Epona on the paths of the dead. Funeral stele from ancient Gaul
-*-
Akhilleus:
“I’d rather slave on earth for another man -
Some dirt-poor tenant
farmer who scrapes to keep alive -
Than rule down here over
all the
breathless dead."
Odyssey Book
IX
The hero of the Iliad
drained of his life blood,
So a Greek view of the
Land of the Dead,
The shades no more than
that - shadows
Of their living selves,
dwellers neither in
Paradise nor any place
of horrific torture
Beyond the emptiness of
their deaths.
Odysseus feeds them
blood to bring them
Into his living world,
but soon again they fade.
Some Greeks thought the
druids of the Keltoi
Had no Land of the Dead,
believing instead
In reincarnation,
reviving from death as
One or more others, a
creaturely exchange
Of life for life, or
lives - anything that dies
Becoming again and again
in one world.
-*-
[the Gauls] “do not fear
death …..
the human spirit is
immortal and will enter a new body”
Diodorus Siculus
For the Greeks numphai
live in forests, groves,
Rivers, streams and
springs of our world.
For Brythons there is
the Otherworld - Annwfn
From which otherness
comes to us,
And returns.
The Otherworld’s a world within world,
Without world, a
not-world (that negative
Does not deny but
asserts a presence)
But animate life is
eternal in Thisworld,
Before and after.
What then of our many dead,
Passing on roads of
transformation, re-configuration?
Here a present life
continues to know itself absolutely,
Uniquely, not
recognising past or future selves
Though they share a time
that is Forever
With a sense of an also
world that is Other.
-*-
It is not possible to be
absolute about what was believed in a particular place
and time, let alone in the wider arcs of space and
time encompassed by ‘the Greeks’, ‘the Celts’ etc.
Certainly, centuries after Homer, and far longer still
after the origins of the stories from which he
distilled his poem, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras
advanced the theory of metempsychosis, or the
transmigration of souls to new physical bodies. Even
the Odyssey, with its vivid portrayal of the
Greek Land of the Dead in Book IX, also tells us in
Book XXIV, where this land is revisited, that Hermes,
leading the ghosts of the dead with his golden wand,
“charms the eyes of men or wakens those he will”. But
the main thrust of the historic heritage of such
belief sees the Greek Land of the Dead as a place of
gloom which transmutes and becomes overlain over time
into later views and of the nature of Hell in the
Middle Ages. The Celtic Otherworld, by comparison,
though sometimes viewed as an Underworld, seems to
originate in a quite different sense of a parallel
realm to that of everyday between which exchanges are
possible and, indeed, often occur.
