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H
Hades
In the contemporary period Hades has become
interchangeable with hell. However, the name
originally referred to the Greek god of the underworld
and king of the dead. Later Hades became,
by extension, the name of the land of the dead
itself. Hades was the son of Rhea and Chronos.
After defeating the Titans (the older gods), Hades
and his brothers, Zeus and Poseidon, divided the
world among themselves. Poseidon received the
seas, Zeus the sky, and Hades the underworld.
Hades was considered so unfortunate that even
the mention of his name was regarded as unlucky,
and mythological tales about the god of the
underworld are scant.
The foundation for Greek classical religion was
set in the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the
Odyssey, which themselves were the inheritors of
older heritages from the Mycenean-Minoan
culture. The chief deity was the Mother Goddess,
who brought both good and evil, though even evil
was understood to be part of the natural cycle of
things. This included death, which was believed to
be essential for new life. The Mother Goddess
herself was ruler of the nether regions and thus a
key element in the cult of the dead. At Argos she
was known as Hera (the Lady), at Eleusis she was
known as Demeter (Mother Earth), at Sparta she
was Orthia, and at Ephesus she was Artemis.
The epic poem, the Iliad, dating to about 800
101
B.C.E. and traditionally assigned to the authorship
of Homer, signals the ascendancy of the Olympian
gods brought by the Hellenic people. Homer’s
view of Hades is reflected in his later work, the
Odyssey, where Odysseus needed to seek advice
from a seer in the land of the dead. To do this, he
sailed into the far west (in several cultures this is
where the sun “dies” daily, thus the location of the
land of the dead) and upon reaching land made a
sacrifice of sheep covered with honey, milk, water,
and wine. The sacrifice brought forth a number of
ghosts, or shades of the dead, who were able to
converse with Odysseus only after drinking the
blood of the sheep. Homer had the ghost of
Achilles tell Odysseus that he would rather be a
peasant serf on earth than a king among the dead.
The House of Hades was pictured as a large
cavern under the earth somewhere or in the far
west beyond the river Oceanus. It was not a
happy place, but shrouded in mist and darkness,
and figures move about as in a dream. Hades was
separated from the land of the living by five
rivers—Lethe (the river of forgetfulness), Styx,
Phlegethon, Acheron, and Cocytus. The entrance
was guarded by Cerberus, a terrifying hellhound
with three heads and serpents around each neck.
The psyche (or life essence, shade, or ghost) of
the deceased would leave the dead body and
travel to that place to lead a pallid, weak, melancholy
existence.