The Monomyth Ontology: a formal OWL vocabulary for Campbell's Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the cyclical pattern of departure, initiation, and return articulated in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), claims that a single narrative grammar underlies heroic myths across cultures, periods, and media. Yet the framework's analytical value lies less in the stories that conform to it than in those that resist, compress, invert, or displace its stages: the most revealing readings emerge precisely where the fit is imperfect. The Monomyth OWL ontology formalizes this insight by treating divergence from the monomyth template not as noise but as constitutive: it models the seventeen canonical stages across three acts, eight archetypal character roles drawn from Christopher Vogler's dramaturgical adaptation, and a six-point fit quality scale ranging from perfect alignment to deliberate inversion.Three orthogonal divergence classes (narrative, sequential, and semiotic) capture what changes when a stage is absent or subverted, when it occurs out of its expected order, and when the signs through which it is expressed shift from the sacred to the secular, from the external to the internal, or from one cultural vocabulary to another. The interpretive act of reading a narrative through Campbell's lens is reified as a structured, queryable entity that anchors every analytical judgment to the specific narrative moment it describes, turning the relationship between an individual story and a theoretical model of storytelling into a first-class knowledge engineering object. An accompanying knowledge graph instantiates the ontology across twelve works spanning from Sophocles to modern cinema and videogames. Resources: Website: https://monomyth.metamuses.org GitHub repository: https://github.com/metamuses/monomyth Ontology: https://monomyth.metamuses.org/ontology Knowledge Graph: https://monomyth.metamuses.org/graph/ Documentation: https://monomyth.metamuses.org/docs SPARQL endpoint: https://monomyth.metamuses.org/sparql