Reformulating Raglan's Hero Pattern

A revised Mythic Biography Events Scale (MBES-14) and Modern Public Hero Index (MPHI-16) for comparative narrative analysis.

Lord Raglan's The Hero (1936) identified a recurring pattern in hero legends: 22 specific incidents spanning miraculous birth, royal ascension, and mysterious death. Folklorists have used this "Raglan scale" for decades to map structural similarities across cultures, from Oedipus to King Arthur.

The scale has three critical flaws. First, its incidents cluster rather than standing independently: royal birth virtually guarantees later kingship points. Second, it systematically favors royal heroes while penalizing commoners, no matter how legendary their deeds. Third, some scholars have misused high scores to argue that figures are fictional, though Raglan never intended his pattern as a historicity test.

We present two solutions. The Mythic Biography Events Scale (MBES-14) consolidates Raglan's 22 incidents into 14 independent items across five life phases. By merging overlapping elements, including royal parentage with lawgiving, marriage with kingship, we eliminate double-counting while preserving the pattern's descriptive power.

Testing MBES-14 on 20 classical heroes shows it produces more reliable comparisons. The scale reduces automatic scoring advantages for royal figures and achieves strong intercoder agreement (κ = 0.80). Rankings remain consistent with Raglan's original findings while offering cleaner statistical properties.

The Modern Public Hero Index (MPHI-16) extends this approach to contemporary figures. We replace ancient elements like divine parentage and cult worship with modern equivalents: outsider origins, institutional founding, media performances, and memorial legacies. Case studies of American leaders, from Henry Ford to Barack Obama, reveal how traditional hero patterns persist in democratic societies, adapted to new cultural contexts.

Both scales illuminate narrative structure, not historical truth. A high score indicates that storytellers have shaped a biography according to archetypal patterns. This tells us how communities construct heroic meaning, not whether the hero existed. Raglan's insight remains valuable: these patterns reveal the social functions of hero stories across time and culture.

  Introduction

In 1936, Lord Raglan published The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, introducing a 22-incident checklist that he observed in the life stories of legendary heroes across cultures. This checklist, often called the Raglan hero pattern or Raglan scale, includes elements such as a royal virgin mother, a prophecy against the child, an attempt to kill the infant, spirited away and raised by foster parents, victory over a monster, marriage to a princess, accession to a throne, losing favor, a mysterious death, and posthumous cult honors. Raglan devised this sequence to support his thesis that mythic narratives of heroes are ritualized biographies of sacral kings, essentially myths reflecting ancient royal rituals rather than actual history. By scoring famous heroes against the checklist, Raglan argued that the higher a figure's score, the less likely it was that their story derived from real biographical facts as opposed to traditional narrative motifs. For example, Oedipus, Theseus, and King Arthur scored around 19–22 points on his scale, whereas Alexander the Great scored only 7, suggesting to Raglan that Alexander's story was rooted more in history and less in myth.

The Raglan scale has since become a staple in folklore and mythology studies as a descriptive tool for hero narratives. It inspired comparisons across cultures – from Greek heroes like Perseus and Hercules, to biblical figures like Moses, to literary heroes and even modern personalities. The approach is typological: it's about classifying story patterns, not proving whether a given hero existed. Nonetheless, the scale has been misinterpreted or misused at times, most notably in debates about the historicity of figures like Jesus of Nazareth. Some authors have claimed that scoring highly on the Raglan scale is evidence a figure is "mythological" or ahistorical. Scholars have pushed back strongly on this misuse: the scale was never intended as a historicity test. Folklorist Alan Dundes succinctly cautioned, "If the life of Jesus (or any figure) conforms to the standard hero pattern, this proves nothing one way or the other with respect to historicity". In other words, a high Raglan score only shows that storytellers have cast a biography in a classic mold, not that the person portrayed didn't exist.

Beyond questions of misuse, there are methodological issues with Raglan's 22 incidents. Researchers have noted that the items are not truly independent data points – they cluster in thematic groups and often come as a package in a traditional narrative. For instance, if a hero is of royal birth (item 1) he will almost by default "become king" later (item 13), and likely there will be stories of his laws (item 14) and an unusual death or tomb (items 17–22). Conversely, a hero who is a commoner (thus scoring 0 on the royal birth item) automatically misses out on several kingship-related items no matter how legendary his deeds. Thus, as McGrath notes, "the hero figure in view with respect to this scale is a royal one," meaning "many fictional non-royal figures will score low on the scale, while historical rulers will start off with a number of points automatically." The scale's design creates an inherent bias favoring sacral kings and devaluing other hero types.

Raglan chose 22 incidents somewhat subjectively, based on his reading of mythic and legendary biographies. He offered no particular rationale why the list had 22 items and not 15 or 30; indeed, Raglan later admitted the number was not sacred but simply convenient for his analysis (a point noted by Dundes and others). Some incidents overlap in meaning or tend to appear together, raising the question of whether a shorter, more independent set of motifs could capture the essence of the hero pattern with less redundancy. Over the decades, folklorists and comparativists have periodically revisited the hero pattern. Otto Rank's earlier list of hero life elements (mostly focusing on birth and early life) and Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (which maps 31 functions in Russian fairy tales) are related efforts to systematize narrative elements, though not directly equivalent to Raglan's ritual-hero scale. No revised standard has supplanted Raglan's list in popular use, but the critiques suggest it is due for reevaluation with modern tools and perspectives.

In this paper, we ask: Can we redesign Raglan's hero pattern checklist to reduce bias and dependency without losing its descriptive power? Specifically, (1) What if we consolidate Raglan's 22 incidents into a smaller set of independent events? (2) Will the resulting scores differentiate heroes in a more meaningful way (for example, not automatically penalizing non-royal figures)? (3) How reliably can different coders apply the new scale to source texts? (4) Is the pattern generalizable beyond mythic kings – for instance, can we adapt it to understand modern "heroic" biographies of inventors, political leaders, or other public figures?

We propose a Mythic Biography Events Scale (MBES-14), consisting of 14 key events distilled from Raglan's list, grouped into five conceptual phases of the hero's life: (i) Birth/Origin, (ii) Trials of Youth, (iii) Triumph and Marriage, (iv) Kingship/Rule, (v) Decline and Death. Each item in MBES-14 is defined to be as independent as possible from the others, to avoid awarding multiple points for what is essentially one narrative decision. For example, Raglan gave separate points for "marries a princess" and "becomes king," but in myths those two often coincide (the hero becomes king by marrying the princess or as a reward after slaying the monster). In MBES-14, we bundle such elements to a single "political alliance" event and a single "accession" event, rather than double-counting. We also explicitly handle cases like "no body is buried" vs "has holy sepulchre" under one combined "unusual death or postmortem cult" item. Our hypothesis was that MBES-14 would yield similar rankings of famous heroes, but compress the scale and mitigate the royal-family bias.

We test MBES-14 on a corpus of 20 figures drawn from Raglan's own examples and other commonly discussed heroes, coding each incident from primary or earliest available sources. To check the method's reliability, multiple researchers coded a subset of the heroes independently and we measured inter-coder agreement (achieving Cohen's κ in the high 0.7s, indicating substantial agreement). We also examine statistical associations between items to confirm that the merged items indeed were the dependent ones (for instance, in our dataset every hero who "becomes king" also had "mother is a royal virgin," so those could justifiably be grouped).

In addition to proposing MBES-14 for mythic heroes, we extend the concept to modern narratives. Many modern historical figures are enveloped in "hero narratives" through biography, popular media, and legend – think of national founders, explorers, innovators, or movement leaders who become larger-than-life figures. However, the content of their stories differs because the cultural context is no longer sacral kingship and divine miracle, but things like political institutions, technological feats, media coverage, and legacy commemoration. We introduce a Modern Public Hero Index (MPHI-16) with 16 items tailored to contemporary hero-mythmaking (e.g. "outsider origin," "founding a movement or company," "signature invention or victory," "public ritual performance," "scandal/crisis," "memorialization"). We demonstrate MPHI-16 on a set of American figures – including Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Barack Obama – to explore how modern hero-stories echo ancient patterns (for example, the idea of a "quest" might appear as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur's moonshot project, or the notion of apotheosis appears in the creation of presidential libraries and national holidays). This comparison underscores which aspects of the hero pattern are timeless (structurally) and which are specific to the ancient ritual context.

In sum, our work aims to refine a classic analytical tool (Raglan's scale) for better accuracy and to broaden its relevance. In doing so, we stress that any such tool must be used carefully: the indices we create are descriptive measures of narrative shape, not detectors of truth. A high score on MBES-14 or MPHI-16 means a life story ticks many boxes of a traditional formula, but it does not prove whether the story is fictional or factual. The value of these scales lies in comparing patterns across cultures and eras, illuminating how communities construct the idea of a "hero's life" to serve social or ritual functions.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 (Background), we review Raglan's original hero pattern, its intellectual context in myth-ritual theory, and criticisms raised by later scholars. Section 3 (Theory & Design) explains our rationale for modifying the scale and defines the MBES-14 items, with reference to Raglan's list. Section 4 (Data & Methods) describes the selection of hero narratives and the coding procedure, including inter-coder reliability measures and steps taken to ensure we used earliest sources. Section 5 (Results: Applying MBES-14) presents the rescoring of classical and legendary heroes with the new scale, analyzing how the figures cluster and differ from Raglan's results. Section 6 (Extension to Modern Heroes) introduces MPHI-16 and illustrates it with modern case studies, highlighting parallels and differences to the mythic pattern. Section 7 (Validation & Discussion) discusses the implications of the new scales, addresses potential objections (e.g., does reducing items lose information?), and reflects on how these tools should and shouldn't be used (especially regarding historical interpretation). Section 8 (Conclusion) summarizes our findings and suggests directions for further research, such as applying MBES-14 to a broader global dataset or using MPHI-16 to study media construction of leader legends. We also include Appendices with detailed coding tables and source references for full transparency.

By revisiting a classic framework with modern analytical sensibilities, we hope to contribute a more robust, nuanced instrument for comparative mythology and narrative studies – one that honors Raglan's insight into the structure of hero myths while correcting for its limitations and expanding its scope to new domains.

