Hercules in Olympus and the Shade in Hades

Julio Cesar Assis

M.A. History of Ideas

University of San Paulo, Brazil
ideashistory@gmail.com

“And I caught sight of mighty Heracles

(that is to say, his shade;
for he himself rejoices in the feats of deathless gods)”[1]

Odyssey XI, 602-2

“The first man Adam was made a living soul [psyche],

the last Adam a life-giving spirit [pneuma]”.

1 Corinthians 15:45

When the classical world was reaching its end, philosophy and religion degrading
in antinomianism and magic, someone raised up whose writings would shine with a
philosophical light only comparable to Plato and Aristotle, the sublime Plotinus.

"We might say that as Plato is to Socrates, Plotinus is to Plato. He is the man who
understands the Master's intentions even better than the Master himself."[2]

Concepts that were formulated in philosophical Greek during the classical era may
have had parallels in another civilization that elaborated them in a poetic form
during Homeric times. Biblical scholar Margaret Barker[3] suggests that essential
elements of the Abrahamic tradition that researchers have often concluded were
imported from the Hellenic environment actually may have been aspects of an
ancestral doctrine that the Greeks themselves could have received from
Southeast, as with their alphabet and so on.

The first temple of Jerusalem was built with technical assistance from Phoenician
architects and artisans during the reign of king Hiram I of Tyre (980-947 BCE).
Pythagoras (580-500 BCE), who was born in coastal Anatolia as the son of a
merchant from Tyre, visited Phoenicia and Syria, where he could have learned an
ancestral spirituality. The presence of this ancient wisdom in Greek thought would
be later reworked by philosophers like Plato and Plotinus.
But is it relevant at all if Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus were or not directly
influenced by any discernible ancient tradition, since each one of them “may not
have been a philosopher in the modern sense, but rather one in the highest ancient
sense, according to which the veritable teacher is one who understands and
transmits a doctrine of immemorial antiquity and anonymous divine origin.”[4]

During the lifetime of Plotinus (205-270), he and the Christians seems to have
ignored each other[5], but this changed with the council of Nicaea in 325 and “it will
be through Platonism, especially in its Neoplatonic form, that philosophical
intellectuals may most readily be led to Christianity.”[6] As wrote Augustine (354-
430) referring to Marius Victorinus:

“…when I mentioned to him that I had read certain books of the Platonists which
Victorinus - formerly professor of rhetoric at Rome, who died a Christian, as I had
been told - had translated into Latin, Simplicianus congratulated me that I had not
fallen upon the writings of other philosophers, which were full of fallacies and
deceit, ‘after the beggarly elements of this world,’[7] whereas in the Platonists, at
every turn, the pathway led to belief in God and his Word.”[8]

After Nicaea, “one result of that Council, then, was to ensure that negative
theology, doctrines of asceticism and of the mystic way, combined with the general
structure of cosmic rest, procession and return, not the schema of hypostases
itself, were to be the Plotinian themes most apparent in subsequent Christianity.”[9]

The Plotinian metaphysical teaching postulates three hypostases: the absolute or

first hypostasis is formless and nameless, but may be called the One. This first
irradiates the second hypostasis, Nous, the spirit or intellectual principle. The
irradiation of this is Psyche or soul, which originates the cosmos or physis, a quasi-
hypostasis, which limit is matter, the point where irradiation ends.

Universal soul, the third hypostasis, limiting and particularizing itself, is present in
human beings as three phases or images. The intellectual intuition, always
contemplating Nous, is the “Soul of the soul”[10] or Spirit in man. The second
phase or image is the reasoning soul, specific to the human being[11]. The last is
the unreasoning soul that conjoined with body is the animate entity or
psychosomatic compound.

