Hera is the wife of Zeus. She embodies the power of limitation, the one that sets the limits, and encourages vigilance and full awareness.
Hera and Zeus – Cabinet des Médailles
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Since the twelve gods can be arranged into couples of opposites, Hera is the opposite of Zeus. But one must not forget that what the ordinary mind considers to be irreconcilable opposites, or at best complementary, are at the level of the overmind only a game of Unity which prepares the putting in place of duality in the densest planes. The couples therefore only represent two aspects of the same reality. The most appropriate image is probably that of the rhythm of the seasons, in which the beautiful days of spring and autumn respond to each other, one belonging to the outgoing movement of energy, and the other to its reflux towards the source. Zeus could not be joined in marriage with any of his other divine lovers because none of them counterbalances this principle of expansion that he represents.
See Family Tree 17
Thus, what checks Zeus in his expansion and surpassing of limits is of course Hera, who incarnates the movement of limitation and retraction.
Hera Barberini, Roman copy from the Greek original, CC BY-SA 3.0, Sailko
Already Cronos, the father of both Zeus and Hera, had through his union with Rhea imposed a principle of limitation of space through pulsation, or of the curving of space into itself. The gold sickle with which he severed the genital organs of his father Uranus is the image of this curving force, the limitation which allowed the appearance of a world of forces and forms.
Hera therefore symbolises the power that forces movement to curve until it is reversed, as do Eros and Rhea (Rho), but on a denser plane.
At the level of the world of forms, Hera, who carries in her name the same structuring character Rho (Ρ) as does her mother Rhea, represents the densification of the pulsation which eventually becomes rhythm. Thus appears the rhythmic movement of alternation, the principle of the cycle which is itself the source of limitation (the name Hera is probably at the origin of the word ‘era’ through the Latin aera). It is the principle of cyclical movement which in its turn allows for the stability of forms without which the universe would be in perpetual chaos.
From an evolutionary point of view, this stability is not incompatible with the universe in perpetual change at the base of Eastern metaphysics. But within this movement, things and beings maintain a more or less identical form until they become old over a time span corresponding to their nature and destiny.
The succession from mother to daughter of Rhea (ΡΗΑ) and Hera (ΗΡΑ) allows one to see how the ancient initiates played with the order of characters to bring nuances to the meanings of concepts expressed by the same consonants and in this case the same vowels as well. We have seen that when vowels follow each other, one of them can be considered to be a consonant. In this case, the character Η (eta) in Rhea plays this role. If we consider the structuring characters Ρ