Journeys to the Underworld

Almost every people that imagined death also imagined a place the dead go down to — and, more strangely, imagined someone going there and coming back. The descent to the underworld is one of the oldest and most widespread of all sacred stories, and where the traveller is weighed at the bottom, we can watch a civilization deciding what it thinks a good life is.

Seven gates, and a hook

The oldest descent we can read was written in Sumerian cuneiform more than four thousand years ago. Inanna, the queen of heaven, "set her heart upon the Great Below" and went down to the realm of her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the dead. At each of the underworld's seven gates the gatekeeper made her surrender one thing — her crown, her measuring rod, her necklace, her breastplate, her gold ring, her lapis beads, her royal robe — so that she arrived before her sister naked and bowed low, stripped of every mark of power. Ereshkigal fixed on her the eye of death, and Inanna was turned into a corpse and hung on a hook on the wall. She was rescued only by a trick of the god Enki — but the underworld does not give something for nothing, and she was released only on the condition that she send a substitute in her place. Her eye fell, coldly, on her own husband Dumuzi, who had not mourned her; and so the pattern of the dying and returning fertility god (the subject of ch01's companion theme) was set. The Akkadian version, The Descent of Ishtar, tells the same story, and adds the bleak Mesopotamian picture of the "land of no return," the "house whose dwellers are deprived of light, where dust is their food and clay their bread."

The Greek descent

The Greeks gave the journey its enduring name: katabasis, the "going down." Their heroes went into Hades and — unlike almost everyone else's dead — came back. Odysseus, in the Odyssey, performs a nekyia, summoning the shades at the edge of the world with a trench of blood to consult the prophet Teiresias. Heracles dragged the hound Cerberus up into the light as his final labour. Orpheus went down to win back his dead wife Eurydice with the sheer beauty of his music, and lost her at the last step by looking back — the most heartbreaking of all descent stories, and one echoed with uncanny closeness half a world away. And Aeneas, in Virgil, made the fullest journey of all, guided by the Sibyl past the ferryman Charon and the rivers of the dead to meet his father and see the souls waiting to be born. Beneath these hero-journeys lay the myth of Persephone, carried down by Hades and permitted to return for part of each year — the myth that made the seasons, and that stood at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries and their promise of a better lot for the initiated dead.

Egypt: the journey as the whole of religion

For the Egyptians the descent was not an occasional heroic feat but the destiny of everyone, and preparing for it was the great work of the culture. The dead travelled through the Duat, the underworld through which the sun-god himself sailed each night, doing battle with the serpent Apophis before rising reborn at dawn — so that every sunrise was a resurrection and a promise. To make the passage, the dead were equipped with the spells we call the Book of the Dead (its own title means "The Book of Coming Forth by Day"), the heir of the older Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts. Its climax is the most famous scene in the religion of the afterlife: the Weighing of the Heart, in which the heart of the dead is set on a balance against the feather of Maat, the goddess of truth and cosmic order. The dead recites the "negative confession" — a list of the sins not committed ("I have not stolen; I have not killed; I have not caused pain") — before a tribunal of forty-two gods. If the scales balance, the dead passes into the field of the blessed; if the heart is heavy with wrongdoing, it is thrown to the waiting monster Ammit, "the Devourer," part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, and the soul is annihilated. Here, earlier and more vividly than anywhere else, is the idea that death is a moral reckoning.

The judged and the un-judged

Not every underworld weighed its dead, and the difference is one of the most revealing in comparative religion. Where a tradition judges, the afterlife enforces the moral order of this life; where it does not, death is simply a place, entered by all alike.

• Zoroastrianism (ch06) sends every soul across the Chinvat bridge, the "bridge of the separator," which widens for the righteous and narrows to a knife-edge for the wicked, who fall into the house of the Lie — one of the earliest clear afterlife judgments, and a probable influence on later Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ideas.
• Tibetan Buddhism (ch53) maps the passage in the Bardo Thödol, the so-called "Tibetan Book of the Dead," a guide read aloud to the dying and the dead through the bardo, the intermediate state, where the deceased meets peaceful and wrathful visions — recognized as projections of one's own mind — before judgment by the lord of death Yama and rebirth or liberation.
• Chinese religion built a vast bureaucratic underworld, Diyu, with courts, magistrates, registers, and graded hells administering karmic punishment before rebirth — the afterlife imagined as an imperial government.
• Against all these stand the un-judged underworlds. The Mesopotamian "land of no return" and the Hebrew Sheol (in its older layers) were gloomy, undifferentiated pits where all the dead went down together, good and bad, to a dim half-existence. And the Norse Hel was, for the most part, simply where you went if you did not die in battle — no divine tribunal decided it; "a soul went wherever it went."