This resembles the apostolic anthropological triad pneuma, psyche, soma: “and
may your whole spirit [pneuma] and soul [psyche] and body [soma] be kept sound
and blameless.”[12]

The passage of the Odyssey when Odysseus visits Hades and sees the shade of
Hercules, which is not the true hero, was honored by Plotinus with a significant
exegesis.
“The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this image separate
existence; he puts the shade of Hercules in the lower world and Hercules himself
among the gods: treating the hero as existing in the two realms at once, he gives a
twofold Hercules.

It is not difficult to explain this distinction. Hercules was a hero of practical virtue.
By his noble serviceableness he was worthy to be a God. On the other hand, his
merit was action and not Contemplation which would place him unreservedly in the
higher realm. Therefore while he has place above, something of him remains
below.”[13]

The explanation for the twofold Hercules is that he is worthy of his empyrean state
“by his noble serviceableness.” However, the civic virtues, those of the social order
like prudence, courage and rectitude, which would turn certain men or heroes
divine do not suffice, they are active virtues that leave behind them a “residue,” the
shade. Only contemplation[14] “would place him unreservedly in the higher realm.”

Each Plotinian level or degree contemplates that immediately above it: nature
contemplates Soul that contemplates Nous that contemplates the One. The
process of irradiation or spiration has as correlative an aspiration or reversion to
the source and all that flows from the Absolute strives to return to it and there
remain.

Since Hercules was a “hero of practical virtue,” with a warlike nature, his
contemplation was not perfect: “Thus it is that the Shade of Hercules in the lower
regions - this ‘Shade’, as I take it, being the characteristically human part -
remembers all the action and experience of the life, since that career was mainly of
the hero’s personal shaping.”[15]

The shade of Hercules, “being the characteristically human part,” may be subjected
to metempsychosis[16]: “The soul which still drags a burden will tell of all the man
did and felt; but upon death there will appear, as time passes, memories of the
lives lived before, some of the most recent life being dismissed as trivial. As it
grows away from the body, it will revive things forgotten in the corporeal state, and
if it passes in and out of one body after another, it will tell over the events of the
discarded life, it will treat as present that which it has just left, and will remember
much from the former existence. But with lapse of time it will come to forgetfulness
of many things that were mere accretion.”[17]

The Orphic-pythagorean-platonic doctrine of metempsychosis should not be

confused with fantasies about “reincarnation.”[18] Nineteen-century spiritualists
and occultists spread the belief that “spiritual” essences of deceased human
beings would “reincarnate,” returning recurrently to the same bodily state. The true
meaning of metempsychosis is that in the same way corporal remains may be
assimilated by the soil and subsequently by plants, which later would be absorbed
by animals and even human beings, it is possible that something similar could
perhaps occur in the case of psychic elements. However, this may happen with the
“characteristically human part” of soul, that is not the intellectual intuition or Spirit in
man, whose source is not specifically human in a biological sense.[19]

If the shade of Hercules is in Hades and may suffer the metempsychosis process,
what about the Hercules who “rejoices in the feats of deathless gods”? The
passing of the true Hercules to a superior level of being is explained by another
doctrine which some also confound with “reincarnation,” the teaching of
transmigration or noetic change of state.

“The Hercules of the heavenly regions[20] would still tell of his feats: but there is
the other man to whom all of that is trivial; he has been translated to a holier place;
he has won his way to the Intellectual Realm; he is more than Hercules, proven in
the combats in which the combatants are the wise.”[21]

The higher soul of Hercules, the intellectual intuition, has transmigrated and now
abides in Nous or Intellectual Realm. However, this is not enough; Hercules
reached Olympus and will never come back, but paradisaical places are still
conditioned states.

