson about mythology in any American English class begins with Joseph Campbell and the “hero’s journey.”

I remember learning about the “hero’s journey” in my own seventh-grade honors English class when we talked about world mythology. I also remember how my sophomore English teacher had a huge poster illustrating the “hero’s journey” on the wall in her classroom. The YouTube series “Crash Course World Mythology” devotes an entire episode to explaining the “hero’s journey” and applies the framework to every hero myth that it discusses.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Hollywood screenwriter and development executive Christopher Vogler, who worked to popularize the notion of a “hero’s journey” in the 1990s

Campbell’s model of the “hero’s journey”

I realize that some of my readers probably never learned about the “hero’s journey” in school and those who did learn about it probably don’t remember exactly how it goes. Therefore, I suppose that, before I explain why Campbell’s model isn’t a useful tool for analyzing stories, I should probably explain what exactly Campbell’s model is.

Campbell starts out with the assumption that every great story must be focused on a single hero, whom he generally assumes to be a heterosexual man. According to Campbell, the “hero’s journey” begins with the hero living in a state of normality, which is disrupted by some kind of “call to adventure,” which takes the hero into the realm of the “unknown,” which “is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.”

Campbell says that, in some stories, the hero may initially refuse the call to adventure, but he will inevitably find that he has no choice but to go on the quest. He says that, once the hero has committed to the quest, a supernatural helper of some kind will become known.

Aided by this supernatural helper, the hero must then defeat the guardian of the “first threshold” and pass from the world of the known into the world of the unknown. The hero then must enter “the belly of the whale,” like a worshipper going into a temple. Here, he must undergo a symbolic death in order to be “born again.”

ABOVE: Jonah and the Giant Fish, painted in 1621 by the Dutch painter Pieter Lastman (lived 1583 – 1633)

Next, according to Campbell, the hero must undergo a “road of trials” in which he must overcome “miraculous tests and ordeals” with supernatural aid. Upon completing this road of trials, Campbell holds that the hero must have a “mystical marriage” with “the Queen Goddess of the World,” whom Campbell describes as “incarnate in every woman.”

Campbell does offer up an alternative for if the hero happens to be “not a youth but a maid,” saying that, at this point in the story, the “maid” must be “fit to become the consort of an immortal” and a “heavenly husband” must “conduct her to his bed.” This is, however, appended almost as an afterthought.

After the “mystical marriage,” Campbell asserts that the hero must face what he calls “woman as the temptress,” in which the hero must encounter some form of temptation that may distract him from his quest. Campbell notes that this temptation may not necessarily come in the form of a woman, but stresses that the temptation is usually of a sensual nature.

Next, Campbell asserts that the hero must pass into “the abyss”—the middle point of his journey where he must make atonement with his father. Then he claims that the hero must attain “apotheosis,” acquiring ultimate understanding of the universe, and finally he must receive the “ultimate boon,” which is the object of his quest.

ABOVE: Scene from an Apulian red-figure kalyx-krater dated to between c. 340 and c. 330 BCE, depicting the hero Iason returning with the Golden Fleece, which may be thought of as an example of the “ultimate boon”

Upon receiving this boon, the enlightened hero must return home. According to Campbell, he may initially refuse to return, but he will find that he has no other choice. The hero may need to escape with the boon via a “magic flight.” He may also receive assistance from an external supernatural force.

In the end, the hero must cross the return threshold and come back a completely different man from the one he was when he left. He is now a “master of both worlds.” Campbell writes on page 205:

“The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity.”

In turn, according to Campbell, the hero gains the “freedom to live” and the power to grant boons upon his fellow men.

ABOVE: Diagram from Wikimedia Commons showing Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” in a simplified graphic form

What is this really?

Joseph Campbell portrays the “hero’s journey” as a template that all great stories from all cultures and all time periods naturally tend to follow. This portrayal, however, is not very accurate. The reality is that Campbell’s “monomyth” is something of a Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together from different parts of various myths. No individual story written before Campbell’s book was published actually follows Campbell’s model exactly in its entirety for every single step.

Indeed, even Campbell himself admits in his book that not all stories address all seventeen stages of the “hero’s journey” explicitly, that sometimes certain stages may be expanded, condensed, or skipped entirely, and that not all stories will necessarily address the stages in the same order.

In other words, the “hero’s journey” is essentially just a list of tropes that sometimes appear in some stories from some cultures. This actually poses a huge problem for Campbell’s thesis that the “hero’s journey” is an innate part of the human psyche. Quite simply, stories can deviate so drastically from the supposed template that there’s really nothing to suggest that the template even exists at all outside of Campbell’s own private imagination.

