The Hero’s Journey

The Hero’s Journey: Life’s Great Adventure – This is the original student text from our teacher’s guide discussing why we should study the hero’s journey and outlining its eight stages. (This material has been updated and expanded in our new teacher’s guide.)

My Journey into the Journey – This article chronicles my (Reg Harris) forty-year exploration of the Hero’s Journey, beginning with Campbell’s mythological model and expanding into the psychology and philosophy of the journey experience and the neurobiology of the “narrative” brain.

Threshold Guardians – Threshold guardians are often seen as evil or repressive, but (like all archetypes) guardians have a polar nature. If we resist them, they challenge and fight us. If we embrace them and explore what they can teach us, they open the way to a journey of growth and enlightenment.

Christopher Vogler’s “Writer’s Journey”– It’s a great irony of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth or Hero’s Journey that the most popular model of the archetype isn’t even Campbell’s. It’s a 12-stage model created by screenwriter Christopher Vogler specifically for writing and editing stories. We take a brief look at Vogler’s model and how it was developed.