Hero Myth

For Neumann the hero myth is not a narrative genre among others; it is the archetypal pattern of ego differentiation. The hero fights the dragon (the uroboros and the Terrible Mother), liberates the captive (anima), and wins the treasure (the center, the Self, the fruitful point).

“Every culture-hero has achieved a synthesis between consciousness and the creative unconscious. He has found within himself the fruitful center, the point of renewal and rebirth which, in the New Year fertility festival, is identified with the creative divinity, and upon which the continued existence of the world depends” (Neumann 2019, par. 84). The dragon fight itself is the test of emancipation: “whether he is the doer who redeems or the conqueror who liberates, what he transforms transforms him too” (Neumann 2019, par. 77).

The hero’s first achievement — earlier than the winning of the treasure — is the separation of anima from mother. “It is a tremendous step forward when a feminine, ‘sisterly’ element — intangible but very real — can be added to the masculine ego consciousness as ‘my beloved’ or ‘my soul.’ The word ‘my’ separates off from the anonymous, hostile territory of the unconscious a region which is felt to be peculiarly ‘my’ own” (Neumann 2019, par. 81). This is the beachhead from which all later anima-differentiation proceeds.

The hero myth ontogenetically recapitulates at puberty: “the rites characteristic of this period have the purpose of renewing the personality through a night sea journey, when the spiritual or conscious principle conquers the mother dragon, and the tie to the mother and to childhood, and also to the unconscious, is severed” (Neumann 2019, par. 154).

Relationships

• uroboros
• neumann-great-mother
• anima
• separation-of-the-world-parents
• centroversion

Primary sources

• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949)