What is the Path of the Hero? pt. 3

Arbor
Fall 2006

In this third installment in the series, "what is the path of the hero?" we will examine the ideas of the once right hand man and later stark critic of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychologist Otto Rank. He wrote dozens of books, however the primary work which concerns us here is The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, which is a pan-mythological review of different heroes from a wide variety of cultures, focusing on the redundant themes and aspects of the birth of the hero, and
what they represent to us, psychologically. Rank's work on the subject was a powerful prelude to later authors, such as Joseph Campbell. Unlike Campbell, however, Rank's perspective on the issue of the hero is psychologically, sexually, and to a lesser extent, socially based, whereas Campbell's was almost entirely from a spiritual and metaphysical perspective. The purpose of this essay is to examine the conclusions of Rank, and compare and contrast them to those of Joseph Campbell, in order to better understand our modern conception of the importance of
path of the hero through the work of two of its most well known expositors.

Otto Rank was born Otto Rosenfeld in Vienna on April 22, 1884, and submitted at the age of twenty one a short paper on the subject of the artist, which impressed Freud so much that he invited Rank to become the secretary of the emerging Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He remained Freud's right hand man for twenty five years, until he proposed a novel theory on the alleged Oedipus complex, Freud's most dear brainchild, that ran contrary to Freud's ideas. This led to a deep, unresolved schism between the two, and Rank spent the remaining fourteen years
as a successful author, lecturer and therapist in America and France.

The Myth of the Birth of the Hero was published in 1909, when Rank was 25, and details the circumstances of the birth of heroes from Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Hindu, Persian, Greek and Roman myth. Although rather limited in its focus compared to Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it provides an impeccably detailed study of what was evidently to Rank the most crucial aspect of the hero's path: hir birth. In the introduction of this rather short work, Rank explains that the aspects of the hero's life and especially hir birth, although from "different
nations- even though widely separated by space and entirely independent of each other- present a baffling similarity or, in part, a literal correspondence (p. 3)." The three most common theories which then existed to explain this phenomena are that of 'elemental ideas,' of Adolf Bastian, that of 'original community' of Theodor Benfey, and the theory of cultural migration, borrowing, or diffusion. The first holds that the human psyche is everywhere and always more or less on the same page or at the same stage of development, and it is only appropriate that the myths we recount at different times and places should be so similar. The second theory is that our myths
come from one original source, i.e. India or Sumer, and have simply endured the passage of time. The third theory is more or less an elaboration on the mechanism inherent to the second (causing one to wonder why Rank chose it as a third or separate theory) which holds that cultures borrow from and lend to other neighboring cultures, and that this accounts for not only the spatial diversity but the thematic similarities of the world's myths.

My opinion is that the three supposedly separate theories are complimentary to one another, and simply explain a different aspect of mythological similarities between cultures. The simple fact that all of the above-mentioned cultures each had astoundingly complex cosmological systems which represent and explain the principles of life, death, the microcosm and the macrocosm, in relation to the planets and strata of terrestrial existence, and that they should so strikingly and specifically mirror each other, presents me with the rather plain conviction that they came, in their extant form, from a source which has its roots beyond recorded antiquity, the
oldest records we have being from Sumeria around 3,000 BC. It seems likely that cosmological and mythic structures are inherently human in their composition and perspective, although come from civilizations which existed much earlier than those we know of, such as Atlantis, Lemuria or Mu, the fabled 'lost civilizations' so important to classical Greek philosophers and new age authors alike. This is not to argue for or against the supposed existence of, say, Atlantis, but to assume that the only probably answer to the origin of these myths is that the further back we could go in time with archeological investigation, the further back our ideas of where myths originate would appropriately follow.

Rank states that "the ultimate problem is not whence and how the material reached a certain people; the question is: Where did it come from to begin with?" and that "granting the migration of all myths, the origin of the first myth would still have to be explained (p.5-6)." The theory that myths originally were and remain to be explanations of natural phenomena is first presented by rank as a possible answer, followed by the theory that they come, as Freud showed in his The
Interpretation of Dreams, from the human psyche is posited.

