Honors Mythology: Hades Throughout Religion

1261 Words6 Pages

Andrew Parker
Honors Mythology
Mrs. Parsont
5/15/23
Hades Throughout Religion The question of mankind's fate after death has plagued mankind for thousands of years, with a large majority of western civilization believing in the “traditional” afterlife involving heaven and hell. However, in ancient Greece, there were many more factors at play when it came to an individual's eternal resting ground. Hades, the Greek god of the afterlife, ruled his expansive underworld, serving punishments and trying all the souls that entered his kingdom. Many other world religions have deities with incredibly strong parallels to Hades, these parallels are most evident in their punishments, servants, kingdoms, and appearances. Not only do these gods and goddesses …show more content…

However, in Christianity, being sent to Hell with Satan serves as the entire punishment for your actions on earth. Countless deities act as the rulers of the underworld, similar to Satan, yet, nearly all other deities actually put the people who were sent there on trial to determine what their punishment should be, often times considered a second death or a sentence to punishment, carried out by the king of the underworlds servants. Two of the many death gods who share these qualities are Osiris and Mictlantecuhtli. Osiris’s role as leader was to make the final decision on the punishment earned by everyone who was sent to him, this means that even the good spirited people who did no wrong would go on trial before him (Bednarski). For the ancient Aztec people, whether or not you died in a manner that would send you to paradise decided where you ended up. Once sentenced to life in Hell, or Mictlan. A person would have to go through the nine layers of Mictlan until they reached the final layer to spend an eternity with Mictlantecuhtli.(Encyclopedia Britannica). Returning the the trial by Osiris, once you had been given the fate of punishment, Ammit, the egyptian eater of souls, would eat you alive or torture you for your sins. This also appears in many other religions such as Norse and of course Greek mythology . Nidhogg is the norse death god Hel’s dragon who tortures and kills anyone sentenced to his hellscape, while Cerberus kills doomed souls and prevents any live humans from getting into the underworld. Unlike the fallen angel, these deities rule over the people within the underworld as opposed to impacting them