Sometimes the "child" looks more like a child-god, sometimes more like a Jung hero. Common to both types is the miraculous birth and the adversities of early childhood-abandonment and danger through persecution. The god is, by nature, wholly supernatural; the hero's nature is human but raised to the limits of the supernatural-he is "semi-divine." While the god, especially in his close affinity with the symbolic animal, personifies the collective unconscious which is not yet integrated in a human being, the hero's supernaturalness includes human nature and thus represents a synthesis of the (divine," i. e. not yet humanized) unconscious and human consciousness. Consequently he signifies a potential anticipation of an individuation approaching wholeness. For this reason the various "child"-fates may be regarded as illustrating the kind of psychic event that occurs in the entelechy or genesis of the "self." The "miraculous birth" tries to depict the way in which this genesis is experienced. Since it is a psychic genesis, everything must happen non-empirically, e. g. by means of a virgin birth, or by miraculous conception, or by birth from unnatural organs. The motifs of "insignifi- 117 cance," exposure, abandonment, danger, etc. try to show how precarious is the psychic possibility of wholeness, that is, the enormous difficulties to be met with in attaining this "highest good."
— C. G. and Kerényi, C. Jung
The god-child and the hero-child mark a genuine fork in what the psyche can do with its own overwhelming contents. The god, Jung argues, personifies the collective unconscious in a form not yet drawn into human nature — it remains out there, transpersonal, numinous, operating at the level of symbol before it has touched individual life. The hero is the more expensive figure: semi-divine means the supernatural has been pulled partway into human flesh, and the cost of that partial integration is exactly what the myth encodes in abandonment, exposure, persecution. The adversities are not decorations. They are the structural report of how difficult it is to sustain that contact without either retreating into pure transcendence or being crushed by what you have touched.
What is worth sitting with is the phrase "precarious psychic possibility." Not guaranteed, not a developmental stage the ego passes through on a schedule — precarious. The wholeness the self anticipates is an anticipation only, a potential the entelechy gestures toward without promising to deliver. Virgin births and miraculous conceptions are the mythology's honest admission that what brings the self into genesis cannot be produced by ordinary willing. The soul does not manufacture this by spiritual ambition or by accumulating insight. It arrives, if it arrives, from somewhere the ego did not plan for — which is another way of saying that every strategy for securing it in advance is exactly what the adversities are there to strip away.
C. G. and Kerényi, C. Jung·Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis·1949