In the West we know the military uniform, clerical collar, medical goatee, and judge's wig. But where people are naked, it is the body itself that mu… - 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.

Yes. What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn’t realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual. You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere.

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed.