Heracles

Heracles symbolizes the Christ in the Greek mysteries. He performed many tremendous works, great labors, impossible for mere mortals, and he was able to accomplish these great labors because he was part divine: in other words, he was a bodhisattva, he had incarnated part of a God within, but he still had his human impure aspect. At the end of his mythology, you find that he dies a very painful death, but that death symbolizes the absolute death of everything in him that was impure. All the human parts die, and what rises is the divine, purified, complete. When he ascends to Olympus as a purified being, the gods give him a present: a wife. This woman is named Hebe.