You might say that "must always be" is a bit too strong, for in the eighth step of the journey ("Meeting with the Goddess"), he appends the notion that there can be heroines. For this, I would like to retell the arguments from Spencer McDaniel's "The Hero's Journey is Nonsense," as I understand them:

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

> "When the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth, but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed - whether she will or no."
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 299-300

If your protagonist is female, then forget the whole 'Woman as Temptress' step that comes next - she will be tempted here and now, and deep within her psyche and yours is the inability to think otherwise, because she is destined to be the chattel of the divine. What an incredibly *weird* way of framing it, Campbell!

Well, OK. What about stories where the protagonists aren't white--

This, folks, is Campbell's *opening.* It is his 'dark and stormy night;' his 'best of times, worst of times;' his Greek chorus who foreshadows everything that is going to happen in the play; he might not have flat-out compared these cultures to primates in this quote*, but he makes it very clear that not only are they not Western, he finds their stories amusing, bizarre, mystical, and on the whole, "it's all the same."

Then there's Campbell's influences. For instance, we know he combined Freudian psychoanalysis with Carl Jung's archetypes and collective unconscious theory. The result, applied to myths and storytelling, is the #Monomyth. Jung, likewise, was a progeny of Freud's work, and, like many conservatives post-WW2, heavily influenced by the works of Irish philosopher Edmund Burke:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke

The collective unconscious theory is, in effect, a mystical mirror-world version of #sociology. Among other things, it posits the existence of #archetypes - that is, through the unperceived connections everyone has to everyone else, we inherit common patterns of thought, or images, or symbols. If the collective unconscious is the cause of rhyming stories and history, archetypes are the effect.

I needn't explain again how the Monomyth, as an analytical tool, prioritises archetypes over the actual texts being analysed. It will not tell you what makes the Aenid and Watership Down different stories, but what it will tell you is that, deep down, they are the same stories, sharing the same archetypes, because of that pesky collective unconscious at work. It's pure tautology.

When Campbell wrote, "there is no final system for the interpretation of myths," whatever his intention, what has manifested in the #Monomyth is its structural opposite - *"there is no alternative for the interpretation of stories."* You can break or subvert every trope in the Monomyth's cycle, and its photo negative, its afterimage, yet stains your eyelids. It insists upon itself that it's impossible for the psyche to come up with anything different.

"We are incapable of telling stories any different. It is impossible to imagine new ways of storytelling. There is no alternative." Where have I heard these before? Suffice it to say that, insofar as we're concerned with the success and spread of ideas, the study of myth has continued to let conservative bias go unchallenged, believing this to be apolitical; the left, so we're to believe, has yet to offer a lucid countertheory, a challenger in the same weight class.