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Halloween 103
body, which is considered a form of prison. Now
in its naked reality, the soul is judged in a meadow
at the intersection of two roads—one leads to the
Isles of the Blessed and the other leads to Tartarus.
The three judges are: Rhadamanthys for souls
from Asia, Aeacus for souls from Europe, and
Minos for any cases about which there is indecision.
The examination seems to be more medical
than conversational. The soul is presented as
marked by the actions of life, particularly in the
sense of being malformed or wounded by authoring
unjust actions. The judges have only to
examine the marks on the soul to determine the
appropriate judgment. The wicked are set on the
road to Tartarus to be rehabilitated or eternally
punished. The good are sent to the Isles of the
Blessed, and are pictured as having lived philosophic
lives. In Homeric mythology, Tartarus was
a region underneath Hades where rebellious
deities, particularly the Titans, were sent for
punishment. In this dialogue, it has been transformed
into a general place of punishment.
In the afterlife myth in the Phaedo, the judgment
of the dead is supposed to take place at the
Acherusian Lake. The incurable evil ones will
spend an eternity of punishment in Tartarus. The
curable evil may spend only a year there. If those
whom they mistreated in life agree to pardon
them, they may be sent back to earth to live
another life, the same fate as those who led lives of
goodness. Philosophical souls are granted the ultimate
boon, freedom from another bodily birth
and an eternity of contemplation among beautiful
surroundings.
In the Republic, the afterlife is described by a
man who had what today would be termed a
“near-death experience.” In his long and detailed
story, the soul is supposed to journey to a place
where there are two openings into the earth and
two openings into the sky. Judges sit in the middle
and send the good souls up one of the upper
openings and the evil soul down one of the lower
openings. There, the souls are either rewarded or
punished tenfold for one thousand years. After
that time the souls come down or go up to the
other openings and meet together in a meadow to
swap experiences. The worst souls do not emerge,
but are thrown forever into Tartarus.
See also Cerberus; Underworld
For Further Reading:
Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New
York: Macmillan, 1987.
Grant, Michael, and John Hazel. Who’s Who in
Classical Mythology. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993.
Hamilton, Edith, and Huntington Cairns, eds. The
Collected Dialogues of Plato. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1961.
MacGregor, Geddes. Images of Afterlife: Beliefs from
Antiquity to Modern Times. New York: Paragon
House, 1992.
North, Helen F. “Death and Afterlife in Greek Tragedy
and Plato.” In Hiroshi Obayashi, ed. Death and
Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1992, 49–64.
Smart, Ninian. The Religious Experience of Mankind.
3rd ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984.
Tripp, Edward. The Meridian Handbook of Classical
Mythology. New York: New American Library,
1970.
Werblowsky, R. J. Zwi. “Transmigration.” In Mircea
Eliade, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New York:
Macmillan, 1987.
Halloween
The holiday we designate as Halloween (All
Hallows Eve) has its roots in the Day of the
Dead—a day when, to speak metaphorically, the
veil between this world and the other world was
“thin.” The present date of All Hallows Eve was set
by the Catholic Church, which took over the
ancient Roman Day of the Dead, Feralia, and
transferred it to the first of November. All Hallows
Eve blended with certain northern European
beliefs to give the Halloween familiar to most
Americans its current associations with demons
and the powers of evil.
The tradition of costumed children going to
door to door asking for food is an echo of the
ancient practice of providing food for the spirits of
the departed. For the most part, citizens of the
modern world have forgotten the original
meaning of Halloween. As a children’s holiday
Halloween was widely celebrated until relatively
recently, when safety concerns severely reduced
the number of trick-or-treaters. Many conservative
Protestants also came to regard Halloween as
a diabolical celebration, and struck it from their
holiday calendar.