Many they who travel thither,
Few who thence have found the home-way,
From the houses of Tuoni
From the dwellings of Manala."'[1]
It is enough to name the familiar classic analogues of these mythic visits to Hades,—the descent of Dionysos to bring back Semele, of Orpheus to bring back his beloved Eurydike, of Herakles to fetch up the three-headed Kerberos at the command of his master Eurystheus; above all, the voyage of Odysseus to the ends of the deep-flowing Ocean, to the clouded city of Kimmerian men, where shining Helios looks not down with his rays, and deadly night stretches always over wretched mortals, — thence they passed along the banks to the entrance of the land where the shades of the departed, quickened for a while by the taste of sacrificial blood, talked with the hero and showed him the regions of their dismal home.[2]
The scene of the descent into Hades is in very deed enacted day by day before our eyes, as it was before the eyes of the ancient myth-maker, who watched the sun descend to the dark under-world, and return at dawn to the land of living men. These heroic legends lie in close-knit connexion with episodes of solar myth. It is by the simplest poetic adaptation of the Sun's daily life, typifying Man's life in dawning beauty, in mid-day glory, in evening death, that mythic fancy even fixed the belief in the religions of the world, that the Land of Departed Souls lies in the Far West or the World Below. How deeply the myth of the Sunset has entered into the doctrine of men concerning a Future State, how the West and the Under- World have become by mere imaginative analogy Regions of the Dead, how the quaint day-dreams of savage poets may pass into
- ↑ Kalewala, Rune xvi.; see Schiefner's German Translation, and Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' pp. 128, 134. A Slavonic myth in Hanusch, p. 412.
- ↑ Homer. Odyss. xi. On the vivification of ghosts by sacrifice of blood, and on libations of milk and blood, see Meiners, vol. i. p. 315, vol. ii. p. 89; J. G Müller, p. 85; Rochholz, 'Deutscher Glaube und Brauch,' vol. i. p. 1, &c.
