Thus much I may notice now; when I come to examine more closely the ancient worship of these goddesses, I shall argue that the idea of a marriage-union between them and human kind was the most intimate secret of the mysteries, and that in such folk-*tales as those which I have here mentioned is contained the germ of a religious conception from which was once evolved the holiest of ancient sacraments.
§ 6. Charon.
There is no ancient deity whose name is so frequently on the lips of the modern peasant as that of Charon. The forms which it has now assumed are two, [Greek: Charos] and [Greek: Charontas], analogous to the formations [Greek: geros] and [Greek: gerontas] from the ancient [Greek: gerôn]: for in late Greek at any rate the declension of [Greek: Charôn] followed that of [Greek: gerôn][1]. The two forms do not seem to belong to different modern dialects, for they often appear in close juxtaposition in the same folk-song. The shorter form however is the commoner in every-day speech, and I shall therefore employ it.
About Charos the peasants will always, according to my experience, converse freely. Neither superstitious awe nor fear of ridicule imposes any restraint. They feel perhaps that the existence of Charos is one of the stern facts which men must face; and even the more educated classes retain sometimes, I think, an instinctive fear of making light of his name, lest he should assert his reality. For Charos is Death. He is not now, what classical literature would have him to be, merely the ferryman of the Styx. He is the god of death and of the lower world.
Hades is no longer a person but a place, the realm over which Charos rules. But the change which has befallen the old monarch's name is the only change in the Greek conception of that realm. It is still called 'the lower world' ([Greek: ho katô kosmos] or [Greek: hê katô gê]), and even the name Tartarus (now [Greek: ta Tartara], with the addition frequently of [Greek: tês gês]) still may be heard. Nor is the character of the place altered. Its epithet 'icy-cold,'
- ↑ For references see Schmidt, Das Volksleben der Neugr. p. 222.