I think that this is a false polarity, and that both can help to explain the origin of myth. Humankind has, as far as we can tell, come into being fully on the earth, with its physical laws, limitations, and patterns, just as much as a species we have always, as far as we can tell, each owned an individualized psyche which is the portal through which we are able to experience and interact with this earthly (as well as the finer) planes. We are each demonstrably unique selves which maintain a microcosmic relation to the macrocosm, the 'outer' or phenomenal universe. To
somehow divide these and hold that myths originate from one or the other is nonsense; myths originate from our having psyches which must by nature interact with nature, inner and outer. Our understanding of the physical and natural environment which is our material incubator is appropriately limited by the parameters of the scope of our minds, which we can easily and prudently assume to be quite limited, as the mind of a snake is limited by its unique scope (sensation by heat levels versus sight and sound). We can assume then that the knowledge we
have of the universe is not of the universe as-it-is-to-itself, so to speak, but as it is to us- two quite different perspectives. Therefore, it is a consequence of the peculiar characteristics of our minds that the universe appears to be what it is, not that it is necessarily a priori that way in and of itself. These myths, which we consider our own, are an amalgamated concrescence which are spontaneously and naturally borne of the union of our centers of consciousness with the universe, in much the same way that the combination of two substances in a chemist's lab sometimes
precipitate a third, unique substance as a result.

The assumption of Rank regarding this issue is similar, however he doesn't seem to see myth-creation as such a necessarily mutual flow between psyche and cosmos so much as a process by which we gradually become conscious, and then project the inner truths we become aware of onto the earth and the universe itself, as a linear process. He somewhat inconsequentially sides with Freud in proposing that the origin is in the human psyche and its subconscious dreams, day dreams, fantasies and conscious thoughts, which were then ascribed to universal and cosmic patterns by our remote ancestors. He justifies this ascription to our revulsion at seeming to maintain, for instance, incestual and patricidal cravings, the horrors of
which we escape by convincing ourselves, through myth-creation, that these unfortunate counterparts of our psyches come from 'out there,' versus from 'within.'

The relativistic conclusions of Einstein alone, however, show that, in our universe, nothing can be known in-and-of-itself by our minds, and that it is utterly impossible (and oh so Newtonian) to attempt to find the dividing line between the world view and the world viewed. The world viewed is as much a product of the world view of the human as the world view is a product of the world viewed. In short, Rank's affirmation of the conclusions of Freud that all myth is a product of human psychical circumstances addresses only half of the issue, which is really, to me, of
the "neither solely the chicken or the egg, but both" variety. To Rank's credit, however, he eludes a direct answer to this question of why and where myths come from, ostensibly to leave the debate open- the jury, for some reason, still out on that one.

Moving on into the bulk of the work, Rank reviews the lives of mythological heroes and finds many eye-opening parallels between them. The basic process which Rank finds in the examples he chooses is that a king is told by a dream or prophecy of one of his subjects (usually an astrologer, magician, or dream interpreter) that a boy is to be born soon in his land, usually of his own siring, who will someday become his successor, perhaps by force. In order to secure his hold of power which he seems to think will last forever, the king orders the death of the boy in question, or if the actual identity of the boy is unknown, as in the stories of Moses and Jesus, the king orders the wholesale slaughter of all boys who are born in his region of authority, within a particular span of time. The boy's mother, or some other feminine entity, spirits the future hero away in order to save its life by hiding it in a vessel set in either water, a mountaintop, or a remote, wild location. Someone fatalistically happens upon the boy, usually either a group of wild but caring animals, or human parents of a lowly or mundane stature, who take pity on and
adopt the boy. He is thusly raised, his own kingly identity unknown to him, until, upon reaching adulthood, he learns his actual fate, and returns to the land of the king who ordered his death to kill the king, and assume the throne. The common details of the story, although superficially absurd, arbitrary, or both, find parallels in the myths of nearly all known major civilizations.
For instance, the recurring mythological theme of the hero being placed, as a baby, in some sort of basket and abandoned, usually but not always to some sort of body of water is found in the stories of the Babylonian king Sargon, the Hebrew Moses, the Hindu Karna, Chandragupta, the Greek Oedipus, Perseus, the Celtic Tristram, the Romans Romulus and Remus, Hercules, and Lohengrin (son of Parsifal of the holy grail myths).

