Myth of the Hero

Definition

The myth of the hero is the recurring narrative pattern in which a single exceptional individual departs from ordinary life, undergoes a trial, and returns transformed with something the community needs. The term covers both the pattern as comparative mythologists have documented it and the use of that pattern to explain events that were in fact collective.

The pattern in comparative study

Four scholars established the analytic tradition, each producing a different segmentation of the same material.

Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909). A psychoanalytic reading of birth narratives from Sargon, Moses, Oedipus, Paris, Romulus, Jesus, and others. Rank's sequence runs: the hero is born to distinguished parents, a prophecy warns against the birth, the infant is exposed or set adrift, is rescued and raised by humble people or animals, later discovers his parentage, takes revenge on his father, and achieves rank and honor.

Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928). A structural rather than psychological analysis, based on a corpus of Russian wonder tales. Propp identified 31 narrative functions occurring in fixed order, though not all appear in every tale, and seven character roles including the villain, the donor, the helper, and the sought-for person.

Lord Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama (1936). A 22-point scale against which any hero narrative can be scored, covering unusual conception, attempted infanticide, victory over a king or beast, a reign, a prescribed loss of favor, a mysterious death on a hilltop, and a tomb without a body. Raglan's purpose was to argue that the pattern derives from ritual rather than from historical persons. Alan Dundes later applied the scale to the life of Jesus, and others have applied it to Abraham Lincoln, with results that raise the question of what the scale actually measures.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). The most widely known version, and the source of the term monomyth, which Campbell borrowed from Finnegans Wake. Campbell reduces the pattern to three movements, separation, initiation, and return, subdivided into seventeen stages including the call to adventure, refusal of the call, supernatural aid, crossing the threshold, the road of trials, apotheosis, and the return with the elixir.

Transmission into industry

Campbell's version entered commercial storytelling through Christopher Vogler, a Disney story analyst who circulated a seven-page memo summarizing The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a practical guide, later expanded into The Writer's Journey (1992). George Lucas has stated that Campbell's work shaped the structure of Star Wars.

The consequence is a feedback loop rather than a discovery. A pattern derived from traditional narratives became a template for producing new narratives, which then supply the evidence that the pattern is universal.

Criticism

Campbell's method selects episodes from widely separated traditions and reads them as instances of one structure, which requires discarding the specific meanings those episodes hold in their own contexts. Robert Ellwood, in The Politics of Myth (1999), traced the political commitments underlying Campbell's generation of comparative mythologists and argued that the search for a single underlying story carries assumptions worth examining. Folklorists have generally treated Campbell as popularization rather than scholarship, with Propp and Dundes preferred as method.

A second objection concerns what the pattern excludes. The monomyth's protagonist acts alone, and the roles available to others are helper, obstacle, or prize. Feminist scholarship, including Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey (1990), was written specifically in response to Campbell's account of where women fall in the structure.

Application to technology narratives

The hero pattern supplies the default form for accounts of invention. A single figure perceives what others cannot, works in isolation, meets resistance from established institutions, and returns with a product that changes the world. Garage origin stories, founder biographies, and product launch narratives all use it.

The pattern is a poor fit for how technical work is actually produced, which is incremental, distributed, and heavily dependent on prior infrastructure and public funding. Its persistence has consequences that are worth naming precisely. It determines who receives credit, which determines who receives capital, which determines who gets to build next. It also renders invisible the maintainers, technicians, and operators whose work has no place in a structure that requires a protagonist.

Several books on this wiki attack the pattern directly. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers argues that the advantages behind individual achievement are structural and unearned. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet documents a network built by committee. The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT treats the institution as the unit of production. Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory supplies the theoretical objection, that agency is distributed across a network of humans and non-humans and cannot be located in one actor.

Related Reading

• The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual
• Outliers: The Story of Success
• Myth of the Machine : Technics and Human Development
• Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
• Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet
• The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
• TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
• Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940
• Decoding Advertisements
• Critical Play: Radical Game Design
• Anthropology Through Science Fiction
• The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Key texts

• Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. 1909.
• Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 1928. English translation 1958.
• Raglan, Lord. The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama. 1936.
• Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon, 1949.
• Segal, Robert A., ed. In Quest of the Hero. Princeton University Press, 1990. Collects Rank, Raglan, and Dundes in one volume.
• Ellwood, Robert. The Politics of Myth: A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. SUNY Press, 1999.