The Nemean lion that Heracles has to defeat in his first labour symbolizes victory over the ego, from habitual selfishness to physical ego.
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Heracles fighting the Nemean Lion – Louvre Museum
The Nemean Lion was ravaging the region of Argos, devouring its herds and people.
The lion reigned supreme over the Nemean Treton and the Apesantus. He had been raised by Hera.
Eurystheus ordered the hero to bring him the hide of the animal.
Pindar adds that he was invulnerable to iron, and Bacchylides that he could only be attacked with bare hands.
These are, apparently, the only elements of the original myth. The following details were added later, especially towards the beginning of our era.
Some argue that the lion was born on the moon; Selene threw it on Earth at Hera’s request.
Heracles, when visiting the site, was hosted by a poor peasant named Molorchos, whose son had been killed by the lion. The peasant wished to honour his guest by offering the only ram he had, but Heracles dissuaded him and asked him to wait thirty days and await his return. If he did not come back, then he could sacrifice the ram in his memory.
Heracles went his way and tracked the lion for twenty-eight days. He first tried to kill him with arrows and a sword (and sometimes his club) but in vain, because his skin was impenetrable. As the lion lived in a cave with two exits, the hero closed one of them, seized him and strangled him with his bare hands. Then he donned his skin.
He then returned to the farmer who was about to sacrifice the ram as thirty days had already elapsed. The ram was then offered to Zeus “savior”.
Before leaving, Heracles, crowned with wild parsley, reorganized the games of Nemea which had been founded by Adrastos during the war of the Seven against Thebes.
Then he brought the remains of the lion to Eurystheus. Terrified, the latter demanded of Heracles that his trophies would now be deposited at the gates of Mycenae. And it was therefore Copreus, a son of Pelops, who transmitted the orders to the hero.
If this work was placed at the beginning, it is because it is the keystone of the Labours, at least of the first six if we consider only what was accessible to ordinary seekers.
The symbolism of the lion, the king of beasts, evokes here the highlight of the ego personality in man – the “little me” that brings everything back to himself – born from ignorance and a sense of being separated (Apesante means “separated”), i.e. what we call the mental-vital “ego”.
Symbol of power, it is the will to empower the ego in its own right and not from the Divine law.
This lion, according to Hesiod, is the son of Orthrus and Echidna (or of the Chimera) and according to Apollodorus, that of Typhon. We studied these monsters in the previous chapter, but we will provide their meanings briefly here.
See Family tree 1
Orthrus is the falsehood (the lie or perversion) that creeps into our lives during the eruption of the mind through a combination of “ignorance” (Typhon “what dissimulates, what blinds”) and the “interruption of evolution in union” (Echidna, the viper which marks the beginning of the separation process).
(The spelling of Orthus “what is right” and therefore meaning exactly the opposite of Orthrus which include the Rho of inversion, comes from the erroneous corrections of manuscripts, according to the note II.106.4 from the Library of Apollodorus, according to J.C. Carriere and B. Massonie.)
In any case, the lion is the result of evolution in ignorance (son or grand-son of Typhon). Hesiod adds a “perversion” (Orthros) to his ancestors, combined with a separation from the Real, all resulting in an identification of the being to the actions of its instruments (the mental, the vital and the body), generating a centralizing movement from the ego.
According to Hesiod, Echidna is the daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, and therefore contemporary with the emergence of the animal ego. This ego takes its roots in sensations that are themselves misleading. According to Apollodorus, Echidna is the daughter of Tartarus “the Nescience”: stopping the evolution i