Cronus swallowed it instead, allowing Zeus to grow to maturity. Instead of giving Cronus the baby, Rhea swaddled a rock. This act of swallowing his children continued until Rhea gave birth to his brother Zeus. He ate them whole to prevent that prophecy from happening. The Titan god feared that one of his offspring would take his throne. But like his siblings before him, Hades was swallowed by Cronus upon birth. He was born after Hestia, Demeter, and Hera. Though he was born at the same time and shared the same lineage as the other Olympian guardians, his realm was far below Mount Olympus. The god was a brother to the Twelve Olympian gods. If they did, many were referring to his realm, which many called “Hades” as well. In ancient Greece, few dared to utter his name. Hades is the god of the Underworld and the dead. Either way, the realm was separate from the land of the living, and one god resided over it. In “The Iliad,” the Underworld dominion was between “Secret place on Earth.” However, the Homeric hymn, “The Odyssey,” described it as only accessible by crossing the ocean. Elysian Fields, also known as Elysium, was for heroes like Perseus and Achilles. Contrary to popular belief, humans didn’t go the Greek equivalent of heaven. The Underworld was a place where all human souls went after death. While they share similarities, most Greek portrayals of the afterlife involved a single place: The Underworld. After a while, because his proper name would not be spoken, Hades was referred to as Plouton, closely related to the Greek for “giver of wealth,” because he was thought to be responsible for the precious minerals found in the ground-he was thus venerated for a time as a god of wealth as well as a god of the Underworld.Ancient Greek depictions of the afterlife are far different from modern ideologies. Those who prayed to Hades would bang their hands or even their heads against the ground in order to get his attention, worshippers would avert their eyes or turn their whole heads away from statues and altars while making sacrifices of beautiful black animals, and special pits were dug in which the sacrificial blood was poured so that it would reach Hades more easily. Historical records indicate that though it did not happen as often as it did for other gods, Hades was, on occasion, ritually worshipped, and with a great deal of servile deference. Everyone else ended up in the Fields of Asphodel-a grey and uninteresting limbo where the shades of the average Joes and Janes wandered aimlessly for all eternity-or in Tartarus, where the evil were punished for their behavior in life by some truly creative methods of torture.Īrcheologists have found the ruins, located in the Greek town of Eleusis, of at least one temple that may have been dedicated to Hades and his queen, Persephone. The Underworld was a notoriously harsh place full of terrifying creatures like Cerberus, Hades’ three-headed guard dog, the grotesque Furies, and the Hekatonkheirs (giants which had one hundred hands and fifty heads), just to name a few and while the Underworld did include a paradise called the Elysian fields, that balmy and beautiful place was reserved for only the most heroic of figures. The Ancient Greeks in particular had a lot to fear from death. As ruler of the Underworld, he was heavily associated with death (though he is not Death incarnate-there was another god for that, named Thanatos), and your average mortal human isn’t usually comfortable thinking about death too seriously. On some level it’s easy to understand why Hades wasn’t very well liked as a god, or at least why the Ancient Greeks would have wanted to keep him at a distance. Top that off with the fact that most people were too afraid of him to worship him, and it seems like the eldest of the Olympians got a pretty rough deal. He drew the shortest stick, and therefore had to accept the twisted, dark, Underworld as his realm while his youngest brother became king of the gods and erected his kingdom in the sky. Normally, according to Greek law, the eldest brother (which in this case was Hades) would have been granted the biggest and best kingdom but Hades was cheated out of his rightful place and title as king of the gods by the drawing of lots (though it seems like an arbitrary system, it was a customary solution to difficult decision-making issues). After Zeus forced his father, Cronos, to disgorge Zeus’ brothers and sisters (whom he had swallowed in order to circumvent any threats to his power), and after Cronos’ children overthrew his rule as supreme god, Zeus and his two brothers-Poseidon and Hades-drew lots to decide which realms they would rule. All told, this may seem like just another example of Hades drawing the short stick-and in this case that’s not an idiom.
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