The Labours of Hercules Are Degrees of Initiation

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages from the Commentary on the Pistis Sophia in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIII, pages 7-8. The opening paragraph of the Pistis Sophia is printed first with numbered markers in it, and the commentary follows as a note on the first of them.

The Gnostic text describes Jesus, risen from the dead, spending eleven years speaking with his disciples and teaching them only as far as the regions of the First Precepts and of the First Mystery — the Four-and-Twentieth Mystery — which the disciples did not understand. The commentary says the number eleven gives the key to the whole situation. The eleventh trial or degree of initiation has been safely passed, and the twelfth and last, which would crown the work if the candidate succeeded, was now being entered upon. Two parallels are drawn immediately: Hercules was about to enter upon his twelfth labour, and the sun upon the twelfth sign of the Zodiac — with the aside that even the popular phrase "at the eleventh hour" is an echo of the same mystery. The arithmetic of the Four-and-Twentieth Mystery is then explained by Éliphas Lévi's Nychthēmeron of Apollonius of Tyana: a nychthēmeron being the space of a day and a night, and each grade of initiation having two degrees, twenty-four in all. Lévi is quoted approvingly for the conclusion the file is named after — that the twelve symbolical hours, comparable with the signs of the Zodiac and the labours of Hercules, represent the cycle of degrees of initiation — though readers who lack Greek are warned in the same breath that the French printed below the Greek in his book is not a paraphrase at all but simply Lévi's own idea of the text.

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