The Ceryneian Hind which Heracles must bring back alive symbolizes the purification of the planes located above the intellect.
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Heracles Captures the Ceryneian Hind, British Museum, London
The third labour imposed by Eurystheus was to catch the Ceryneian hind that lived in Oenoe (Oinoe in Greek).
Heracles was to bring her alive without doing her any harm because she was sacred to Artemis. She had golden horns. Heracles pursued her relentlessly for an entire year in Arcadia and finally captured her on the banks of the river Ladon while she was crossing it. Having touched her with one of his arrows without hurting her, he took her on his shoulders. (Pindar offers a variant in which the hero pursued the hind until Hyperborea.)
On the way back, he met Artemis and Apollo. The goddess accused him of having tried to kill the hind that was dedicated to her and tried to take her back. Heracles threw the blame on Eurystheus and the gods then ordered him to move on.
The labours of the Nemean Lion and of the Lernaean Hydra illustrate the two major realisations in the first step of the path, victory over the ego and suppression of desire, the expression of the intrusion of distorted life energy into the higher planes.
The following three labours provide their modalities:
– The labour of the Ceryneian hind through the purification of the spiritual planes (planes above the intellect) in order to allow the influence of higher forces
– The labour of the Erymanthian boar through the progressive rejection of demonstrations of the coarse vital (vital pacification)
– The labour of the Stymphalian birds through the recognition of the mixture of plans (vital and mental) and the realisation of a certain mental calm.
These works, like all others, are spiral shaped and concurrent processes. (This explains why the Boar and the Hind may have been switched in the works of Diodorus. The representations of the victories of Heracles in these two labours appeared on the currencies of Psophis).
The first two take place at symmetrical places of Arcadia, northwest and northeast. Both are closely related to Artemis, the goddess of “integrity” or “total purity”, who “roves over the mountains, along the ridges of lofty Taygetus or Erymanthus, joying in the pursuit of boars and swift deer” (Odyssey, VI, 102-104). Thus, one who cares about purification must work in both registers, that of the purification of the mind and that of the gradual rejection of the disturbances coming from the lower nature.
We must remember that Arcadia is the symbolic province of “endurance” in yoga that leads to achieving “equality”. It derives its name from that of Arcas, the hero associated with “the bear”, image of a “power of resistance or endurance”. The north is a direction of asceticism, the northeast is a yoga related to the future (the hind) and the northwest is related to the past (the boar). This work indicates a realisation that the seeker will obtain at the end of his work towards equality (Arcadia).
