"This is the land of the dead." "And this its master." "Hades, a god so feared, no one would speak his name." "His myth reveals how the ancient Greeks viewed death." "It is a chilling vision of the one fate no mortal can escape." "And it has eerie links to the real ancient world." "Curses, ghosts and secret cults." "Prepare to descend into the underworld and experience the story as the ancients heard it." "This is the truth behind the myth of Hades." "In a lush green pasture a beautiful young woman picks flowers." "Her name is Persephone and she is being watched." "In Greek mythology, when a young maiden is plucking flowers in the meadow something bad is about to happen." "Suddenly the ground breaks open." "An unseen hand reaches up from the darkness and drags her down into the underworld." "Hades, god of the dead has chosen his queen." "Hades is mythology's warden of death." "He commands the vast and frightening realm that all mortals, good and bad, must enter when they die." "It is his job to make sure they never escape." "He is the god of the dead and none of us want to die." "He is to be feared." "His power is awesome." "The Greeks wanted nothing to do with Hades because to know him is to be dead." "The Greeks tended not to depict or represent Hades." "There are not temples built to him." "He's someone that is kept at arm's length like a kind of uncle whose business you're not sure about and don't want to talk about too much." "The main idea is that for the ancient Greeks to be dead is not a very good thing." "The myth of Hades was created to make sense of what happens after we die." "These stories reflect human yearning to hold on." "We can see in them how the Greeks thought about death, what their hopes and fears were about death." "A lot of religious traditions try and supply a way in which your existence can continue in the next world." "And Greek religious traditions are no different." "According to the myth, dead souls enter a vast and gloomy underworld." "A realm named after its master, Hades." "It is the ancient Greek equivalent of heaven, hell and limbo, all under one roof." "We, in a Christian context, think that what happens to you after your death has to do with what you've done here on earth." "If you've been a good person, then you go to heaven." "If you've been a bad person you go to hell." "For the Greeks, those places were all located in one place, they were all the underworld." "It's the one place we can't ever see." "We can make up stories about what might be going on there, the great punishments that are occurring or the terrible things that might be happening, but we never know so we continue to wonder." "In the myth there are three levels of Hades." "Most of the dead descend to the fields of Asphodel, the dreary resting place of the nameless masses." "The fate of the average person in the underworld is just to have to wander around a grey shade and live a not very exciting or interesting life." "It's a kind of sad place to be." "It's sort of like the Catholic conception of limbo." "A sort of twilight place, quiet and peaceful but full of mourning trees, where the soul would simply wander aimlessly." "And then there is the place reserved for those who've most offended the gods." "A vast abyss, 40,000 miles deep." "A dungeon of suffering and eternal torment surrounded by a flaming river." "This is Tartarus." "The souls of very bad people would be sent to Tartarus, which is quite like the Christian conception of hell." "In fact, Tartarus was so closely linked with hell by the early Christians that it was even mentioned in the New Testament." "It appears in a verbal form in the Second Epistle of Peter having to do with people being thrown into Tartarus." "Then there were a few who were terribly wicked who were punished in Tartarus." "And that I think is the origin of what Christians know as Hell." "For the fortunate few, paradise awaits in the third realm of Hades, the islands of the blessed, the ancient Greek equivalent of heaven." "Everything grows by itself and you can eat your field with no work, there is absolutely no work." "There is constant rejoicing, there are round dances, there are streams and there is pure friendship." "That was where famous and glorious people would spend the rest of their lives." "In the myth, all human beings must eventually succumb to Hades' command." "For some, that day comes far too soon." "Hades has kidnapped a young maiden named Persephone." "He holds her captive in the underworld." "Hades has taken her away to his realm to be his wife forever." "But Persephone is not forgotten." "In the world above, her powerful mother is searching for her." "She is Demeter, goddess of the harvest, the woman who feeds the world." "This is one myth that defines one of the most central aspects of the universe." "Demeter is able to destroy human kind." "She can rip the world apart." "The ancient Greeks believed" "Demeter was responsible for the changing of the seasons." "And that Persephone's disappearance started the