The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A psychological interpretation of mythology

by Otto Rank

Retaining from the original tendency of the romance, the fact that Bitiah, Pharaoh’s daughter, drew the child from the water, i.e., gave it birth, the outcome is the familiar theme (grandfather type) of the king, whose daughter is to bear a son, but who on being warned by the ill-omened interpretation of a dream, resolves to kill his forthcoming grandson. The handmaiden of his daughter (who in the biblical story draws the box from the water, at the behest of the princess), is charged by the king with the exposure of the newborn child in a box, in the waters of the river Nile, that it may perish (the exposure motive, from the viewpoint of the highborn parents, here appearing in its original disastrous significance). The box with the child is then found by lowly people, and the poor woman raises the child (as his wet nurse), and when he is grown up he is recognized by the princess as her son (just as in the prototype the phantasy concludes with the recognition by the highborn parents).

If the Moses-legend were placed before us in this more original form, as we have reconstructed it from the existing material, [97] the sum of this interpretation-mechanism would be approximately what is told in the myth as it is actually transmitted; namely that his true mother was not a princess, but the poor woman who was introduced as his nurse, her husband being his father.

This interpretation is offered as the tradition, in the re-converted myth; and the fact that this tracing of the progressive mutation furnishes the familiar type of hero myth, is the proof for the correctness of our interpretation.

It has thus been our good fortune to show the full accuracy of our interpretative technique upon the material itself, and it is now time to demonstrate the tenability of the general viewpoint upon which this entire technique is founded. Hitherto, the results of our interpretation have created the appearance of the entire myth formation as starting from the hero himself, namely from the youthful hero. At the start we took this attitude in analogizing the hero of the myth with the ego of the child. Now we find ourselves confronted with the obligation to harmonize these assumptions and conclusions with the other conceptions of myth formation, which they seem to directly contradict.

The myths are certainly not constructed by the hero, least of all by the child hero, but they have long been known to be the product of a people of adults. The impetus is evidently supplied by the popular amazement at the apparition of the hero, whose extraordinary life history the people can only imagine as ushered in by a wonderful infancy. This extraordinary childhood of the hero, however, is constructed by the individual myth-makers—to whom the indefinite idea of the folk-mind must be ultimately traced—from the consciousness of their own infancy. In investing the hero with their own infantile history, they identify themselves with him, as it were, claiming to have been similar heroes in their own personality. 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 it 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, [98] the hero being credited with the myth-maker’s personal infantile history. Meanwhile the tendency of this entire process is the excuse of the individual units of the people for their own infantile revolt against the father.

Besides the excuse of the hero for his rebellious revolt, the myth therefore contains also the excuse of the individual for his revolt against the father. This revolt had burdened him since his childhood, as he had failed to become a hero. He is now enabled to excuse himself by emphasizing that the father has given him grounds for his hostility. The affectionate feeling for the father is also manifested in the same fiction, as has been shown above. These myths have therefore sprung from two opposite motives, both of which are subordinate to the motive of vindication of the individual through the hero: on the one hand the motive of affection and gratitude towards the parents; and on the other hand, the motive of the revolt against the father. It is not stated outright in these myths, however, that the conflict with the father arises from the sexual rivalry for the mother, but is apparently suggested that this conflict dates back primarily to the concealment of the sexual processes (at childbirth), which in this way became an enigma for the child. This enigma finds its temporary and symbolical solution in the infantile sexual theory of the basket and the water. [99]

The profound participation of the incest motive in myth formation is discussed in the author’s special investigation of the Lohengrin saga, which belongs to the myth of the birth of the hero. The cyclic character of the Lohengrin saga is referred by him to the fantasy of being one’s own son, as revealed by Freud (p. 131; compare also pp. 96 and 990). This accounts for the identity of father and son, in certain myths, the repetition of their careers; the fact that the hero is sometimes not exposed until he has reached maturity, also the intimate connection between birth and death, in the exposure-motive. (Concerning the water as the water of death, compare especially chapter IV of the Lohengrin saga.) Jung, who regards the typical fate of the hero as the portrayal of the human libido and its typical vicissitudes, has made this theme the pivot of his interpretation, as the fantasy of being born again, to which the incest motive is subordinated. Not only the birth of the hero, which takes place under peculiar symbolic circumstances, but also the motive of the two mothers of the hero, are explained by Jung through the birth of the hero taking place under the mysterious ceremonials of a re-birth from the mother consort (l. c., p. 356).

