Hero's Journey Mythology

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WHAT IS MYTHOLOGY?

Mythology : Muthos + Logia
(Derived from Greek Words)

“The point of Mythology is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we are going.” -Michael Straczynski

Growing up reading a lot of Epics, Fables and Fantasies, Mythology has always been around in my peripheral. Be it Panchatantra, or Harry Potter; Arabian Nights or Percy Jackson, the little bits and pieces of old Myths, distorted as they may have been in some of these books, are what caught my interest in the first place and prompted me to take up this class, in hopes …show more content…

Ramayana is one the best examples of a Hero's Journey where Lord Rama abandons his claim to Ayodhaya's throne to serve an exile of fourteen years in the forest, faces innumerable obstacles, defeats his enemies and having completed his exile, makes a triumphant return to Ayodhya and eventually becomes Emperor. Another representative case that can be cited is the story of Jesus, starting from his supernatural conception to his crucifixion. There are various other cultural heroes like Hercules, Quetzalcoatl and King Arthur whose journeys are equally valiant, inspiring and wise, and embody the necessary characteristics of a Hero's …show more content…

A myth taps into a universal cultural narrative, the collective wisdom of man. A sublime exemplification of the universality of these themes is that so many people who have had no contact with each other create myths that are remarkably similar.

All the myths that are mentioned above are different from one another but in each broad type of myth, there is a thread of commonality interlinking the myths of various cultures through recurrent ideas and themes. These recurrent ideas were defined by Adolf Bastien, a renowned Ethnologist, as Elementary Ideas (Elementardaken) and their varying manners of representation in different cultures as Volkergedanken. Carl Jung defined the Elementardaken as “Archetypes of the Collective

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