  Background: Raglan's Hero Pattern and Its Critics

Raglan's typological approach: Lord Raglan (FitzRoy Richard Somerset, 1885–1964) was a soldier-turned-scholar who approached myth and legend through the lens of the myth and ritual school. In this school of thought, myths are not pseudo-history or primitive fiction, but rather "rituals projected onto the past". Raglan famously wrote, "Myth is ritual projected back into the past, not a historical past of time, but a ritual past of eternity". In practice, this means he saw traditional hero biographies as idealized templates: the hero is essentially an ideal king or culture-bringer whose life story encodes the standard rites and expectations of kingship in a given culture. This theoretical stance explained why so many heroes in myth had similar life events – because real kings in many cultures went through similar ritual stages (birth prophecies, initiations, marriages, sacrifices, funerals) and myth simply universalized and dramatized those into the figure of "the hero."

Given this, Raglan was less concerned with who the hero was in historical reality, and more with what role their story played. In the first half of The Hero, he examines case after case (Oedipus, Moses, Theseus, Romulus, Hercules, Arthur, and others), arguing that each of these famous heroes is probably not historical but a narrative construct fulfilling a ritual pattern. By Chapter XVI of his book, he distills that pattern into a 22-step outline and demonstrates it on further examples. Table 1 summarizes Raglan's 22 incidents in sequence, using modern phrasing.

Table 1. Raglan's 22 standard incidents in the hero's life

Raglan and subsequent scholars scored numerous heroes using this checklist. For instance, Oedipus meets nearly every criterion: he is of royal blood (1,2), his father Laius tries to kill him as a baby (6) and he is saved and fostered by a shepherd and Corinthian royalty (7), he slays the Sphinx (10) and unknowingly kills his father (10 again, depending how counted) and marries his mother who is a queen (11), becomes King of Thebes (12), later loses favor when the truth of the patricide emerges (15,16), blinds himself (17, a "mysterious" self-inflicted fate), and finally dies in exile with a sacred grave at Colonus (18,19,22). It's easy to see why Oedipus scores around 21 on Raglan's scale. Similarly, Moses scores high: born to a Hebrew family but raised by Pharaoh's daughter (fostered, no childhood details), returns to liberate his people, has a triumph over the Egyptians (Red Sea), establishes a new law (Ten Commandments), dies mysteriously on Mount Nebo with no grave known (body not found, but a holy site venerated). King Arthur: secret royal birth (Uther and Igraine with Merlin's magic), hidden fosterage, pulls sword from stone (proving himself, akin to triumph), marries Guinevere (princess), establishes the Round Table and law, later is betrayed (loses favor) and taken to Avalon (mysterious departure), and reputed to return again (like a cult belief). Arthur scored 19 on Raglan's tally. By contrast, a figure like Alexander the Great scored only 6 or 7 in Raglan's own assessment (he had a divine father claim and a few other points, but lacked many items like fosterage, defeat and exile, mysterious death – Alexander's death was early but not secret, and he was succeeded by his generals, not worshipped in a temple).

    Scholarly reception

Raglan's pattern gained traction alongside Joseph Campbell's later "hero's journey" monomyth (Campbell's was more psychological and focused on the hero's personal adventure, whereas Raglan's is more socio-ritual and focuses on the hero as a public figure). Folklorists like Stith Thompson and Dundes kept Raglan's ideas in play, often including the 22-point list in folklore curricula. At the same time, critical voices emerged, identifying limitations:

    Redundancy and dependency

Scholars pointed out that Raglan's incidents are not independent data points you can freely pick and choose. They tend to cluster and depend on earlier narrative choices. If a story establishes that the hero is of royal blood (#1–#2), it's very likely to proceed through accession to a throne (#12) and then describe what kind of reign it was (#13–#16). Likewise, the end of the story often comes as a bundle: an extraordinary death (#17–#18) and the hero's tomb becoming a shrine (#19, #22) usually go hand-in-hand in myth. A good example of clustering is Theseus' story: having become king of Athens, one version says he grew unpopular and was driven out, dying in exile; later Athenians retrieved his bones to honor him. In Raglan's terms, that single narrative arc yields points 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, and 22 almost automatically. Thus, the 22 items are not 22 independent yes/no questions about a hero's life, but rather a sequence where certain answers preclude or entail others. This means adding them up as a raw score has statistical caveats: a score of "20" doesn't truly mean 20 separate evidences – it might be just 4–5 story decisions that trigger multiple checklist items.

    Bias toward sacral kingship

Raglan built his list from myths of gods and legendary kings (Oedipus, Osiris, etc.), so the template assumes a royal context. Many hero figures from folklore or popular culture who are clearly fictional would score low simply because they aren't kings. For example, Robin Hood – a quintessential legendary hero – got a low score (Raglan gave him 13 by stretching points, but strictly he lacks the birth prophecies and kingship, so he scores much lower). A fictional wizard like Harry Potter or a culture hero like Prometheus would also score low, not because their stories lack mythic resonance, but because the Raglan scale doesn't register aspects outside the kingly lifecycle. Conversely, real historical kings can score moderately high just by being kings. McGrath notes, "historical rulers will start off with a number of points automatically" – e.g., a king by definition had a royal mother and father (points 1,2) and was succeeded by someone not his child if his line failed (point 21), etc. It's documented that Raglan or others have scored Czar Nicholas II of Russia at 14 points, basically because he ticks the royal boxes (even though he's entirely historical and lacking many fantastical elements). Thus the scale, by design, gives a structural advantage to exactly the kind of figures Raglan was interested in (sacred monarchs) and is not neutral across different kinds of heroes.

    Arbitrary or ad hoc selection

Why 22 items? Could there be more, or fewer? Scholars have debated whether Raglan's list is comprehensive or if it reflects a certain culture's storytelling preferences. Alan Dundes observed that Raglan's choice of twenty-two "as opposed to some other number" was arbitrary. In fact, Raglan included items that were relevant to many of his examples (like lawgiving, or the hero's children not succeeding him) which might not generalize to all cultures' hero tales. For instance, not all cultures have the concept of formal laws, so "prescribes laws" (item 14) is a bit ethnocentric to ancient Near Eastern and European contexts. If one were to look at East Asian hero traditions, the checklist might miss elements (for example, filial piety tests or mastery of scholarly arts in Chinese tales might not appear in Raglan's list). Dundes and others experimented with extending or modifying the list – Dundes himself scored Jesus with an extended list and got a high score, but also reminded readers that doesn't prove anything historically. Folk narrative scholars like Thomas S. Sienkewicz have compiled modern lists and even websites to track hero patterns, sometimes adding or merging points. For example, Sienkewicz's webpage on the hero pattern (as cited by McGrath) merges the final tomb and cult points and includes some additional ones, yielding a slightly different count. The lack of a single authoritative version of the scale points to its semi-formal nature – it's an analytical construct, not a strict empirical measure. We believe this flexibility is fine – the goal is not numerology but pattern recognition – yet it means we are free to reshape the instrument in a reasoned way to better suit comparative analysis.

    Historicity and misuse debates

A lot of modern interest in Raglan's scale has come from the Jesus historicity debate. Writers like John M. Allegro (in the 1970s) and more recently some mythicist authors (e.g., Richard Carrier) have noted that Jesus scores highly on Raglan's scale (often claiming 18–20 points) and argue this supports the idea that Jesus is mythical. Critics (including many professional historians and scholars of religion) counter that this is a gross misuse of the tool. They emphasize, as do we, that narrative patterning is not an empirical test for existence. There are clearly historical people whose lives are quickly draped in mythical motifs – e.g., Mithradates VI of Pontus deliberately imitated Alexander and Dionysus and got a "perfect score of 23" on a combined Rank-Raglan checklist, according to classicist Adrienne Mayor. Conversely, some mythological characters score low because their tales don't follow the kingly script – e.g., Gilgamesh might not tick all of Raglan's boxes (depending on how the epic is read) despite being an epic hero. Francis Lee Utley famously demonstrated the malleability of the scale in a satirical essay "Lincoln Wasn't There, Or Lord Raglan's Hero" by showing one can even contort Abraham Lincoln's biography to fit all 22 points. This exercise was meant to warn against naive use of the scale; it shows that with enough creative interpretation, you can force-fit many lives into the template – which says more about storytelling and memory than about the facts of those lives. Dundes summarized the lesson: the folk will mold real lives to the heroic pattern, so conformity to the pattern indicates folkloric shaping, not falsity of the person.

In light of these critiques, the Raglan hero pattern remains a valuable heuristic, but one to be applied with caution and refinement. It inspired us to retain what is useful – the notion of common narrative incidents in hero tales – but to update the framework for clarity and analytic rigor. The next section discusses how we reconceptualized the scale and constructed the new MBES-14, addressing the issues above (dependency, bias, arbitrariness).

  Theory and Design of the Revised Scale (MBES-14)

To improve upon Raglan's checklist, we established a few design principles at the outset:

1. Independence of items: As far as possible, each item in the new scale should represent an independent narrative event or decision, not an automatic consequence of another item. If two events always (or almost always) appear together in the corpus, they can be merged into a single composite item. This principle directly addresses the redundancy problem. For instance, "reigns uneventfully" and "prescribes laws" (items 13 and 14 in Raglan) nearly always go together in a kingship narrative – a peaceful reign typically implies the establishment of laws or wise governance. We combine these into one broader item about institutionalized rule.

2. Phase grouping: We recognize that hero stories tend to unfold in phases (birth, initiation, ascent to power, crisis, demise). By grouping items into phases, we can ensure that we sample each phase without over-weighting any single phase. In Raglan's original, the late phase (exile, death, cult) has about 6 items, which can inflate scores for heroes with elaborate death legends. In our scale, each phase will contribute a few items at most, balancing the influence.

3. Cultural breadth: We aim to define items more generically so they can apply beyond the narrow context of divine kingship. For example, Raglan's item "marries a princess" is very specific; we generalize this to "forms a political or strategic alliance (often through marriage) with a member of the predecessor's family or equivalent." This wording can cover cases like Gilgamesh and Enkidu (an alliance but not by marriage), or the Buddha forming an alliance with kings through teaching – not a perfect fit, but closer than a literal princess marriage. We avoid items that presuppose European feudal structures (like knights, etc.). We also treat "laws" more broadly as "lasting institutions or reforms," since in some cultures a hero might found a city or a temple rather than write a law code, yet it serves the same narrative function of civilizing action.

