Reading through the healthy introduction to "The Epic of Gilgamesh" (Penguin, Sandars, 1972) it is fascinating that the epic nature of the hero follows a structure that should be familiar to all. The story's origin stretches to the third millennium B.C. and yet, some 4.5 millennia later, I can hold the story in its most complete form - as was pieced together by extant sources over a period of many decades.
The hero of this tale was one of the early kings of what is now Iraq. He is great, with all of the fearless qualities that we inherently seek in a leader. He conquers - but ultimately cannot conquer death. So he sets himself on the road to immortality.
The story, as pointed by the editor, divides itself as "a meeting of friends, a forest journey, the flouting of a fickle goddess, the death of the companion, and the search for ancestral wisdom and immortality" [sec 5, pg 22]. I thought immediately of Lord of the Rings - but, the end of the journey for Frodo was to not search for wisdom, but ultimately destroy it. The Ring created chaos, in that the gods and man were too familiar. Man thirsted for power and immortality, but it would end in death (for himself and those around him).
It is interesting to note that the conceptualization of Heaven and Hell derive from very ancient analogies. Sumerians believed in righteousness as a token for the place where all heroes go - the Babylonians believed in Hell as a place where the "dust is their food and clay their meat, they are clothed like birds with wings for garments". It was from the latter and to the former that Gilgamesh suffered for after the death of his friend, Enkidu.
What comes to mind in both these cases (although I'll suffer a nerd branding), is the episode of TNG, "Darmok" where an alien puts himself and Picard in harm's way to physically and temporally make an allegory similar to Gilgamesh and Enkidu. That's science fiction at its best for me: pulling the ancient forward to the technologically enmeshed present.
One wonders if the hero's epic journey is fulfilled in our own.
