The Cosmogonic Cycle in the Heart of DarknessThe short novel Heart of Darkness tells a story like any other heroic myth, but better. This novel rewards an informed reader. Many find the job extremely confusing and actually quite boring. Although it is a complicated book, the reader is stimulated by the symbols and linguistics used by Conrad. The most notable is the flaw in the cosmogony cycle. This cycle is an integral part of every hero's journey. An important step in the cycle, the second step in fact, is to find a guide, spiritual or tangible. If one searched carefully enough in most works of canonical literature, one would find all the necessary elements of the cosmogonic cycle on the journey of the protagonist, the journey into the underworld, the confrontation with the father figure, the meeting and the rescue of a prisoner, then the journey back to consciousness. A guide is there to guide the hero. This is usually a man or woman who has been through a similar journey and knows the pitfalls the hero can fall into. Without this character in Marlow's journey, he fell into the temptation of remaining in the unconscious realm of "evil." Conrad never gave Marlow any guidance, thus condemning him to the failure of his mission. At the beginning of the protagonist's journey, it seemed that the "two women...knitting black wool" (Conrad 13) in the mall office were there. to foreshadow Marlow's fatal death. This conclusion may have been drawn because it is an obvious reference to women who knitted while watching aristocrats being guillotined during the French Revolution. I believe it meant something much deeper. A good writer, of Conrad's caliber, does not place superfluous scenes, words or sentences in his book. He only writes what he needs to write. In this light, because Marlow did not die at the end of his journey, therefore the women must have represented something else. They foreshadowed the death of Marlow's soul. They knew he didn't have a spiritual guide because they knew the trading company hadn't offered him one. They also knew that Kurtz didn't have a guide either. There were multiple uses of the word soul in the final chapter, many of which discussed the inability for a man's soul to escape the forest..