ABSTRACT
When a hero rescues a woman from captivity or wins a treasure – frequent motifs in many myths and fairy tales – what happens is the mythological equivalent of a person’s discovery of the reality of his or her soul, as Neumann maintains (Neumann 1993: 196). When myths about creation develop, what happens is that the psyche projects its own primordial creative power on to the cosmos. Hence, in heroic myths and tales, this same creative power of the psyche is being tried out as something human. This something is a part of a human being’s personality – the soul.
