Hercules

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Hercules — the Roman name for the Greek Herakles — is the strongest and most labored of the heroes of Greek myth: son of Zeus by a mortal woman, hounded by the goddess Hera, condemned to the Twelve Labors, and at his death taken up into the company of the gods. No other Greek hero was worshipped so widely or so variously. He was a figure cults claimed at once as a man who had suffered and as a god who could be prayed to.

The myth is consistent in outline across the ancient sources. Driven mad by Hera, Hercules kills his own children; the labors are the penance imposed for that horror. He strangles the Nemean lion, beheads the many-headed Hydra, cleanses the Augean stables, fetches the apples of the Hesperides, and at the end drags the hound Cerberus up from the dead — a sequence later writers liked to read as a passage through and beyond death itself. His end is its own image: poisoned by a robe soaked in the blood of a centaur he had killed, in agony he builds his own pyre on Mount Oeta and burns, and the immortal part of him rises to Olympus while the mortal part is consumed. The hero becomes a god by being destroyed.

That ending made him useful to philosophy. The Stoics took Hercules as their model: not the brute of the club and lion-skin but the man who endures every ordeal without complaint, clears the world of monsters as the wise man clears the soul of passions, and is rewarded with a place among the divine. Epictetus invokes him repeatedly as the type of the one who labors and does not break. Earlier still, a famous fable of Prodicus, preserved by Xenophon, set the young Hercules at a crossroads between Virtue and Vice, choosing the hard road — an allegory that ran through later moral literature.

The esoteric and occult traditions inherited this allegorized hero rather than the cult-figure. The twelve labors invited mapping onto the twelve signs of the zodiac, a correspondence drawn by some ancient astrologers and elaborated by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers into a scheme of the soul’s progress through the wheel of the year. Such readings treat the myth as an encoded account of initiation: the labors as trials of purification, the pyre as the death that precedes rebirth, apotheosis as the goal. The correspondence is a later interpretive overlay, not something the archaic myth states; whether the twelve labors were ever a fixed canonical set in the earliest tradition is itself uncertain, the number stabilizing only over time. What the figure carried forward, beneath every reading, was a single durable shape — that the way to the divine runs through ordeal, and that what is burned away is not the whole of a person.

→ In the library: Epictetus — The Discourses and Manual (1916)

→ Related: Chiron · Cadmus · Iapetos