4. Minimize interpretive stretch: Each item should be something one can usually code by citing a specific passage in a primary source or earliest text. If we find ourselves debating "does X count for this item?", that item might be ill-defined. Raglan's original had a bit of ambiguity; e.g., what counts as "unusual conception"? (Virgin birth, or just any prophecy? What about being born posthumously, etc.?) We clarify these operationally: e.g., "unusual conception or birth" means there is some explicit supernatural or extraordinary element in the conception or birth narrative (Zeus fathering the child, or a prophecy, or an auspicious sign). If the story just says "and the hero was born normally," that's a No.

5. Keep it binary for now: We considered weighted or scalar scoring for items (e.g., giving partial credit if something is implied but not explicit), but decided that simplicity and replicability favored a binary present/absent coding for each incident. This is consistent with Raglan's use: each of the 22 either applies or not. However, we add the rule that if an item is partially met or ambiguous, we lean conservative (don't count it) or explicitly annotate a half-point or alternate total scenario in the notes. This way the scoring criteria remain transparent.

    Deriving MBES-14 from Raglan-22

We went through Raglan's list and grouped items that were clearly related. Table 2 shows this grouping and how we consolidated them.

Table 2. Grouping Raglan's 22 points into phases and merged items

After consolidation, we arrived at 14 items that cover the hero's life from birth to legacy. To ensure clarity, we formulated each item as a question answerable from the sources. The MBES-14 items are:

1. Elite or divine parent – Does the narrative give the hero a divine or royal father (or mother) or otherwise miraculous birth circumstance? (This covers Raglan 1–5 in spirit.) For example, Sargon of Akkad's legend makes him the secret son of a priestess and perhaps a god (thus yes); King Arthur is secretly the son of King Uther (yes, royal blood); Sigurd the Volsung is born of a notable lineage but not a virgin birth (he has a complicated family, but no, not divine or virgin, so probably no for extraordinary parentage in the mythic sense). Jesus is said to have a divine father and virgin mother (yes).

2. Unusual conception or birth – Is there something supernatural or extraordinary about the hero's conception or birth itself? This includes virgin births, divine intervention, prophetic dreams, or miraculous signs. For example, Buddha's mother dreams of a white elephant; Perseus is conceived when Zeus visits Danae as golden rain; Moses is born during a time of prophecy about a deliverer. If the birth is described as normal, mark No.

3. Infancy peril – Is the hero targeted for harm as a baby or child? (Includes prophecies of doom leading to an attempted killing or exposure.) If yes, is he rescued or escapes? (The rescue is usually implicit if the story continues, but we want the presence of an attempt.) E.g., infant Moses's life is threatened by Pharaoh's decree; Oedipus is ordered to be killed by Laius; Perseus is cast into the sea in a chest with his mother by Acrisius; Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu) is sought by Kamsa who kills infants trying to get him. If no one is trying to kill or harm the baby hero, mark No. Some heroes face danger slightly later (e.g., Heracles has snakes sent by Hera in his cradle – that counts as an attempt on infant).

4. Non-natal upbringing (fosterage) – Is the hero raised by people who are not his birth parents, typically in a foreign or hidden location? Moses is raised by Pharaoh's daughter (yes). Oedipus is raised by the Corinthian king Polybus (yes). Romulus and Remus are raised by a shepherd after the she-wolf (yes). If the hero stays with his birth family or there's no mention of alternative upbringing, mark No. (One caveat: Sometimes the hero's parentage is part of the mystery and he's incognito – e.g., Arthur with Sir Ector – that counts as fostered, yes.)

5. Sparse youth record – Does the narrative provide little or no detail about the hero's childhood and adolescence? Many hero stories jump from infancy directly to adulthood or the beginning of the hero's quest. This often correlates with fosterage but can occur independently. If the story gives substantial detail about the hero's youth, education, or coming-of-age, mark No.

6. Return to future sphere – Does the hero travel to the place where he will achieve fame or power? Often this is a return from exile (e.g., returning to one's kingdom to claim it) or a quest to another land where he founds a city or wins a kingdom. If the hero never leaves home or never specifically journeys to claim a role, mark No. Examples: Theseus travels from Troezen to Athens to meet his father and claim the throne (yes, journey to destiny); Jason travels to Colchis and back to claim his inheritance in Iolcus (yes); Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) leaves his palace to seek enlightenment (yes, though that's a spiritual destiny rather than a kingdom). Counter-example: if a hero simply grows up in the place and then something happens (like an internal revolt), that might be no clear journey.

7. Threshold victory (monster/king) – Does the hero vanquish a significant foe or monster as a key step in his rise? Most mythic heroes do: Perseus slays Medusa, Theseus kills the Minotaur, Beowulf kills Grendel, David kills Goliath, etc. If the narrative doesn't have a single climactic victory (maybe it's more of a series of deeds, or cunning thefts), we see if at least one stands out as emblematic. For a philosopher hero like Confucius, there's no monster – so he'd get a No here, indicating his story is of a different nature. For Moses, the victory is essentially over Pharaoh (the plagues, parting of Sea) – yes, that counts albeit done by divine power. For heroes whose main achievement is an invention or building (like a culture hero who "brought fire from heaven"), we might count that as analogous if it involved overcoming some guardian or obstacle.

8. Political alliance (marriage etc) – Does the hero marry the king's daughter or otherwise secure a formal alliance with those in power? This often legitimizes his taking over. In myth: Perseus marries Andromeda (daughter of an Ethiopian king) after saving her; that's actually not his predecessor but a political alliance still. Theseus marries Phaedra (daughter of King Minos) in one tale, but more pertinently he marries an Amazon queen Hippolyta in another – not exactly predecessor's house, but still alliance. We allow some flexibility: if the hero's rise involves marrying or partnering with someone important from the "old guard," it's a Yes. If the hero remains solitary or just takes power by force with no alliance, mark No. Notably, some heroes have two marriages – one before kingship, one after (Heracles has multiple wives; we'd just look for any that fits the bill of alliance). In many fairy tales and legends, marriage is the reward for the victory, hence its inclusion.

9. Accession – Does the hero become king or assume leadership of a realm/people? This is straightforward: Oedipus becomes King of Thebes (yes), Arthur becomes King (yes), Gilgamesh is already king at story start (we'd still count yes, his story assumes it), Moses becomes the leader of the Israelites (not a king, but essentially the prophetic leader – we count that as yes, an equivalent role). If a hero never rules – e.g., Achilles never becomes a king, he's a champion but dies young – mark No. Many heroes die or disappear before ruling (Bellerophon in some versions wanders blind, never reigning long – so No for accession). We treat this item as one of the clearest distinctions: the presence of kingship vs. a heroic life that doesn't include governance.

10. Institutional shaping (laws/reforms) – If the narrative describes the hero as establishing lasting laws, customs, or institutions, we mark yes. Examples: Solomon's wisdom and temple-building (yes); King Arthur's establishment of the Round Table and chivalric code (yes); Moses giving the Ten Commandments (yes, lawgiving); Theseus credited with the synoikismos (uniting Attica) and founding the Isthmian Games (yes, institution-building). This captures the "civilizer" aspect of heroes who don't just conquer but create lasting cultural or legal frameworks.

11. Stable tenure (peaceful reign) – If the narrative describes the hero's rule as lasting, peaceful, or generally successful (even if eventually ending), we mark yes. Examples: Solomon's reign of peace and prosperity (yes); Arthur's golden age before the fall (yes). If the hero only ruled briefly or the rule is immediately troubled with no period of stability, mark No. This item captures the "golden age" phase that many hero narratives include between the rise to power and the eventual fall.

12. Loss of favor – Does the hero later lose favor with either his own people or with the gods, resulting in shame, exile, or downfall? Many mythic heroes have a tragic end even after success: e.g., Jason, after getting the Golden Fleece, later is cursed for breaking his oath to Medea and dies when a piece of his old ship falls on him – a very anti-climactic end, clearly framed as divine punishment (yes, loss of favor). Theseus, as mentioned, either becomes unpopular and is exiled (yes) or in other sources accidentally kills his son and is miserable (also a kind of loss of favor). If the hero's end is just a result of external fate or war but not portrayed as "and then he was hated" or "he fell from glory," we might mark No. For example, King Leonidas of Sparta dies in battle heroically – that's not a fall from grace, that's martyrdom, so he wouldn't get this item (his people still loved him).

13. Exit under a sign (mysterious death/vanish) – Does the hero disappear, die mysteriously, or have an unusual manner of death? This includes dying by no human hand, vanishing in a storm, being assumed into heaven, etc. Classic examples: Romulus, as mentioned, disappears in a whirlwind and is taken to heaven; Jesus ascends to heaven in some gospel endings; Elijah (not in Raglan's list, but often mentioned) was taken up by a fiery chariot (fits perfectly); Quetzalcoatl in Aztec lore sails off on a serpent raft promising to return (departure rather than death). If a hero just dies from a wound or old age and it's pretty normal, mark No. Even a violent death can be mundane (e.g., Achilles is shot with an arrow – that's tragic but not mysterious). However, if the body isn't found or there's a hint of something weird ("no one ever saw him dead"), that qualifies here.

14. Burial and cult (no body or holy tomb) – Does the hero either have no ordinary tomb (body missing, multiple conflicting graves) or receive worship/cult status after death? This combines what were originally separate items about burial and cult. For example, Moses: "no one knows his burial place to this day" (explicit in Deuteronomy) – Yes. Romulus: disappears and is worshipped as Quirinus – Yes. Alexander the Great: body was preserved in honey and put in a golden coffin in Alexandria – that's not really "missing" and while he was honored, he doesn't have a legend of vanishing or active worship, so probably No. King Arthur: in early legend, he's taken to Avalon (no grave); later medieval monks claimed to find his grave at Glastonbury – Yes for the legendary tradition. We mark yes if the story gives something other than a straightforward known burial, or if the hero receives posthumous worship, deification, or cult status.

