The standard design of Gilgamesh in the Smite video game from the wiki

(7) GILGAMESH

Epic!

No, seriously – the first epic hero, Mesopotamian mythic hero and titular protagonist of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The first surviving version of that epic apparently dates back to the 18th century BC, in turn originating from Sumerian poems which may date back to the Third Dynasty of Ur in 21st century BC.

“He was possibly a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, who was posthumously deified”. That’s certainly how he was presented by my favorite adaptation of him by Robert Silverberg, who had him as the protagonist of posthumous fantasy in Silverberg’s novel To the Land of the Living. Silverberg obviously had an enduring interest in Gilgamesh, featuring him in a more straightforward adaptation Gilgamesh the King. Indeed, Gilgamesh has been surprisingly enduring and prolific in adaptation in art and popular culture, not just by Silverberg.

Gilgamesh is perhaps most famous for his epic quest for immortality – in which he failed, ironically perhaps for its fame but not surprisingly given how much any such quest is defying the odds. The house of mortality always wins.

Gilgamesh and his epic are even more impactful from their influence on both Biblical and classical mythology, particularly the latter as an influence on the Iliad and the Odyssey.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

“Archangel Michael defeats Satan” painting by Guido Reni at some time between 1630 and 1635

(6) ANGELS & SAINTS

Well, you simply can’t feature a list of mythological heroes without featuring angels and saints, even if they aren’t always straightforward as heroes.

That’s particularly the case for angels – even in the Biblical text, they can be as ineffable as the God for whom they serve as supernatural intermediaries or messengers. All too often they are agents of His wrath. Not to mention they are literally looking like some sort of eldritch abomination:

“Six wings, four faces, a wheel of fire with eyes lining the rim — you name it. Benevolent or not, these angels were the stuff of nightmares. They didn’t traditionally introduce themselves with “Fear not!” for nothing. Those that were winged tended to stay in heaven or looked… different”.

Of course, angels were also depicted as appearing human, defaulting to the modern archetype of winged (and haloed) humans. Careful with those wings, though – bird wings good, bat wings bad. It’s interesting how the wings of fallen angels seem to transform from good bird wings to evil bat wings – insect wings tend to be reserved for fairies. (Some works also transform angelic halos to something more sinister when they fall).

Also interestingly – and somewhat surprisingly – there are only a few named angels, most notably Michael and Gabriel, demonstrating the usual -el suffix for angel names although there are exceptions.

Michael is the archetypal heroic angel – or is that angelic hero? – famously as the warrior of God and leader of Heaven’s host of angels against Satan, in which role he doubles up as dragonslayer, albeit he casts down rather than slays Satan in the latter’s form as dragon.

Michael also demonstrates some other angelic features. Firstly, that angels have been depicted as a hierarchy of different ranks or types – Michael himself is an archangel. Secondly, Michael has been canonized as a saint as well as an angel – Saint Michael – such that he offers a nice segue into featuring saints as heroes.

Saints of course are almost always depicted as human, at least originally, with a few exceptions of angels characterized as saints or the singular case of Mary, rendered semi-divine through her own immaculate conception. However, saints transcend their humanity to partake of divine or semi-divine nature – becoming saints – by the power of their faith or grace, “having an exceptional degree of holiness, likeness, or closeness to God”.

As such, they are heroic by nature, albeit usually of a gentler or more pacific nature than other mythic heroes – very often, the only violence is of a self-sacrificial nature, as martyrs. However, there are warrior saints – even at least one dragonslayer saint in the form of Saint George, the archetypal heroic saint.

Really, angels and saints could well be the subject of their own top ten list – indeed, many such top ten lists, including their various elements, tropes, and types, not least angelic hierarchies and patron saints. They came very close to having their own entry in the special mentions for my Top 10 Mythologies, except that they primarily appear in Biblical mythology and associated religions – although there are analogies and counterparts in other mythic or religious traditions such as Buddhism.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Collage of a masque monkey photographed by Shantanu Kuveskar as feature image for Wikipedia “Monkey” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en and coyote photographed by Yahtin S Krishnappa as feature image for Wikipedia “Coyote” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(5) TRICKSTER – MONKEY & COYOTE

“Some people call me the space cowboy, yeah

Some call me the gangster of love…

‘Cause I’m a picker, I’m a grinner

I’m a lover and I’m a sinner

I play my music in the sun

I’m a joker, I’m a smoker

I’m a midnight toker

I sure don’t want to hurt no one”

I don’t know – the lyrics of the Steve Miller Band’s The Joker just seemed apposite to trickster heroes (or Dionysian heroes for that matter, although there’s a large overlap between the two), just as the lyrics to Queen’s theme for Flash seem apposite to more conventional savior heroes (or Apollonian ones).

Tricksters need little introduction as archetypal characters, except to note there’s enough of them for their own top ten – or at least two top ten lists, one for trickster heroes and one for trickster villains, as it is the nature of tricksters to break rules and cross boundaries, including between heroism and villainy, even if they tend to prefer mischief to outright evil. If a villain uses deception and manipulation as well as brute force, they tend to have something of a trickster nature to them – including arguably my top mythic villain, Satan. I’ve already featured heroes and villains in my Top 10 Heroes & Villains of Mythology that could be characterized as tricksters – most demonstrably two that are counterparts to each other, Odin and Loki in Norse mythology.

“And the nature of Monkey was…irrepressible!”

