Read the below lecture, resources, and assignment requirements at end.

The Heroic Journey

Psychological and Cultural Meanings of Myths

This week you explore the heroic journey of Hercules with awareness of the psychological AND cultural contexts of quest myths.

For the psychological context, you identify stages of the Herculean quest according to a storytelling pattern that Joseph Campbell called the mono-myth. Mono is a prefix taken from the Greek mónos, meaning one, single, alone. Thus, the term mono-myth indicates that across cultures various heroic figures in stories of The Quest follow a similar pattern–similar because it is built into the psyche of human beings.

For the cultural context, you will compare several versions of the Hercules myth to find connections between storytelling and cultural values. Thus, in spite of Campbell’s idea that a heroic journey shows the same elements across cultures, you will see that cultural context shapes the telling of a story. We will ask ourselves whether cultural context also shapes the meaning of the various common stages of the heroic quest.

The Week Five discussion is based on these Learning Resources: