Providing students with patterns to organize their thoughts in order to build new learning is fundamental to process of education. When examining mythology, a foundational concept in deconstructing and reconstructing mythology has been the work of Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey. In order to better visualize the work of Campbell, it is important to understand the ideological lineage that Campbell is working in. In building his own thought, he is utilizing the work of previous scholars Otto Rank and Lord Raglan.
Students will need to understand the life stories of the individual theorists in order to consider what impact their lives had on their work. In addition, this thought process will continue into their own work as they will be asked to reflect on the work they are doing considering what impact the students’ journey has on the work they are doing.
Otto Rank
Born April 22, 1884 in Vienna, Austria, Otto Rank was the son of Simon Rosenfeld and Karoline Fleischer.4 Rank grew up in a financially struggling Jewish family where his father struggled with alcoholism which caused some tension in the family. As a result, Rank left home around the age of sixteen with his brother to build his own life.5 To this goal, Rank chose a new surname as a symbolic act of self-creation before legally changing it later in life. This idea of self-creation lends itself to the work he would later do on the pattern of the hero. Also at this time, Rank struggled with bouts of depression that he felt he was able to overcome through ¨a self-proclaimed spiritual rebirth.6
During his formative years, Rank studied in a trade school and was employed in a machine shop while also enjoying hobbies such as reading, writing, and studying the work of Sigmund Freud, a well-regarded psychologist.7 Freud’s work, “The Interpretation of the Dream,” was the impetus for Rank to start his own work, “The Artist,” in 1907. In this early work, Rank attempted to explain art using a psychoanalytic approach. The publishing of The Artist brought Rank to the attention of his idol, Freud, who managed to get him a spot at the University of Vienna. Rank’s psychological approach first demonstrated here would be the basis of his work on the hero. During his time at the institute, Rank attained a doctorate degree in philosophy.8
Rank rose to the top of the intellectual upper echelons of Vienna´s psychological community eventually becoming the secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. As a part of his work on psychoanalysis, Rank wrote an essay on The Lohengrin Legend, in which he psychoanalyzed the knight of Arthurian legend with the same name. This work led to the publishing of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero where he explored the connections between literary themes present in mythology and psychoanalysis.9 Meanwhile, he also began the development of his own publishing house. His work in publishing led to an eventual split with his mentor Freud and others in the psychology community when he published The Birth of Trauma in 1924.10 In this work, Rank explored the concept of how the transition from the safety of the womb to the harsh reality of the outside world was highly traumatic and the source of anxiety and neuroses in people.11
After completing military service during World War I, Rank married Beata Minzer on November 7, 1918. They would later have a daughter, Helene, on August 23, 1919. Later in life, Rank practiced psychology throughout Europe and in the United States, while doing substantive work on the concept of will as a critical component to an individual's personality. He became a noted psychologist who used his theories on psychoanalysis to better understand mythology.12 In 1939, he married his secretary, Estelle Buell. On October 31, 1939, Otto Rank died in New York City after an adverse drug reaction to medication prescribed for a kidney infection.13
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero
In Rank´s early work, he explores the recurring themes that are present across multiple mythologies and organizes them into a list of critical components of the origin story of a hero.
This list contains ten of those elements:
(1) the hero having a royal or immortal lineage,
(2) difficulties in conception,
(3) a foretelling of future danger prior to the child´s birth,
(4) a separation between the child and its parents,
(5) the child being left exposed,
(6) an encounter with water,
(7) the rescue by animals or commoners,
(8) the child growing up in the new environment,
(9) the recognition of the hero through a scar or a wound,
and (10) a reencounter between the parent and the child.14
Rank also explores duality in his work. The ideas of life and death are central to this exploration. Rank views life as a celebration of the individual whereas death involves turning oneself over to their family or community. While Rank recognizes the pursuit of a sense of individual self is a lonely journey, he counters that submersion into a community leads to a negative state of stagnancy. The deep dive into immorality in Rank´s work also reveals that the pursuit of immortality is what leads to the creation of art that will outlive the artist.
The View of the Individual and the Community in Rank´s Work
In examining both the biography and the work of Otto Rank, the clear connection to Rank´s worldview and his own childhood experience becomes clear. Students should be able to recognize due to his own troubled upbringing and split from his family, Rank would have seen the pursuit of individual identity as the crux of the hero´s journey. The inherent problem with this philosophy is that it is not universal. While a large subsection of the population would concur that the individual is the single most valuable aspect, not all cultures and societies would agree. In examining a new approach to this work, examining the role of community will be paramount to the creation of a modern definition of the hero and their journey. For example, instead of isolation from family and community, it could possibly be the embrace of said community that is what leads to the call to action for this individual to rise the ranks from ordinary to extraordinary.
Lord Raglan
When considering the individuals that contributed to Joseph Campbell’s work on the Hero´s Journey, it is also important to consider the contributions of Lord Raglan.
Lord Raglan, named Fitzroy Richard Somerset, was born on June 10, 1885, to George Somerset and Ethel Ponsoby. During his formative years, Raglan was sent off to Eton for his education and then was enrolled in the Royal Military College Sandhurst. At the end of his training, he joined the military. [15
His military service eventually led him to Egypt where he developed a strong interest in Egyptian archeology and culture. Additionally, he contributed to the tome Sudan Notes and Record. This work put him in contact with Professor C.G. Seligman who encouraged him to continue and expand the ethnographic research being done in this part of the world. His work earned him recognition in the academic community where he eventually joined the Royal Anthropological Institute. At the Institute, he was initially a Fellow before joining the council where he was able to focus on the origins and continuation of religious rituals.16 Raglan´s work in this area of anthropology eventually led to the publication of his work, The Hero - A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama. He is also known for some of his more extreme viewpoints (i.e. men wear hats because the hat acts as a defacto crown in order men to live as if they were kings).17 His work earned him recognition in the academic community where he eventually joined the Royal Anthropological Institute.
In his personal life, he married Julia Hamilton in 1923. Together, the couple had four children: two sons and two daughters. He died September 14, 1964, at Cefntilla Court in Wales.18
The Hero - A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama
In his work, Raglan outlines what he feels are the key details of the hero´s story that permeate throughout various myths across different cultures. Raglan states that the importance of the myth is to inform the reader about what a good king should do in order to promote the success of their people.19 In doing so, Raglan identifies a list of twenty-two features common in myth:
(1) a royal virgin mother,
(2) father is the king,
(3) the parents are closely related,
(4) there are unusual circumstances surrounding the birth,
(5) believed to be a god,
(6) an attempt to murder the child at birth,
(7) the child is then carted off,
(8) raised by foster parents,
(9) details about the hero´s childhood are vague,
(10) returns home when he reaches adulthood,
(11) defeats the king or another foe,
(12) marries the princess,
(13) becomes king,
(14) rules without drama,
(15) sets the law,
(16) loses the favor of the gods,
(17) is forced to abdicate his throne,
(18) meets a mysterious death,
(19) atop a hill,
(20) his children do not rule,
(21) his body isn´t buried, and
(22) one or more monuments are erected.
This pattern was then used to rate heroes of different myth and other quest stories to determine the validity of the structure with heroes such as Oedipus, King Arthur, and Moses.20 While not all heroes meet every element of the pattern, the overwhelming number of overlapping themes establishes the pattern´s existence.
The View of the Individual and the Community in Raglan´s Work
Like Rank, Raglan´s own backstory suggests that his later life work is influenced by his life experiences. Coming from a family of with royal ties, Raglan appeared to value power of the individual over the benefit of the people he claimed to be trying to protect in his work. This power dynamic is further suggested by Raglan´s comment on crowns suggesting that there was a need for people to be at the level of kings. Raglan’s childhood was spent away from his family, which would deemphasize his own desire and need to belong to that fundamental sense of community leading one to sense the emphasis on the individual. As a result, a more modern approach would probably see the implementation of law as a benefit to the community and as such rework the final stages of the arc.
The work of Lord Raglan and his contemporary Otto Rank is the basis of the work ultimately done by the more commonly known hero authority of the modern academic age, Joseph Campbell.
Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell was born on March 26, 1904 in White Plains, New York to a middle class family. Campbell’s family was very devoted to their Roman Catholic faith instilling it in their children. Upon viewing the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Campbell’s interest in Native American folklore was born.21 Throughout his youth, Campbell studied Native American cultures often told to him by his father.
At Dartmouth, he majored in biology, but later he transferred to Columbia where studied medieval literature. Campbell studied mythology on his own after being told he couldn’t make mythology his topic for his dissertation for his Ph.D. Despite the obstacle, Campbell still received his Ph.D. in Comparative Mythology in 1927. He had done additional work in Paris and Munich. He would marry dancer and choreographer Jean Erdman.
Campbell taught at the Canterbury School before joining Sarah Lawrence College’s English department in 1934, where he would work for the next 38 years before retiring.22
The basis of Campbell’s work was the idea that myths and epics are linked to the human psyche. According to Campbell, myths are “cultural manifestations of the need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.”23
Campbell’s first work was The Hero with a Thousand Faces in which he describes the “pattern of a heroic journey and asserts that all cultures share this pattern in their heroic myths.” 24 In this work, he also developed archetypes for hero’s journey as well as how to tell a hero’s story. According to Campbell, the hero went on a quest where they faced trials and achieved victory or transformation. Campbell believed myth acted as a metaphor for the human experience. In subsequent work, Campbell continued to analyze myth. In Mask of God, Campbell explored mythology and religion of different cultures. In Myths to Live By, he examined the role of myth in the modern world.25 In The Mythic Image, Campbell stated that the human mind and dreams are the basis of mythology, which had earlier been proposed by Carl Jung.26
Joseph Campbell died on October 30, 1987, in Honolulu, Hawaii. After his death, the Joseph Campbell Foundation was established to promote the study of mythology and explore human experience.27
The Hero’s Journey
Joseph Campbell’s work with mythology led to him to develop the hero’s journey, a pattern that is often used to explore legends and myths. His pattern set a protagonist out on a quest in order to achieve a goal that will either enlighten them or reward them. Along the way, the hero underwent certain steps in order to reach their end goal. The steps are described below:
(1) The Call to Adventure: internal or external conflict results in the hero acknowledge the beginning of change.
(2) Refusal of the Call: initially, the hero rejects due to fear, danger of the unknown, or uncertainty of themselves.
(3) Meeting the Mentors: the hero encounters a wise individual who imparts on them either knowledge, skill, or tools in order to complete their journey.
(4) Crossing the Threshold: the hero is required to leave their normal world to enter an unfamiliar or supernatural world.
(5) Trials: the hero must undergo a series of tests to prove they are worthy and/or reach their end point.
(6) The Ordeal: the hero is forced to face death or their greatest fear in order to reach a place of transformation.
(7) The Reward: the hero celebrates their victory while their looms continual threat on the horizon
(8) Return from the Unknown: the hero takes the road back to their normal while continuing to encounter dangers.
(9) Resurrection: the hero is forced to make the ultimate sacrifice and leading to rebirth settling any conflict set in the call to action stage.
(10) Return to a Normal Life: the hero returns and their is acknowledgement of the transformation of not only the hero but the world.
The hero’s journey is a pattern that has been used to examine multiple texts and has influenced many creatives since Campbell first wrote it. George Lucas was influenced by the hero’s journey when crafting the story of Luke Skywalker’s quest to become a Jedi knight in the film series Star Wars.28
Campbell himself was influenced by the earlier work of Raglan and Rank, who’s insight into the hero and mythology provided him with the foundational work necessary to complete this task.
The Impact of Campbell’s Life on His Work
In considering the creation of Joseph Campbell’s work, it is important to consider what role the individual would have played in this development. From the start of his work, he was forced to go alone. His concept of mythology being a metaphor for life could also be drawn from his own pursuit of a doctorate in mythology when he was told he couldn’t get one. This was his quest that he had to go on alone and he achieved it. Whether or not he had a value for the greater academic community could be more speculative. Additionally, Campbell’s interest in religion most likely started at an early age being raised in a religious household. Catholicism is a religion that has much ritual so it is understandable how blending this with a youthful interest in Native American cultural stories would lead him to see how the world had developed. This aspect could represent how family and community impacted the work that Campbell created.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an award winning filmmaker, writer, and critic. He was born September 14, 1950 in Keyser, West Virginia, to Henry Gates, Sr. and Paulina Coleman. His father, Henry, Sr., was hardworking, holding down two jobs: one at the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company and as a janitor at the local telephone company. To support the family, his mother cleaned other peoples’ homes.29 Growing up, Gates’ father talked about the fights of boxer Joe Louis as if they were stories of a cultural narrative instilling in him a value in storytelling. Gates also began to study genealogy at a young age after the death of his paternal grandfather by interviewing his family for stories. Later, Gates and his first wife, Sharon Lynn Adams, would have two daughters of their own, Liza and Maggie.30
In terms of higher education, Gates enrolled at Potomac State College in 1968 before he transferred to Yale in 1969. At Yale, he earned B.A. in History in 1973 in addition to graduating summa cum laude. After his undergraduate work, Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1979. It was at Cambridge where Gates studied English literature before returning to Yale as an Assistant Professor from 1979 to 1985 in the English and African American studies departments during which time he earned the MacArthur Award. From 1989 to 1991, Gates was employed at Duke University.31
While studying literature, he became particular interested in the role of the Trickster figure that could be universally found in both African and African American literature. The result of his research was Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro American Literary Criticism, which won the 1989 American Book Award. This work focused on the concept of “signifyin(g),” in which the meaning of words are inverted to show the opposite of their intended meaning. For example, insulting someone as a term of endearment.32 Gates’ work in the Signifying Monkey linked literary criticism to the African American vernacular tradition.
Among his notable contributions outside his work on the Trickster figure included the publication of his autobiography, Colored People: a Memoir. Furthermore, Gates launched a television series, African American Lives using genealogy to understand African American History.33 In terms of research, Gates continues to discover the long forgotten works of African American writers such as Harriet E. Wilson. He feels, “It is clear that every black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (literary and vernacular) but also one white and black.”34 As of 2024, Gates is an Alphonse Fletcher University Professor as well as the Director of Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard.35
Signifying Monkey – An African American Literary Criticism Approach
In his major work, Signifying Monkey, Gates explored the concept that enslaved Africans brought with them their culture of utilizing wordplay in order to create a trickster figure in storytelling. The African American vernacular links African American culture to American culture by maintaining the use of similar archetypes.36 Gates tracked the art of signifying to Esu, the trickster figure in Yoruba mythology.37
Trickster figures in African American storytelling can be a god, goddess, man, woman, or animal. These characters tend to be irresponsible, mean-spirited, funny, lovable fools, who are quite quick-witted. In turn, the trickster acts as a cultural hero in the sense that they represent what one shouldn't be, to the extreme to emphasize how out of sync with societal norms the behavior is. The trickster’s foolishness shows the read the opposite of how to live.
The trickster will try many ways to get what they want. In addition, trickster often appears at a crossroads in order to impart new knowledge.38
Analysis
Gates’ interest in genealogy, family stories, and cultural stories all seem to start at a fairly early age stemming from his grandfather’s passing. These interests seem to be part of a clear lineage into his academic work surrounding the trickster figure in African and African American storytelling. In addition, they seem to represent a broader value of the community. In researching his own family, he was touching upon a greater landscape of storytelling traditions. While not implicitly stated, students of color are often looking for versions of themselves in the canon, which would explain why Gates continues to search for and uncover lost works of early African American writers. For my students, this shows the connection between culture and academics in a very important way. Additionally, the relevance of signifyin(g) in today’s culture is still relevant as many middle school students still roast each other today.
