“Hercules, called Alexicacos, for he brought round the wicked and converted them to virtue; Soter, or Saviour, also called Neulos Eumelos, the Good Shepherd; Astrochiton, the star-clothed, and the Lord of Fire. “He sought not to subject nations by force but by divine wisdom and persuasion”, says Lucian. “Herakles spread cultivation and a mild religion, and destroyed the doctrine of eternal punishment by dragging Kerberus (the Pagan Devil) from nether world.” And, as we see, it was Herakles again who liberated Prometheus (the Adam of the pagans), by putting an end to the torture inflicted on him for his transgressions, by descending to the Hades, and going round the Tartarus.
Like Christ, he appeared as a substitute for the pangs of humanity, by offering himself in a self-sacrifice on a funereal-burning pile. “His voluntary immolation”, says Bart, “betokened the ethereal new birth of men. …Through the release of Prometheus, and the erection of altars. We behold in him the mediator between the old and new faiths. He abolished human sacrifice wherever he found it practiced. He descended into the sombre realm of Pluto, as a shade… he ascended as a spirit to his father Zeus in Olympus.”
So much was antiquity impressed by the Heraklean legend, that even the monotheistic (?) Jews of those days, not to be outdone by their contemporaries, put him to use in their manufacture of original fables. Herakles is accused in his mytho-biography of an attempted theft of the Delphian oracle. In Sepher Toldos Jeschu, the Rabbins accuse Jesus of stealing from their Sanctuary the Incommunicable Name!
Therefore, it is but natural to find his numerous adventures, worldly and religious, mirrored so faithfully in the Descent into Hell. For extraordinary daring of mendacity, and unblushing plagiarism, the Gospel of Nicodemus, only now proclaimed apocryphal, surpasses anything we have read. Let the reader judge.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 