Quest

In the cultural dreams that are our myths, heroes serve as our personae – representatives of our collective psyches – first as cultures and then as a species. Gilgamesh reflects a Mesopotamian physical and psychological experience, and Odysseus could not be anything else but Archaic Greek. But when we compare the heroes of these various cultures, Joseph Campbell’s heroic monomyth pattern emerges, and we discover a hero who belongs to all of humanity. “The Hero,” writes Campbell, “is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms” (1949/1973 Hero, pp. 19–20).

The central event in the universal hero myth, the heroic monomyth, is the quest, in which a hero – the representative of a culture – seeks some significant goal or boon for his or her people. Often the voyage involves archetypal stages such as the search for truth or riches or a lost loved one, a struggle with monsters, and the descent to...