Another problem with Campbell’s model is that his desire to make it apply to as many stories as possible leads him to use extremely vague and imprecise language and, as a result, much of what he says about the supposed stages of the hero’s journey is essentially meaningless. Indeed, a very large portion of everything Joseph Campbell says about mythology in general sounds like it came straight out of a fortune cookie.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a fortune cookie prediction, which is honestly what Joseph Campbell sounds like most of the time

Campbell’s false individualist, sexist, and heteronormative assumptions

Even if we ignore Campbell’s vagueness and imprecision, he also bases his model of the “hero’s journey” on all kinds of false assumptions. For one thing, he assumes that every great story needs to have an individual hero. There’s no reason why this must necessarily be the case, though. There are many great stories that aren’t about heroes and even the stories that are about heroes don’t necessarily have a single hero who stands at the center of everything.

Some critics of Joseph Campbell have argued that there is a distinction between “individualistic” western cultures that tell stories about individual heroes and “collectivist” eastern cultures that tell stories about groups. For instance, an article by Rachael Lefler titled “How Monomyth Theories Get It Wrong about Fiction,” which was published on the site Owlcation on 3 April 2018, argues that Campbell looked at Greek mythology, which is supposedly “individualistic,” and falsely assumed that all stories were “individualistic.” Lefler argues that eastern cultures like “Korea, China, and Japan” are “collectivist” and that their stories therefore break Campbell’s mold. She cites Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, which has eight main characters, as evidence.

I don’t think this argument is entirely accurate. I don’t think that so-called “western cultures” are inherently “individualistic” and I certainly don’t think that ancient Greek culture was very “individualistic.” In fact, I actually think that ancient Greek society was generally very community-oriented. Moreover, I think that many works of ancient Greek literature actually don’t fit neatly into Campbell’s mold either. Notably, as I will discuss more in depth in a moment, the Iliad is a prime example of a work that isn’t clearly centered around a single individual hero.

ABOVE: Shot of the eight main characters in the film adaptation of Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club

In addition to assuming the existence of a single hero who must be the focus of the story, Campbell also makes the sexist assumption throughout most of his book that heroes must usually be male. Thus, throughout nearly the entire book, he consistently refers to the so-called “hero with a thousand faces” using the masculine pronoun “he” and only occasionally mentions the possibility that, in some cases, a hero might be female.

This assumption tells us more about the kinds of stories Campbell himself was reading than it does about the stories that exist in the world, because there are a heck of a lot of stories out there about female heroes. Indeed, some of the oldest surviving narrative poems from ancient Sumer are about the powerful goddess Inanna.

Campbell also assumes that all heroes must be cisgender and heterosexual. He assumes that male heroes are always sexually attracted to women and female heroes are always attracted to men. He even makes sexual union with the opposite sex an important part of his outline for the “hero’s journey.”

This assumption is, of course, inaccurate; there are a great many stories involving heroes who are not straight and cisgender. Heck, even Achilleus, the hero of the Iliad, may not be what we would consider straight. In the poem, Achilleus’s closest companion is a man named Patroklos. The Iliad doesn’t explicitly say that Achilleus and Patroklos are lovers, but, as I discuss in this article from October 2020, many ancient Greek authors believed that this was implied.

ABOVE: Impression from an ancient Akkadian cylinder seal dating to between c. 2334 and c. 2154 BCE, depicting the Sumerian goddess Inanna wielding a weapon while resting her foot on the back of a roaring lion, which she holds on a leash. An attendant pays obeisance before her.

Fitting stories into Joseph Campbell’s Prokroustean bed

Even with all Campbell’s fortune-cookie-level vagueness, there are still many great ancient stories about heroes that don’t fit his model of the “hero’s journey” unless you really contort them beyond all recognition.

Campbell explicitly references the Odyssey in his description of the “hero’s journey” and it is widely cited as a great story that supposedly fits Campbell’s model. Although the Odyssey doesn’t fit Campbell’s model exactly, I think that, of all the works of fiction written before the publication of Campbell’s book, the Odyssey probably comes the closest to fulfilling all the stages of Campbell’s template.

