What is the Hero's Journey and how am I the hero? In his 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell studied countless fairy tales, myths, legends and folk tales and discovered a pattern. He called it the "mono-myth" or The Hero's Journey. Campbell noticed that all heroes and heroines took more or less the same journey. He described the evolution of the hero's character through three phases: separation, initiation and return. It includes a symbolic death and re