Having thus outlined the contents of the birth myth of the hero it still remains for us to point out certain complications within the birth myth itself, which have been explained on the basis of its paranoid character, as “splits” of the personality of the royal father and persecutor. In some myths, however, and especially in the fairy tales which belong to this group, [100] the multiplication of mythical personages, and with them, of course, the multiplication of motives, or even of entire stories, are carried so far that sometimes the original features are altogether overgrown by these addenda. The multiplication is so variegated and so exuberantly developed, that the mechanism of the analysis no longer does it justice. Moreover, the new personalities here do not show the same independence, as it were, as the new personalities created by splitting, but they rather present the characteristics of a copy, a duplicate, or a “double,” which is the proper mythological term. An apparently very complicated example, namely, Herodotus’ version of the Kyros saga, illustrates that these doubles are not inserted purely for ornamentation, or to give a semblance of historical veracity, but that they are insolubly connected with the myth-formation and its tendency. Also, in the Kyros-myth, as in the other myths, the royal grandfather, Astyages, and his daughter, with her husband, are confronted by the cattle-herder and his wife. A checkered gathering of other personalities which move around them, are readily grouped at sight: Between the high born parent couple and their child stand the administrator Harpagos with his wife and his son, and the noble Artembares with his legitimate offspring. Our trained sense for the peculiarities of myth-structure recognizes at once the doubles of the parents in the intermediate parent-couples and all the participants are seen to be identical personalities of the parents and their child; this interpretation being suggested by certain features of the myth itself. Harpagos receives the child from the king, to expose it; he therefore acts precisely like the royal father and remains true to his fictitious paternal part in his reluctance to kill the child himself—because it is related to him—but he delivers it instead to the herder Mithradates, who is thus again identified with Harpagos. The noble Artembares, whose son Kyros causes to be whipped, is also identified with Harpagos; for when Artembares with his whipped boy stands before the king, to demand retribution, Harpagos at once is likewise seen standing before the king, to defend himself, and he also is obliged to present his son to the king. Thus Artembares himself plays an episodal part as the hero’s father, and this is fully confirmed by the Ktesian version, which tells us that the nobleman who adopted the herder’s son, Kyros, as his own son, was named Artembares.

Even more distinct than the identity of the different fathers is that of their children, which of course serves to confirm the identity of the fathers. In the first place, and this would seem to be conclusive, the children are all of the same age. Not only the son of the princess, and the child of the herder, who are born at the same time; but Herodotus specially emphasizes that Kyros played the game at kings, in which he caused the son of Artembares to be whipped, with boys of the same age. He also points out, perhaps intentionally, that the son of Harpagos, destined to become the playmate of Kyros, whom the king had recognized, was likewise apparently of the same age as Kyros. Furthermore, the remains of this boy are placed before his father, Harpagos, in a basket, it was also a basket in which the newborn Kyros was to have been exposed, and this actually happened to his substitute, the herder’s son, whose identity with Kyros is obvious and tangible in the report of Iustin, p. 34. In this report, Kyros is actually exchanged with the living child of the herders;, but this paradoxical parental feeling is reconciled by the consciousness that in reality nothing at all has been altered by this exchange. It appears more intelligible, of course, that the herder’s wife should wish to raise the living child of the king, instead of her own stillborn boy, as in the Herodotus version; but here the identity of the boys is again evident, for just as the herder’s son suffered death instead of Kyros in the past, twelve years later the son of Harpagos (also in the basket) is killed directly for Kyros, whom Harpagos had allowed to live. [101]

The impression is thereby conveyed that all the multiplications of Kyros, after having been created for a certain purpose, are again removed, as disturbing elements, once this purpose has been fulfilled. This purpose is undoubtedly the exalting tendency which is inherent to the family romance. The hero in the various duplications of himself and his parents, ascends the social scale from the herder Mithradates, by way of the noble Artembares, who is high in the king’s favor, and of the first administrator, Harpagos, who is personally related to the king—until he has himself become a prince; so his career is exposed in the Ktesian version, where Kyros advances from the herder’s son to the king’s administrator. [102] In this way, he constantly removes, as it were, the last traces of his ascent, the lower Kyros being discarded after absolving the different stages of his career. [103]