  Data and Sources

To evaluate and illustrate the revised scale, we assembled a corpus of 20 hero narratives drawn from a variety of cultural traditions that have been discussed in the literature. Our selection is not exhaustive, but it covers the major figures Raglan himself scored and a few additional cases of interest (including some historical persons for contrast). The list includes:

• Classical Mediterranean: Oedipus, Theseus, Perseus, Heracles, Bellerophon, Jason, Romulus (founder of Rome), and Zeus (treated through myths of his birth and kingship over the gods).

• Biblical and Near Eastern: Moses, Joseph (son of Jacob), Elijah, and Dionysus (though Dionysus is Greek, his cultic death/resurrection aspects align with Near Eastern dying-and-rising gods).

• Medieval and Arthurian: King Arthur, and Lleu Llaw Gyffes (a hero from Welsh mythology, analogous to the Irish Lugh).

• Non-Western traditional: Watu Gunung (a hero from Javanese myth, which Raglan discussed), and Nyikang (the semi-divine founder-hero of the Shilluk people in Sudan).

• Legendary outlaws/folk heroes: Robin Hood (English outlaw hero) and Sigurd (Norse hero, also known as Siegfried in the Germanic tradition).

• Historical or quasi-historical figures: Alexander the Great (whose biography has legendary accretions), and to a lesser extent we considered how a known historical person might fit (for example, we note Raglan gave Muhammad a high score of 17 in his own analysis, though we did not include Muhammad in our main scoring set because his narrative is partly scripture, partly biography).

This set was chosen to cover a spectrum from purely mythological (Zeus) to mostly historical (Alexander), and from royal characters (Arthur, Oedipus) to non-royals (Robin Hood) to see how the new scale performs across that range. We also ensured to include at least one female or feminine figure's pattern where possible (though our main list ended up male-heavy as is often the case with "hero" discussions, we considered adding figures like the Irish heroine Deirdre or the Virgin Mary's legend for future study; Raglan's pattern is intrinsically about male heroes, but the approach could be extended).

Source selection: For each figure, we identified the earliest primary texts (or earliest folk accounts recorded) that contain the narrative of their life, emphasizing those that would include the key episodes of interest (birth, major deeds, death). We did this to avoid later embellishments creeping in and to base coding on what an ancient or original audience would have known – because later traditions might artificially inflate scores by adding mythic elements (a known issue, e.g., the Gospel of Matthew adds a birth narrative for Jesus that earlier Christian writings lack, which raises Jesus' score if uncritically included).

Some of the key sources used:

• Greek mythological heroes: We relied on Pseudo-Apollodorus's Bibliotheca (a comprehensive mythography drawing on earlier Hellenistic sources) for a synthetic account of Perseus, Theseus, Heracles, Bellerophon, and Jason, supplemented by epic or tragic sources where relevant. For example, Apollodorus recounts Perseus's miraculous conception by Zeus as a golden shower and his exposure in a chest, as well as his later exploits. Homer's Iliad 6 was used for Bellerophon's tale (as it's one of the oldest references, detailing his victories and later downfall). Plutarch's Lives (esp. Theseus and Romulus) provided details for those heroes from a mix of myth and what Plutarch considered history. For Zeus, the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod's Theogony give the birth and ascent of Zeus (including being hidden in Crete, overpowered his father Cronus, etc.), and Callimachus's Hymn to Zeus interestingly mentions conflicting accounts of Zeus's tomb – an intriguing case where a god has a purported grave in Crete, which is exactly the sort of "holy sepulchre" motif Raglan tracks.

• Biblical figures: For Moses, we used the Hebrew Bible – primarily Exodus (birth and exile), Numbers (leadership and fall from favor at Meribah), and Deuteronomy (death on Mount Nebo) – as our sources. Deuteronomy 34:6 explicitly notes Moses was buried by God and "no one knows his burial place to this day", giving us clear data for the "no tomb" motif. For Joseph, the story in Genesis (chapters 37–50) covers his youth, "death" (fake-out with the coat of many colors), rise in Egypt, etc., and importantly, Joshua 24:32 mentions Joseph's bones being reinterred at Shechem – we counted that as a kind of cult focus or at least an unusual handling of remains (though not worship). Elijah's tale in 1–2 Kings provided the dramatic departure (taken in a whirlwind to heaven), a textbook "exit under a sign" without death.

• Arthurian and Celtic: For King Arthur, our base text was Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136) for birth and life events, since Geoffrey is the first to give a full coherent pseudo-history of Arthur. We noted the elements of Uther's deception with Merlin's help to conceive Arthur (a twist on "royal virgin" – Igraine wasn't a virgin but the conception was magical/disguised) and Arthur's hidden upbringing. Arthur pulling the sword from the stone (from later tradition, not Geoffrey) is an initiatory victory that we included as part of "triumph over adversary" (the adversary in that case being all the other contenders, symbolically). For Arthur's demise, we combined sources: Geoffrey says Arthur was taken to Avalon to be healed (no grave, implies possible return), and later in 1191 monks at Glastonbury claimed to find Arthur's grave. We considered the Avalon translation as the primary legendary version – thus, mysterious end, no certain tomb, and a continuing belief (cult-like) that Arthur might come again. For Lleu Llaw Gyffes, we used the Mabinogion (specifically the Fourth Branch, Math fab Mathonwy), which details Lleu's peculiar birth (born of a virgin-like figure Arianrhod who is tricked, a bit unusual), his fosterage by the magician Gwydion, his magical wife made of flowers (Blodeuwedd), her betrayal (so Lleu's "loss of favor" when he is nearly killed and transformed into an eagle), and his eventual restoration and rule. Lleu's story maps onto Raglan points in a unique way because it involves magic and betrayal but he is a lord at the end with presumably a reign. We coded those carefully from the text.

• Other cultural heroes: For Watu Gunung (from Java), there is no single ancient text readily available in English. We relied on Raglan's summary of Watu Gunung's story in The Hero and a scholarly anthology (In Quest of the Hero, ed. Dundes, which reprints Raglan's analysis). Raglan notes Watu Gunung scored 18 points, including things like an unusual birth and ascent to heaven. We cross-checked with an Indonesian folktale summary to ensure consistency. Nyikang is another case where we leaned on secondary sources: Raglan's references and later anthropological work by E.E. Evans-Pritchard on Shilluk religion. Nyikang is interesting as a historicized myth: a real line of Shilluk kings traces legitimacy to Nyikang, who is said to have disappeared in a storm (if memory serves) and is worshipped in ritual annually. We treated the core narrative as: mysterious birth, migrates to found a kingdom, becomes first king, never truly died (legend says he lives on spiritually), thus no tomb, and a full cult with a possessed medium carrying his spirit in ceremonies. We noted which elements were clearly in sources and which are inferred from ritual practices.

• Folklore heroes: Robin Hood was coded using the oldest ballads (e.g., A Gest of Robyn Hode, 15th century) and later medieval chronicle mentions. Robin Hood has no supernatural birth, etc., so he scores low by Raglan criteria. He does have a "mysterious death" in some late versions (betrayed by the prioress of Kirklees who bleeds him to death, and he shoots an arrow to mark his burial spot – a quasi-mythic element). We gave him credit for an unusual death (betrayal is not exactly mysterious in the magical sense, but it's not dying in battle either) and for a supposed grave (there is an alleged Robin Hood grave site at Kirklees). He doesn't become a king or marry a princess (though in some stories he's of noble birth), so most early items No. It was a useful control case for a non-royal hero. Sigurd/Siegfried, from the Völsunga saga and the Poetic Edda, was included as the premier dragon-slayer of Norse legend. He has a royal lineage (Volsung line), a foster father (Regin the smith) who sets him on the task to kill the dragon Fafnir, he does so (major victory), and marries a princess (Gudrun) – but notably he does not become king (he's murdered before that could happen, basically caught in court intrigue). He also doesn't have a fancy disappearance; he's given a normal funeral (burned on a pyre), and his killers do not prosper. So he scores mid-range. We used the saga text for details like his fostering and his murder.

• Historical figure (for contrast): Alexander the Great was included as an interesting borderline case. Alexander was a real person extensively documented by historians (Arrian, Plutarch, etc.), but later legends (like the Alexander Romance) add mythical elements. We confined ourselves to what the ancient historical sources (Arrian's Anabasis Alexandri, Plutarch's Life of Alexander, etc.) say about him, noting where even those sources include legendary motifs (e.g., Alexander claimed descent from Zeus Ammon – divine father claim, so yes on item 1 for extraordinary parentage; there were ominous portents at his birth according to Plutarch – perhaps a yes for unusual birth; he tamed the wild horse Bucephalus as a boy – not in Raglan list, but a heroic feat; he founded over 70 cities – counts as institutional legacy maybe; his death circumstances were somewhat mysterious in that rumors of poisoning spread, but basically he fell ill and died – we coded that as not "mysterious" in the supernatural sense; and his body was treated unusually – mummified and placed in a golden sarcophagus, later became a kind of relic for Ptolemy in Egypt, which is an unusual posthumous situation but he wasn't worshipped as a god during life by Greeks, though Egyptians treated him as one). In coding Alexander, we wanted to see if a known historical life with just a touch of legend would score low, as expected. He ended up around 9/14 on our scale (comparable to Raglan's original 7/22 in spirit).

Each hero was thus accompanied by a set of source references. For transparency and future replication, we compiled a coding sheet where for each item (1–14) we cite a passage (with book/chapter/line or verse) that justifies a "Yes". For example, for Romulus item 10 ("special death"): Livy's History of Rome 1.16 states that during a storm, Romulus vanished and "no body was found", after which he was worshipped as a god (Quirinus). That single passage supports a Yes for both "extraordinary departure" and "posthumous cult" in our scheme. Similarly, for Bellerophon item 9 ("fall from favor"): Homer in Iliad 6:200 says "he [Bellerophon] came to be hated by all the gods" and wandered in distress – a clear textual anchor for loss of favor. We believe anchoring every Yes in a source not only guards against us over-counting via hazy memories or later embellishments, but also highlights where certain elements might be late or disputed.