In the third and final section of the work, Rank attempts the interpretation of these myths and their similarities, deconstructing them according to his almost thoroughly Freudian perspective. The first sword he uses to slice up the goods into intelligible segments is the idea that the hero always feels some sort of ingrown animosity towards hir parents, and the need to distance hirself from them, that "for the hero, who is exposed to envy, jealousy, and calumny to a much higher degree than all others, the descent from his parents often becomes the source of the greatest distress and embarrassment (p. 66)." The reason for this seems to be that the child or hero must sever hir familial relations so that sHe can become to hirself a fundamentally separate person from the parents and their nest, a requisite first step to any healthy psychological development. "The detachment of the growing individual from the authority of the parents is one of the most necessary, but also one of the most painful achievements of evolution. It is absolutely necessary for this detachment to take place, and it may be assumed that all normal grown individuals
have accomplished it to a certain extent. Social progress is essentially based upon this opposition between the two generations. On the other hand, there exists a class of neurotics whose condition indicates that they have failed to solve this very problem. For the young child, the parents are, in the first place, the sole authority and the source of all faith. To resemble them . . . to grow up like father or mother- this is the most intense and portentous wish of the child's early years (p. 67-68)."

According to the Freudian conception of psychological development, the infant develops a sexual affinity to the parent of its opposite sex, accompanied by the wish to destroy the parent of its own sex, as the latter represents a threat to its idealized type of access (in this case, sexual) to the parent of opposite sex. Once the child has experienced a certain degree of intellectual development, sHe grows past the infantile stage of viewing the father and mother as monolithic representations of their gender, and realizes, by comparison to other adults, that hir parents are not only imperfect, but considerably lacking in appeal to the child.

It is then that the child begins projecting the initial incestual and patricidal tendencies which resulted from its experience in the womb, and then in the nursery, respectively, when the child realizes that its parents are not the idealized characters it thought them to be (which Rank calls the 'family romance'), and looks for and sees then in other adults this ideal. This projection results in the child estranging itself from the healthy factors of its own upbringing, and ascribes to the latter all of the banal and repulsive tendencies which it finds itself to have, thus replacing the biological parents for others of an ostensibly more noble, fun, easy, or wise nature. This replacement occurs, of course, before the child could dissolve, or even be aware of, the unhealthy, unrealistic idealizations of its parents which fomented as a result of its birth and early life.

We strive after impossible ideals throughout life because of our inability to realize the plain fact that our parents were never perfect, and unfortunately could never be expected to live up to what we wished or wish them to be. The ego of the child and now young adult, which Rank compares to the hero itself, then sets out to find its true identity, now out of the womb or nest which was the original mechanism of estrangement from this true identity. The child's rejection of its parents owes itself to the "youthful hero, foreseeing his destiny to taste more than his share of the bitterness of life, deplores in a pessimistic mood the inimical act [sexual intercourse]
which has called him to earth. He accuses the parents, as it were, for having exposed him to the struggle of life, for having allowed him to be born (p. 76)." The vessel in which the child is placed in order to be saved from the murderous consternation of the king represents, to Rank, the womb in which the reincarnated soul, child, or potential hero, is placed. The hero then is saved from untimely death by the compassion of the feminine figure who steals hir away to the basket placed, in the case of Moses for instance, among the reeds of the rushing Nile to safety.

It is noted by Rank that the estrangement the hero (or child's ego, in real life) from hir parents is usually a development which occurs more as a result of the father than the mother. For the father, in this sense, represents "the king, the tyrannical persecutor (p. 79)." After a time, however, the hero must renounce hir repudiation and rejection of the father, for sHe must become the king hirself someday, to complete the process, as hir father did with his own father. The throne which the hero's true father occupies then represents, paradoxically, the potential for freedom from tyranny itself, and the hero then is placed in a position of defending hir father
from the external forces which opposed and oppose him, versus a position of yearning for the death of hir father, hir protege as king.

