![]() ![]() In the Odyssey the seer Tiresias is the only one who has retained his consciousness and judgment, and this as an exceptional gift of Persephone. The ghosts of the dead were in ancient times conceived as incorporeal images of their former selves, without mind or consciousness. He is friendly to the spirits who enter, but if anyone tries to got out he seizes him and holds him fast. He is a terrible monster with three heads, and mane and tail of snakes. At the gate lies the dog Cerberus, son of Typhaon and Echidna. In Homer it is the spirits themselves who refuse to receive any one to whom funeral honours have not been paid. ![]() Charon has the right to refuse a passage to souls whose bodies have not been duly buried. The souls are brought down from the upper world by Hermes, and pay the ferryman an obolos, which was put for this purpose into the mouths of the dead. This was Charon, the son of Erebos and of Nyx, a gloomy, sullen old man, who takes the souls in his boat across Acheron into the realm of shadows. The lower world once conceived as separated from the upper by these rivers, the idea of a ferryman arose. In the waters of Lethe the souls of the dead drink forgetfulness of their earthly existence. In the post-Homeric legend, these rivers are represented as surrounding the infernal regions, and another river appears with them, that of Lethe, or oblivion. The last two unite and join the waters of the Acheron. The lower world of Homer is intersected by great rivers, the Styx, the Acheron (river of woe), Cocytus (river of cries), a branch of the Styx, Phlegethon and Pyriphlegethon (rivers of fire). Such places were Hermione and the promontory of Taenarum in the Peloponnese, Heraclea on the Euxine, and Cumae in Italy, where the mythical Cimmerli were also localized. In later times entrances to the lower world were imagined in other places where there were cavernous hollows which looked as if they led into the bowels of the earth. The actual abode of the subterranean powers is Erebos, or the impenetrable darkness. The soil of this court, and indeed of the lower world in general, is a meadow of asphodel, an unattractive weed of dreary aspect usually planted on graves. Here is the abode of the Cimmerians, veiled in darkness and cloud where the sun never shines. Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /In the Odyssey, its entrance and outer court are on the western side of the river Oceanus, in the ground sacred to Persephone, with its grove of barren willows and poplars. ![]()
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