Unit 5: Part 3 Vocabulary

One who had spent a lifetime in destruction, now found the gory spectacle intolerable. Groans and wailings reached his ears with deadly clarity....This was too much for him.

He had a ritual bath and performed special prayers to gain the benediction of Shiva; donned his battle dress, matchless armor, armlets, and crowns.

The charioteer, more practical-minded, advised him, “I would not go near Rama. Let us keep away.” But Mahodara, obstinate and intoxicated with war fever, made straight for Rama.

His fatherly affection was not strong, as events proved, but his fear of the gods was. They visited with terrible punishment those who shed the blood of kindred. Acrisius did not dare slay his daughter.

Each guest, as was customary, brought a gift for the bride-to-be, except Perseus alone. He had nothing he could give. He was young and proud and keenly mortified.

But Perseus had Hermes with him, so that the road lay open to him, and he reached that host of happy people who are always banqueting and holding joyful revelry.

The woman had a son who was rich. I no longer remember what sort of business he had. He was ashamed of his mother, the washwoman, and never came to see her. Nor did he ever give her a groschen. The old woman told this without rancor.

If one of the children complained of a pain, she would say, “May I be your ransom and may you outlive my bones!” Or she would say, “May I be the atonement for the least of your fingernails.”

I had a strange feeling: the coins in the old woman’s washed-out hands seemed to become as worn and clean and pious as she herself was.

This person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir.

But the structure and something of the spiritual sense of this adventure can be seen already anticipated in the puberty or initiation rituals of early tribal societies, through which a child is compelled to give up its childhood and become an adult—to die, you might say, to its infantile personality and psyche and come back as a responsible adult.

To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey—leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition.

So we need to be very careful of those we put on a pedestal, and choose only those who embody those qualities that reflect the very best of human nature.

This is why one of the most heroic things you can do is to surmount anger, and why my definition of heroism is certainly not the Greek one, which has more to do with excelling in battle and besting one’s enemies.

He knew how to work the land, impose respect on tavern drunks, and break recalcitrant horses, but he was also devoted to his quest for the sacred.

Altruism and heroism. If not for these twin radiant badges of our humanity, there would be no us, and we know it.

Nothing and nobody can fully explain the source of the emotional genius that has been everywhere on display. Politicians have cast it as evidence of the indomitable spirit of a rock-solid America; pastors have given credit to a more celestial source.

Yet, as biologists are learning, there is more to cooperation and generosity than an investment in one’s nepotistic patch of DNA. Lately they have accrued evidence that something like group selection encourages the evolution of traits beneficial to a group, even when members of the group are not related.