Event Archetypes

Event archetypes (or archetypes of transformation) are grounded in orientations toward specific situations. These tend to correspond to significant challenges and opportunities (e.g., disasters and epiphanies), to important moments in life (e.g., birth, marriage, and death), and to holidays (e.g., New Year’s Day, Easter, and the solstices).

Among writers, filmmakers, and critics, event archetypes are typically considered in terms of the hero’s journey (or monomyth) as described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces or the simplified version presented by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey. The hero’s journey is best understood as a loose, quasi-sequential collection of some particular event archetypes. But the collection is by no means exhaustive, nor was it intended to be.

I’ve spent little time studying event archetypes, per se. In the future, I hope to extend my research in this area. Until then, I can only provide a cursory summary of the work of Campbell and a few others here.

Below is the hero’s journey as Joseph Campbell presented. You’ll also see the heroine’s journey and the virgin’s journey as described by Valerie Estelle Frankel in From Girl to Goddess and Kim Hudson in The Virgin’s Promise, respectively.

All of the following ‘journeys’ are descriptive, not prescriptive. It’s also important to understand that ‘virgin’ here is being used as a term of art that’s quite different from the colloquial definition.