Tricksters can be “god, goddess, spirit, human” or anthropomorphic animal spirits. Indeed, the last tend to be the best tricksters or at least my favorites, hence the two I’ve included as representative for this entry – Su Wukong, the Monkey King of the Chinese Buddhist legendary tract Journey to the West, and Coyote, the leading trickster of Native American mythology (albeit the Raven figure comes close as it plays the same role in other cultures).

“As one of the most enduring Chinese literary characters, Wukong has a varied and highly debated background and colorful cultural history. His inspiration might have come from an amalgam of influences, generally relating to religious concepts.”

Apparently, sources or influences for Su Wukong include Taoism and legends about monkeys or gibbons from the Chu kingdom of China onwards, but it’s hard not to suspect some influence from the Hindu god Hanuman.

“The Coyote mythos is one of the most popular among western Native American cultures, especially among indigenous peoples of California and the Great Basin”.

Personally, I like to trace a line of descent from the Coyote figure in native American mythology to Wile. E. Coyote in Looney Tunes cartoons – heck, he’s even in the same geographic area. (I also do another bit tracing his line of descent from Sisyphus as hero of existential philosophy). Of course, poor Wile E. Coyote is out-tricked by the Roadrunner (perhaps reflecting the same avian trickster spirit as Raven) or is just too tricky for his own good.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT TRICK-TIER?)

Clipped cover of Jesus & Buddha: The Parallel Sayings by Marcus Borg and published by Ulysses Press in 2004 – an interesting book and also apt illustration for this special mention entry

(4) SAVIOR – JESUS & BUDDHA

By definition, mythic heroes tend to be saviors on a mythic scale, even on the scale of saving the world.

Jesus and Buddha are the definitive world saviors – indeed, so much so that one might wonder why I don’t rank them higher than this special mention entry.

Well, firstly and most fundamentally, Jesus and Buddha are world saviors as the foundational figures of the world religions named for them (or technically, Jesus’s title as Christ). Other heroes of mythology, notably those of classical mythology, may have had their cults, but the hero cults of Jesus and Buddha – if one calls them that, as at least one historian did when observing Christianity to be a Greek hero cult devoted to a Jewish messiah – persist in contemporary religious belief. Accordingly, as heroic figures they are regarded with reverence that requires them to be ranked separately, even uniquely – hence this special mention. Indeed, even ranking them together or among the heroes of mythology might be regarded as controversial to that reverence.

There’s another reason I rank them as special mention. Jesus and Buddha are similarly unique as heroes in that they are not saviors by the use of violence, even that violence used against the forces of evil or chaos that is characteristic of other heroes. Instead, they defeat those forces and save the world by other means, spiritual rather than physical – Jesus by belief or faith, and Buddha by enlightenment.

Indeed, it’s a plot point in Buddha’s legendary biography that he renounces his princely status – and the prophecy of more conventional heroic conquest, eschewing conquering the world for saving it. He effectively renounces it again when tempted in his fabled meditation under the Bo Tree by the forces of evil represented by the demon lord Mara. Jesus similarly renounces such things as all the kingdoms of the world when offered to him instead of his path to salvation, in his even more famous trial of temptation. Jesus also famously inverts the model of heroic conquest even more so than Buddha, saving the world not by conventional victory or violence but by self-sacrifice – the ultimate gambit of winning by losing, as it were.

Otherwise, they are so well known as religious figures, even outside their respective religions – albeit more so for Jesus due to the more pervasive extent and influence of his religion – that it would be redundant to recite further details, other than to observe that each could be the subject of their own top ten, indeed of many such lists.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

Collage of The Fool (left) and The Hanged Man (right) from the most iconic modern Tarot deck, the Rider-Waite Tarot deck designed by A.E. Waite and Illustrated by Pamela Colman-Smith (first published by William Rider & Son in 1909, hence the name) – public domain image

(3) TAROT – FOOL & HANGED MAN

The Tarot may have its mystique and even its mythos, but does it have heroes?

O yes – hence this special mention, drawn from the archetypal characters of individual cards, particularly those of the more iconic Major Arcana or “trumps” of the Tarot. Indeed, there are enough ‘heroic’ cards of the Tarot for their own top ten and a few special mentions beyond that.

However, as the title of this special mention entry indicates, two cards stand out above all others as heroes of the Tarot – the Fool and the Hanged Man.

At first glance, both might seem unusual choices. There are cards that might seem more conventional heroic figures by the metric of power – the Magician, the Emperor, the Hierophant, the Chariot, and the Sun.

However, it is the Fool that is the true hero of the Tarot. In its modern form, the Major Arcana has its own mythic narrative, essentially a version of the archetypal hero’s journey, with the Fool – traditionally numbered zero or just unnumbered – as its hero, similar to the figure of the holy fool. The Fool sets out on his quest, innocence in search of experience, poised to fall or fly. The rest of the Major Arcana depicts the figures he encounters, as well as ultimately his descent into and triumphant return from the underworld.

Coming in close second place is the Hanged Man, a self-sacrificial mystical inversion of the Fool, that the Fool either encounters or – in my preferred reading – becomes, in his descent into the underworld. Indeed, the image of the Hanged Man is parallel to that of the Fool. Where the Fool innocently and seemingly inadvertently is poised to step off a precipice while gazing (or perhaps dreaming) skywards, the Hanged Man is more deliberately poised to descend into the Underworld, hanging by his foot in seemingly mystical pose with head downwards.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER)