It is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable o… - Joseph Campbell

The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life ; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full posession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place.
Thus phrased, in the extremest of terms, the problem may sound remote from the affairs of normal humans. Nevertheless, every failure to cope with life situations must be laid to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general patter for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. therefore, it is formulated in the broadest terms. the individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. who and where are his ogres? those are the reflcetions of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. what are his ideals? those are the symptoms of his grasp of life.

Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

Every step they took, she told him something he'd never known before; and yet it always seemed, the moment she'd said it, as if he had known it all his life.