Underworld of the Dead

UNDERWORLD OF THE DEAD. - The underworld of the dead, designated by the term "Inferi" (Infernal regions), does not carry the idea of a dark place of punishment, as might appear from its Christian acceptation, but rather, more generally, as a subterranean kingdom where souls gather after death, whether they deserve reward or punishment. The Infernal regions are depicted not only as a kingdom of darkness and sorrow, but also as a luminous kingdom of the blessed: a characteristic that is common to practically all ancient religions.

1. Among the Mesopotamians, Babylonians and Assyrians, the world of the dead, a dark place where nevertheless the water of life flows, is called arallù. One enters it through seven gates and it is governed by the divine pair Ere'kkigal and Allatu. A description of it is found in the poem of Gilgamesh (v.)

2. The Egyptians embellished the vision of their underworld. From the primitive belief that made the tomb the dwelling of the deceased, for whom it was necessary to provide whatever was needed for his shadowy life, they passed to conceiving the subterranean world (amenti) as a place where the soul, once it has reached the boat of the sun, having traversed the twelve divisions of the journey and immediately undergone the judgment of Osiris with his 42 judges, passes into the fields of Yaru (Earu) where a happy and everlasting dwelling is reserved for it.

3. Indo-Iranians

In the Vedic period of the Indian religion, heaven is exclusively the world of pious men, of heroes, etc., from which the reprobate are excluded (Rgveda, X, 17, 4). Alongside this belief there must have existed, even if explicit notices of it are lacking, that of an otherworld destined for the wicked. Indeed, while a Vedic ritual (Taiti, Arany, VI, 5, 13) says: "Before king Yama (the king of the dead)... men who here below were faithful to truth and those who lied are separated," the following passages may provide some proof of the belief in a subterranean kingdom for the souls of the wicked: "May Indra and Soma hurl the evildoers into the covered and closed cavern (cāura), into darkness..."; "May he be able to dwell beneath the three earths... who against us plots treachery" (Rgveda, VII, 104, 3 and 11); and again it is said of those "who lead a dissolute life like women who deceive their husbands, who are wicked and false and faithless, these have created this deep place for themselves" (ibid., IV, 4, 5). Moreover in the Atharva Veda (II, 14, 3), while it is wished for the wicked sorceress "that she may plunge into the depths of the infinite prison," there is a passage (V, 19, 3) that lingers to describe the sinner - who on earth has offended a brahman - seated among rivers of blood and eating his own hair; which could demonstrate the belief, in India, in an infernal world quite well defined, and perhaps very closely connected with that common to other Indo-European peoples (v. below).

Moreover the Avesta (which preserves many beliefs common to the Indo-Iranian period) has preserved a detailed description of the fate awaiting good and wicked souls: "The wicked, the evil princes... their souls will receive unclean food, and certainly they will go to inhabit the house of the Druj" (Yasna, 49, 11), and: "He who will have deceived the just man, for him later groans, a long dwelling in darkness, infected food and words of insult. Behold the world, O wicked, where your works and your religion lead you" (ibid., 31, 20).

Beyond this, in the Avesta a particular detail is preserved that will be found extensively developed especially in the Greek religion, that of the crossroads at which the soul must arrive when it has reached the afterlife: "Across the Civat bridge souls can direct themselves to heaven, or, if damned to hell, to the Druy" (ibid., 46, 11).

4. Greece

For the Greeks the afterlife, that is, the world of the Infernal regions which they call Hades (Αἰδῶς = the invisible) is a real world; indeed a kind of geography of it existed, with the description of roads, regions, rivers, etc., which, according to tradition, had been first fixed by Orpheus, on the occasion of his Katabasis (Olympiodorus, In Platonis Phaedonem comment., ed. W. Norvin, pp. 202-12) and which was undoubtedly made known to the initiates in the mysteries of Eleusis, as a viaticum for the afterlife ("O thrice blessed those mortals who after having contemplated these mysteries, will go to Hades: for they alone will be able to live there; for the others all will be torment": Sophocles, frg. 348, ed. Didot).

