Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/564

532 BOOK Olympos. Zeus then, as Hades, is simply the unseen, or the being who can make himself as well as others invisible. As such, he wears the invisible cap or helmet, which appears as the tarn-kappe or nebel-kappe of Teutonic legends. This cap he bestows on Hermes, who is thus enabled to enter unseen the Gorgons' dwelling, and escape the pursuit of the angry sisters. But his home is also the bourne to which all the children of men must come, and from which no traveller returns ; and thus he becomes the host who must receive all under his roof, and whom it is best therefore to invoke as one who will give them a kindly welcome, — in other words, as Polydektes, Polydegmon, or Pankoites, the hospitable one who will assign to every man his place of repose. Still, none may ever forget the awful character of the gate-keeper (TruXaprr;?) ^ of the lower world. He must be addressed, not as Hades the unseen, but as Plouton the wealthy, the Kuvera of the Ramayana ; and the averted face of the man who offered sacrifice to him may recall to our minds the horrid rites of the devil-worshippers of the Lebanon.^

The Rivers Hades, then, in the definite authority assigned to him after the seen" Land ^^^ "^^^^ ^^^ Titans, is the only being who is regarded as the lord who remains always in his dismal kingdom, for Persephone, who shares his throne, returns for half the year as Kore to gladden the hearts of men, and Zagreos, Adonis, and Dionysos are also beings over whom the prince of darkness has no permanent dominion. Of the geography of this land of the dead we need say little more than that it is no genuine growth of mythology. It was easy for poets and mythographers, when they had once started with the idea of a gloomy land watered with rivers of woe, to place Styx, the stream which makes men shudder, as the boundary which separates it from

' These are the gates of the walls of the light. The Christian world has built by Poseidon, which all the dead chosen to misconstrue the phrase, and must enter, and within which lie the endless wars, turning on theories of realms of darkness. In the Iliad and Primacy, Indefectibility, and Infalli- Odyssey irvXai "AiSov, "AiSov Swfia are, bility, have been the result, with others, familiar phrases. Jacobi, * Like Hermes, and Herakles, J]/vt/!o/o^ie, s.v. Hades. The same idea Hades has also assumed a burlesque is found in Attic tragedy, Hkw vfKpHu form, as in the German story of Old Kivdfxwva Kol oicJtov iTvas tirwi', Eur. Rinkrank, who dwells in a great cave I/ek. i. A//c. 127, and in the gates of into which the King's daugiiier falls the Semitic Sheol which Hezekiah in the mountain of glass (ice). The dreaded to enter. These gates are to unwilling wife contrives to catch his be assaulted by the Church to which beard in a door, and refuses to let it Jesus committed the work of the world's free until he gives her the ladder by salvation, and are by it to be finally which he climbs out of the mountain battered down, — the words oii kuti^xv- depths into the open air. Thus es- (TovTiv auTTjs denoting only that they caping, she returns with her heavenly will not be strong enough to resist the lover, and despoils Rinkrank (Plouton) attacks made on them by the children of all his treasures.