Ancient Greeks have a vast collection of gods and stories in their religion. They believed that death is not the end of the soul. Following a person dying, their soul leaves through an exhale or a little puff of wind. Hermes, known as the messenger of the Olympian gods, led the soul to the entrance of the underworld (Art, 2003). There they would wait for the ferry to carry them across the river Styx. The ferry was rowed by Charon. He was tasked with taking the souls of the dead to the gates of the underworld. The Cerberus, a three-headed dog, guarded the gates, making sure that the souls who went in did not leave. Three judges, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, would give a sentence based on their previous life. This sentence decided what region of the underworld the soul would inhabit. (The Underworld, 2019)
Ancient Greeks describe the underworld as a sunless place where the dead go. The early writers said the underworld is one place, that, “All souls, regardless of how exemplary or dishonorable their earthly lives might have been, ended up in the same place after death.”. Later writings, such as the Odyssey, Iliad, and Aeneid, suggest the existence of at least 4 regions of the Underworld each serving a different function. These regions are named Tartarus, The Fields of Mourning, The Asphodel Meadows, and The Elysian Fields. The underworld also has 5 rivers that are named the Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon, and Lethe. The Styx is the river of hatred and unbreakable oaths. It circles the Underworld seven times. Acheron is the river of sorrow and pain. Cocytus is the river of lamentation and wailing. Phlegethon is the river of fire that leads to Tartarus where the worst people go. Lethe is the river of oblivion and forgetfulness where dead souls can drink to forget their life. It is said that it is a place where the soul prepares for reincarnation. Most ordinary people go to the Asphodel Meadows while only the best reside in the Elysian Fields. Souls that inhabit the Fields of Mourning are those who were hurt by love. (The Underworld, 2019)
Works Cited
The Underworld. (2019, November 5). Retrieved November 5, 2019, from https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Places/The_Underworld/the_underworld.html
Art, A. D. of G. and R. (2003, October). Death, Burial, and the Afterlife in Ancient Greece | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved November 5, 2019, from https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dbag/hd_dbag.htm
One of the first vampire like creatures is from a Greek myth. The Greek gods always seem to be creating monsters and mayhem. This is no less true for Zeus. During a messy love affair that Zeus has with Princess Lamia [ley-mee-uh] , his jealous wife ends up capturing and killing all of the Princesses children.
Lamia takes her revenge by stealing the babies of mortals and sucking the life out of them. This myth, like any other, changes throughout time. In a later version, Lamia evolves into a " legion of unearthly beings with the upper body of a woman and lower shapes of a serpent." These creatures were called lamaie [ley-mee-ee] and they sucked blood of children and could alter what they looked like so they could seduce men to lead them to their death.
The main lesson of this myth....don't cheat on your spouse.
In the story of Cupid and Psyche, the goddess of love, Venus, was decidedly jealous of Psyche's beauty. This jealousy leads her to order Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with the evilest man but Cupid fell in love with her and married her. She was lonely because he would only visit at night. She was told that she can never look at him because if she did their child would be mortal.
One night she looked at him while he was sleeping and he woke up and ran away. She searched for him and on her journey she was enslaved at Venuses palace. In the palace, she was given a task to bring a box of beauty from the goddess of the underworld. Against the advice given to her when the task began, she opened the box and fell into a death-like sleep. Sorta like sleeping beauty. She was brought back from the death-like sleep by Cupid and gained immortality.
When you here about Pandora what do you automatically think of? Her box right? Pandora is a Greek mythology story where a god fashioned the first mortal woman out of clay. She had something and that something was said to have contained evil spirits and misery. That something was a jar. Not a box.
You are probably wondering, how did it change from a jar to a box? Well, in the 16th century there was a man named Desiderius Erasmus, who painted an interpretation of Pandora with a box instead of a jar. People aren't sure whether he misinterpreted the Greek or confused it with the box in the story of Cupid and Psyche.
Think of this jar-box transition as a long game of telephone. I don't know about you but with my OCD like tendencies, I tend to get annoyed when people say box instead of a jar. I hate to say it but, Pandora's box does have a better ring to it.
Encyclopedia Britannica. (2019). Pandora | Greek mythology. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pandora-Greek-mythology [Accessed 5 Jun. 2019].