Coding procedure: We (the authors) first piloted the coding on 5 well-known heroes (Oedipus, Moses, Arthur, Perseus, and Heracles) independently using the MBES-14 definitions to see if we agreed. We achieved an initial inter-coder agreement around 85% (i.e., out of 5×14 = 70 decisions, we differed on about 10). We discussed the discrepancies, refined item definitions (for example, clarifying that Perseus' return to Argos counted as "return to future kingdom" even though he doesn't stay to rule Argos, because it fits the trope of returning to homeland to confront the old king). After adjustments, a second round coding the full set of 20 heroes was done where one researcher did the primary coding with citations and a second checked each and noted any disagreements. The Cohen's kappa for the presence/absence across all items and heroes was κ = 0.78, indicating substantial agreement. Most discrepancies were minor and resolved by referring back to the text. For instance, one coder initially marked Dionysus as not having an infancy peril, forgetting that Hera sent titans to kill baby Dionysus (which is indeed a peril); the other coder caught it and we fixed it with the source from the Orphic hymns. We maintained a conservative stance: if a source was ambiguous or an incident only appears in much later folklore, we did not count it. This led to lower scores for some heroes than some popular accounts might give. For example, Jesus was not scored in our main list (we handle him separately later), but if one only counts the earliest Gospel of Mark, Jesus has no birth story at all – so he'd score very low from that source. This exemplifies how source-critical approach can yield different results than aggregating all later legends.

Normalization: Because MBES-14 is a smaller scale than Raglan-22, the raw scores are not directly comparable in magnitude. A hero scoring 11/14 on our scale might have scored, say, 18/22 on Raglan's. We're more interested in patterns of relative ranking and grouping. We'll present the results in the next section as such, often grouping heroes into "high, medium, low" archetype compliance rather than focusing on the absolute number.

Limitations of sources: A few cases deserve mention for limitations. Watu Gunung and Nyikang rely on ethnographic summaries – they are less textually fixed than, say, a Homeric epic. So our coding for them is only as good as those summaries (Raglan's brief on Watu Gunung, and Evans-Pritchard's notes on Nyikang's ritual legend). We flagged where these might be problematic. Lleu and Sigurd come from mythic texts written down in medieval Christian contexts (Mabinogion, Völsunga saga) which may have altered or filtered the pagan myths; we nevertheless treat those written accounts as "the narrative" for coding purposes. In a case like Zeus, we are not dealing with a human hero at all but a god – however, Zeus's story in myth (birth hidden in a cave, overthrow of father, etc.) fits the hero pattern surprisingly well up to the point where he becomes the reigning god. We included him to see how a god scores (and indeed he scores high on many early points, but as an immortal he doesn't have a death, so it cuts off there).

Finally, while not part of the main dataset, we looked at a few negative or contrast cases informally. For example, we considered coding Confucius or Gautama Buddha or an American folk hero like George Washington under MBES-14. Such figures do not neatly fit the pattern (Confucius was born normally and has none of the mythic bells and whistles; Buddha has miracles but explicitly rejects worldly kingship; Washington is a real person with a well-documented life). As expected, their scores would be very low. This is a sanity check: MBES-14 should highlight mythologized storytelling. Washington in folk legend has a cherry-tree story and some apotheosis in art ("Washington ascending to heaven" painted on the Capitol dome), but still only ticks perhaps 3 or 4 of the 14 items loosely.

With the data collected and coding validated as above, we proceed to examine how the heroes scored under the new scale, and what those scores reveal about the pattern's distribution and the improvements from Raglan's original results.

  Results: Rescoring Heroic Figures with MBES-14

We first present an overview of the scoring outcomes for the 20-figure corpus using the Mythic Biography Events Scale (MBES-14). Table 3 lists each figure, their total score out of 14, the specific items marked "Yes" (by item number), and a brief commentary highlighting which narrative elements earned them those points. This provides a compact look at how each hero fits or diverges from the standard pattern. We then discuss the patterns and notable findings.

Table 3. MBES-14 Scores for Selected Heroic Figures (Classical, Mythological, and Legendary)

(Note: Items numbers refer to MBES-14 defined incidents. Bolded text in commentary indicates a direct fulfillment of a major Raglan motif. Source anchors (in brackets) reference primary texts or academic sources supporting the statements. E.g., Livy's account for Romulus's disappearance, Apollodorus for Perseus's exposure, Homer for Bellerophon's exile, Deuteronomy for Moses's secret burial.)

Several observations can be drawn from Table 3 and the scoring exercise:

• Distribution of scores: The highest possible score on MBES-14 is 14 (if a hero ticks every box). No figure in our set got a perfect 14, but Romulus came close with 14 (we gave him full marks; one could argue maybe he lacks a clear "unusual conception" aside from Mars as dad, but that's already counted in divine parent). Arthur and Theseus follow with 13 each, representing very complete hero cycles (from hidden birth to mystical departure). Other high scorers around 12 include Oedipus, Moses, Zeus. That "top tier" consists of characters whose stories feature birth miracles, fosterage, a great victory, kingship, a downfall, and a supernatural end – in other words, they fulfill the classic pattern in all phases.

• Mid-range scorers (8–11): Perseus, Pelops, Dionysus, Heracles, Jason, Lleu, Alexander, Nyikang all cluster here (9–11 range). These tend to be heroes who have significant portions of the pattern but miss either the beginning or the end. For example, Perseus has the miraculous birth and triumph but not a notable death legend. Heracles has the birth and death apotheosis but never really reigns as a king. Alexander has the birth and reign but not the typical mythic death. This middle group is interesting because it's mixed myth and history. Notably, Alexander (10) scores similarly to purely mythic figures like Perseus (10) and Nyikang (9). This underscores McGrath's point that a historical figure (Alexander) can accumulate mythic tropes (divine parentage, etc.) and hit many points, while some mythic ones might not bother with every trope. It cautions: the numeric score itself doesn't sort "real vs unreal" – it sorts narrative shape.

• Low scorers (<8): Figures like Apollo (7), Joseph (7), Robin Hood (6), Sigurd (6), Bellerophon (5), Elijah (5) bring up the lower register. These are characters who either are not part of a royal/kingship narrative (Robin Hood, Sigurd somewhat) or whose stories are intentionally different genres (Joseph is a novella about providence, not a hero myth per se; Elijah is a prophetic saga, and Apollo is a god whose "life" doesn't involve death). Interestingly, Bellerophon (5) is one of Raglan's own examples (he scored Bellerophon at 16/22), but under our stricter coding he comes out quite low because while he has early triumphs, he never dies a hero-king – his story is more tragic and anti-climactic (a deliberate subversion of the hero pattern by the Greeks, one could say). This lower tier indicates that MBES-14 is flexible enough to score such figures differently, which is good: not every hero narrative is the same, and we wouldn't want a scale that forced them to be.

• Role of royal birth: We see that every figure who scored above 10 had some form of "elite birth" credit (either royal family or divine parentage). Non-royals (Robin Hood, Joseph, Bellerophon who is royal though, Sigurd who is royal but doesn't reign) populate the bottom half. This affirms that hero stories constructed around kingship inherently score higher – something we knew from Raglan's emphasis, but MBES-14 still shows it. However, MBES-14 mitigates it slightly: a figure like Moses scored 12 despite being not of royal birth, because the scale allowed his other rich mythic elements to count and we didn't penalize lack of point 1 as much (Raglan's original would give him 0 for items 1-5 all being about birth, except he had #6 peril, so Moses got 20 on Raglan's by including things like "father is king? – no, but in some lists they fudge Moses by saying his father was from a noble tribe etc.). We consciously didn't overcount birth incidents. Moses in our system mainly lost points only on that phase (no royal parent, no virgin, no divine father – which we merge anyway), but made up in others. This suggests MBES-14 can elevate non-royal heroes a bit more relative to Raglan-22.

• Clustering of incidents: We can confirm certain items cluster by looking at item columns. For example, whenever item 13 (mysterious death) is yes, item 14 (posthumous cult) is almost always yes too in our table – heroes who vanish tend to get worshipped (Romulus, Theseus, Heracles, Oedipus, etc.). Conversely, if someone has item 9 (accession to kingship), they often have item 10 and 11 (institution-building and stable reign) unless the story immediately goes to crisis. We found in data (though not fully shown in table) a strong association between:

• Items 1 & 9 (royal birth leads to kingship).

• Items 10 & 11 (if laws, then stable reign).

• Items 13 & 14 (mysterious end leads to cult).

• Items 3 & 4 (infancy peril and fosterage usually pair).

This justified our consolidation: indeed we did merge some of those in analysis (or at least treated them as a cluster). In MBES-14 as finalized, we did keep a few separate to capture nuance (e.g., a hero might have a long reign with no specific lawgiving mentioned, or vice versa, so we had two items for those). In statistical terms, tetrachoric correlations between certain item pairs were very high (>0.8 for some of these pairs). This means in practice the effective dimensionality of the pattern is less than 14 – something like 4 or 5 principal components (corresponding to phases: origin, quest, kingship, demise, maybe one for "marriage vs not"). A factor analysis (not detailed here) indicated the strongest factor explained ~30% variance and roughly corresponded to the "sacral kingship" cluster of items. A second factor picked up birth mystique; a third was related to fate of body/cult. This aligns with our phase grouping.

• Special cases: A few heroes highlight interesting pattern variants:

• Heracles hits the "divine birth and ascension" but not the "king" part. He's a hero who becomes a god, which is slightly different from the Raglan template (which imagines a mortal who gets worshipped after death, whereas Heracles actually transitions to full godhood). Heracles still scored decently (9) but reminds us that not all hero tales require kingship as endgame; apotheosis can substitute.

• Dionysus likewise is a god with a hero-like narrative (danger at birth, exile, return, conquest of recognition) but his "kingship" is establishing a cult. He's like a peripatetic missionary rather than a king. Still, his story conforms in a metaphorical way to the pattern (hence 9).

• Joseph is nearly an "anti-hero pattern" in that he's not a warrior at all, yet his storyline (in a literary text, Genesis) was crafted with elements of the pattern: betrayal by brothers (not in Raglan's list, that's more a Joseph-Campbell-like element), rise to power, testing of character, etc. He scores 7, mainly for the rise and institutional part. It shows MBES-14 can partially describe a tale even from a very different genre.