The Odyssey, however, does not represent all of Greek literature and you don’t have to look far to find other Greek stories that hardly match Campbell’s criteria at all. Indeed, to find such a work, you only have to look to the Iliad—the epic poem to which the Odyssey is often considered a sequel. Campbell barely references the Iliad in his book and, if you’ve read the Iliad, it’s easy to see why he avoids talking about it. Let’s go through and examine how well Campbell’s model of the “hero’s journey” describes the Iliad:

• The hero: First of all, there’s the problem of who the “hero” in the Iliad is even supposed to be. Ostensibly, the central figure of the poem would seem to be Achilleus, but yet he isn’t even there for the vast majority of the epic. Most of the poem focuses on what the other characters are doing while Achilleus is simply sulking angrily in his tent. In many ways, the poem is more about how Achilleus’s decisions impact all the other characters than it is about Achilleus himself.

• The call to adventure: The poem opens with the Achaian army being devastated by a plague sent upon them by Apollon to punish Agamemnon for having taken Chryseïs, the daughter of Apollon’s priest Chryses, as his sex slave. Achilleus insists that Agamemnon must return Chryseïs to her father to end the plague. Agamemnon eventually does so, but insists on taking Achilleus’s sex slave Briseïs. Achilleus responds by declaring that he will no longer fight for the Achaians. This is the event that sets the rest of the epic in motion. Are we supposed to believe that Achilleus accepts “the call to adventure” by refusing to fight?

• Supernatural aid: Achilleus does indeed receive supernatural aid early on in the epic. Near the end of book one, he asks his mother, the goddess Thetis, to beg Zeus to make the Achaians suffer terrible losses in his absence so that Agamemnon will have no choice but to return Briseïs. The idea of “supernatural aid,” however, is so vague that all kinds of different things could potentially qualify and the mere fact that Achilleus receives supernatural aid isn’t particularly significant.

ABOVE: Zeus and Thetis, painted in 1811 by the French Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

• The road of trials: Achilleus spends the vast majority of the Iliad brooding in his tent. Other characters face trials as a result of Achilleus’s refusal to fight, but Achilleus himself does not. It’s only near the very end of the poem that he finally decides to fight.

• Meeting with the goddess: There are two major goddesses who aid Achilleus, but, contrary to what we would expect from Campbell, there’s absolutely no sexual or romantic tension between Achilleus and the goddesses who help him. One goddess who helps him is Thetis, his own mother. The other goddess who helps him is Athena, who has sworn an oath of perpetual virginity and frankly doesn’t seem interested in men anyway.

• Woman as the temptress: There is a scene in the Iliad, book nine, in which Agamemnon sends Odysseus, Aias, and Phoinix to Achilleus as emissaries. They offer to return Briseïs and give Achilleus various other spoils, including seven enslaved women from the island of Lesbos, if he will agree to return to battle. Achilleus refuses to accept any of the gifts, insisting that Agamemnon has impugned his honor and that he will not fight for the Achaians until Agamemnon has given him ποινή (poinḗ), which means “recompense.” This is almost the exact opposite of what we would expect based on Joseph Campbell. Achilleus is not being distracted from a quest by “temptations”; he’s literally just sitting in his tent and his comrades are offering him the so-called “temptations” in an effort to get him to fight, but, instead, he refuses and continues sulking. This only fits the “hero’s journey” if we assume that Achilleus’s quest is, in fact, not questing, which hardly makes any sense.

• The belly of the whale: In book sixteen, Patroklos goes into battle wearing Achilleus’s armor and is slain by Hektor, the prince of Troy. Achilleus is absolutely devastated at this loss and I think we may very well say that he undergoes a “symbolic death.” He immediately abandons his refusal to fight and refuses to eat or drink until he has killed Hektor and avenged Patroklos’s death. I suppose this can perhaps be described as a “belly of the whale” sort of moment, but only if you interpret “belly of the whale” in the vaguest possible sense to essentially mean “something bad happens.”

ABOVE: Painting from 1815 by the French painter Léon Cogniet depicting Achilles and Briseïs mourning the death of Patroklos

• Apotheosis: In his wrath, Achilleus starts pushing the boundaries between divine and human. He wears armor that has been forged by the god Hephaistos to replace the old armor that the Trojans stole off Patroklos’s body. His refusal to eat or drink reminds us of the fact that deities don’t need to eat or drink. In book twenty-one, he literally fights the god of the river Skamandros. Although Achilleus doesn’t literally become a god, I’m willing to give Campbell full points on this one.

