Monomyth

myth:monomyth

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, distilled the hero-myths of the world — Gilgamesh, Heracles, the Buddha, and a thousand more — into a single pattern: the call, the departure, the trials and the descent, and the return changed. A scholar's map of the old hero-cycles that then became a conscious template for the storytellers of the modern age. — comparative mythology