Report: it's about more than just being a badass.
The Labours of Hercules (Heracles in the Greek), are a wonderful example of a myth that has transcended both its time and its culture.
Part of a great lineage of similar stories, including Gilgamesh and Melqart, Hercules and his misadventures remain a cornerstone of our culture and our storytelling, even today. His tale hides a great deal of meaning below the surface, and it can be easy to miss.
Herc’s life represents a fine example of both Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Otto Rank’s pattern of the mythic hero.
Breaking with Freudian theory, Carl Jung suggested that the defining myth of mankind was not about the family, but about the hero emerging from—and ultimately transforming—chaos. This parallels so many levels of the human experience: evolutionarily, our emergence from the unconscious life of the animals. Developmentally, our growth out of the unconscious paradise of childhood. And psychologically, the individuated ego ultimately emerging from the primordial waters of the unconscious.
Hercules defeating the various monsters is exoterically about civilizing the world, and esoterically about civilizing the self.
But true to Jung’s other ideas, “civilizing the self” is not about denying or repressing the animal, unconscious elements within us—it’s about accepting and harnessing them. We see this play out most clearly in the story of Herc’s battle with the Nemean Lion.
The Nemean Lion is not just any lion—it’s the “sum of all lions”. It’s massive, it’s invincible, and it’s a child of Typhon—the go-to symbol of unconscious chaos, the conquest of whom being the defining moment of Papa Zeus’s own heroic journey of individuation.
The details matter here: the battle against the lion is unbelievably rough, and it seems to go on forever. Weapons won’t stop it. Fire won’t stop it. Its hair was golden armor, its claws like the blade of adamant. Desperate, Hercules outsmarts the monster and lures it into a pitch black cave.
In a move that only be described as “completely badass,” Hercules gets the lion in a headlock and chokes it until it finally passes out. In this brief moment of respite, Athena comes to him with the answer: “Use the lion’s own claws against him.”
This alone is an incredible bit of symbolism:
Athena, the civilizing goddess of human wisdom, suggests that Hercules use the lion’s own claws against it; the key to mastering the animal unconscious within us is to learn to work with it, not against it. It’s ancient and ferocious and you can never destroy it; but if you learn to harness it, it will become your greatest protection. Wisdom itself is to know this.
And that’s exactly what ends up happening: Herc takes the claw, skins the lion, and wears it as his iconic impenetrable armor for the rest of his days. The lion and Hercules are symbolically inseparable. Other episodes in Herc’s story, especially his frenzies and mistakes, represent the tension of keeping this delicate balance.
As mentioned, Hercules conquering the Nemean Lion is a microcosmic analog to Zeus’s conquest of Typhon:
Hercules, a son of Zeus, integrates the lion, a son of Typhon. Just as Typhon was never truly destroyed and lays beneath the earth powering the forge of Hephaestus, the unconscious is that which powers our growth and development—when in balance.
Speaking of “being a son of Zeus,” Herc’s mom was definitely not Hera. While I don’t blame the Disney movie for the changes it made, you lose a lot of the subtext if you think Hera was on #teamherc. His true mother was Alcmene, and his birth name was Alkaios or Alkeides, depending on the source. Hera’s relationship with her stepson was… strained. The name “Hercules” ultimately means “the glory of Hera.”
There are two ways to look at this: Hercules’s name is sarcastic, poking fun at Hera, the jealous goddess of family bonds, and her unsuccessful attempts to ruin Hercules—which backfired and ultimately led to his apotheosis. All that said, Hera isn’t always treated fairly in the myths, and there’s a lot more to her role in the story—she’ll be getting her own post soon enough!
The other way is to view his name “after the fact”: that because of Hera, he was ultimately able to civilize the world, to master himself, and to pave the way for the rest of us to do the same. Without Hera’s challenges, Hercules would never have reached godhood. It’s said that after everything, she eventually came around: upon his death, Hercules was brought to the heavens and made a god—and married Hebe, the goddess of mercy and eternal youth.
Stability and change; meaning and matter; heaven and earth; ideal and form; ego and Self. These related symbols all point to the interplay between the two sides of reality, the tension of opposites so critical to both Jungian thought and metaphysics. This complex of symbols underpins all of myth, and arguably the nature of human thought itself.
This is often misunderstood: the goal isn’t “no chaos,” or “maximum order”—that’s tyranny, that’s stasis. The goal is the balanced mediation between each half of existence, leading to the emergence of something new: a gestalt, greater than the sum of the parts. Properly mediated, this union becomes the source of meaning, and can also be seen as the true goal of individuation.
Herc’s labors, individually and as a collection, represent man, in the image of god (Herc parallelling his father Zeus), mediating order and chaos. It can go too far, but chaos (change) is necessary—if Typhon had been completely destroyed, existence would freeze. If the lion had been obliterated, Hercules would never have ascended. To live rightly in the world requires balance, first and foremost.
The battle with the lion is only the first labor, but it’s a fitting way to represent them all: just as working with the unconscious is the first step to individuation. All the other labors are made possible by this critical first step. So it is with our development and our achievements: we can only approach our true potential by facing all parts of ourselves.
If this sounds simple or easy, it isn’t; most of us never take this first step. Be your own hero: face the monsters of chaos within, discover and cultivate the higher Self, and learn balance both, denying neither. More on this soon!