• The ultimate boon: In book twenty-two, Achilleus achieves his goal of killing Hektor. If you interpret the term “ultimate boon” to refer to whatever the hero is trying to accomplish, I guess you could say that, at this point, Achilleus achieves the “ultimate boon.” Nonetheless, I’m not sure if this really counts, since killing Hektor doesn’t give Achilleus any kind of power to help humanity that he didn’t already have, nor does it improve his understanding of what it means to be human, as far as we can tell. In fact, considering that Achilleus immediately goes on to brutally mutilate Hektor’s corpse almost as soon as he kills him, I would almost say that it’s the opposite; killing Hektor only brings out the savage in him.

• The magic flight: Achilleus doesn’t really go on a “magic flight.” He does tie Hektor’s corpse to his chariot and drag it through the dust around the walls of the city of Troy three times before riding away, but I don’t think this really counts. There’s no magic involved and he isn’t really “escaping” from any danger.

• Atonement with the father: Achilleus’s father Peleus never actually appears in the Iliad, but he does play an important role in the story. In book twenty-four, King Priamos, the father of Hektor, whom Achilleus has slain, visits Achilleus in his tent in order to beg him to the return Hektor’s corpse. Priamos appeals to Achilleus by telling him to remember the love he feels for his own father and to recognize that he, Priamos, is also a father who loves his son (Iliad 22.486–506). Priamos’s words about Achilleus’s father cause him to break into tears. It is this connection that leads Achilleus to return Hektor’s body to Priamos. I don’t think this scene counts as an “atonement with the father,” though, because Achilleus never actually had a quarrel with his own father for which he needed to atone, nor is there evidence that his meeting with Priamos has fundamentally changed his relationship with his own father in any way. The scene is really about Achilleus recognizing Priamos’s humanity and his love for his own son and therefore deciding to show mercy by returning Hektor’s corpse. Campbell takes the view that the hero’s father can appear in many different forms, including perhaps even the form of a monster that needs to be slain, but I don’t really buy this, since it essentially allows people to interpret anything they want as representing the hero’s father.

ABOVE: Painting of King Priamos supplicating Achilleus, painted in 1809 by the French Neoclassical painter Jérôme-Martin Langlois

• Enlightenment: Once we get to the end of the epic, it’s unclear whether Achilleus is any more “enlightened” than he was at the beginning. He makes some thoughtful observations about the human condition in his conversation with Priamos, but it’s unclear whether these are the result of a new wisdom that Achilleus has gained through his recent experiences or they are simply observations that Achilleus was always capable of making, even before the death of Patroklos.

• Freedom to live: Achilleus doesn’t attain “freedom to live” in any sense; on the contrary, the poem repeatedly alludes to the fact that Achilleus will be killed in battle by Alexandros, Hektor’s brother, very soon after the poem ends. Hektor himself literally prophesies Achilleus’s own demise as he is about to die (Iliad 22.358–360).

My conclusion here is that only two of the steps in Campbell’s theory of the “hero’s journey” are indisputably fulfilled by Achilleus in the Iliad: “supernatural aid” and “apotheosis.” He arguably also fulfills the criteria of the “belly of the whale,” “the ultimate boon,” “atonement with the father,” and “enlightenment,” although all these can be reasonably disputed. It is possible to argue that the other steps are fulfilled, but only if you resort to warping and reinterpreting the poem in order to make it fit Campbell’s model.

When it takes all the rationalizing and explaining you can do just to make the story you’re analyzing seem to fit the model you’re trying to make it fit, that’s a very good indication that the model you’re trying to use probably isn’t a useful tool of analysis.

Moreover, trying to interpret all stories to fulfill the “hero’s journey” leads us to ignore parts of those stories that don’t seem to fulfill the template, but that might actually be important. For instance, in the case of the Iliad, by focusing exclusively on Achilleus, we end up ignoring all the other characters in the poem, who actually take up most of the attention.

ABOVE: Ancient Greek polychromatic vase painting dating to c. 300 BCE depicting Achilles dressed in armor and a plumed helmet

Campbell’s ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism

The idea of the “hero’s journey,” however, isn’t just completely useless for actually analyzing and understanding stories; it’s actively harmful for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most serious problem with Campbell’s work is that the whole idea of all stories across cultures being fundamentally the same provides covert justification for western ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism.

On the very first page of the prologue of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell explicitly claims that all stories from all cultures follow the exact same outline and that, although cultural context may affect the details of a story, it does not affect the meaning. He writes:

“Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will always be the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.”

