Hades

I thought Hades would be the best way to start my segement on hell, as it is perhaps one of the most well known other then the bibible, of course originaly Hades, was just the name of the Gods whom was lord over the Greek underworld, but the name Hades would come to be synomnous with the word for the greek Underworld, so it came to mean one in the same.

Hades is overall viewed as being a rather dreary and unforunate place, not one in which one looks forward to having to go. And in the original tradition, Hades was the singular and only underworld. It did not matter who a person was, or what they did in life, they would all end up in the same place. 

A little later in history the idea of the  Elysian fields would come to be, which is the Greek Paradise and the place where the heroic and the virtuous would have thier final resting place.

Here are some passages from Homer regaruding Hades

Now when, with sacrifices and prayers, I had so entered the hordes of the dead. I took the sheep and cut thier thorats over the pit, and the dark-clouding blood ran in, and the souls of the perished dead gathered to the place, up out of *Eerebos, brides and young unmarraied men, and long-suffering elders, virgins, tender with sorrows of young hearts upon them, and many fighting men killed in battle, stabbed with brazen spears, still carrying thier bloody armor upon them. Those came swarming around my pit from every direction with inhuman clamor, and green fear took hold of me.

*EREBOS (or Erebus) was the Protogenos (primeval god) of darkness, consort of Nyx (Night), whose dark mists enveloped the edges of the world, and filled the deep hollows of the earth. His wife Nyx drew these mists across the heavens to bring night to the world, while his daughter Hemera scattered them bringing day : one blocking out the light of Aither (shining, blue heaven) and the other revealing it. The bright upper air (aither) was regarded as the source of day in the ancient cosmogonies rather than the sun.

The name Erebos was also used for the dismal, netherworld realm of Haides.

“Easily I will tell you and I put it in your understanding. Any one of the perished dead you allow to come up to the blood will give you a true answear, but if you begrudge this to any one, he will return to the place where he came from” 

So speaking the soul of of the lord Teiresias went back into the house of Hades, once he had uttered his prophocies, while I waited steadily where I was standing untill my mother came and drank the dark-clouding blood, and at once she knew me, and full of manetations she spoke to me in winged words:

“My child how did you come here beneath the fog and the darkness and still alive? All this hard for a the living to look on, for in between like the great rivers and terrible waters, that flow, Ocean frist of all which there is no means of crossing on foot, not unless one has a well-made ship.”

I, pondering it in my heart, yet wished to take the soul of my dead mother in my arms. Three tims I started tword her, and my heart was urgent to hold her, and three times she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow or a dream, and the sorrow sharpend at the heart within me, and so I spoke to her and addressed her in winged words/

“Mother, why will you not wait for me when I am trying to hold you, so that even in Hades’ with our arms embracing we can both take the satisfaction of dismal mourning?” Or are you nothing but an image that proud Presphone sent my way, to make me grieve all the more for sorrow?”

So I spoke and my qeenly mother answere me quickly. “Oh my child, ill-rated beyond all other mortals, this is not Presephone , daughter of Zeus, beguiling you, but it is only what happens when they die, to all mortals. The sneiws no longer hold the flesh and the beones togehter, and one the spirit has left the bones all the restr of the body is made subject to the fire’s strong fury, you but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away. “

A couple of things that are intresting about the Greek underwrold, is that it is portrayed as a place in which one can physcial visit. It is part of the real world in someway still. And in the Greek tradidtion it is usually always through a body of water in which one must get there. Odeyssus from Homer is not the only story of a mortal whom had gone into the underworld. There are other heros whom have made the trip as well. Including Herculeus, and Orpheus whom I will dicuss more later.

The other intresting thing to note, is how Dante, in The Inferno, has borrowed so much from the Greek Hades, for his own discriptions of Hell.