The hero has, usually, two sets of parents; the "high born" or royal parents who, in the myths, are hir biological parents, and the parents who raise hir after hir exile, the ones of lowly or homely stature, the step-parents. The "high born parents are the echo, as it were, of the exaggerated notions the child originally harbored concerning his parents (p. 82)." It follows then that the lowly set of parents represent the child's actual biological parents in real life, as they are, unfettered by the child's hopeless conception of them as perfect and godlike. The prophecy which the father or king receives which foretells his eventual fall from power at the hands of his son,
"becomes a hopeful prophecy for the lowly father- compare, in the birth story of Jesus, the oracle for Herod and Joseph's dream (ibid.)" It is evident that the polarity of highborn vs. lowborn parent-couples represents the stages or poles of a cyclic process which is being symbolically rendered by the myth. For the birth of the boy (future king) threatens the present king, and, wanting the boy dead, the king is the mechanism by which the boy is sent away to be raised by, in the reversal-of symbols which takes place in translating the myth down into real-life processes and characters, a humble or lowly version of the boy's original parents, the king and queen. By being reared by the lowly parent-couple, the hero is estranged from hir
biological parents to be raised by a different characterization of them. I believe that Rank is saying this symbolizes the shift in appreciation that the child goes through when sHe realizes that hir parents are not divine, but human. However, the supposed divinity of the kingly parents represents the still-present idealization of the child, however the projection of divinity onto the child's biological parents retrains itself onto a new type of person in the child's life; this is the point in the story where the hero, after having been raised to near adulthood by the lowly parent-couple, fatalistically reunites with the king who originally exiled him, and usurps the throne.

I believe this represents that the projection shifts not from the mythic original high-born father to the low-born father (or in real life, the idealized conception of the biological father to the realistic conception of the same), but that the projection of the kingly status on the biological father reverses back onto the hero-character or actual child, effectively charging the hero with becoming this character which the high-born father represents. In other words, when the child realizes that although its parents wield full authority over its life, they are not divine or kingly, and it must, by default, become this in their stead, and make manifest this kingly divinity on its own throne in the future. Thus, the usurpation of the throne which the pubescent hero-character
becomes aware of the cosmic necessity of achieving represents the usurpation of the authority by the child which the parents, initially idealized as high-born and then low-born, originally held. It is a changing of the guard, so to speak. We actually wish to become, mostly subconsciously, that perfect and near-divine type of person which we originally, very early on in life, took our parents to be, and disappointingly learned otherwise. As Rank says

The true hero of the romance is, therefore, the ego, which
finds itself in the hero, by reverting to the time when the
ego was itself a hero, through its first heroic act, i.e., the
revolt against the father, The ego can only find its own
heroism in the days of infancy, and is therefore obliged to
invest the hero with its own revolt, crediting him with the
features which made the ego a hero. This object is achieved
with infantile motives and materials, in reverting to the
infantile romance and transferring it to the hero. Myths are,
therefore, created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood
fantasies, the hero being credited with the myth-maker's
personal infantile history (p. 84).

It seems clear to me that the source of tension wherefrom the manifold projections and idealizations of the hero (or child's ego) derive is the original state of the young child being completely helpless in contrast to the actual and idealized absolute authority and power of the father. The young child knows the bounds of the competition, if even in epically blown up proportions, when it is very young; father has absolute power, and child has little to none outside of volunteering the loving sympathy of the mother, the original source of all comfort and warmth (the womb). The cycle, then, from which the myths derive and which finds its inspiration in the
processes which we all witness and undergo as small children, then young adults,
and then later into adulthood, is thus: the very young child experiences a
simultaneous, infantile glamorization and hatred of the father, due to its lack of
scope to know that father outside of this polarity; as the ultimate source of its
existence, therefore godly, and as the ultimate obstacle to its ability to establish its
own authority or power, therefore tyrannical.