cycle." "She didn't know what had happened to her daughter, so she wandered the earth and in her grief at the loss of her daughter she forgot to give fertility to the land." "So plants withered and died, human beings no longer gave birth, the earth descended into the deepest of winters." "Faced with the prospect of an endless frost, the other gods command Hades to return Persephone." "But Hades has a plan." "Hades knew that if he could get her to eat food belonging to the underneath that she would then become part of the underneath." "He offers Persephone a snack of pomegranate seeds." "She naively accepts and seals her fate." "It is a mistake for which the entire planet will pay." "She must now spend three months of every year in the underworld, one month for every seed she ate." "The rest of the year she can spend with her mother." "When Persephone is down in the underworld" "Demeter doesn't give earth the fertility that it needs, and that is what the Greeks understood as winter." "When Persephone returns to her mother Demeter rejoices and that's what we have as spring and summer." "The ancient Greeks believed Persephone travelled to and from the underworld with each change of seasons." "But how did she get there?" "The answer lies in a cave near the Greek town of Eleusis, just northwest of Athens." "To the ancients, this wasn't just a cave, it was a portal of death." "According to the myth," "Demeter met with her daughter Persephone right here." "Persephone came out from the underworld through this cave." "A boundary between the land of the living and the land of the dead." "And between real life and myth." "But this wasn't the only passage into Hades." "There were lots of entrances to the underworld in ancient Greece, in fact it was sort of a competing industry." "It was a little bit like the way that Americans used to say George Washington slept here." "Every locale wanted to be able to say we have an entrance to the underworld." "This was a place of great importance to the ancient Greeks." "In fact experts determined that the ruins found near the cave entrance were the remains of a temple." "Among the artefacts discovered there was a stone relief" ""To the god and goddess"." "It was a dedication to a god who couldn't be called by name." "A shrine to the angel of death himself," "Hades." "You need to remember that temples to Hades are not common, because of who he is and what his worship is, there aren't many reasons to build temples." "In fact, the way you would get his attention is you would smash on the ground and say, "Hey, Hades!"" "So the fact that there's a temple at Eleusis is just striking." "It was here, at Eleusis, that ancient Greece's largest religious cult met to worship." "A secret society obsessed with death." "We know historical personages who would go there and stay and go through the initiation." "Plato, Cicero, Socrates, that tells you the importance of it." "Surviving texts revealed that the Cult members came here in search of a shortcut to paradise, a path to eternal bliss in the realm of Hades." "Cults would give you the information you needed to find your way to the Islands of the Blessed." "You lived it out in relative splendour with great abundance of food and parties and wine." "Experts believe the cult at Eleusis may have influenced another religion that promises life after death..." "Christianity." "We know that the Cult helped to liberate people from the fear of death." "And very interestingly, prepared the ground for Christianity." "It sowed the seeds of a universal Cult that revolved around the defeat of death." "To the ancient Greeks this was the face of death." "In the myth, Hades is a merciless master of souls." "But he was not always this way." "He has undergone a dramatic transformation." "From forgotten child, to feared god." "In fact he was cursed from the moment of birth when he was eaten alive by his own father." "Hades is the ancient Greek god of the underworld." "A dark lord who controls all dead souls." "But he wasn't always so menacing." "In the palace of the gods a baby's cries pierce the silence." "A newborn son, his name is Hades." "His father is Kronos, the king of Greece's ruling gods the Titans." "Kronos was told in a prophecy that one of his children would murder him and he is determined to make sure that doesn't happen." "The father fears being replaced by the son, that's human psychology." "Kronos' solution to the problem was, eat your kids." "In one swift motion Kronos consumes his newborn son." "Infanticide wasn't really common in ancient Greece so the idea of a father deliberately trying to kill his children would have been very shocking to them." "Now, of course, since they're immortal, the children that Kronos swallows are not dead, they are just locked away inside of his belly." "Hades and most of his siblings grow up inside their father's stomach." "But one child was able to escape Kronos' wrath, his name is Zeus." "He returns as a grown god and frees his trapped brothers and sisters." "The siblings