Moore is writing here in the very grammar he means to transcend. The call for a "great rebirth of the heroic" — a massive, world-rescuing surge of courage against the abyss — is itself the heroic inflation the book elsewhere warns against. Notice the pneumatic charge in the rhetoric: civilization is slipping, only the heroic will stop it, the odds are enormous, the sword goes into the dragon's mouth. This is not depth psychology describing the hero; this is the hero-complex narrating itself, convinced that if it is courageous enough, it will not have to suffer the slow, unspectacular, unrescuable nature of most of what actually ails us.

Hillman's critique of the hero was precisely this — that heroic consciousness is an ego-inflation dressed in mythological respectability, and that its appetite for dragons, abysses, and evil spells is also an appetite to avoid what is genuinely difficult: the unheroic, the circular, the unresolved. The soul's material rarely arrives as a dragon. It arrives as repetition, as numbness, as the same argument on a Tuesday. Moore's book contains genuine insight into masculine development, but this passage shows the frame buckling under its own weight — recruiting the archetype it studies to perform the very rescue fantasy the archetype requires in order to feel real.