Already in this very first sentence, Campbell’s disdain for cultures that he does not perceive as “western” is evident. To him, Congolese stories are nothing but “dreamlike mumbo jumbo” to be treated with nothing more than “aloof amusement” and Inuit stories are nothing but “bizarre … fairy tales.”

Even Campbell’s description of Laozi is implicitly dismissive. Western authors like Campbell rightly describe pre-modern European thinkers like Thomas Aquinas as “philosophers,” but they habitually describe pre-modern east Asian thinkers like Laozi as simply “mystics.” The word philosopher implies seriousness and intellectual rigor, while the word mystic implies inferiority, irrationality, and lack of intellectualism. This naming practice therefore inaccurately implies that pre-modern east Asian thinkers weren’t as intelligent or as serious as pre-modern European thinkers.

Furthermore, Campbell’s argument that all stories from all cultures and all time periods are fundamentally the same also has culturally imperialist implications. Campbell’s argument naturally implies that the people reading his books (who are, let’s face it, mostly white people from western countries) should be able to immediately understand any story from any culture around the world without having to know anything about the specific culture from which the story originates.

Campbell’s theories therefore provide justification for white westerners to reject the interpretations that non-western peoples give for their own stories, if those interpretations don’t align with what the white westerners in question think the interpretations should be. Thus, western perspectives are portrayed as universal perspectives and non-western perspectives are dismissed.

ABOVE: Late nineteenth or early twentieth-century photograph of an Azande medicine man or “witch doctor”

Why the idea of the “hero’s journey” is harmful to understanding stories

Moreover, by convincing people that all great stories are fundamentally the same, the “hero’s journey” encourages people to disregard the culturally specific details of stories they are analyzing as fundamentally unimportant and instead analyze those stories from the perspective of looking for trends that are supposedly “universal.”

When it comes to analyzing stories, however, the differences between stories from different cultures and time periods often matter a lot more than the similarities. It is crucially important when analyzing a story to think about how the story in question is fundamentally shaped by the specific culture, time period, and literary genre in which it is composed, by the specific background of the author, and by the specific audience for which it is intended.

It is impossible to truly understand a work of fiction without first understanding the culture in which the work of fiction was produced. If you want to know what the Homeric epics meant to ancient Greek people, you can’t find the answer just by reading the epics themselves without any context and coming up with a meaning on your own. You can do that, but, if you do it, the meaning you come up with will be your own interpretation, which may not necessarily be the same meaning the ancient Greeks would have found. If you want to know what the epics meant to the Greeks, you have to study ancient Greek culture and read what other ancient Greek authors wrote about the Homeric epics.

Even when it comes to works of fiction composed in the present-day United States, understanding the historical and cultural context in which the works were composed is crucial to understanding the works themselves. This is even the case for works of fiction that were supposedly modeled on Campbell’s theories.

ABOVE: Allegorical illustration from a medieval manuscript dated to c. 1250 CE, depicting Homer with an archiater and the god Mercurius

How Star Wars is a product of the specific cultural environment of the 1970s

From beginning to end, the original Star Wars movie is fundamentally a product of the cultural environment of the United States in the 1970s. For instance, the reason why the movie starts with the introduction “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” is because, since at least the nineteenth century, fairy tales told in the English language have often begun with the introduction “A long time ago in a land far, far away…”

This introduction is specific to a particular genre within a particular culture; not all stories begin with this introduction. Classical epics, for instance, usually begin with an invocation to the Muse in which the poet names the subject about which they are about to sing. Thus, the opening line of the Iliad reads:

“μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος…”

This means, in my own translation:

“Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilleus, son of Peleus…”

The first part of the opening line of the Odyssey reads:

“ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον…”

This means:

“Tell me, Muse, about a man much-turning…”

If Star Wars were imitating classical epic poetry, then it might have instead had an introduction like this: “Sing, Muse, about a man in touch with the Force, much-skilled in fighting with laser swords…”

ABOVE: Introductory slide to George Lucas’s Star Wars

Thinking about the culturally specific influences behind familiar stories is important because it reveals that many of the assumptions that exist within our own culture that we take for granted are not universal at all, but rather rooted in very culturally specific prejudices. For instance, in the Star Wars movies, darkness and the color black are both closely associated with evil. The evil side of the Force is referred to as the “dark side” and the title darth, which is used by the evil Sith Lords, literally sounds like the word dark. On top of this, Darth Vader wears a black suit and the Emperor wears a black cloak.

