summary
- The ancient Greeks believed in life after death and that the souls of the dead moved on from the world of the living to an underworld ruled by the god Hades.
- People were buried with a coin in their mouth to pay the ferryman Charon to take them across the River Styx to Hades, where they were greeted by Hades, his wife Persephone, the guard dog Cerberus, and other chthonic deities.
- In ancient times, Hades was characterized as a gloomy realm where all the dead dwelled, heroes alongside villains and kings alongside peasants.
- Over time, the idea of judgement and people being separated into different afterlives based on their lives emerged. The Elysian Fields were for the good, and Tartarus for the wicked.
- Rituals such as the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic Mysteries were designed to help people achieve the best possible afterlife.
Like most world religions, the ancient Greeks did not believe that death was the end. Greek mythology includes a concept of life after death, with the soul separating from the body and passing into the Greek underworld, ruled by the Greek god Hades, also often referred to as Hades. It seems that in ancient times, Hades was a realm of murky darkness where all the dead lived side by side. Over time, the idea of a person’s actions in life being judged to determine their place in the afterlife emerged, an idea that influenced later Christian and Islamic ideas about the afterlife. Let’s take a closer look at what the ancient Greeks thought about life after death.
The Contradictions of the Greek Underworld
According to Greek myth, the world of mortal men sat below the heavens, ruled by the Olympian gods, and above the underworld, ruled by Hades, and also called Hades, which is located at the edges of the ocean and under the deepest depths of the Earth.
Homer’s Odyssey, written around the 7th century CE, presents Hades as a realm of gloom and darkness, solely inhabited by the dead, and all the dead, from great heroes to lowly peasants, are there together. In Homer’s Odyssey, even the spirit of the great warrior Achilles in the underworld tells Odysseus that he would rather be subjugated as a landless slave than be the king of the underworld due to the dreary existence in the land of the dead.
Nonetheless, Greek mythology stresses respect for the dead due to the belief in the continued existence of the fallen after their spirit has passed on. In the 4th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Plato asserted that the gods’ biggest reward to the dead is to have their memory remain in the minds of the living long after they are gone.
Burial Rituals in Ancient Greece
Once a Greek man or woman passed away, their families washed their bodies and placed a coin inside their mouth as payment for the spiritual ferryman Charon, who carried the bodies’ spirits across the river Styx into the underworld.
During the burial, valuable objects such as pottery, coins, and jewelry were buried alongside the dead as gifts for them to use in the underworld.
Families of the deceased visited these tombs annually to make offerings and refresh the tomb decorations. This ritual stemmed not only out of respect but also from the fear that the dead brought bad luck if the family did not pay tribute to them regularly.
The Soul’s Journey After Burial
The Greeks believed that after the burial, Hermes, the god of trade, travelers, and merchants, led the soul to the entrance of the underworld to a ferry that carried the spirit across the River Acheron (river of woe) and/or Styx (river of hate), depending on the source. These two rivers divided the world of the living from the underworld proper.
Charon, sometimes called the Ferryman, rowed the boat. Only souls who paid him the boat fare with coins, placed on the eyes or under the tongue of the corpse during burial, could gain access to the ferry. Those unable to pay the fare remained trapped between the world of the living and the dead.
The journey into the underworld is described in many surviving Greek myths. Some of Greece’s greatest heroes, such as Heracles and Theseus, even traveled down into the underworld and then returned to the realm of the living.
Hades’ Underworld
The gods that resided in the underworld were known as chthonic deities. The most important deities of the underworld were Hades and Persephone. Persephone was a goddess of fertility who was kidnapped by Hades to be his wife. This devastated her mother, Demeter, another fertility deity, who neglected the fertility of the world in her sorrow. In order to restore balance, it was agreed that Persephone would spend half the year in Hades and half the year with Demeter, explaining the seasons.
There were also many minor deities living in the underworld, including the Furies (Erinyes), the divine personification of death (Thanatos), his twin brother, the god of sleep (Hypnos), and the goddess of the night (Nyx). One of the underworld’s most famous inhabitants was Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the dead.
A notable aspect of the underworld was its rivers. The ancient sources typically mention five rivers: the River Styx, the River Acheron, the River Phlegethon, the River Cocytus, and the River Lethe.
The underworld consisted of various realms ruled by Hades and his wife, Persephone. In some sources, Elysian Fields resembled a Greek pagan version of the Christian Heaven, where good spirits whose lives were etched into the memories of the living began a bright new state of existence. Wicked spirits were condemned to the dark pits of Tartarus. These spirits either overindulged in their carnal desires or lived more for earthly pleasures than spiritual fulfillment during their earthly life. Forgotten spirits who did not significantly impact the lives of others were sent to the Land of Hades, where they wandered for all eternity.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were an initiation cult with rituals based on the story of the abduction of Persephone and focused both on the cycle of life, death, and renewal, and on how to ensure the best possible position in the afterlife.
Orpheus, the Orphics, and the Orphic Tablets
The Orphics were a sect within Greek religion with a different system of beliefs and rites. The Orphics believed that their rites were created by the legendary poet Orpheus. In Greek Mythology, Orpheus visited the underworld to claim the soul of his deceased wife, Eurydice. Enchanted by his music, Persephone allowed Orpheus to take Eurydice with him, but under one condition: Orpheus would have to lead the way and not look back until they were back to the living. If he looked back, Eurydice would return to the underworld forever. Suspicious of the silence behind him, Orpheus eventually succumbed to the desire and turned back, only to see the spirit of Eurydice being drawn back to the depths of Hades’ realm.
The Orphic religion centered around the cult of Dionysus, and more specifically, the myth of Dionysus being torn apart by the Titans. In the myth, the Titans devour Dionysus, and Zeus punishes them with his thunderbolt for their sin. From the ashes, the first humans are created. As a result, each human is made of two parts: the material that is connected with the Titans, and the soul, connected with Dionysus. The Orphics sought to purify their bodies of the guilt they carried for eating Dionysus. They believed that if they succeeded, they’d spend eternity next to Orpheus and other heroes in the afterlife. The uninitiated would be reincarnated.
Particularly interesting are the Orphic tablets. These tablets were buried with followers of Orphism and offered instructions to the deceased. It seems that if the dead could follow the instructions, they could successfully navigate the afterlife.
The Afterlife in Greek Mythology vs. Abrahamic Religions
The concept of an afterlife is not unique to Greek mythology. Most religions have some sort of belief in a soul and what happens to your essence when you die.
The Christian bible exhorts believers to make all their decisions during life based on what will happen to their soul in the afterlife. Jesus Christ maintained that there will come a time when all the virtuous dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and leave their tombs as spirits to be physically resurrected.
Islamists believe God either grants admission into eternal paradise, Jannah, earned through good deeds and unwavering faith in the existence of Allah, or combines the soul to Jahannam, the Muslim version of hell. Evildoers condemned to Jahannam suffer spiritual and physical agony for all eternity.
The common theme among all three religions, the ancient Greek beliefs, Christianity, and Islam, centers on the belief that the soul never dies. Your actions in life decide your conditions in the afterlife.
Modern Views on Life after Death
Both philosophers and scientists have been trying to decipher the secrets of what happens to us after we die for millennia, but we still have no empirical evidence to throw light on the question of the afterlife. Nonetheless, most modern belief systems contain a belief that death is not the end and is just a moment of transformation in our longer journey.
