THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL
NO PART OF IT MAY BE REPRODUCED
WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR
This is Part 2 of an 11-Part Series
Extracted from Chapter Two of my book The Seven Gates of Soul
Previous posts in this series include:
The Fear of Death in Early Cultures
The Fear of the Soul’s Journey After Death
The dead needed to be persuaded, shall we say, to leave their former stomping grounds, if not rudely booted on their way, because the journey across the barrier between the dead and the living was often conceptualized as an arduous and dangerous undertaking. Egyptian funerary texts describe the journey to the next world as a treacherous ordeal, involving encounters with horrific monsters, burning lakes, locked gates opened only by magic, and a host of other sinister obstacles ("Rites and Ceremonies," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 26, p. 806). The Greeks and Romans believed that the dead were carried across the poisonous river, Styx, by a fiendish boatman called Charon, in exchange for a coin, which was placed in the mouth of the corpse (Stephen H. Harris, Classical Mythology: Images & Insights, 3rd Ed., pp. 249-250). A treacherous journey across a bridge, often over water to get to the land of the dead is a common image occurring across a wide range of diverse cultural traditions – in the Cinvat Bridge in Zoroastrianism (Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 1, p. 330), the Bifrost of Eddic lore (Kveldulf Gundarsson, Teutonic Magic: The Magical & Spiritual Practices of the Germanic Peoples, p. 2), the Sirãt Bridge of the Muslims, the Bridge over the Gtöll River of Scandinavian mythology, and even in the Brig o’ Dread or Brig o’ Death in Christian folklore ("Rites and Ceremonies," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 26, p. 805).
The depiction of these journeys reflects a common fear for the grim experience that was believed to await the dead in their next life, and on their way to it. Not only was the journey dangerous, but the final destination was no ideal vacation spa, much less the sort of place where the dead might want to spend eternity. For some, like the early Arabs before Mohammed, there was literally no place for the dead to go. Only the ghosts of slain men lingered after death, and then just long enough to seek revenge against those who had killed them (Willard G. Oxtoby, World Religions: Western Traditions, p. 343). According to early Mesopotamian traditions, all the dead were banished to a grim and hopeless place called Kur-nu-gi-a (the Land of No Return) ("Rites and Ceremonies," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 26, p. 806), where they were forced to live in darkness and eat clay (Barry B. Powell, Classical Myth, p. 48). The underworld of classical Judaism was called Sheol, “the land of deepest gloom; a land whose light is darkness, all gloom and disarray” (Job 10:21). In Sheol, the good and wicked alike shared a common fate, in which nothing at all happened (Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 1, p. 260). Since this was literally inconceivable, its absolute finality was quite frightening. The early Greek underworld, as described by Eliade, sounds like a prison camp. Hades, he says, was “a musty world clad in darkness, a place odious to mortals and immortals alike,... (a) country without laughter or sunshine, where all are obliged to make their way sooner or later.... As soon as the new arrivals cross the dismal threshold, Hades (the Lord of the Underworld) locks the gates, and his agents, who never sleep, prevent any attempt at escape” ("Hades," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 6:143).