The Hero's Journey

• The Call
• Setting Out
• Becoming Lost
• Encountering Nature
• Purifying Oneself
• Sacrifice/Making an offering
• Encountering a Stranger or Animal
• The Riddle
• Being Tested
• Enduring an ordeal
• Overcoming an enemy
• Crossing an impossible barrier
• Descent to the Underworld
• Finding what one is seeking
• Epiphany
• Transformation
• Blessing
• Bringing something back
• Return

Common characteristics of the archetypal hero

• Unusual circumstances of birth, sometimes in danger or born into a royal family
• leaves family or land and lives with others
• an event, sometimes traumatic, leads to adventure or quest
• hero has special weapon only s/he can wield
• supernatural help
• must prove self many times while on adventure, can't just claim to be a hero
• the unhealable wound, received during desent to hell
• hero experiences atonement with the father - payment for wrongdoing
• when hero dies, s/he is rewarded spiritually - salvation, redemption

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got ahold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. -George Bernard Shaw