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约瑟夫·坎贝尔的单一神话范式（monomyth），即其1949年著作《千面英雄》中阐释的启程、启蒙与回归的循环结构，主张存在一套统一的叙事语法，贯穿不同文化、时代与媒介的英雄神话。然而该框架的分析价值并非体现在契合其结构的叙事中，反而更多源自那些背离、压缩、倒置或置换其叙事阶段的作品：最具启发性的解读恰恰诞生于叙事与范式契合度欠佳之处。 单一神话OWL本体将这一洞见形式化，它将背离单一神话模板的情况而非视作无意义噪声，而是视作构成性要素。该本体建模了三幕叙事结构下的17个标准阶段，采用源自克里斯托弗·沃格勒戏剧改编框架的8种原型角色，并设置了一套包含6个等级的契合度评分体系，评分范围从完全契合到刻意倒置。三类正交的偏离分类（叙事偏离、序列偏离与符号偏离）分别刻画了三种变化：叙事阶段缺失或被颠覆、阶段出现顺序违背预期，以及承载阶段的符号从神圣转向世俗、从外部转向内部，或是在不同文化叙事语汇间发生转换。 以坎贝尔的理论视角解读叙事的阐释行为，被具象化为结构化且可查询的实体，将每一项分析判断锚定至其所描述的具体叙事节点，从而将单个叙事作品与叙事理论模型之间的关系转化为一等知识工程对象。 配套的知识图谱在12部涵盖索福克勒斯剧作至现代电影与电子游戏的作品中实例化了该本体。 资源： 官方网站：https://monomyth.metamuses.org 本体文件地址：https://monomyth.metamuses.org/ontology 知识图谱地址：https://monomyth.metamuses.org/graph/ 文档地址：https://monomyth.metamuses.org/docs SPARQL查询端点：https://monomyth.metamuses.org/sparql GitHub仓库：https://github.com/metamuses/monomyth