In the first place it is mankind itself, the collective, to whom the hero, just because he deviates from the human norm, appears as a hero and a divinely begotten being.  Secondly, the idea of the hero's intrinsically dual nature derives from his own experience of himself.  He is a human being like the others, mortal and collective like them, yet at the same time he feels himself a stranger to the community.  He discovers within himself something which, although it 'belongs' to him and is as it were part of him, he can only describe as strange, unusual, god-like.

• the hero
• collective
• god
• time
• nature
• experience
• community