Enceladus

According to Apollodorus (i. 6. § 2), during the war between the gods and the giants, as Enceladus was fleeing, Athena threw the island of Sicily to crush him.

Virgil, in the Aeneid (iii. 578), gives another version of this story in which Enceladus is struck down by Zeus and the fire-breathing volcano Etna is placed over his shattered body.

The two versions are quite similar since the Etna volcano is the highest mountain in Sicily, although Apollodorus does not mention the volcano.

Since Sri Aurobindo mentions Mt. Etna, it is clear that it is Virgil’s version that he follows here.

The war of the gods against the giants is about the battle of the overmind forces associated to human forces against the evolutionary memories embedded in the body at the deepest level of the vital and even the cells.

Enceladus is one of the giants and represents ’the vibration of excitement’ which is in the body and which disappears or at least is kept at a very low level under the action of the inner master, Athena, who puts a tremendous pressure on it. If we consider that a volcano is thrown at Enceladus, then it indicates a strong purification by the pressure of the fire contained in matter, the fire in the cells which have achieved conscious unity with the divine. Mt. Etna must have been the highest volcano known to the ancient Greeks. The fire that emerges from its mouth possibly represents the burning flame of aspiration in the cells towards the Divine.

If the Titans represent the forces of creation that are temporarily neutralised in human evolution – they were consigned by Zeus to Tartarus – the giants, on the other hand, must be killed, for they stand for early evolutionary processes that must be annihilated in the yoga of the body. In order to defeat the giants, the gods had to ally themselves with a mortal and it was Heracles who fulfilled this role. This means that when man (i.e. humanity) has reached a sufficient level of development under the laws and direction of Nature, he must unite with the forces of the overmind and actively participate in his future evolution towards divinisation of the totality of his nature.

This struggle between the Gods and the Giants is not mentioned either in Homer or in Hesiod. Apollodorus places this fight just after the one of the gods against the Titans and identifies Enceladus with a gigantic primitive force equivalent to that of the Titans. In fact, we have every reason to believe that it is one of the most advanced battle in the yoga of the body, for it requires man’s conscious participation. It must therefore come after all the Labours of Heracles, for this hero was not yet born during the war of the gods against the Titans.