now unite to form the Olympians and seize control of the universe from their parents in a final clash with the Titans." "After the overthrow of the Titans the Olympians have the job of trying to figure out who does what in this new order." "Hades, Poseidon and Zeus, the three male Olympians agree to divide the spoils of conquest." "It is a defining moment for Hades." "One that will forever determine the power structure of the gods." "Hades is the oldest child and according to the real Greek law of the time that gives him an advantage." "Throughout most of the Greek world the law of primogenitor was the practice." "Which means the oldest born, who should be Hades, should have by right inherited the largest share." "But Zeus, the youngest brother, has his own ambitions to rule the world." "It is a clash between Zeus' ambition and Hades' birthright." "The brothers decide to draw lots - whoever wins the heavens will become the king of the gods." "In ancient Greek custom the drawing of lots was a typical procedure used to divide things that were otherwise very difficult to discern." "And everybody would have recognised that the drawing of lots was a legitimate way to make a tough call like this." "The gods draw." "Poseidon claims the seas." "Zeus claims the heavens, thus becoming mythology's supreme commander." "And Hades draws the short straw, he is left with the land of the dead." "This was not something he chose for himself." "It was fated him, he did it, but it bent him in some ways." "It made him not a happy god." "It is a tragic turning point for Hades." "He could have ruled the universe, instead he is condemned to the realm of the dead." "In ancient Greece, the attitude towards death was not so different to our feelings today towards death, so people would not worship Hades as much as they did Poseidon and Zeus." "Other gods do not come to see him because death is hateful to the gods." "Hades' new home is dark, bleak, and filled with the sadness of dead souls." "Ancient texts describe it as a dank expanse of caves and rivers." "It is a place that is dark and gloomy." "Its rivers are full of mist." "It has the stench of decay." "It's a very forbidding place." "It's a place where if you go you do not come back from." "So goes the myth, but could it be based on reality?" "This is Diros, a network of caves that runs for miles beneath Greece." "Its maze of rivers and caverns match the ancient descriptions of Hades perfectly." "Caves function as in-between spaces." "They were clearly understood to be potential points of transition between the upper world and the underworld." "Caves are exceedingly important throughout the Greek world, because the first humans who lived there lived in caves." "Even after they move out and start building and practicing agriculture, these caves retained their sacred significance." "The experience of entering and being in such a gloomy place definitely affected the imagination of Greeks and their construction of what Hades and the underworld must have looked like." "The ancient Greeks were terrified of Hades and his morbid realm, but they were even more afraid of the dead souls who were denied access to it." "According to the myth, these rejected spirits would return to haunt the living... ghosts." "According to Greek myth, the god Hades rules a dark and dank universe." "The underworld of the dead." "It begins to metamorphise the afterlife into a kingdom." "And the function of any just monarch is to punish the wicked and to reward the good." "Hades assembles a gang of enforcers to watch over his dead souls." "Cerberus, a ferocious three-headed guard dog." "The Hundred-handers, prison guards of Tartarus." "And the principle henchman of Hades, Charon." "He patrols the river Styx, the waterway of hate." "Charon has a job of faring souls from one side of the world, the world of the living, to the other side of the river Styx, which is the world of the underworld proper, or the world of the dead." "He is a skeletal figure, very demonic, and shadowy." "He, in essence, is the border between life and death." "He is decayed." "In terms of popular culture, he comes down as the Grim Reaper, he comes down as the one who will point his finger and take you." "There is no way into Hades except through Charon." "And no one can cross the river Styx for free." "Every dead soul must offer a coin for passage." "If the soul doesn't have that money to pay the ferryman, it wanders forever unable to rest on the shore of the Styx." "This is why ancient Greeks would place a coin either under the tongue or on the eyelids of the corpse of the dead person." "This ritual was essential to the ancient Greeks." "If the coin wasn't placed, the deceased would never find peace." "There is no doubt that the ancients took this seriously." "Many states had laws that punished people who did not fulfil their duty to bury the dead." "The family had obligations to make sure that the dead were cut off from this world and sent to the next." "Because if they didn't, the dead