The child is then, to greater or lesser degree, imbued with this black/white view of first the actual father, and then all fatherly authority figures. Upon reaching late adolescence or early adulthood, the ego has continuously wished to be what the father was from the start, and seeks out ways in which to flex this authority. The type of person who outrightly rejects the authority of the father and leaves the nest in contempt, and the type of person who, in spite of hir latent hatred of the father, seeks perpetually the approval of first the actual father, and all authority figures who follow, such as a teacher, boss, judge, or politician, represent two reactions to the same complex or tension; in short, anyone with a degree of power which the ego envies. The former example Rank compares to the anarchist, who rejects the authority of the king or tyrant because of this original rejection of the father's authority (a classic example of Freudian simplification, to the point of dumbing down). The latter example, not touched on by Rank, I would compare to the type of person who 'sucks up' to authority figures hir whole life, while secretly wanting to maim and kill or both that person in authority. An example would be the son who unflinchingly and tediously follows the footsteps of the father, on into adulthood, and perhaps works for or with the father, trying always to be as much of a replica of the father as
possible, in the hopes of one day being in his position, the unchecked motivation of the son since infancy. Sons like this hate their fathers just as much as the anarchistic types who externally and vocally reject the father's authority. There is little difference in the two types outside of the method of rejection; one seethes on the surface, and the other seethes deep within.

These myths, therefore, expose to us our own patterns of parental love/ hatred, and provide us with an example of their nature. I do not hold the conviction that these myths were authored by some benevolent source which sought to edify us to these harmful patterns which must be broken, i.e. compulsive hatred of the father and compulsive infatuation with the mother. To the contrary, I believe that these myths find their origin in us, from whatever cultural, social framework (the more "civilized" the culture, the more pronounced the neuroses become), and they are more like spontaneous mirror reflections of our own infantile drives and motivations, projected onto mythic heroes, beasts, and fair maidens. It can be seen, then, and it is my belief that myths serve, back of it all, a dual purpose: they communicate to us, in symbolic form, the process by which we 'come into our own' as developed (or degenerated) egos with, hopefully, our own sense of authority in whatever sphere of life. The other purpose they serve, which Rank
seems either unconcerned, unaware of, or both, is to be a transcendental model of how we come to be able to seek out, understand, and ultimately destroy our own drive to false, temporal power, and seek to finally destroy and dissolve the original source of separation, jealousy, and fear we all possess: our ego.

Our ego is the analog to the mechanism of exile which separated the child hero from its royal, divine parentage: the jealousy and contempt the father or king holds upon knowing that his power will ultimately be transferred to his son, signaling his own eventual impotence or disempowerment. It is this type of petty clinging to tradition and authority which the ego machinates in order to maintain a strong hold over the spiritual growth of the human, who must actually transcend the ego and converse with the higher self, or soul-identity, which existed 'long before' the ego or human did, and which will exist 'long after' as well.

The mother figure who, as a she-wolf as in the myth of Romulus, or the common, low-born, step-mother who raises the exiled boy represents, to me, the earth and its comforts. For we are, upon being born, exiled from full and open rapport with the divine by the mechanism of our encasement in matter, and unwittingly need to suckle from the fruits of the earth in order to survive. This is at once literal and symbolic. Of course we need the earth and its produce to survive, however in the symbolic realm, this can lead to what Jesus Christ called "building a
house on sand," or "building your kingdom on earth." For we must ultimately deliver ourselves from these cycles of paranoid power grabbing and equally paranoid mother-figure suckling, if we are to be delivered from our encasement in matter to the freedom of nirvana, or the 'snuffing out' of desire for petty, ego-driven comforts.

We will now compare and contrast the approach of Rank with that of Campbell to this issue of the hero and its mythological patterns, for each display a unique and differing perspective. In shaded contrast to Rank's almost completely Freudian or psychological approach, Campbell is much more concerned with the spiritual, and to a lesser extent cultural, ramifications of the hero-character. The object of Campbell is adequately summarized in the comment he made upon
completion of the fourth volume of his The Masks of God series, Creative Mythology, where he explained his drive to be the

confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully entertained:
of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also
in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the
manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced,
developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted,
and today, in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding
together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax,
out of which the next great movement will emerge (Campbell, p.1)

