The Hero's Journey Or The Monomyth

When we look at history, we have to wonder: So what kinda stories did they tell? How did they tell them? Were they any good? To answer the last question they are very good. Better than you might even expect. Even though they are all good and come from many different societies, they all have a lot things in common. Starting from the beginning of history (well, as far as we can date back), stories, despite their time periods, different cultures, and different people, have been kind of writing the same stories for ages. This was discovered by a guy by the name Carl Jung. Jung described stories in history as peoples' memories. He called it "collective unconsciousness". This is the theory that all human beings have a unconscious but collective …show more content…
This was mostly concluded because about 70% of stories are written about a hero. Specifically a man. We don't know who this man is but we know that he goes through this journey. Jung investigates deeper and finds that this all our heroes go through this cycle called the Hero Cycle, Hero's Journey, or the Monomyth. This cycle is made up of many archetypes, or an original that has been imitated. They also can represent, in a sense, basic human nature. Some of these include: The Call to Adventure, The Return, and the Revelation. The hero must go through this journey. Maybe not in the same order, but all of these are in most stories written or told. This journey can also be repeated multiple times within a story. This cycle is even seen in stories and movies today, such as Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Star Wars. This has shaped society more than we can imagine by further pushing our creativity to limits. We are going to start of by looking at the first story in human history: The Epic of Gilgamesh. This story centers around the King of Uruk, Gilgamesh. This was written in Mesopotamia, in the city of Uruk. This was written a good 1,500 years before Homer wrote the Iliad . It is safe to say that it was written in the first centuries of the second millenium B.C. It was later put in storage by King Assurbanipal during the Assyrian Empire in the seventh century. Assurbanipal was a king …show more content…
In the first paragraph, it describes creation of Gilgamesh and all the feats he has accomplished in his life before the story even starts. This story can also be an epic because of the introduction and many other elements in the story (also because hence the name of the story). This elements include: Warrior King, Invocation of the Muse, and Divine Intervention. Gilgamesh the King starts off as this king who is rather bored and really has nothing to do. He sleeps with all the girls in the city, he goes to war simply because he wants to and takes men away from from their families in order to do so. With this hint of information, he is seems to disregard the human life or humanity he himself rules. This maybe because he isn't completely human. He is part god and part human. Some pictures depict him holding a lion as if it were a cat. The people of the city wish for a new king because of the current one's arrogance. So the gods here this request and decide to make Gilgamesh more humble by having the snot beat out of him. They do this by bringing in Enkidu. Enkidu is part animal and part human and lives in the wild with the animals. But he also was made by the gods. A man later sends a woman to seduce him and sleep with him. Because he has done this, he gains the intelligence of man. Wisdom. A huge moral in the story was that you can't have wisdom and be without restraint at same the time. He loses his ability