Quest In The Odyssey

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2. Campbell says that all these stories involve journeys and battles that produce psychological transformations or elevations to different levels of consciousness. Campbell says that a mythic hero embraces death only to discover the meaning of life, and becomes more alive in his dying than at any other time. This is surely the case with Gilgamesh. Properly understood, the quest for Humbaba is not a misguided juvenile exploit that turned out badly, resulting in a mistake that had to be fixed. Instead it has value precisely because it sets the stage for the second journey. By making the second quest necessary, it makes the whole cycle of quests more like the story of a complete human life. 3. Campbell points out that warriors in the hero stories…show more content…
Campbell points out that at least some of the journeys, or some portion of them, are journeys over mysterious bodies of water that are gateways to raised consciousness. Often the water is explicitly called the River of Death. That's the case in Gilgamesh. Be prepared to see this motif repeated in Monkey, the Odyssey, and the Inferno. 5. Campbell points out that a common theme of the epic journey is the quest for the lost father, one of the principle themes of the Odyssey. In Gilgamesh and in the Inferno, the hero finds a symbolic father. Utnapishtim is Gilgamesh's symbolic father. Virgil is Dante's symbolic father in the Inferno. 6. Campbell points out that the spiritual hero often needs magical guides to help him, as Obewon Kenobe helps Luke Skywalker, for example. Gilgamesh has several such guides, most notably Siduri and…show more content…
Campbell points out that the spiritual hero fights monstrous beasts. These beasts represent some repressed aspect of his own character that the hero must overcome in order to achieve enlightenment. Monkey, the Odyssey, and the Inferno are literally stuffed with examples of this motif. Monkey is particularly unusual in that some of the monsters change into spiritual guides of the type mentioned in point # 6, above. But Gilgamesh has its share of interesting monsters, what with Humbaba, the Bull of Heaven, the Scorpion people, and Ishtar herself. You could also argue that Enkidu first appears as a monster of sorts. If so then he, like two of the monsters in Monkey, changes into a spiritual guide. The Gilgamesh makes use of these and other motifs to achieve a number of different ends. Clearly it talks about whether or not life can have a purpose, and if so, what that purpose might be. But it may have an even more fundamental subject. Can it be an accident that the story is about an unbreakable bond between two men, both of whom are only half-human? In the study guide to Monkey, I suggest that a reader may need to combine all the spiritual travelers on the road to the West to get one human being. The story then provides a working map of the human character. Would that trick work with Gilgamesh and Enkidu as

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