Folkard’s introduction offers a dense and dazzling catalog of the world's floral mythology—an herbal grimoire where every leaf and blossom carries symbolic weight, medical promise, or ancient superstition. At once antiquarian and poetic, it opens the door to a world where plants are not background, but characters: whispered to by witches, consecrated by priests, and feared by those who know too much.

In The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Otto Rank offers a radical psychoanalytic reading of ancient hero legends, arguing that their recurring motifs—exposure, rescue, concealed parentage—are not historical or celestial in origin but expressions of universal infantile fantasies. These myths, he suggests, are the collective dreams of humanity, staging the primal conflict between child and parent beneath the mask of epic destiny.