In this chapter, we move to our exploration of how the deep culture theory can be used to analyze the hero as a symbol in contemporary popular culture. The hero myth was first ever recorded in human history as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. It is perhaps the most widespread, recognizable symbolic mytheme and has been extensively employed in contemporary Hollywood screenwriting. Indeed, the hero myth has become the basis for countless books and famous Hollywood adventure movies, including Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Matrix, Hunger Games, and Avengers. Yet, depictions of the hero's journey in Hollywood and elsewhere tend to be rather uniform and truncated. Moreover, understandings or analyses of the hero's journey are often disconnected from ordinary, “lived experience.” This is typically because while the hero's journey may be narrated to include symbolic elements, the hero him-or herself is often not recognized as a symbol and therefore as neither complex nor relevant.

In fact, the hero is not just an element in a story that encodes other symbols, which is how the hero's journey tends to be viewed. Rather, the hero him-or herself is also a symbol, and was always enfolded in a mytho-logos, or logic, within which the hero's journey carried meaning for inner transformation. Such a logos was well understood in the journey of the hero as a rite of passage in many cultures documented by anthropologists. And, we argue, this logos was also understood as the way to make sense of fictionalized hero myths in antiquity, such as Odysseus’ epic journey home. However, modern re-tellings of the hero story are typically not accompanied by a manual, as it were, that tells us how they fit symbolically into our lives. Using the theory of deep culture, in this chapter we recover some of the elements of the logic enfolding the hero as a symbol, concentrating on two aspects in particular: the hero symbol's multivalent complexity, and its role in inner transformations. From this perspective, we connect the hero as a symbol to everyday life, which was the function of ritualized practices in traditional cultures.

One point to note here is that storytelling is an important venue where the hero as a symbol gets to work on audiences, while related images like paintings reinforce the story. However, the hero can also be recognized as a symbol in other venues, for instance in political narratives.