Prepare to descend into the underworld and experience the story as the ancients heard it. This is the truth behind the myth of Hades. In a lush green pasture a beautiful young woman picks flowers. Her name is Persephone and she is being watched.
In Greek mythology, when a young maiden is plucking flowers in the meadow something bad is about to happen. Suddenly the ground breaks open. An unseen hand reaches up from the darkness and drags her down into the underworld.
Hades, god of the dead has chosen his queen. Hades is ythology's warden of death. He commands the vast and frightening realm that all mortals, good and bad, must enter when they die. It is his job to make sure they never escape. He is the god of the dead and none of us want to die. He is to be feared. His power is awesome. The Greeks wanted nothing to do with Hades because to know him is to be dead.
The Greeks tended not to depict or represent Hades. There are not temples built to him. He's someone that is kept at arm's length like a kind of uncle whose business you're not sure about and don't want to talk about too much. The main idea is that for the ancient Greeks to be dead is not a very good thing. The myth of Hades was created to make sense of what happens after we die.
These stories reflect human yearning to hold on. We can see in them how the Greeks thought about death, what their hopes and fears were about death. A lot of religious traditions try and supply a way in which your existence can continue in the next world. And Greek religious traditions are no different.
According to the myth, dead souls enter a vast and gloomy underworld. A realm named after its master, Hades. It is the ancient Greek equivalent of heaven, hell and limbo, all under one roof. We, in a Christian context, think that what happens to you after your death has to do with what you've done here on earth.
If you've been a good person, then you go to heaven. If you've been a bad person you go to hell. For the Greeks, those places were all located in one place, they were all the underworld. It's the one place we can't ever see. We can make up stories about what might be going on there, the great punishments that are occurring or the terrible things that might be happening, but we never know so we continue to wonder.
In the myth there are three levels of Hades. Most of the dead descend to the fields of Asphodel, the dreary resting place of the nameless masses. The fate of the average person in the underworld is just to have to wander around a grey shade and live a not very exciting or interesting life. It's a kind of sad place to be.
It's sort of like the Catholic conception of limbo. A sort of twilight place, quiet and peaceful but full of mourning trees, where the soul would simply wander aimlessly. And then there is the place reserved for those who've most offended the gods. A vast abyss, 40,000 miles deep. A dungeon of suffering and eternal torment surrounded by a flaming river.
This is Tartarus. The souls of very bad people would be sent to Tartarus, which is quite like the Christian conception of hell. In fact, Tartarus was so closely linked with hell by the early Christians that it was even mentioned in the New Testament.
It appears in a verbal form in the Second Epistle of Peter having to do with people being thrown into Tartarus. Then there were a few who were terribly wicked who were punished in Tartarus. And that I think is the origin of what Christians know as Hell. For the fortunate few, paradise awaits in the third realm of Hades, the islands of the blessed, the ancient Greek equivalent of heaven.
Everything grows by itself and you can eat your field with no work, there is absolutely no work. There is constant rejoicing, there are round dances, there are streams and there is pure friendship. That was where famous and glorious people would spend the rest of their lives.
In the myth, all human beings must eventually succumb to Hades' command. For some, that day comes far too soon. Hades has kidnapped a young maiden named Persephone.
He holds her captive in the underworld. Hades has taken her away to his realm to be his wife forever.
But Persephone is not forgotten. In the world above, her powerful mother is searching for her. She is Demeter, goddess of the harvest, the woman who feeds the world. This is one myth that defines one of the most central aspects of the universe.
Demeter is able to destroy human kind. She can rip the world apart. The ancient Greeks believed Demeter was responsible for the changing of the seasons. And that Persephone's disappearance started the cycle. She didn't know what had happened to her daughter, so she wandered the earth and in her grief at the loss of her daughter she forgot to give
fertility to the land.
So plants withered and died, human beings no longer gave birth, the earth descended into the deepest of winters. Faced with the prospect of an endless frost, the other gods command Hades to return Persephone.
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