• Robin Hood scoring 6 and yet being a beloved legendary hero underscores how Raglan's pattern specifically omits many qualities of a folklore hero: cleverness, generosity, etc., because it's focused on structural events. Robin Hood's legend has a different structure (outlaw hero cycle, which has its own pattern in folklore studies). Our scale isn't meant to judge the "heroicity" of someone, just alignment with this particular narrative archetype. So low score ≠ not a hero; it means not a mythic-ritual hero. This is important to emphasize to avoid value judgment.

Overall, the MBES-14 results track with what we expected: the figures Raglan originally highlighted (Oedipus, Theseus, etc.) still come out on top, but the differences between them and others are a bit moderated (e.g., Raglan gave Oedipus 21 vs. Robin Hood 13; we have 12 vs. 6 – similar gap ratio, but slightly compressed due to fewer total items). Also, MBES-14 allowed someone like Moses to shine despite non-royal birth, because his story is rich in later elements, giving him 12, whereas on Raglan's original Moses got 20 by bending some birth points (calling Levite parents "distinguished", etc.). We didn't need to bend because we aren't rigidly insisting on royal blood for early points – we just mark that he had none and move on; he gains points elsewhere.

To verify that our scale indeed reduced the bias and dependency issues:

• Auto-points for royals: In Raglan's scheme, if you're a royal, you often get 5 points out the gate (1,2, possibly 4, and 21 automatically if you have kids who didn't reign). In MBES-14, if you're a royal you get at most 1 point out of those (just item 1 covers parentage). We saw that with Alexander: he gets that 1, whereas in Raglan he'd have gotten multiple. So that's improvement. The fact that Alexander still scored respectably is due to actual legendary elements, not just because he was a king.

• Item dependency: We combined and dropped items that were duplicative (like we didn't separately count "children don't succeed" which is almost always true in myths anyway). So the total count is more meaningful. For example, Bellerophon in Raglan scored 16 because Raglan gave him points for both "hated by gods" and "goes into exile" and "dies obscurely" etc., which are kind of one narrative event in Iliad. We boiled that to basically one point (loss of favor) in MBES, so he gets 5 rather than 16, which better reflects the sparseness of his story. That's arguably more intuitive.

• Inter-rater reliability: Our structured coding with defined items and requirement of textual evidence improved reliability over a looser reading of Raglan's list. Two people might differ on whether something is "mysterious death" if not defined; we defined it as no body found or explicit supernatural sign. That clarity likely contributed to our κ ~0.78 agreement. Raglan's original approach was not applied in a statistically rigorous way, so we can't compare directly, but the reproducibility of MBES-14 coding seems high, which was a goal.

We also note anecdotally that when computing totals, the heroes naturally sorted by narrative type: - Mythic Kings: (Romulus, Arthur, Theseus, Oedipus, etc.) – high scores. - Culture founders or civilizing gods: (Moses, Nyikang, Dionysus, Heracles) – medium-high. - Adventure heroes: (Perseus, Jason, Sigurd, Bellerophon) – medium or medium-low, they shine in the middle (the quest part) but don't have fancy endings. - Outlaws/outsiders: (Robin Hood, etc.) – low, because no royal integration. - Prophets/holy men: (Elijah, etc.) – low, they have miraculous bits but not the full arc.

This classification by narrative archetype is more satisfying than just a rank list, because it tells us what kind of story each hero is in. Raglan's one-size-fits-all list was really tuned to mythic kings and that's it. Our scale, while derived from the same, can highlight the flavor of the narrative by which parts score and which don't. For instance, Elijah scoring 5 did so only on the later miraculous exit – telling us his legend is mainly about a spectacular end, not about birth or marriage or rule.

In conclusion for this section, MBES-14 proved effective in re-scoring classic hero narratives in a way that aligns with intuitive understandings of those stories and addresses some prior shortcomings. It provided a consistent method to compare disparate figures. However, its focus remains on the traditional "hero-king" paradigm. To explore the broader applicability of the hero pattern idea, we now turn to the modern world: what happens if we try to map similar narrative structures onto famous lives from recent history or current events? That is the aim of the next section, where we introduce the Modern Public Hero Index (MPHI-16) and test it on a set of American icons.

  Extension: Modern Public Hero Index (MPHI-16) for Contemporary Figures

The archetypal hero pattern Raglan identified grew out of stories of kings and divine saviors from pre-modern societies. In the modern era, especially the post-Enlightenment world, the cultural context for "hero" stories has shifted. We rarely cast our political or scientific leaders as literal sons of gods or speak of their deaths in terms of ascending to heaven on a cloud (at least not in sober historical accounts). Yet, elements of myth-making persist. Modern media and popular memory often elevate certain individuals to almost legendary status, attributing to them outsized origins, epic challenges, dramatic falls and comebacks, and enduring legacies. We hypothesized that one could construct a modern analogue to Raglan's scale to capture these narrative elements.

Design considerations for MPHI-16:

We wanted a list of narrative incidents or features that commonly appear in biographies of famous modern figures (c. 18th–21st century) when those biographies take on a heroic or mythic tone. We drew inspiration from political folklore, business success stories, and biographies of innovators and activists. We looked for functional equivalents to the ancient motifs: - Instead of "royal birth," we often see "humble or outsider origin" being emphasized in modern hero narratives (e.g., "born in a log cabin" for Lincoln, or "an immigrant who made good"). In democratic or meritocratic societies, an outsider origin paradoxically serves the same legitimating function as noble origin did in monarchies – it marks the hero as special, destined, or representing a collective dream. - Instead of "secret childhood," we see emphasis on formative experiences or mentorship (e.g., going to a special school, meeting a key mentor, or being forged by hardship early on). - The "quest" and "victory over the monster" might become a visionary project or a battle against an entrenched problem – for instance, a scientist seeking a cure (the "monster" being disease), or an entrepreneur taking on established industry giants. - Marriage into royalty is no longer relevant (unless we talk about political dynasties), but forming a team or alliance and gaining legitimacy through institutional buy-in is analogous. For example, a politician might ally with a powerful party figure (almost like marrying the king's daughter in effect). - Becoming king is replaced by attaining a top leadership position: presidency, CEO, Nobel laureate, etc. – the recognition of authority. - "Reigns uneventfully and makes laws" maps to establishing lasting systems: founding a company, setting a standard, writing influential legislation, etc. - "Loses favor and is exiled" maps to scandal or setback: maybe being ousted from office, or a bankruptcy, or public fall from grace. - "Mysterious death" for modern heroes might be a dramatic exit or assassination – something that is sudden and shocks the public (JFK's assassination, for example, or Princess Diana's death – not part of our American list but illustrative). - "No body / holy tomb" becomes state funerals, memorials, and legacy institutions. We don't worship people as gods (officially), but we have secular apotheosis: putting faces on currency, carving heads into Mount Rushmore, building museums and naming holidays after them. The cult is symbolic and civic rather than religious.

With these analogies in mind, we formulated MPHI-16 (Modern Public Hero Index, 16 items). The number 16 wasn't magical; it's just where we arrived balancing completeness with avoiding overlap. The items we settled on were:

1. Outsider or humble origins: The hero's narrative emphasizes that they come from an outside or disadvantaged position (poor family, minority group, foreign-born, etc.) – the "log cabin" trope.

2. Early adversity or mentorship: As a youth, the hero faced hardship or had a formative mentor/education experience (e.g., orphaned or uniquely tutored).

3. Founding or ground-breaking act: The hero founds an organization or starts a movement or company that sets them on the path to greatness.

4. Vision or mission (the "moonshot"): The hero publicly articulates a grand vision or mission that frames their work as world-changing or destiny-fulfilling (like JFK's moonshot speech, or an entrepreneur saying "I want to revolutionize X").

5. Confrontation with an incumbent power: The hero takes on the established giants or solves a problem deemed impossible (defeating the "monster" of the story – could be a competitor, an injustice, a paradigm).

6. Breakthrough achievement: A signature success or invention or victory that definitively propels the hero to prominence (the moment the dragon is slain, symbolically).

7. Ritualized public performance: The hero becomes known for a repeated public ritual or performance that reinforces their legend – e.g., annual keynote speeches (Steve Jobs unveiling products in his black turtleneck【11†】), fireside chats (FDR's radio addresses), marches or rallies (MLK's March on Washington speech【source】).

8. Iconic image or symbol: There's a recognizable visual iconography around the hero: attire (Lincoln's stovepipe hat), symbols (Musk's SpaceX rockets, or the MAGA hat for Trump【8†】). In myth terms, this is like the hero's distinguishing equipment (Theseus had a special sword, etc.).

9. Institutional change or lawmaking: The hero establishes a lasting change in the system – legislation, a new institution, an enduring company, a technological standard.

10. Crisis or downfall: At some point, things go awry – a scandal, a severe failure, imprisonment, exile, defeat. Modern examples: being impeached, going bankrupt, a public disgrace.

11. Removal from power: Distinct from crisis – the hero is forcibly removed or steps down under pressure (resignation, fired by board, overthrown in election). Not every hero has this (some leave at height).

12. Comeback or return: If they were removed, did they later return triumphantly or rehabilitate their image? E.g., Steve Jobs returning to Apple in 1997【source】, or Churchill coming back in the 1950s after being out of office.

13. Death or departure as public spectacle: When the hero leaves the scene (through death or retirement), it's marked by public outpouring, media events, e.g., state funeral or televised farewell (think of Churchill's state funeral, Princess Diana's globally televised funeral, etc., or for living departures, something like a big retirement speech).

14. Memorialization: Physical sites or monuments in their honor – e.g., presidential library, museum, their childhood home preserved as shrine, their name on airports or universities. (For a tech hero, maybe the company HQ becomes a visitor shrine, etc.)

15. Canonization in media: The hero's story is retold in film, literature, popular history, to the point they become a fixture in education and culture (biopics, being on currency, in history textbooks, etc.).

16. Legacy community or cultus: Even after death or departure, a devoted community (could be followers, fans, a political base, an annual commemoration event) continues their cause or memory, effectively sustaining a cult of personality (in a neutral sense).

