The wild Erymanthian boar us which Heracles must bring back alive represents the manifestations of the low vital which must be gradually rejected.
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Heracles brings back alive the wild boar of mount Erymanthos to Eurystheus – Louvre Museum
For the fourth test, Eurystheus imposed upon Heracles to bring him back alive the Erymanthian boar that had its lair on the Erymanthus mount and ravaged the lands below.
On his way, Heracles was received by the Centaur Pholos who offered him roasted meats while he ate them raw. Heracles asked him for some wine. Pholos being afraid of opening the jar which belonged to all the centaurs, Heracles reassured him and opened it himself. Attracted by the aroma, the other Centaurs of Arcadia rushed to them, armed with rocks and trees. Heracles pushed them back with firebrands and killed some, while others went to the southern tip of the Peloponnese to Cape Malea where lived Chiron, the wisest of them all. The latter had taken refuge when he was driven out of Thessaly by Lapithae led by Pirithous and Theseus. (The other Centaurs driven out of Thessaly took refuge in Arcadia.)
Heracles returned to the Centaur’s home to find him dead. In fact, while the latter was contemplating one of the hero’s arrows which he had removed from the injury of one of his congeners, wondering how such a small thing could kill a Centaur, he had inadvertently dropped it on his foot and was killed immediately. Heracles gave him a magnificent funeral and then resumed the hunt for the wild boar, pursuing him in the deep snow. After capturing him, he brought him back alive to Mycenae.
Following the labour, Heracles still had some trouble with the Centaurs, particularly during the attempted rape of his second wife Deianira by the Centaur Nessus. Finally, in a last gallop, the Centaurs disappear into Eleusis where there was an access to Hades.
Erymanthian Boar is Captured by Hercules, 1608, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Some versions of the myth add that before all things, Heracles had first to rid the country of the robber Sauros “lizard”, symbol of the lukewarm, of inertia and of laziness. This half-hartedness or tepidity is castigated in all initiation schools because the seeker always has good reasons to feel sorry for himself or to postpone what he knows to be the right action.
If the boar’s symbolism is vast in ancient mythologies, the episode of the Centaurs associated with this labour leads us to consider that this boar hunt referred to the purification and control of the most archaic vital energies.
It should be noted that the hero has no mandate to kill the wild boar but only to bring it back alive to Mycenae. It is therefore more an awareness and a “control”, a first rejection, rather than an eradication work, which will be the subject of another famous adventure “the hunt for the wild boar of Calydon “led by Meleager son of Oeneus, “divine inebriation”. The latter continues this fourth labour of Heracles within the lineage of Iapetus and Protogenia (adventurers of the ascension of the planes of consciousness).
Here, the seeker should only hunt the wild boar in the deep snow, that is to say, isolate him in purity to limit his influence. Snow is also perhaps a sign of pacification of that energy.
Like all labours, this is a