The Neoplatonic master relates an unmistakable personal experience employing

classical temple imagery: “This is the purport of that rule of our [Greek] Mysteries:
Nothing Divulged to the Uninitiate: the Supreme [god] is not to be made a common
story, the holy things may not be uncovered to the stranger, to any that has not
himself attained to see [the One]. There were not two; beholder was one with
beheld; it was not a vision compassed but a unity apprehended. The man formed
of this mingling with the Supreme must – if he only remember – carry its image
impressed upon him: he is become the Unity, nothing within him or without
inducing any diversity; no movement now, no passion, no outlooking desire, once
this ascent is achieved; reasoning is in abeyance and all Intellection and even, to
dare the word, the very self: caught away, filled with God, he has in perfect stillness
attained isolation; all the being calmed, he turns neither to this side nor to that, not
even inwards to himself; utterly resting he has become very rest. He belongs no
longer to the order of the Beautiful; he has risen beyond beauty; he has
overpassed even the choir of the [civic] virtues; he is like one who, having
penetrated the inner sanctuary [of the temple], leaves the temple images [of gods]
behind him – though these [images] become once more the first objects of regard
when he leaves the holies [of the temple]; for There [in contemplation] his converse
was not with [an] image [of a god], nor with [any such] trace, but with the very Truth
in the view of which all the rest is but of secondary concern.”[22]

Plotinus quotes Homer to emphasize that the ultimate attainment implies the
contemplation of the One.

“‘Let us flee to the beloved Fatherland’[23]: this is the soundest counsel. But what
is this flight? How we are to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable
to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso - not
content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense
filling his days.

The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is the Father.

What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the
feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to
carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you
must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked
within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to
use.”[24]

[1] The Odyssey of Homer. New York, Bantam, 1991. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum.
[2] Rist, J.M. Plotinus. The Road to Reality. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 24.
[3] Barker, M. “Temple and Timaeus”, The great high priest: the temple roots of Christian liturgy,
chapter 11.
[4] Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947). “Measures of Fire”. Metaphysics, Princeton, 1987, p. 160.
[5] The only possible exception been Enneads VI.8.
[6] Rist, John. “Plotinus and Christian philosophy”. The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus.
Cambridge, 1996, p. 408.
[7] Colossians, 2:8.
[8] Augustine, Confessions, VIII. 3-6. www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.xi.html.
[9] Idem p. 396.
[10] Philo (30 BCE-40 CE), “Who is the heir of divine things.”
www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book17.html.
[11] Man is gifted with mind, Sanskrit manava and manas.
[12] 1 Tessalonicenses 5:23.
[13] Enneads I.1.12. Plotinus. The Enneads. London, Penguin, 1991. Translated by Stephen
MacKenna and B. S. Page.
[14] Contemplation, Latin contemplum, with or at the temple.
[15] Enneads IV.3.27.
[16] Also called metensomatosis and palingenesis. The concepts of metempsychosis and
transmigration were clarified by Ananda Coomaraswamy, “On the one and only transmigrant”.
[17] Enneads IV.3.27.
[18] Marco Pallis, “Reincarnation”,
www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/browse.aspx?ID=12.
[19] “And God formed man, dust from the earth, and breathed into his face a breath of life, and the
man became a living being.” Hebrew adamah, Latin humus (earth), adam and homo (born of the
earth). Genesis 2:7, LXX, http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/01-gen-nets.pdf.
[20] Another translation ascribes the boasting to the Shade: “The Hercules of Hades is able still to
speak of his bravery. But he esteems it a small thing now that he has passed into a region more
sacred and has arrived in the intelligible realm: he is now endowed with strength more than
Herculean for those battles which are the battles of the sages.” O’Brien, Elmer. The Essential
Plotinus. New York, Mentor, 1964, p. 160.
A. H. Armstrong avoids the point: “And Homer’s Heracles might talk about his heroic deeds; but the
man who thinks these of little account and has migrated to a holier place, and has been stronger
than Heracles in the contexts in which the wise compete...” Plotinus IV. Loeb Classical Library,
London, 1995, p. 135.
[21] Enneads IV.3.32.
[22] Enneads, VI.9.11.
[23] Iliad II, 140; Odyssey IX, 29ff. and X, 483-4.
[24] Enneads I.6.8.