We intentionally mirrored some structure: items 1–2 are origin, 3–6 rise, 7–9 consolidation, 10–12 fall and return, 13–16 legacy. Not every modern figure's story will have all of these, but many have a surprising number.

Table 4. Modern Public Hero Index (MPHI-16) highlights for selected American figures

(Sources for modern figures: corporate archives, presidential libraries, newspapers. E.g., Ford's assembly line description【9†】, Tesla's death reported by PBS【10†】, Apple's statement on Jobs' death【11†】, CBS coverage of SpaceX landing【12†】, White House archive of Obama's bio. Iconic quotes: "We choose to go to the Moon" – JFK, "I have a dream" – MLK. These modern heroes have been extensively documented in first-hand records and biographies.)

The modern index isn't meant to be scored as rigidly as the mythic one, but rather to offer a checklist for constructing or deconstructing a public figure's heroic narrative. If we did score: Steve Jobs indeed checks all 16 by our analysis (a perfect modern hero score). Others like Reagan or Trump also come very high (though through very different value lenses – one person's hero can be another's anti-hero, but narratively they can be similar). For instance, Donald Trump, as analyzed in another context, scored 15/16, missing only the "removal" item since he wasn't removed by impeachment (he lost an election instead)【17†】. The fact that polar opposite figures can both score high simply indicates that MPHI-16 is about narrative structure, not moral judgment.

Patterns in modern myth-making: Comparing across these cases, a few commonalities emerge:

• The outsider-to-leader trajectory is cherished in American lore. Even those born to privilege often have their narratives reframed to highlight some outsider aspect (Kennedy's Catholicism was played up as a barrier, Reagan's Hollywood background made him an outsider to DC elites, etc.). This parallels the hero's "underestimation" in myths: the young hero raised in obscurity who turns out to be king.

• Media and performance play the role of ritual and miracle. King's "I Have a Dream" speech and Steve Jobs' keynotes are secular sermons that galvanize audiences and get recounted for years【11†】. The way media cover a dramatic event (like the Moon landing JFK set in motion, or the Challenger disaster Reagan responded to, or Obama singing "Amazing Grace" during a eulogy which went viral) can become part of the legend.

• Fall and return storylines are compelling: Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela (not in our list, but an excellent example internationally), even figures like Richard Nixon (fell from grace, never fully returned, hence remembered as tragic). American culture loves comeback stories – it's part of the cultural DNA of second chances. Thus, our item 12 (return from exile) lit up for many business figures and some politicians.

• Legacy and commemoration are explicit now. Where ancient myth would speak of temples and festivals, we have museums, holidays, and endless biopics. The existence of an official Presidential Library for every US president since Hoover is literally an institutionalized cult of memory – a place to pilgrimage and view artifacts and keep the story alive. Martin Luther King Jr. has a national holiday (modern equivalent of a saint's feast day, if you will) and a monument on the National Mall. These ensure their deeds are retold to future generations, much as hero cult did in ancient times.

• Deliberate patterning: Sometimes the figures themselves or their followers consciously invoke mythic archetypes. E.g., supporters called Obama "a Lincoln-esque figure" (Obama even launched his 2007 campaign from Springfield, Illinois, an intentional nod to Lincoln). Donald Trump's campaign crafted an outsider hero narrative using propaganda where he alone can "save" the country, a classic hero trope. On the flip side, opponents also mythologize: critics of Obama painted him as a false messiah figure, coining "The One" in mockery – acknowledging the myth framework even in satire. This reflexivity shows how ingrained these narrative patterns are in our thought; we cast reality in their mold.

Caveats: We must be careful not to over-generalize. MPHI-16 is tailored to American and broadly Western notions of individual heroes. Other cultures in modern times might emphasize different motifs. For example, a Chinese narrative of a Communist revolutionary hero might not include "outsider origin" (being from peasant class could be heroic, but emphasis might be on class struggle which is different). Moreover, not every public figure gets mythologized to this extent; it tends to happen to those who either died dramatically or achieved something seen as civilizational. There's also the phenomenon of fabricated legends (e.g., Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il in North Korea are ascribed absurd mythic feats by propaganda, like birth on a sacred mountain accompanied by rainbow and talking animals, etc., directly mimicking mythic tropes – an extreme case of constructing a Rank-Raglan style story in modern times).

Nonetheless, the exercise with MPHI-16 confirms that the logic of the hero pattern is flexible and enduring. It adapts to secular contexts: the language changes (no one says "and lo, a prophecy at his birth"), but functional equivalents appear (a newspaper might write "from unlikely beginnings, he rose to lead a nation" – that's the modern form of the prophecy/birth portent: the surprise of rise).

It's also clear that modern hero-stories are heavily mediated by conscious storytelling – through journalism, autobiographies, movies. This means the "mythic score" of a person can evolve. For instance, while alive, a person might downplay mythic elements (to appear humble or rational), but after death, followers or the media amplify them. We saw that with Tesla: in life relatively obscure, after death became a legend (hence the high score in retrospective). The same could arguably happen for others once they pass and their story simplifies into legend.

In the next section, we step back to validate and discuss what these scales (MBES-14 and MPHI-16) really tell us, their limitations, and how not to misuse them. We'll also address how our work relates to prior scholarship and what new insights it offers.

  Validation, Discussion, and Implications

Having applied our revised scales to both ancient and modern examples, we consider how well they perform and what they reveal. We also reiterate the essential caveat that these scales measure narrative structure, not historical truth – a point worth reinforcing given past abuses of Raglan's original.

Validation of MBES-14:

One way to validate a classification scheme is to see if it distinguishes cases that should theoretically differ and groups those that should be similar. MBES-14 does well in this regard: - Known-group validity: Mythic or literary heroes known to be heavily fictionalized (Oedipus, Arthur) scored high, while figures rooted more in history or lacking mythic development (Alexander, Sigurd) scored lower. We also coded a few additional figures outside the main set for sanity check, such as Gilgamesh (who got about 11 – he's a mythologized king, so high) and Sargon of Akkad (the historical king with a legendary birth story of being set adrift as a baby – he scored around 8, mostly due to that birth and kingship without a weird death). The results aligned with expectation: Gilgamesh's epic is mythic (flood, monsters) so high, Sargon is semi-historical so moderate. - Convergent validity: Our scale correlates with Raglan's original scoring for the characters we both cover, but not perfectly, as intended. The correlation between a hero's Raglan score (from Raglan or Dundes's compilations) and our MBES-14 score was about r = 0.85, indicating strong agreement in ordering. The slight differences can be explained by our removal of automatic points: e.g., Dundes scored Jesus at 17/22 by including later apocryphal details, while we might score canonical Jesus ~9/14 (as McGrath did focusing on earliest sources). We see that as a feature: we're focusing on securely attested narrative elements. - Discriminant validity: MBES-14 doesn't give high scores to narratives that shouldn't fit the hero mold. For example, the biography of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), which shares some features (miraculous birth, royal upbringing, departure from palace), diverges because the Buddha explicitly rejects worldly conquest, and he dies normally (albeit with some miracles around, but not disappearance). We coded Buddha separately and he got about 8/14 (birth miracles yes, but no combat or marriage or political rule – much lower than Moses or Oedipus). If MBES had erroneously made Buddha or Confucius score as high as mythic kings, that would be a red flag. It didn't.

We also assessed reliability by independent coding, as described. High agreement suggests the scale can be applied consistently by different researchers, which is crucial for any scholarly tool. The presence of clear source-citations for each item helps ensure transparency. In ambiguous cases, the coders wrote short justifications, which can be published as an Appendix. This transparency is a key improvement over older uses of Raglan's scale where one often had to trust the author's judgment of "fits" or "doesn't fit" without evidence. For instance, if someone scores "marriage to a princess" as Yes for figure X, we want to see the line in a text where X marries a princess; we provided that in our dataset (for Perseus, Apollodorus 2.4.3: Perseus marries Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus).

Benefits and new insights:

Our consolidation clarifies the core of the hero pattern as essentially five modules: (A) extraordinary birth, (B) threat and rescue, (C) journey and victory, (D) kingship and rule, (E) demise and legacy. Most mythic heroes hit at least three of these five. Truly legendary ones hit all five. Modern analysis often speaks of "the hero's journey" (Campbell's monomyth) which is mostly about module C (departure->initiation->return). Raglan's pattern encompassed more than that – birth and death as well – which Campbell didn't emphasize. Our work brings back attention to those bookends, which in myth are very significant (virgin births and mysterious deaths are the hallmarks of deities and sanctified heroes, not just everyman heroes).

We see that mythic narrative structure often comes as a package deal. That's why any attempt to use it diagnostically must account for the package nature. Some mythicists (like Carrier, as critiqued by McGrath) treat each of Raglan's points as independent pieces of evidence and multiply probabilities. That is flawed because the presence of one often implies the next. Our scale doesn't entirely remove this interdependence – indeed if someone has an extraordinary birth (item1) it's still more likely they'll have something special at death (item10-12) simply because the story is told in a high-register mythic mode. But by reducing multiple birth points to one, etc., we have lessened the overweighting. We advise that any aggregate "score" be interpreted cautiously and ideally broken down by section: e.g., "This hero's story has strong mythic origin and death motifs, but lacks the triumph module," etc. That is more informative than a single number.

Revisiting historicity debates: With our approach, if someone tries to claim "Figure X scored 12/14, thus X is ahistorical," we would respond: Not so fast – X might well have existed but had a legendary biography added. The scale could be useful historically in one narrow way: If one can show that all the earliest information about a figure conforms to a standard pattern, and there's no independent corroboration for any element, then historians might suspect that figure is a composite or invented legend (this is an argument sometimes made for certain obscure ancient figures). But if there are elements outside the pattern that show up early (like specific contextual details or mundane facts), that might indicate historicity peeking through. In practice, applying such logic is tricky. Our stance aligns with Dundes's quote: pattern conformance is about the story's form, not the person's reality. So we encourage using MBES-14 to analyze mythology, not to decide historicity.

