Myths and cosmogonies: what Campbell and Eliade reveal — and what they don't show

An ethical note: Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk (Apalech Clan) is cited here as a structural corrective to the romantic universalism of Campbell's monomyth. Aboriginal cosmology cannot be appropriated as an available narrative system — it remains protected by its lineages of transmission. This article pays homage without transmitting.

Opening

Amara grew up in Côte d'Ivoire in a family where dreams were told in the morning on waking, before eating, because the spirits of the ancestors spoke in the night and ignoring them brought misfortune. She now lives in Paris. For the first time she opens a popular guide to dream practice. The first question the guide puts to her is: "What is the challenge this dream has thrown at you?"

She sets the book down.

Not because the question is wrong. Because it speaks another language. In her own dream culture, the dream is not a challenge thrown at a solitary hero. It is a message received from a community of the unseen, calling for a collective response. The grammar of the question presupposes a particular narrative frame — the hero who answers the call, who crosses the trials, who returns transformed. That is Campbell. That is the monomyth. It is a real structure, powerful, ancient. But it is not the only real, powerful, ancient structure.

This tension is at the heart of this article. Campbell and Eliade accomplished something formidable: to show that myths the world over share deep structures. And in doing so, they also did something risky: they offered a grammar that was not quite neutral. Both observations are true at once.

In 30 seconds

Mircea Eliade showed that the sacred "irrupts" into the profane through hierophanies — moments when a stone, a place, a dream, suddenly take part in a larger reality. Joseph Campbell mapped the monomyth — separation, initiation, return — as the shared structure of the heroic narratives of every culture. Both bodies of work are foundational. But Tyson Yunkaporta and others have shown that Campbell's universalism implicitly encodes Western individualism. The productive tension is to hold both: the power of shared structures and the irreducibility of each particular cosmogony.

Voices of the masters

Eliade — the sacred irrupts into the profane

Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane (1957), sets out a phenomenological frame for all human religions. Its keystone is the concept of hierophany:

"Any object, act, or place can become a hierophany — a manifestation of the sacred that paradoxically makes it 'something other' while remaining part of its natural environment. A stone that reveals the sacred is still a stone, yet it participates in a wholly different reality. The sacred does not abolish the profane; it irrupts through it."

It is a remarkable formulation. The sacred does not replace the profane. It irrupts through it. A stone remains a stone. A night of dreams remains a night of sleep. But something crosses through them and charges them with another dimension.

Eliade adds a temporal structure to this observation. Homo religiosus does not live in a uniform linear time. He lives in two times at once: ordinary time (chronos) and the time of origins, which Eliade calls illud tempore:

"Sacred time is not linear and irreversible but circular and recoverable. Through festivals, rituals, and ceremonies, religious man periodically re-enters the mythical time of origins (illud tempore), when the gods acted for the first time. This re-entry regenerates the world."

To recite a myth, to perform a rite, to cross a threshold — for Eliade, all of this is a way of returning to the origin. Not metaphorically: ontologically. The marriage rite does not "symbolize" a divine union — it repeats the original divine union. And in that repetition, it receives its power.

Eliade — cosmogony as the paradigmatic model

In The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade spells out what a cosmogony is:

"The creation of the world is the exemplary divine act. All subsequent acts of creation, healing, renewal, and even destruction follow the pattern of the original cosmogony. To create anything is to re-enact the passage from chaos to cosmos."

The cosmogony is not one story among others. It is the model of all stories. Each time a human being crosses a deep crisis and comes out transformed, they re-enact the cosmogony. Chaos (the undifferentiated, the pre-formal) → cosmos (order, form, meaning). The passage is always the same. The staging changes from culture to culture.

Imago mundi: "To settle somewhere is to found a world." To inhabit a place — truly to inhabit it — is to re-enact the cosmogony on the scale of a life. This gesture is universal. How it is told, ritualized, transmitted — that is infinitely particular.

Campbell — the monomyth

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), traces the structure of the hero's story across all mythic narratives. He calls it the monomyth (a term borrowed from James Joyce):

"The hero's adventure follows a nuclear formula: separation from the world, penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return. This pattern — the monomyth — is the skeleton key to all mythology."

Separation — initiation — return. Campbell traces this structure in Greek, Indian, Norse, Native American, Japanese, and Egyptian myths. He finds it again in the Gospels, in Gilgamesh, in European fairy tales, in Siberian shamanic narratives.