In his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell painstakingly surveyed the manifestations of the hero in the world's myths, with encyclopedic comprehension of countless and varied mythologies from a vast array of different cultures. He postulated a "monomyth," a theoretical template which the mythological systems of the world more or less follow, from which stem "religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries of science and technology, [and] the very dreams that blister sleep (Campbell, p. 3)." He mapped the entire sequence of the mythic hero's life, from the prophecies surrounding hir
birth, to the intricate nuances of development the hero undergoes in combating and conquering its own foolishness and perceived inadequacies in the form of dragons and mistresses, to the apotheosis of attaining to salvation or bodhisattva-hood, and finally to the memory of the hero long after hir death. Providing a sturdy middle point between thinkers such as Rank and Lord Raglan, Campbell's approach, although executed technically as a mythologist, is deeply human and relatively free from academic pretensions. He appears unconcerned with proving any one thesis, other than that explained by the quote above, that of establishing the "unity of the race of
man," in its "spiritual history." Or that, despite differences in age and clime, we all, as humans, experience the same types of angels and demons throughout our lifetimes and this is only evidenced by the striking similarities in our myths, however remote from each other culturally, spatially, or temporally.

To compare Rank with Campbell is somewhat unyielding in that Rank devoted only seventy five or so pages to the subject of the hero, whereas Campbell devoted his entire life's work to the hero, totaling dozens of volumes. Rank focused solely on the parallels between the myths surrounding the birth of the hero, whereas Campbell, especially in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, exegetically combs through all aspects of the hero's life. However, we can compare their separate conclusions regarding the birth, or more specifically in Campbell's case, the oddities
and absurdities surrounding the hero's venture into the inner world of the supernatural (because Campbell hardly addresses the birth specifically).

Both Rank and Campbell acknowledge that some sort of fundamental separation must exist between the hero and hir family (chiefly but not only the parents), and that it is this painful but seemingly necessary schism which preludes the life of greatness to follow. According to Rank, "the normal relations of the hero toward his father and his mother regularly appear impaired in all these myths . . . there is reason to assume that something in the nature of the hero must account for such a disturbance (Rank, p. 65-66)." In other words, it is this sense of separation
which we all experience upon leaving the womb that is an inherent aspect of each of our psycho-spiritual structures, and this type of separation is what is symbolized by the hero being placed in a basket and exposed to the elements, in order to assume its role now as a separate being out to experience and make coherent the phenomena of the earth. Campbell: "Freud has suggested that all moments of anxiety reproduce the painful feelings of the first separation from the mother- the tightening of the breath, congestion of the blood, etc., of the crisis of birth.
Conversely, all moments of separation and new birth create anxiety (Campbell, p. 52)." As Campbell focuses more on the "call to adventure" of the hero than the birth of the hero as the antecedent event which decides the hero's fate, a direct correlation between the two cannot be firmly established regarding, specifically, the birth. However, in a sense, the "call to adventure" is a sort of birth, in that the hero leaves the womb of familiar social and cultural surroundings to experience the bizarre and the perilous. It "signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and
transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown," which may mean transference to "beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop (Campbell, 58)." Rank also acknowledges this by stating that the exposure of the infant hero is usually executed in either the sea or a river, at a remote mountain peak, or in a desert. It is this type of drastic separation from its biological family, either at birth in Rank's case, or at young adulthood as in Campbell, which symbolizes the initial removal of the hero from the land of the comfortable, by staying within the hero could accomplish nothing of fateful import.

Secondly, although Campbell's review of the mythic hero's life-span is far more involved and ponderous than Rank's, they have interesting conclusions which mirror and contrast each other. Rank focuses more on the birth and its peculiar aspects, and Campbell focuses more on the rest of the hero's life, all the way to apotheosis. To compare, I will quote both authors' basic schema in full:

The hero is a child of most distinguished parents, usually
the son of a king. His origin is preceded by difficulties, such
as continence, or prolonged barrenness, or secret intercourse
of the parents due to external prohibition or obstacles.
During or before the pregnancy, there is a prophecy, in the
form of a dream or oracle, cautioning against his birth, and
usually threatening danger to the father (or his representative).
As a rule, he is surrendered to the water, in a box. He is then
saved by animals, or by lowly people (shepherds), and is
suckled by a female animal or by an humble woman. After
he has grown up, he finds his distinguished parents, in a
highly versatile fashion. He takes his revenge on his father,
on the one hand, and is acknowledged, on the other. Finally,
he achieves rank and honors (Rank, p. 65).

