Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [102]
Unlike the later Christian version of hell, Hades was not originally a place of terror, but a hilly landscape, dotted with trees and flowing with rivers. One of these was the River Lethe, or Oblivion, where the events of life could be forgotten. In later Greek traditions, some of the dead went to the Elysian Fields, a paradise reserved for the distinguished, and to the Fields of Asphodel, where most souls wandered in the gloom, looking for flowers.
But then there was also Erebus, one of the original elements of the Creation, which was a region of the deep, dark Tartarus, reserved for the grossest sinners who had violated some divine law or otherwise crossed Zeus. One of these was a king named Tantalus, who commited the cardinal sin of talking about having once dined with the gods, or, in another version of the myth, having cooked his own son and served him to the gods to see if they could detect this forbidden food. This mythic moment may mark the rejection of both cannibalism and human sacrifice. For his crime, Tantalus was sentenced to stand in a pool of water, which drained away when he tried to drink, and with fruit dangling before his eyes, which was whisked away as soon as he reached to eat it. Tantalus was, in other words, eternally “tantalized.”
The other famed denizen of Tartarus was Sisyphus, a clever king and founder of Corinth, who saw Zeus seduce a nymph and made the mistake of talking about it. Angry at Sisyphus for revealing his secret, Zeus told Thanatos to capture Sisyphus and place him in chains. But Sisyphus pulled a very old trick by convincing Thanatos to demonstrate how to put the chains on himself. With Thanatos out of action, “death takes a holiday,” and no one could die in the land of mortals. Upset that nobody was dying in battle, the war god Ares stepped in, killing Sisyphus and freeing Thanatos.
But Sisyphus had one more trick up his sleeve. He had earlier instructed his wife not to bury him if he died. Since he hadn’t been buried, he convinced Persephone that he shouldn’t be in Hades, and she freed him, supposedly to attend his own funeral. Realizing that the gods had been tricked once more, Hades dragged Sisyphus back to the underworld, where three judges of the dead ordered his punishment. He was forced to push a boulder up a hill. Every time he reached the top, the stone would roll back down again, and Sisyphus had to start again—pushing the same stone up the hill for all eternity. The story of Sisyphus was converted into one of the great twentieth-century allegories of existentialism by Albert Camus, who saw the plight of modern man in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Camus wrote, “The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.”
The only mortal to defeat Hades and death was the fabled singer Orpheus, whose songs had supernatural powers. When his beloved wife, Eurydice, dies of a snakebite, Orpheus descends to the underworld and enchants Hades and Persephone with his singing. They allow Eurydice to leave, only Orpheus is instructed not to look back at her before leaving the underworld. But Orpheus can’t resist a backward glance at his beloved, and she is lost forever.
Hephaestus (Vulcan) God of fire, blacksmiths, and metalwork, Hephaestus is the son of Hera, and something of a trickster god, a typical role for gods of smiths and crafts in other mythologies as well. The identity of his father is a mystery, and at birth, he is dwarfish and disfigured with a limp, so his mother, Hera, throws him from Mount Olympus, and he falls into the sea. Another version blames Zeus, angry at apparently being cuckolded, for throwing Hephaestus into the sea, which cripples him.
Raised for years in a cave by nymphs who teach him the arts of metalwork, Hephaestus creates a magical golden throne as a gift for his mother. As soon as Hera sits in it, she is trapped in a fine golden mesh. Hephaestus only agrees to release her when Dionysus, the god of wine, gets him drunk and brings him back to Olympus. Hephaestus