His ontological thesis is bold:

"Myth and dream are the same symbolic language — dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream — and both serve the essential function of conducting the energies of the psyche through the critical thresholds of transformation that a human life demands."

Myth is the dream of the culture. The dream is the myth of the individual. In both cases, the same function: to accompany the psyche through the inevitable thresholds of transformation in a human life. Where there is no longer a living mythology to guide these passages, Campbell says, the individual stands alone before their crisis.

The Power of Myth (1991, with Bill Moyers) adds: "Follow your bliss." That slogan was taken over by the self-help world. What Campbell meant is more precise: "The inward thing that you basically are — when you do that, you vitalize the world around you." Not an invitation to do what feels good. An invitation to align with the vocation that precedes the ego.

The productive tension: Campbell vs the critics

Campbell's universalism is real and contested at once. It is real: independent work (Propp on the Russian folktale, Greimas on narrative semiotics) has confirmed that certain narrative structures recur across cultures.

But it is contested, and the contestation lands. Tyson Yunkaporta, in Right Story, Wrong Story (2024):

"Western narratives — hero's journey, individual triumph, progress narrative — encode individualism, competition, and linear time. Indigenous narratives encode reciprocity, kinship obligation, and cyclical renewal."

"One way of knowing becomes universal tyranny when forced globally."

The problem is not that the monomyth is false. It is that, by presenting it as the universal model, you make a narrative structure that is not natural pass for natural. The separation-initiation-return structure is individualist: a singular hero departs, crosses trials, returns with a gift. In many non-Western cosmogonies, the subject of the adventure is the community itself. Or a relationship between the living and the ancestors. Not a hero to be manufactured.

Eliade is criticized differently. Historians of religion such as Jonathan Z. Smith have shown that his concept of the "sacred" as a universal category tends to flatten cultural particulars beneath a European phenomenological grid. And Eliade's political commitments in the 1930s are not unrelated to certain angles of his analysis.

Yunkaporta's formulation is the most exact: "Right Story" and "Wrong Story" do not name a universal truth against an error. They name stories that honour or violate the relational obligations of the system they belong to. The monomyth is a right story where individuation is central. It becomes a wrong story when it is imposed on cosmogonies that do not start from the individual subject.

Personal cosmogony as a middle way

There is a formulation that escapes this tension and is directly usable. It is the notion of personal cosmogony.

If every act of creation repeats the passage chaos → cosmos (Eliade), and if myth accompanies the psyche through its inevitable passages (Campbell), then a human life can be read as a personal cosmogony: a succession of passages from chaos to order, of disintegrations and refoundings, with its own figures, its own turning points, its own private illud tempore — the moments when everything began otherwise.

This reading imposes no heroic schema. Nor does it impose a collective structure. It is an invitation to look at the shape of your own life with the eyes a cosmogonic narrative offers: is there an original chaos? Were there moments of refounding? Which figures acted as midwives of a new world? Which periods answer to a personal illud tempore?

In the Gospels, in the Popol Vuh, in the Yoruba cosmogony, in Genesis, in the Enuma Elish — the materials differ infinitely. The question they pose is the same: how does something begin, and who carries it?

Why it matters

You probably know this feeling: crossing a deep crisis with no words to name it. No map. No precedent. Just raw disorientation.

Campbell and Eliade had the right intuition here. Myths are not outdated superstitions. They are psychic technologies. They do something reasoning alone cannot: accompany the psyche through the thresholds that will not be crossed by will. Campbell said it in 1949. The diagnosis still holds: we live in a mythological deficit. The great cosmogonies that once guided life's passages — adolescence, grief, transformation — have lost their grip in secularized societies. This emptiness is not harmless. It leaves people alone before crises that have an ancient structure, with no language to cross them.

But the tension with Yunkaporta is just as exact, and it has to be held without resolving it too quickly. When the monomyth is presented as the universal structure, what is not neutral is made to pass for neutral. The separation-initiation-return grammar is deeply individualist. It presupposes a singular hero. Yet in many non-Western cosmogonies, the subject of the adventure is the community itself — or a balance to be kept between the living and the ancestors. Not a hero to be manufactured.

Amara, who told her dreams in the morning before eating, was not living in a mythological deficit. She was living in a different cosmogony. Not a lesser one. A different one.

Campbell and Eliade remain useful. The discipline is to hold them as what they are: tools of analysis, not the only possible grammar.

The practice

Here is what reading Campbell and Eliade — with their tension — teaches in concrete terms:

1. Identify your personal cosmogony. Not "your hero's journey" — your own founding story. Was there in your life an original chaos out of which something took shape? Were there moments of refounding — passages from chaos toward a new form of order? What are your illud tempore — the moments when everything began again?

