While crossing a river, Cura gathered clay and, engrossed in thought, began to mold it into a man.
He grants her request readily, but when she also asked to give her creation her own name, he forbade it, insisting that it had to carry his name.
He determines that since the spiritus was granted by Jove, he should have it in death; Tellus, or Earth, would receive the body she had given; because Cura, or Care, had been the creator, she would keep her creation as long as it lived.
Heidegger regards the fable as a "naive interpretation" of the philosophical concept that he terms Dasein, "being-in-the-world" in Section 42 of Being and Time.
[1][2] Heidegger's use of this fable in casting the female Cura as creator has been seen as an inversion of the equivalent Christian myth, in which woman is created last, with the centrality of Cura as a challenge to the Western concept of self-sufficiency and "atomization" of the individual.