Eurystheus ordered Heracles to bring him back the golden apples of the Hesperides, a garden which was located in the Hyperboreans’ land on the Atlas. These golden apples symbolize the Knowledge whose limits are constantly receding as human evolution progresses.
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Heracles in the garden of Hesperides – Louvre Museum
It is said that it was Gaïa’s wedding present to Hera on the occasion of her marriage to Zeus.
They were guarded by a snake (son of Phorcys and Ceto according to Hesiod) and entrusted to three Nymphs, the Hesperides, who protected them from the lust of Atlas’ daughters.
Having reached the Caucasus mountain range, Heracles killed the eagle born of Typhon and Echidna who was devouring Prometheus’ liver and freed the latter. To maintain the sky, he suggested to Zeus that Chiron – who wanted to die because of his wound – take Prometheus’ place. The latter was grateful to the hero and advised him not to get the apples by himself, but to entrust this task to Atlas while he would support the sky. The hero followed his advice.
But when the Titan returned from the garden with three golden apples, he refused to take his place again. So Heracles had to devise a stratagem: on the pretext of sliding a cushion on his shoulders, he asked the Titan to relieve him for a moment. Obviously, he then did not take back the sky onto his shoulders and handed the apples back to Eurystheus.
According to Apollodorus, Eurystheus then handed back the apples to Heracles who gave them to Athena. The goddess brought them back to The Garden of Hesperides since they could not be anywhere else.
In another version, Heracles went himself to collect the apples after killing the snake-dragon.
With those two last Labours, which suppose an advanced stage in «the integral liberation», begins the path of «perfection» which consists of realising an always greater transparency for the action of the divine forces to operate within the body.
The previous Labours occurred in the four directions: The Cretan Bull to the South, The Mares of Diomedes to the North, The Belt of Hippolyte, the Amazon Queen to the East, and Geryon’s cattle to the West. The two last ones, The Garden of Hesperides and the capture of Cerberus, have been symbolically located by the elders in the two remaining directions, on the vertical axis:
- at the Zenith, for the Garden of Hesperides which is near mount Atlas in the Caucasus if we follow Apollodorus’ version, which is the most coherent. The state of Knowledge which is symbolised by the apples is reached when the spirit/matter separation maintained by Atlas ceases. For the other authors, this garden is most often located without more details «at the edges of the world» (where no one has been or the most advanced point reached on the path), in the «Far-West» (at the root of life in matter) or even «beyond Oceanos» (beyond the realisation of the cosmic Divine).
To have the knowledge is to have access at each moment in consciousness to all the elements necessary to action in Truth, including the vision of its causes and of its consequences, as much in the details as on the plane of the universe, and in all the planes of consciousness (thus in all the «worlds»). Indeed, this labour is about progressing towards an indefinite extension of consciousness, in width and in depth. In fact, those who reached the furthest on this path mention that it is an exit from time and space as we know them. Sri Aurobindo, describing the Yoga of the King, speaks about it in Savitri I.V:
“Admitted through a curtain of bright mind
That hangs between our thoughts and absolute sight,
He found the occult cave, the mystic door
Near to the well of vision in the soul,
And entered where the Wings of Glory brood
In the silent space where all is for ever known.”
(The Wings of Glory mentioned here can most probably be compared to those on Hermes’ Caduceus.)