Hades, in turn, appears distinct from Tartarus, the prison of the dethroned gods (Il., VIII, 13 ff.) and from Erebus, the proper prison of the dead (cf. loc. cit., 368).

This world of shadows was not, however, entirely inaccessible to the living; beyond the already mentioned katabasis of Orpheus, see the Nekyia of Odysseus in the Odyssey (Od., XI), which served as a model for later ones. It could be accessed through certain caves or caverns, such as that of Cape Taenarum in Laconia, of Hermione in the Argolid, of Cumae in Italy, etc.

This kingdom of shadows consists of an immense subterranean cavern located in the West, at the boundaries of the Ocean (Homer, Il., XX, 61; Od., X, 506 ff.); and it is ruled by the pitiless Hades (or Pluto), later, together with his spouse Persephone (Il., IX, 457, 568).

It is separated from the world of the living by one or more great gates (also called the "gates of the Sun": Od., XXIV, 12), once crossed one arrives at the "meadow of asphodel" (Od., loc. cit. and XI, 539). This meadow - which is like the vestibule of Hades, and on which occurred the encounter of Odysseus, having descended to the Infernal regions, with Achilles (Od., loc. cit.) - in later age, when the conception of the afterlife as reward or punishment of souls became clearer to the Greek mind (v. below), was held to be the place of those who in life had been neither good nor wicked (cf. Lucian, De luctu, 9).

According to tradition, Orpheus had spoken of a single infernal river: the Styx, which appears in the most ancient strata of the Homeric epic; indeed in the Iliad (VIII, 369), to name the subterranean world, one swears by the river Styx. But later the rivers that traverse or encircle Hades become numerous, and in the Odyssey itself (VIII) one finds the Acheron, the Pyriphlegethon and the Cocytus.

The ferryman of these rivers is the old Charon of grave and calm appearance - the first mention of whom dates back to the 6th century (cf. Pausanias, X, 28, 1) - to whom the soul owed an obol for the ferry.

Guarding the Infernal regions, at the gate stands Cerberus, the dog, variously represented with a hundred, fifty or three heads, certainly known from high antiquity (the "dog of Hades" is alluded to in Il., VIII, 367; Od., XI, 623; named for the first time in Hesiod, Theog., 311).

The psyche, or vital breath, leaves man when he dies but is not extinguished by death; it, preserving the appearance of the dead, wanders without consciousness in the eternal night of Hades. It could, however, return to consciousness when it was offered to drink the blood of a sacrifice performed by the living, poured into a pit, in communication with the infernal world.

However, the belief in Hades as a reward or punishment for the souls of the departed must not have been foreign to the religion of Greece at a later stage, both because in Homer himself (Il., III, 279; XIX, 260), in solemn oaths, alongside the supreme gods the Erinyes are invoked, who punish perjurers beneath the earth; and because even in Homer (Od., XI) there is mention of the three Titans: Tityus, Sisyphus and Tantalus condemned in Hades to ever-renewing punishments; but above all because already in Hesiod (Erg., 287 ff.) and with greater detail in Pindar (frg. 129, 130B, in Plutarch, Consol. ad Apoll. 35; cf. Pindar, Olymp., 2, 56) one finds the tradition of the two paths — of Vice and of Virtue — which from the fork placed at the entrance of Hades can lead the one (to the left) to the places of torment of the gloomy Tartarus, where the Erinyes rage among various monsters; the other (to the right) instead to the pleasant and luminous Elysian fields, to an eternal joy of banquets, dances and flowers (cf. Aristophanes, in Koch, Comic. fragm., I, 517; the Elysian fields, at the borders of the Ocean, already known to Homer: Od., IV, 563-89). Contemporaneous with this conception of Hades must have arisen that of the souls which, led to the underworld by Hermes (called, for this function of his, Φυγοσωμικός = guide of souls; cf. Od., XXIV, 1 ff.), presented themselves to be examined and assigned to the most suitable place by an infernal judge.

