Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 6 The Hero’s Journey as Symbolic Cut

“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experiences available… The call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration.”

— Joseph Campbell

Campbell’s “monomyth” — the so-called Hero’s Journey — has become a cultural cliché, used to template everything from Hollywood blockbusters to personal growth seminars. But beneath its formulaic popularity lies a deeper function: not the transmission of timeless narrative, but the symbolic cutting of a reality system into phase.

From a relational-ontological standpoint, the Hero’s Journey is not a tale to be told but a symbolic operation: a cut in the topology of construal that enables new alignments of meaning, identity, and possibility.

The Cut: From Stability to Instability

Every symbolic system maintains a coherence — a reflexive alignment between collective values, ontological assumptions, and lived practices. The Hero’s Journey begins when that coherence is ruptured.

• The Call to Adventure signals a phase-shift: a destabilisation of the current construal.

• The Departure does not represent literal movement but the symbolic unbinding of alignment — the dislocation of self from the coordinates of the known.

• The Threshold Guardians and Initiatory Ordeals figure the forces that resist or reconfigure the symbolic architecture of the self-world relation.

At each turn, what appears as narrative sequence is actually the enactment of symbolic instability — a traversal of construal that puts the social ontology itself into motion.

The Journey: Traversing Possibility Space

As the journey unfolds, the hero undergoes transformation — but not as an individual alone. What is transformed is the phase-relation between collective construals.

• The Road of Trials sequences the traversal of alternative symbolic construals — each trial a perspective, a cut, a provisional alignment.

• The Abyss marks the limit of symbolic coherence — a point where reflexive orientation collapses, and the possibility of rephasing becomes both necessary and uncertain.

• The Revelation is not a truth discovered but a new symbolic topology — a shift in alignment that reconfigures the system of meaning itself.

This is why myths of descent, death, or dissolution feature so prominently. They are not tales of suffering alone, but symbolic mechanisms for transitioning between incompatible construals of reality.

The Return: Rephasing the Collective

The final arc of the journey — the Return with the Elixir — completes the symbolic operation. The hero does not bring back “knowledge” or “power” in a literal sense, but a new alignment of the collective symbolic field.

• The Return is a symbolic re-entry into the shared system of construal.

• The Gift is the new reflexive phase: a reconfiguration of self, community, and cosmos that can now be lived.

• The Master of Two Worlds embodies the capacity to mediate between incompatible construals — to sustain coherence through symbolic reflexivity.

In this light, the Hero’s Journey is a collective symbolic cut — a traversal and rephasing of social ontology that allows for the reconstitution of meaning.

Myth as Reflexive Infrastructure

Campbell interpreted the Hero’s Journey as a map of psychological transformation. But through a relational lens, it is better understood as symbolic infrastructure for reflexive re-coordination.

It is:

• A mythic technology for shifting alignment.

• A recursive traversal of the possible.

• A symbolic system for phasing the collective into a new ontological topology.

Not every culture has heroes. But every culture faces moments when the symbolic fabric begins to fray — when coherence gives way to ambiguity, and the real becomes unliveable.

The Hero’s Journey is a mythic grammar for such moments. Not because it resolves them, but because it allows a system of meaning to cut, collapse, and reconstrue itself — all while keeping the symbolic infrastructure intact.

That is the true power of the monomyth: not its archetypes, but its function as reflexive topology in motion.