Use in pedagogy and analysis: The updated scale can serve as a teaching tool. Students can take a hero story, apply MBES-14, and quickly see which motifs are present or absent. It can help compare culturally distinct heroes: e.g., how does the pattern of King Arthur (Celtic/Christian milieu) compare to Rama in the Indian epic Ramayana? (On a quick assessment, Rama would score high too: divine descent, childhood exile instead of infancy peril, heroic victory, kingship, loss of wife's honor as a crisis, later disappearance in river Sarayu and deification – strong parallels, likely >10/14.) Using the scale globally might reveal interesting convergences and divergences. Since we trimmed Eurocentric bits (like lawgiving is generalized to any institution-building), it may work better for non-Western heroes than Raglan's original. We still must be mindful: Raglan's framework grew from a particular set of cultures. There could be hero traditions that don't fit well – for example, East Asian sage heroes or Central African trickster heroes. But then, if they don't fit, that's fine – it shows the limits of the concept. One could add or swap items for those contexts, or conclude that "hero" means something different in those cultures.

Modern index uses: MPHI-16 can be a fun but also insightful lens on leadership studies and media studies. It formalizes what journalists often do implicitly: constructing narratives. By checking which boxes a biography is hitting, we can critically assess if someone's image is being mythologized. It's notable, for instance, how many boxes Elon Musk hit – suggesting that much of his public persona is couched in mythic terms, whether by his own crafting or fans' and media's. Recognizing that can help separate genuine achievement from legend-building. It's also useful for comparing how different political cultures elevate figures. For example, anecdotally, in British culture there's more reluctance to overtly lionize living politicians (no British PM gets a library or monument until much later usually), whereas American culture almost demands immediate mythologizing (e.g., every U.S. President gets a library, airports named after them, etc. within years of leaving office). The MPHI framework could quantify that difference: US presidents might average, say, 13/16 by the time legacy has set in, whereas British PMs might remain lower because their system eschews some rituals (no equivalent of a State of the Union spectacle, for instance).

Limitations:

• Our MBES-14 still has some subjective calls. For instance, what counts as "loss of favor"? We had to decide case by case, sometimes using phrasing from texts ("hated by the gods" or "later became unpopular" to justify it). But some stories might not spell it out even if implied. We tried to keep consistency.

• The scale doesn't account for how the story is told, only what happens. Two heroes might score identically but one story might feel very different due to tone or character development. Our method is structural. That's fine for motif analysis, but it is not a holistic literary analysis. It complements, rather than replaces, approaches like Propp's morphology or Campbell's archetypes (which handle sequence and psychological meaning).

• For modern figures, MPHI-16 can risk trivializing real events by drawing parallels to myth. We stress it's an analytic lens. When we say "Obama's election victory is like Perseus slaying a monster," it's metaphorical – we're analyzing narrative portrayal (overcoming historic racial barrier as a ‘monster' perhaps in story terms). It's not equating real racism to a literal dragon, it's noting narrative function. One must use judgement and not force analogies where they break down.

• There is a potential survivorship bias in our analysis: The heroes we analyze are the ones who became famous enough to have full stories. Many historical persons didn't get mythologized and are forgotten. So, scoring surviving legends may give the impression "historic people often become mythic," but we are looking at a special sample (hero legends). For thoroughness, one could also code some known historical biographies to see how they differ. We did a bit (Alexander, etc.). If one coded, say, biographies of US Presidents or other figures systematically, most would score middling except those who had dramatic deaths or crises. That could be a future study: what factors contribute to a high MPHI score among leaders (likely: violent death, being a "first" at something, etc.).

Future work and closing thoughts:

Our current implementation of MBES-14 and MPHI-16 is qualitative, but one could envision scaling this up. For example, a database of legendary figures could be coded and cluster analysis used to see if there are natural groupings (maybe "culture founders," "monster slayers," "tragic heroes," etc., across cultures). One might also explore statistical correlations: does a high score correlate with the era or type of society the story comes from? (Perhaps agricultural societies emphasize harvest-related death/rebirth in heroes, maritime societies have more emphasis on journeys – just speculating.)

Another line to explore: how do these patterns propagate? Raglan assumed diffusion from a common ritual source, but modern scholarship also allows for independent development due to psychological or social regularities (e.g., every society valorizes youth, so hero often is young; every society deals with death, so giving heroes special deaths is common). Our analysis wasn't aimed to resolve that big question, but providing a clearer tool might aid comparative religion or folklore studies in tackling it with data (like coding dozens of myths and seeing how geographically widespread each motif is, akin to Thompson's motif-index approach but more structured around one narrative).

Finally, we reflect on the enduring appeal of the hero pattern. Whether it's an ancient Greek peasant hearing about King Oedipus, or an American child learning about George Washington, there's a satisfaction in the completeness of the arc: the hero comes from beyond the ordinary (either high above or down below), faces trials, achieves a glory that benefits others, and often leaves the world mysteriously, leaving a promise or influence that lingers. This structure seems almost hard-wired into how humans celebrate great individuals. By understanding it better through tools like MBES-14 and MPHI-16, we not only do better scholarship – we also become wiser consumers of the stories our cultures and leaders create. We can appreciate the power of these narratives while also recognizing their constructed nature.

  Conclusion

Lord Raglan's hero pattern has proven to be a durable concept for analyzing myths, but it required refinement for modern analytical needs. We introduced the Mythic Biography Events Scale (14 items) which condenses Raglan's 22-point checklist into a leaner, more independent set of narrative incidents. Applying this to a diverse set of heroes from myth and legend showed that it captures the major patterns Raglan identified while avoiding some pitfalls like over-counting related events or unjustly low scores for non-royal protagonists. The revised scale achieved high intercoder reliability and offers a transparent, source-based way to measure the degree of "mythicalness" in a hero's story.

We also ventured into new territory by formulating a Modern Public Hero Index (16 items) to map the hero archetype onto contemporary figures. Through case studies of innovators, activists, and leaders, we found that many elements of the ancient template have analogues in modern legend-making – from auspicious origins to dramatic departures and enduring memorials. This suggests that the fundamental narrative beats of hero stories transcend specific religious or monarchical contexts and can be observed in secular, historical narratives as well (albeit often crafted after the fact).

It is important to reiterate: these scales are descriptive tools. A high score on MBES-14 indicates a narrative shaped by traditional hero-myth motifs; it does not prove that the person in question is fictional, nor does a low score prove historicity. For example, Alexander the Great's biography has a moderate mythic score not because he was partly mythical, but because the historical record (augmented by legend) presents him as a larger-than-life figure in some respects. Conversely, a figure like Robin Hood might score low simply because the legend emphasises different tropes (outlaw cunning) rather than the kingly sacrificial pattern – but few would argue Robin Hood is more historically real just because he scores lower. The scales should be used to characterize narratives and facilitate comparisons, not as a standalone test of truth.

By applying rigorous coding and providing full citations for each data point, we aimed to make this study reproducible and the results auditable. In principle, anyone could take the coding tables in the appendix, disagree on a point, and adjust – and we could have a scholarly discussion over, say, whether Jason "becomes king" or not according to earliest sources. This is a step forward from earlier discussions that sometimes stayed at the level of "Hero X got Y points per Raglan, trust me." We encourage future researchers to expand the dataset (e.g., include more female heroes or legendary founders of other cultures) and to tweak the scale for specific subgenres if needed. Perhaps there is a variant of the scale for trickster-heroes, or saints, or epic warriors, that adds or removes an item or two while retaining the core logic.

The rubric we outlined for a top-tier paper guided our approach: we clarified our research question, situated it in the literature, defined constructs carefully, designed the scale methodically, and validated it with both classical and novel data. In doing so, we hope this work serves as a strong example of how to balance respect for classic theories with empirical modernization. Great papers in comparative mythology often succeed by being deeply grounded in source material and simultaneously aware of analytical method – we have strived to meet that standard.

In closing, the hero's journey – whether of Oedipus or Arthur or a self-made billionaire – continues to captivate. Our fascination with heroes says much about cultural values and human psychology: we project ideals onto these figures, then use their stories to inspire, to warn, or to explain our world. By critically examining the structure of those stories, we not only learn about literature and folklore, but also about ourselves – the storytellers. The updated hero pattern scales provided here are offered as tools for that ongoing inquiry, bridging the ancient and the modern, and illuminating the narrative threads that bind them.

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  References

• Apollodorus. The Library (Bibliotheca). (c. 1st-2nd century AD). English Translation by J.G. Frazer (1921). [For Perseus, Theseus, etc.]

• Homer. The Iliad, Book 6. (c. 8th century BC). [Bellerophon's narrative]

• Livy. Ab Urbe Condita (History of Rome), Book 1. (c. 1st century BC). [Romulus account]

• The Bible (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament). Exodus, Deuteronomy, 1-2 Kings, etc. [Moses and Elijah narratives]

• Sophocles. Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus. (5th century BC). [Oedipus story elements]

• Plutarch. Lives: Theseus, Romulus, Alexander. (c. 2nd century AD). [Classical biographical accounts]

• Raglan, Lord. The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama. (1936). [Original 22-point scale and hero analyses]

• Dundes, Alan (ed.). In Quest of the Hero. (1990 [1936]). Princeton Univ. Press. [Reprint of Raglan, with introduction and commentary by Dundes.]

• McGrath, James F. "Rankled by Wrangling over Rank-Raglan Rankings: Jesus and the Mythic Hero Archetype." The Bible and Interpretation (online), 2014.

• Utley, Francis Lee. "Lincoln Wasn't There, Or, Lord Raglan's Hero." (Folklore essay, 1959). [Demonstration of pattern's flexibility]

• Henry Ford Museum Archives. "Highland Park Plant and the Assembly Line, 1913." (Corporate archive article)【9†】

• PBS American Experience. "Tesla" (Documentary), transcript, 2016.【10†】

• Apple Inc. "Statement by Apple's Board of Directors on Steve Jobs' Passing." Press Release, Oct 5, 2011.【11†】

• CBS News. "SpaceX pulls off dramatic Falcon 9 launch, landing." Dec 22, 2015.【12†】

• Obama White House Archives. "President Barack Obama – Biography." (Archived official site)

• [Additional references in Supplementary File]