Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 32 -- To Cross the Styx
CHAPTER 32
TO CROSS THE STYX
Water has numerous symbolic meanings. It is again and again divisible, yet when poured
together, reconstitutes a seamless whole. It is life-giving, our first abode. We consume it daily.
As a cleansing substance, we emerge from it purified.
Water can drown us, of course, but as myth is more often about the mortal soul than about
physical safety, water is an agent of transformation of consciousness. In crossing the gulf
between our world and that to follow, ego is dissolved, emerging completed and liberated on the
distant shore.
The Greeks weren't arbitrary in myth creation when they made Charon a ferryman.
From Wander Ships: Folk-Stories of the Sea (1917) by
Wilbur Bassett, the frontispiece at the right.
Many religions and cults look upon the sun as the abode
of souls, and the sea the home of the sun into which it
sinks at evening and disappears even as the soul after
death. It is hidden or concealed. Hades is the unseen,
the concealed place as is the Norse Hel (Icelandic helja,
to hide). So we are not surprised to find that the Aryan
words for sea, desert and death are from the same root.
Thus we have in Anglo-Saxon mere, sea, lake; in Perian
meru, desert; in Latin mors, death, from the same root
as murder... And so in Egypt the sun set in the vast
unexplored desert in the west. There was the land of
Apap the immense, personification of the desert, the
serpent king who guarded the approach to the halls of
Osiris, the sun. Between this land and inhabitable Egypt
lay the Nile, which was therefore the river of death. The
death voyage and the ritual of the crossing of this river
of death are clearly set out in the so-called Book of the
Dead
The Midgard Sea of the Eddas was undoubtedly originally a river, as the sea is a conception
not readily grasped by the primitive mind. That river was Jormungandr, which in the later
mythology is described as the great Midgard worm, which lies at the bottom of the Midgard sea.
So the Greek Oceanus, originally a river flowing in a circle like the Midgard serpent whose tail
continued to grow into his mouth, disappeared in the ocean of later days.
This leads to the general theorem that sea and ocean myths are less ancient than river myths,
and indeed many sea-ceremonies of the present day hark back to that ever-flowing character
characteristic of the primitive ocean.
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