2. Notice the hierophanies. Eliade offers a useful category: certain moments, objects, places, dreams, suddenly carry a charge of meaning that exceeds their ordinary appearance. The stone remains a stone — but it "means" something. Learn to recognize these moments without over-reading them.

3. Question the grammar of your story. In which narrative structure do you tell your life? Hero's journey (individual, linear, progressive)? Cycle of return (regeneration, circular time)? Relationship to ancestors or community (collective narrative)? None of these grammars is "better" — each reveals different aspects.

4. Don't impose your cosmogony on others. Amara's cosmogony — dreams as messages from the ancestors, cyclical time, collective response — is as legitimate as Campbell's monomyth. The discipline is not to assume that everyone lives their dreams and their passages in the same grammar.

5. Work with the tension. Campbell and Yunkaporta do not cancel each other out — they describe different aspects of the real. The monomyth exists. So does the individualism it encodes. Hold both without resolving them prematurely.

Pitfalls

Campbell-washing. "Hero's journey" has become a marketing storytelling tool — used to structure keynotes, pitches, campaigns. In doing so, the concept is emptied of its psychic substance. Campbell was speaking of real life passages, not of narrative structures for selling a product.

Naive universalism. "All cultures have the same founding myth deep down." No — they share certain structures, and many others that diverge profoundly. Partial convergence does not license a total synthesis.

Erasure through phenomenology. Eliade's concept of the sacred is powerful, but it tends to dissolve particulars into a general phenomenological category. Some traditions resist that dissolution — and that resistance is precious, not an obstacle to overcome.

"Follow your bliss" misunderstood. Campbell's slogan, lifted out of context, has become an invitation to hedonism or escape. What Campbell meant: to align with the vocation that precedes the ego — not with what feels good on the surface. The difference is enormous.

Cosmogony as an imposed grid. To use Eliade to "analyze" someone else's dreams or experiences with the category of hierophany as if it were an objective tool — that is already to impose a particular phenomenological grid. Tools are useful when used consciously, not when taken for reality itself.

FAQ

Is Campbell's monomyth scientifically proven? Comparable structures exist across many traditions — independent work (Propp, Greimas) has confirmed structural recurrences. But Campbell is not an anthropologist in the strict sense: he works by comparative reading, not by field ethnography. His work is an interpretive synthesis — powerful, but to be read as such.

Can Campbell and Eliade be used without cultural appropriation? The distinction is between using them as tools of analysis (to understand structures) and using them as grids of experience (imposing their frame on different cultures). The first is legitimate. The second is problematic. And in both cases, one must be aware of their limits and their blind spots.

What is a hierophany, concretely? Eliade gives many examples: a "sacred" stone in a tradition — it does not differ physically from other stones, but it "manifests" something other. A cosmic tree, an axis of the world, a powerful dream. The defining mark is the feeling of taking part in a reality larger than the ordinary, without the object or the event ceasing to be itself. It is an experience, not a concept — Eliade stresses this constantly.

"Follow your bliss" — how do you tell it apart from mere whim? Campbell is precise here: "bliss" is not superficial joy or immediate pleasure. It is "the inward thing that you basically are" — the deep vocation, what precedes the ego. The practical distinction: superficial joy evaporates when circumstances change. The deep vocation persists even in difficulty — it is recognizable precisely because it withstands the obstacle.

To go further

1. *Eliade — The Sacred and the Profane*** (1957): indispensable. Short and dense. The phenomenological base for understanding what a hierophany is and how the sacred structures human space and time.
2. *Campbell — The Hero with a Thousand Faces*** (1949): read Part I in full. The epilogue on modernity and the mythological deficit is the most directly applicable to our contemporary questions.
3. *Yunkaporta — Right Story, Wrong Story*** (2024): the most direct and least lazy post-colonial corrective. Not a denunciation — a reorientation. Required reading alongside Campbell to hold the productive tension.
4. *Eliade — The Myth of the Eternal Return (Cosmos and History)** (1949): on sacred time, cosmogonic repetition, and "the terror of history." A companion to Sacred and Profane* — more philosophical, more difficult.
5. *Hillman — Re-Visioning Psychology* (1975): for the notion of psychological polytheism** — the psyche is not inhabited by a single heroic archetype but by a plurality of mythic figures. An internal corrective to the Jungian tradition that pluralizes where Campbell tends to unify.