Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology
Chapter 3) described the Acheron as the source of the Styx and Cocytus. And yet others
claimed the Acheron to be a branch of the Styx.
According to others, the Acheron, turbid with mud, flows from desert places to
The Stygian marsh, or
Acherusian Lake where the souls remain until they are reborn, or perhaps,
The Grove of Persephone, the wife of Hades, whose kingdom lies further downstream.
The Styx, the river of hate, the river of unbreakable oath
The poet Hesiod (c. 750 BC) considered Styx to be the daughter of Oceanus. Comprising onetenth
the volume of its parent, the Styx flows out of a rock and into a mass of broken rock
where it encircles the underworld nine times. In other accounts, the Styx passes around
Acherusian Lake and becomes the Cocytus.
We'll have more to say about the River Styx in Chapter 32, To Cross the Stys, and in Chapter
63, The Law of Subterranean Streams.
The Pyriphlegethon, the river of fire
Around the underworld runs a fence of bronze beyond which night spreads in triple line to the
Pyriphlegethon, a torrent of lava and clashing boulders. The Pyriphlegethon approaches the
edge of boiling Lake Acherusia, but does not mingle. Souls remain here until they are reborn.
A handy mnemonic: the first letters of the five rivers spell CLASP. As we'll be encountering them
over and over, it may help speed the recognition.
The five rivers oscillate from one side of the underworld to the other. As they surge to and fro,
surficial waters flow into and out of chasms, generating the sea's tides.
Tartarus, the lowest abyss beneath the earth, from where all waters originate and to where all
waters return, is as far distant from earth as earth is from the sky. An anvil falling down from
heaven would take ten days to reach the ground. An anvil falling from earth to Tartarus would
take ten days more. Homer portrayed Tartarus as an ominous realm inhabited by shadows. In
the dank, gloomy pit below the roots of the earth and sea, the dead fade into nothingness. .
Nothing is real; existence itself is but a miserable illusion.
(Note the term "abyss," a noun more ominous than "hole" or "cave." We'll deal with the idea of a
foreboding cavity within the earth's interior in many chapters to come.)
In myth closer to the present, Tartarus becomes Hades, a place of punishment for mortal sinners,
antithetic to the blessed afterlife on the Elysium Fields.
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