In Literature
Joseph Campbell, in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, writes that the Universal Hero from monomyth must pass through a stage of Apotheosis. According to Campbell, apotheosis is the expansion of consciousness that the hero experiences after defeating his foe.
Arthur C Clarke's novel Childhood's End has the Overlords refer to Mankind's "apotheosis" when the world's children evolve into their union with the Overmind (see also post-human).
In Chapter 23 of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, regarding Ishmael's friend Bulkington, the term serves as a last word climax for the chapter:
"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis."
In "The Dark Tower" by Stephen King, the desert which is the main setting of the first book in the series; "The Gunslinger", is referred to as "the apotheosis of all deserts".
The Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson several times employs the concept of apotheosis: for Mistborn Kelsier, for the Lord Ruler, and arguably for Kelsier's Mistborn apprentice, Vin.
Read more about this topic: Divinization
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.”
—James Connolly (1870–1916)