What is the Hero Journey?

I came to the hero journey quite by accident. I'd been loving all these stories my entire life, but hadn't any language to express why they appealed to me so deeply. Stories about King Arthur. Achilles. Spartacus. Luke Skywalker. Superman. That's just the tip of the iceberg. One day I was teaching a class on western civilization at a community college and we were reading excerpts of the Iliad, the part where Achilles tells Hektor that there would be no pacts between lions and men...and it struck me that this scene was really about being a flawed human. I'd been studying history for most of my adult life by that time and I guess I was so busy "learning" timelines, causes and effects, strategies and rationales, treaties and war...the "how to" of culture and civilization...that I never stopped to think about how ALL of it was really an essay, a treatise, on what being a human being actually means. I made a shift that day in how I approached teaching history and how I studied history. And, most importantly, I came across the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. My eyeballs were opened up to archetypes and universal themes in a way that made everything I'd ever learned connected in this wonderful spiderweb of life. I began teaching about the Hero Journey. That was over 20 years ago. I've attached a "working" prezi about the 12 Steps in the hero journey to the image below. The prezi will never be finished, because the learning never stops with this topic. The more I know, the less I know. Enjoy!