One of the prerequisites to being a hero involves being a descendent from a divinity with divine blood. Heracles fulfills this condition for he is “[t]he son of Zeus and a mortal woman…half-human and half-divine.” Also, the circumstances of a hero’s conception are often very mysterious and unusual. In the case of Heracles, “Zeus was said to have extended the night for three days in order to conceive such a son.” However, divine blood alone cannot guarantee hero-hood. At birth, heroes go through a rite of passage, a test as to whether or not he possesses enough divine blood to attain hero-hood. Most often, this comes in the form of an en

emy who will try to dispatch the baby hero before he can mature into a man. In the case of Heracles, this is Hera, his divine enemy, who tries to kill the infant. Jealous Hera, furious that he is the bastard child of Zeus and yet another mortal woman, tries “sending a serpent into his cradle” to kill him. Luckily for Heracles, he manages to strangle the serpent, passing this rite. Heracles also fulfills other archetypal heroic events. For one, at some point in their careers, heroes will enter the Underworld while alive, and return to the land of the living. This is a significant rite of passage because it represents the strength of their mortality. With the exception of Heracles, heroes are mortal and will eventually die, but their will to live, their mortality, is much stronger than normal mortals. As one of the labours he performs for Eurystheus, Heracles fetches “Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades [and shoots] the King of the Underworld in the process.” Another rite of passage for heroes is in terms of his death. Heroes die mysteriously, or on the battlefield, as in the case of Achilles. Heracles’ death is terrible indeed, and, in death, he fulfills yet another archetypal heroic event, in that he leaves no body. When the centaur Nessus tries to rape Heracles’ wife Deianeira, the hero shoots the centaur with an arrow dipped in the Hydra’s blood. “The dying centaur offers Deianeira a way to ensure Heracles’ commitment to her: he tells her to collect [his] blood, [which was] now mixed wit

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