The god who goes down

A special and haunting form of the descent is the god or divine hero who enters death itself. The Japanese creator Izanagi followed his dead wife Izanami into Yomi, the land of the dead, and — like Orpheus — was forbidden to look at her; he looked, saw her corruption, and fled, sealing the entrance with a boulder as she vowed to kill a thousand of the living each day (and he to give life to fifteen hundred) — a myth that explains both death and birth. In Norse myth the beloved god Baldr dies and goes to Hel, and cannot be ransomed because one creature refuses to weep for him. And in Christianity the Harrowing of Hell holds that Christ, between his crucifixion and resurrection, descended to the realm of the dead to free the righteous souls held there since the beginning — the descent-and-return raised to the center of a world religion.

The believer's lens

For the traditions that told them, the stories of descent are maps for the soul. In Egypt the whole of religion prepared the dead for the journey: the spells of the Book of the Dead and the weighing of the heart against a feather. The Orphic initiate was buried with inscribed gold leaves to guide the way. The Tibetan reader of the Bardo Thödol speaks to the dead to guide them through the intermediate state. And the hero who goes down and returns (Inanna stripped at the seven gates, Orpheus, Aeneas, Christ harrowing hell) shows that death can be entered and overcome. Where the dead are judged, the underworld is where a life's deeds are finally weighed, so every such story is also a teaching about how to live. To those who hold them, these are not merely images: they say that death has a shape, a road and a destination, and that one can prepare for it.

The skeptical lens

The historian documents the descent as a genuine cross-cultural pattern with dated texts: Inanna's Descent and The Descent of Ishtar in cuneiform; the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts and Book of the Dead; Homer's nekyia and Virgil's katabasis; the Orphic gold leaves as physical objects; the Chinese Diyu, the Norse Hel and the Japanese Yomi. Striking parallels, above all Orpheus and Izanagi each looking back and losing the beloved, do not by themselves prove contact; independent invention is a live explanation. Some traditions judge the dead and others do not, and how much the judged afterlife of Judaism, Christianity and Islam owes to Persia is contested. Why the story is so universal (sleep and waking, the sun's nightly disappearance, initiation rites, or something in the mind) is an open question. None of these maps is evidence of what actually happens after death; they are evidence of what people held, and of what each civilisation thought a good life was.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The underworld journey is encoded in a small, remarkably stable set of symbols, found again and again across unconnected cultures.

• The gate and the threshold. The descent is a passage through barriers — Inanna's seven gates, the gates of Hades, the sealed boulder of Yomi. To die is to cross thresholds and be stripped at each; what remains at the bottom is the naked self.
• The river and the ferryman. A water-boundary divides the living from the dead — the Greek Styx and its ferryman Charon (still paid with a coin on the tongue of the corpse), the rivers of the Duat sailed by the solar barque. The dead must be carried across.
• The bridge and the scale. Where the afterlife judges, the instrument is a bridge that sorts by widening or narrowing (Zoroastrian, and later Islamic, Sirat) or a balance that weighs the heart (Egyptian). The moral life is imagined as weight and balance — the deep metaphor beneath "gravity" of sin and "lightness" of the pure heart.
• The map and the guidebook. Uniquely, several traditions wrote instructions for the dead — the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Bardo Thödol, the Orphic gold leaves buried with initiates in southern Italy and Crete, inscribed with directions ("you will find a spring on the left... do not drink; say to the guardians, I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven"). The afterlife as a country one could be given a map to is one of the most striking encodings in this archive.

Connections

This chapter runs beneath the whole book. Its descent-and-return is the twin of the flood (ch01) and the dying-and-returning god as engines of renewal; its judgment scene feeds directly into the apocalypse and last judgment of ch50. The bleak Sheol of pre-exilic Israel (ch07) and its transformation, under likely Zoroastrian (ch06) influence, into a judged afterlife with heaven and hell is a central thread of Second Temple Judaism (ch10), early Christianity (ch16), and Islam (ch21). The Egyptian Duat is the heart of the Egypt chapter (ch02); the Greek katabasis and its mystery-cult promise belong to early and classical Greece (ch08); the bardo to Tibetan Buddhism (ch53). The underworld is where every tradition finally says what it believes a human being is.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch47.html · a comparative library of the sacred.