6 Quotes Tagged: underworld

down the dank mouldering paths and past the Ocean's streams they went
and past the White Rock and the Sun's Western Gates and past
the Land of Dreams, and soon they reached the fields of asphodel
where the dead, the burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

Persephone to Hades

You are the kindest thing that ever happened to me, even if that is not how our tale is told.

When everyone else told me i was destined to be a forgotten nymph that nutured flowers and turn meadows gold,

you saw that the ichor that resides in me demanded its own throne. You showed me

how a love like ours can turn even the darkest, coldest realm into the happiest of homes.

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

Keep climbing,' he told himself.
'Cheeseburgers,' his stomach replied.
'Shut up,' he thought.
'With fries,' his stomach complained.

Another scene from universal myth unfolds — here powerfully reminiscent of the Underworld quests of Orpheus for Eurydice and of Demeter for Persephone. The ancient Japanese recension of this mysteriously global story is given in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, where we read that Izanagi, mourning for his dead wife, followed after her to the Land of Yomi in an attempt to bring her back to the world of the living:
'Izanagi-no-Mikoto went after Izanami-no-Mikoto and entered the Land of Yomi ... So when from the palace she raised the door and came out to meet him, Izanagi spoke saying; 'My lovely younger sister! The lands that I and thou made are not yet finished making; so come back!'
Izanami is honoured by Izanagi's attention and minded to return. But there is one problem. She has already eaten food prepared in the Land of Yomi and this binds her to the place, just as the consumption of a single pomegranate seed binds Persephone to hell in the Greek myth.
Is it an accident that ancient Indian myth also contains the same idea? In the Katha Upanishad a human, Nachiketas, succeeds in visiting the underworld realm of Yama, the Hindu god of Death (and, yes, scholars have noted and commented upon the weird resonance between the names and functions of Yama and Yomi). It is precisely to avoid detention in the realm of Yama that Nachiketas is warned:
'Three nights within Yama's mansion stay / But taste not, though a guest, his food.'
So there's a common idea here — in Japan, in Greece, in India — about not eating food in the Underworld if you want to leave. Such similarities can result from common invention of the same motif — in other words, coincidence. They can result from the influence of one of the ancient cultures upon the other two, i.e. cultural diffusion. Or they can result from an influence that has somehow percolated down to all three, and perhaps to other cultures, stemming from an as yet unidentified common source.