5. Rome

The information concerning the most ancient Roman beliefs about the afterlife is quite scanty. An element with every probability truly indigenous and archaic is the one concerning the mundus (v.), which (cf. Festus, s. v.) was a pit dug in the ground, with a vaulted roof, into which only one person could lower himself. It was consecrated to the two infernal divinities Dis pater and Proserpina (corresponding to the Greek Pluto and Persephone), and the days on which it was opened were considered religious, that is, inauspicious, since then "it is as if the door of the sad and infernal gods were opened" (Macrobius, Sat., I, xvi, 18-19). So that it is perhaps not rash to hold that this mundus, point of communication between the world of the living and the underworld, corresponded precisely to those caverns of Greek religion which gave access to the kingdom of the shades.

However, similar places existed elsewhere as well; in fact near Cumae, on the shores of Lake Avernus, a cave — which Virgil (Aen., VI, 126) defines as "ianua Ditis" — led directly into the infernal region.

This kingdom the Romans called Orcus (= Orcus, which is also the name of the infernal god; cf. the Greek Hades), and its economy was described quite late and almost entirely by retracing Greek models (for the sources, v. Ennius, ap. Lucret., I, 117 ff. and ap. Lactant., I, 14; Lucretius, VI, 762 ff.; III, 1036 etc.; Apuleius, Metam., VI, 18 ff.; Silius Italicus, XIII lib.; but above all Virgil, Aen., VI and the short poem Culex).

From the Etruscans, on the other hand, it seems that the Romans drew the concept of Acheron (Acherunt), which until Lucretius had the meaning of underworld, and only later was the name of the infernal river. The Roman Charon too is certainly inspired by the analogous Etruscan figure more than by the Greek one.

6. Etruscans

Very little can be said about the conceptions of the afterlife among the Etruscans, of whom is known, only through some fleeting citation of Latin authors, the existence of the Libri Acheruntici, in which in all probability all their otherworldly beliefs were collected.

However, as far as can be judged from archaeology, they drew very much from the Greeks for their beliefs about the afterlife. Thus, in the first place the very name of the infernal world, by them probably called: axrum, which would derive from the Greek Ἀχέρων (= Hades), Eita and Persipnai (= Hades and Persephone), Turmi Altai (= Etruscan psychopompos) who accompanies the hindial, that is the psyche, the demon Culfu (a type of Erinys with a torch and a sword in hand) guarding the entrance of the kingdom of the dead.

Xaru, corresponding to Charon, on the other hand, by his terrible appearance, often winged, armed with a large mallet with which he strikes the souls, appears quite different from the solemn Greek Charon. Beside him often appears the other demon Tuxulxa, and, among the other infernal divinities, one should remember Leind, goddess of death, Mean who in the mirror of Perugia crowns Hercle as victor over Cerberus; Krankru instead, an infernal animal, is a feline or wolf with long stag's horns.

7. Germans and Balto-Slavs

From Herodotus (IV, 94 ff.) it is known that the Thracians believed that their god Zalmoxis every three years returned to earth from the subterranean dwelling and that he himself in life had built it.

Among the Germanic peoples one finds Hel, the sad subterranean place that received, for expiation, the souls of the dead and which was reached through a long journey; Hel at the same time was the goddess of death and of the infernal world (cf. the Greek Hades, and the Latin Orcus).

Tuonela was the subterranean kingdom for the Finns, and Porgu for the Estonians, who believed they could reach it through the opening of a cavern.

9. The Underworld in ethnology

A belief very widespread also among primitives is that of another infernal world, dark and undesirable, where the spirits of the wicked expiate their faults (South America: Matacos, Muyscas, Patagonians, etc.; Mexicans) and which is reached by crossing a river or the sea accompanied by a ferryman (Fijians; New Guinea). Quite often, however, this infernal kingdom is also a luminous and happy kingdom as befits men of high rank, and for those fallen in battle (Polynesia and tribes of North America).

Finally, one must remember the belief, so widespread, according to which the infernal world can be accessed through the opening of certain caverns (among the Kai, the Tami, Nilotics, etc.). Thus, a population of Cushites (North Africa) narrates of an old woman who, taken by the hand by the divinity, was led before the mouth of a cave, which was the entrance of hell; having descended below she saw various men and women who were expiating punishments. Then continuing she arrived at a country "where the sky was very close to the ground" and where everything was green, abundance and serenity.

Cesare D'Onofrio