ABSTRACT
Heroes are public figures; they represent the collective identity of a community. This chapter outlines this relationship between the hero and his or her community. It centers less on the internal structure of the charismatic community. The chapter treats the cultural core of charisma as an independent reference. The symbolic structure of the myth cannot be reduced to a mere reflection of rituals, nor can the ritual be reduced to the simple performance of the cultural script of a myth. The heroes Achilles, Hercules and Theseus in ancient Greek mythology were imagined as warriors of superhuman force, liminal figures who could cross the boundary between everyday life and the realm of Gods and demons. Heroes are social constructions of particular communities, cultural imaginations of supreme individuality, collective projections of sovereign subjectivity, of the sacred on particular persons and their lives. The construction of distance that is constitutive for heroism engenders a special dialectics of evanescence.