According to Campbell's rubric, which begins with the hero's "call to adventure,

The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday
hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily
proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters
a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may
defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom
of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or
be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment,
crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero
journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate
forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some
of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the
nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme
ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented
as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother
of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the
father-creator (father atonement), his own divination, (apotheosis),
or again, if the powers have remained unfriendly
to him- his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft,
fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness
and therewith of being (illumination, transformation, freedom).
The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed
the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary);
if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle
flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers
must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom
of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings
restores the world (elixir) (Campbell, p. 245-246).

Obviously, the focus and findings of each author are in many ways quite different.
One could say that they even seemed to be looking at different sources, although
fundamentally they weren't (Campbell merely had a far wider knowledge of myth
thank Rank evidenced).

The first element of difference between the two seems to be that Rank views the hero of the journey of the hero as a strictly inter-familial psycho-drama, where for Campbell the hero's journey encapsulates the near entirety of cosmic phenomena. Within the Rankian system, the hero must come to terms with hir own disturbed relations with the biological, immediate (and sometimes extended) family, and seek atonement with the father-king/tyrannical persecutor. It is the accomplishment of this at-one-ment, when the hero has appropriately surmounted hir rightful throne which heralds the integration of all the aspects of hir nature which had hitherto threatened it, i.e. estrangement from mother and father as righteous mentors, estrangement
from hir own true identity, the tyranny of the king, and the task of rightful ascendence to the throne.

Whether these vicissitudes are to be taken literally, symbolically, or as a mixture of both, the symbols emphasized by Rank hardly extend beyond the realm of familial relations, and his analysis follows accordingly. He places the major tension/reaction/solution points as stages of the lifetime interaction between son/father, or child/parent (to be gender-unspecific, a trait unbecoming to early twentieth century social scientists), and analyzes them according to a more or less standard Freudian framework. The conflicts which the hero must undergo, from the stories of Sargon to Moses to Cyrus to Lohengrin, pertain almost wholly to the power struggles between the young future hero-king (the child's ego) and the father king/tyrannical persecutor (father/authority figure's ego). Although this provides for an undeniably important and prescient understanding of these all-too-important themes, Rank seems unconcerned with the spiritual import of them, deconstructing all aspects of self realization to a clear understanding and overcoming of the 'incest motif' and the instinctive patricidal tendencies of the child.

Campbell, on the other hand, although acknowledging that "the symbolism of mythology has a psychological significance," noting the achievements of "Freud, Carl G. Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Geza Roheim, and many others," notes that "if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream (Campbell, p. 255-256)." He further writes that

to grasp the full value of the mythological figures that have
come down to us, we must understand that they are not only
symptoms of the unconscious (as indeed are all human
thoughts and acts) but also controlled and intended statements
of certain spiritual principles, which have remained
as constant throughout the course of human history as the
form and nervous structure of the human physique itself.
Briefly formulated, the universal doctrine teaches that all the
visible structures of the world- all things and beings- are the
effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which
supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation,
and back into which they must ultimately dissolve
(Campbell, p. 257).

The elements and themes of myth, for Rank, remain within the paradigm of strictly psychological boundaries, and allow us to better understand the unhealthy and murky complexes and associations which result from having a mother and a father. And he has certainly, within these bounds, achieved his task. On the other hand, for Campbell, the elements and themes of myth represent a fully cosmic (or even beyond cosmic) journey which every soul must undergo if it wishes to be rendered free from the veil of illusion or maya to which the ego binds us, and achieve union with the Godhead, not merely to come to terms with its own disturbing wish to engage in sexual intercourse with its mother and kill its father.

The functions of each author can then be neatly placed as thus: if one wishes to explore and understand the psychological, sexual, and social lessons which the mythologies of the world provide for us, then Rank provides an excellent analysis. If one wishes to understand the metaphysical, psychological, and most of all spiritual lessons inherent in the world's mythologies, then Campbell is perhaps the most adequate authority in contemporary literature. The prowess of one does not diminish the other; they are two very different perspectives of a single, timeless,
universal, and incredibly timely subject, whose name is: what is the path of the hero?


Sources Used

Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Vintage Books, 1959)
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton University Press,
1973)
Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology (New York, Penguin Compass, 1976)