When people talk about story structure, Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey often takes center stage. It’s become a kind of narrative shorthand, especially in film, fantasy, and game design. But not all meaningful stories are really about heroes conquering the world. Sometimes stories are more subtle than that. While Campbell was an anthropologist who looked at how the man goes out to slay the beast and comes back changed, other anthropologists (still men, alas) looked at how ritual is invoked to bring meaning to the changes that happen whether we choose to go out of the village or not. Birth, maturation, marriage, death. Some stories are about crossing thresholds, being unmade. The one who returns is not the changed hero, but a new person.
Let’s start with Campbell, just in case you haven’t been initiated into the Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell’s concept, sometimes called the monomyth, describes a recurring pattern he identified across many world myths. While it has many elaborations, the core arc looks like this:
1. Departure
– The hero begins in an ordinary world.
– A call to adventure disrupts the status quo.
– After some resistance, the hero crosses a threshold into the unknown.
2. Initiation
– The hero faces trials, enemies, and allies.
– A central ordeal brings the hero to symbolic death or extreme risk.
– The hero gains a reward: knowledge, power, or an object.
3. Return
– The hero returns to the ordinary world.
– The reward is brought back to benefit the community.
– Order is restored or improved.
Don’t get me wrong, Campbell’s structure is great when you’re focused on external action. But when you’re talking about changing inside, about identity, about relationship, it’s not so good.
Enter ritual narrative structure. Let me guess, you’ve never heard of it, right? Most people haven’t. Somehow, Campbell had better marketing, I don’t know, but honestly, Arnold van Gennep published his work first, all the way back in 1909. And then Victor Turner published several books in the 1960s, and while he took the anthropology to story places, the theater especially, it just…didn’t hit stories the way Campbell did. I’m tempted to say that gender constructs had something to do with it. Probably Freud was in there somewhere, because anything in the middle of the 20th century that has to do with gender and goes wrong is probably Frued’s fault.
But I digress. If you are like I was, you are not just interested, but desperate to hear about a story structure that has to do with cycles, with thresholds, with the rituals that make meaningful life and community work.
The anthropology work is based on rituals that mark life transitions: birth, adulthood, marriage, death and more. (I won’t get into it here, but if van Gennep had been a woman, he would have included menopause like Sharon Blackie does, but that’s for another day.) He observed communities in Africa mostly and noticed a shared structure he called rites of passage. These rites have three stages:
1. Separation: The participant is removed from their previous social role or identity.
2. Liminality: A threshold state: “betwixt and between.” Old rules no longer apply, but new ones aren’t yet formed. Identity is unstable, ambiguous, or dissolved.
3. Incorporation: The participant goes into the wilderness and dies; a new person/identity returns. The change is recognized and socially acknowledged. The journey is about becoming.
When Victor Turner came along he expanded van Gennep’s ideas, focusing especially on liminality. Turner described liminal spaces as rule-breaking, symbolic, dreamlike or dangerous, often overseen by tricksters, guides, or monsters. Think about a shamanic tradition of going to the underworld to find the soul pieces that are lost or severed. It makes me think of the Popol Vuh stories from Mexico. They’re pretty weird and shamanic and liminal. We’ll get into them another day, but they’re worth a perusal at least at a Wikipedia level.
One important point about when a person crosses the threshold into a liminal space. Hierarchies collapse. Think about quests where people who are “higher” and “lower” work together. Remind you of any Numenorian kings and hobbits? Or maybe a unicorn and a…what would you call Molly Grue…a strumpet? You don’t get to be the most important person because of birth or money in liminal spaces.
Another important point, you don’t necessarily fight. You may not conquer. But what will happen is that who you are when you entered is stripped away from you. Sometimes all at once, sometimes in phases or bits, but you change. Sound like real life? What happens when you’re a teenager? What happens if you go through a traumatic experience? You don’t conquer, but you do change, and you come out the other side not by killing a monster, but by finding meaning in your new reality. Anyone who has ever experienced cancer and lived knows what I’m talking about.
So here it is:
The Ritual Narrative Structure
When we apply ritual theory to storytelling, we get a structure that looks something like this:
1. Separation: The protagonist is pulled (or wanders) out of a familiar identity. This may be quiet, accidental, or unwanted.
2. Liminal Descent: The protagonist enters a strange, symbolic space. Time, rules, and logic may distort. Guides and antagonists often blur together. The protagonist loses certainty, innocence, or selfhood.
3. Transformative Ordeal: Not a “boss fight,” but a moment of recognition, grief, or surrender. The old self can no longer continue.
4. Return or Re-entry: The protagonist exits the liminal space. The world may look the same—but the protagonist is not. The change may be bittersweet, partial, or irreversible.
Once again, these are stories about identity. Who are we, how do we relate to each other, and what does life mean? Let’s look at a couple of stories that you could map with Campbell, but honestly, they fit better with ritual.
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. Of course I’m talking about the novel. No, I don’t hate the cartoon, but if you’ve experienced both, you know.
Separation:
The unicorn leaves the immortal forest, abandoning timeless innocence.
Liminality:
The unicorn becomes human. She began to be stripped of her identity when she first heard that she is the last unicorn. When she becomes human, she is neither truly immortal nor mortal. Mortality, fear, desire, and regret flood in. The world is strange, painful, and morally ambiguous.
Transformative Ordeal:
Love, loss, and self-awareness permanently alter the unicorn. What is gained cannot be unlearned. She is no longer like the others, for no unicorn was born who could regret, but now she does. She, an immortal being, regrets.
Return:
From the moment she learned that she was unique as the last unicorn, there was no turning back. She is going to be different forever, but both joy and sorrow live in her. She will remember Prince Lir when humans are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.
And what about the elixir of life from the Hero’s Journey? There isn’t one. She paid a terrible price willingly. She saved the unicorns, but not herself.
Labyrinth: Jim Henson’s amazing film from 1986
On the surface, Labyrinth looks like a quest. In practice, it is almost a textbook ritual narrative.
Separation:
Sarah escapes a frustrating adolescence and wishes away responsibility.
Liminality:
The Labyrinth is a classic liminal space: nonlinear, symbolic, ruled by tricksters, full of false choices and identity tests. Allies mislead as often as they help.
Transformative Ordeal:
The confrontation with Jareth is not about defeating a villain, it’s about rejecting a fantasy of power and eternal childhood.
Return:
Sarah comes back to the same world, but with a new internal stance. She doesn’t leave the fantasy world behind her, but now she understands how to love these things as an adult rather than be ruled by them as a teenage child.
So when do you use a ritual narrative structure? When your story is about:
· Grief
· Coming-of-age
· Gender
· Identify
· Mortality
· Loss leading to wisdom
Then consider a different structure, one that is about crossing thresholds, and by the way, look for the next post because while the Hero’s Journey has a big circle, the ritual structure has circles too, or spirals, or—-well, we’ll look at it next time.
noellecarter 