The latest exploits of Heracles illustrate the advanced stages of the process of purification-liberation or “unveiling” of the divine involuted in matter. After the installation of the seeker in the overmind, these are the first experiences of the supramental transformation.
Heracles fighting Cyknus – Louvre Museum
To fully understand this web page, it is recommended to follow the progression given in the tab Greek myths interpretation. This progression follows the spiritual journey. In particular, the pages dealing with the twelve Labours must be studied beforehand.
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Abilities required for accessing the supramental world:
‘Capacity for indefinite expansion of consciousness on all planes including the material.
Limitless plasticity, to be able to follow the movement of becoming.
Perfect equality abolishing all possibility of ego reaction.’
Mother’s Agenda, Volume 3, 12 January 1962
The preceding volume was left off with the last of Heracles’ twelve ‘labours’, the ‘athloi’. These adventures of the hero were followed by the ‘praxeis’, or free acts, which are not however temporally situated ‘after’ the labours.
In fact, it must be remembered that the hero had raised the famous pillars at the beginning of the tenth labour when journeying towards the ‘misty’ island of Erythia, situated at the confines of the ocean at the far reaches of the Occident, to bring back the Cattle of Geryon. The eleventh labour, the quest for the apples of the Garden of the Hesperides, involved an acquisition of Knowledge which proved to be an endless endeavour, and the twelfth labour, the Capture of Cerberus at the threshold of Hades, a preliminary groundwork for the work in the body, a becoming conscious of that which impedes its transformation into a supramentalised body.
The last three labours were therefore considered by the Elders of ancient times to be realisations of a future humankind, this being corroborated by their mythical settings. The last labour to be set within a geographically identifiable location was the ninth, that of the Girdle of the Queen of the Amazons.
As the initiates made forward progress, the experiences undergone on the path of these three last labours must have allowed them to give some complementary indications.
However, since no greater synthesis could be formulated the chronology of the corresponding myths remains very uncertain. We have attempted to organise them from the point of Heracles’ sack of Troy, which would have logically had to have taken place during his ninth labour. It must be remembered that the complete adventures of Heracles represent the theory of the process of purification and liberation till the ultimate point of what Sri Aurobindo refers to as ‘the liberation of Nature’.
The sack of Troy
We must resume our discussion of the adventures of this hero from the moment in which he returned to Troy with a fleet of six ships to pillage the city, an episode which has been discussed in its first elements in chapter 3 of this work.
Heracles sought to avenge himself on Laomedon, who had refused to grant him his recompense for the liberation of Hesione, consisting of the greatest horses on earth which his grandfather Tros had received from Zeus in exchange for Ganymedes ‘who cares for joy’. According to Apollodorus, all of Laomedon’s sons were killed except for Podarces, ‘he who sets aside incarnation’, who was bought again by his sister Hesione and took on the name Priam, ‘the repurchased’. Homer on the other hand names some of his sons still living during the War of Troy which took place later on.
This episode indicates that the seeker who has achieved joy in the spirit – for Ganymedes was abducted by Zeus to become the cup-bearer of the gods – is granted a second chance to find the right path, that of a yoga which does not separate spirit and matter, but rather one within which it is no longer the ego that is at the origin of action but the divine. This corresponds to the second phase of yoga described in the Gita, the first being based on attaching oneself to neither acts nor the fruits of such acts, and the second being to conclusively eliminate the ego which carries out action to instead allow the divine