Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Hero Cycle Myths gathers twenty seven narratives built around a hero or a small band facing an ordeal, quest or war, the largest grouping of its kind in the atlas, spanning monster slaying feats, journeys for a treasure, and wars fought for a throne.

Several turn on overcoming a monstrous adversary. Beowulf and Grendel has the Geatish warrior travel to Denmark to kill a night raider bare handed, then pursue and kill its avenging mother in her underwater lair. Perseus and Medusa has the hero equipped by the gods to behead the one mortal Gorgon by looking only at her reflection. Theseus and the Minotaur has an Athenian prince volunteer to end a tribute of youths fed to a bull headed monster, finding his way out of the labyrinth with a princess's thread. The Binding of Fenrir has the Norse gods deceive a prophesied wolf into accepting a magical fetter cast from six impossible things.

Gilgamesh's Quest for Immortality has the king of Uruk seek out the one man granted eternal life after his companion's death, ending not in immortality but in a plant of rejuvenation stolen by a serpent.

A third cluster fights a war to reclaim a throne or a people. Rama's Exile and the War With Ravana has an exiled prince ally with a monkey army to retrieve his abducted wife from a demon king. Moses and the Exodus From Egypt follows a hidden child raised in the household that ordered his death into the founding departure of a people. Joseph and His Brothers has a favoured son sold into slavery rise to govern Egypt and confront the brothers who sold him. The Contendings of Horus and Set has an eighty year tribunal decide Egypt's throne between a god and his uncle, and the Kurukshetra War, the Mahabharata's war between cousins, is framed by the Bhagavad Gita's counsel on its own battlefield.