This association of darkness and the color black with evil is rooted in Christianity, which has been the dominant religion in the United States for most of modern history. Throughout the writings of the New Testament, darkness is repeatedly equated with evil and Satan, while light is repeatedly associated with goodness and God. For instance, in the Gospel of John 8:12, Jesus is portrayed as saying, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

In the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 26:17–18, God is portrayed as saying to the apostle Paul, as translated in the NRSV:

“I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.”

In later times, Christians in western Europe expanded upon the already-existing association of darkness with evil and came to associate the color black with evil as well. During the Early Modern Period (lasted c. 1450 – c. 1750), English people often referred to Satan as “the Black Man” and, in paintings and depictions from this period, he is often portrayed as being literally black in color.

Not all cultures, however, have this association between evil and darkness. The ancient Egyptians, for instance, saw black as a good color, because they associated it with the black soil that is found in the area around the Nile. This soil is extremely fertile and good for growing crops. It was on account of this soil that the Egyptians called the land around the Nile where they lived “Kmt,” which literally means “the Black Land.”

The color the Egyptians associated with evil was red, because they associated it with the red sands of the desert, where it was impossible to grow anything. If Star Wars were an ancient Egyptian story, then the characters might call the good side of the Force “the black side” and call the evil side of the Force “the red side.”

ABOVE: The Temptation of Christ by the Devil, painted in 1860 by the French painter Félix-Joseph Barrias. Notice how the artist portrays Satan as black.

Similarly, the reason why, in the original Star Wars trilogy, the Sandpeople on Tatooine are portrayed as lawless, inhuman savages who live in the wilderness and attack the human settlers on the planet is because the portrayal of Sandpeople in the film is partly based on the inaccurate and racist portrayal of Native American people in western films that were popular in the United States during the 1960s and 70s.

More recent works created in the Star Wars universe have sought to revise the portrayal of the Sandpeople from the original trilogy. Notably, the television series The Mandalorian, which premiered in November 2019, portrays Sandpeople as reasonable people who are simply defending their land from invasive human settlers.

This revision of the Star Wars mythos corresponds with changing attitudes among white people towards Native American people and Indigenous people more broadly. More white people are starting to recognize that Indigenous people are intelligent human beings, not “savages,” and that settler colonialism is wrong. As such, stereotyped portrayals of Indigenous “savages,” even on alien planets, are becoming less appealing and much less marketable.

ABOVE: Image of the Sandpeople, who are partly inspired by the portrayal of Native Americans in old western films

The cultural environment of the United States in the 1970s didn’t just influence the details of an otherwise universal story; major plot points of the film are clearly the result of the film’s specific cultural environment. The reason why the Death Star, a terrifying superweapon that can destroy an entire planet, is such an important part of the film is because the film was made in the 1970s during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were developing increasingly powerful and dangerous superweapons. Thus, the idea that an evil galactic empire would create such a superweapon seemed only natural.

Once again, this idea is culturally specific. The idea of a tyrannical empire creating a superweapon that can destroy entire planets wouldn’t have occurred to anyone in, say, the Roman Empire in the second century CE; they had other ways of showing that rulers were tyrannical.

As I discuss in this post I made in August 2020 and this other post I made in January 2022, ancient Roman authors routinely portray emperors they personally disliked as possessing certain qualities to show that they were evil. They portray such emperors as extremely arrogant, sexually depraved, wasteful with money, and sadistically cruel towards Senators and other social elites.

If Star Wars were an ancient Roman story, then, instead of building a superweapon that can destroy planets, Darth Vader would probably be constantly boasting of his own superiority, comparing himself to deities, engaging in wild sex orgies, having sex with his own sisters, indiscriminately throwing out large quantities of gold to the illiterate masses, dissolving priceless pearls in vinegar, and sadistically torturing galactic Senators in all sorts of horrible ways. These things would all be instantly recognizable to Roman people as signs of an evil ruler.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the Death Star destroying Alderaan

Conclusion

I could go on and on like this for hours, pointing out ways in which the original Star Wars movie, far from reflecting a universal template present in all cultures, is actually fundamentally shaped by the specific cultural environment in which it was created. Nonetheless, I think that, by now, I have made my point.

If you follow Joseph Campbell and interpret Star Wars as an expression of a timeless “monomyth” that recurs in all cultures and all time periods, then all the very culturally specific influences I have noted here—as well as the other influences that I haven’t even mentioned—will have a tendency to get swept under the rug in favor of interpretations that are less critical and that are more inclined to accept aspects of the story as “universal.” I don’t think that this is a good thing.