would be ghosts in this world, and that affected everyone." "The dead could come back, haunt, ask for something, cry, complain, hurt, destroy, all of these ideas are found from the earliest stories that we have until now." "This is myth, but what is the evidence?" "The Greeks left behind a clue about their belief in ghosts." "Ancient voodoo dolls." "Archaeologists excavating graves in Greece have discovered tiny lead figurines with their hands and feet bound together." "And they are all enclosed in small coffins etched with curses." "Inscribed on this are magical spells that are intended to call up the dead and the gods in charge of the dead, to basically torture people who are still living." "If you're competing in a boxing match you might ask the dead to restrain the arm of your opponent." "Another realm in which they were frequently used is business, so if you are a leather tanner and the other leather tanner down the street is doing better business you ask the dead to somehow screw up his business." "These voodoo dolls were placed in the graves of those who most likely never made it to Hades." "They were known as the "restless dead"." "People who had died too young, people who had died violently, for example by being murdered, or people who had not received proper burial." "These ghosts could not get into the underworld, so they were restless and unhappy and angry, and it would be easier to get one of them to do something nasty for you." "Those souls who did make it into the underworld were locked away for good." "Hades punishment for any who tried to leave would be relentless." "But that didn't stop some from trying." "An old weakened man stands wearily at the bottom of a mountain." "Sweat streams down his face." "Veins explode from the skin." "His name is Sisyphus and he is the first soul who ever dared to defy the will of Hades." "Just before his life on earth ended" "Sisyphus made plans to cheat death." "Sisyphus tells to his wife, "Please, don't bury me."" "He knows that if his wife doesn't bury him he won't go all the way through to the other side of Hades, he'll be stuck in this kind of no man's land." "Who has not imagined tricking death?" "Sisyphus, through his rhetorical art, through his intelligence, through his sheer wit, he's able to convince the god of death, or to find a way out of hell." "Sisyphus knew better than to try deceiving the king of the dead, instead he went to the queen." "Sisyphus complained to Persephone, the queen of the underworld, that his wife had done this terrible thing, how could she possibly have treated his body in such a terrible way." "Persephone felt sympathetic and angry with the wife, and gave Sisyphus permission to go back up to the world above in order to scold his wife." "Of course, once Sisyphus is back in the world above, he has no intention of returning to Hades." "Sisyphus has done the impossible, he has tricked death and turned the natural cycle of life on its head." "But the lord of the underworld will have his revenge." "No one cheats Hades and lives to tell about it." "Hades, the god of the dead, releases no one." "But a soul named Sisyphus has slipped through his grasp." "When Hades finds out he has been deceived he is furious." "He immediately drags Sisyphus back to the underworld." "Sisyphus thought that he could outwit the gods, that he could outwit death, that he could outwit nature." "To the ancient Greeks such an attitude was dangerous." "Any soul who tried who cheat death was a threat to society." "Greeks believed that when someone died they needed to be put in their place and kept there." "The assumption was that the dead were seeking life from the living and draining them of life." "If the dead were always present they'd suck your life out." "In the myth, the punishment for trying to cheat death is painful... and permanent." "Hades condemns Sisyphus to the hell of the ancient world," "Tartarus." "There, in the scorching heat, he is forced to push a huge boulder up a mountain." "At the end of each day, he reaches the top exhausted and in agony, and watches helpless as his boulder rolls back down." "He suffers the same punishment every day... for eternity." "From the story of Sisyphus, in which we have a person who's engaged in an absolutely pointless endeavour for eternity, we got the modern English word of "Sisyphean", which describes some kind of a task that seems very arduous" "and also entirely pointless." "The story of Sisyphus sent a strong message to the ancient Greeks, that no one can outwit death or its master." "Hades is the one who humans most try to trick or deceive or get around, and we can understand this." "Hades is that god whose will and power over you is absolute, no one can negotiate their way out of death." "But even after Sisyphus there are still those who try." "One of them is Orpheus." "A musician who makes the sweetest music in the world." "It will become his weapon against the lord of the dead." "Orpheus was the founder of the musical tradition." "He was the person who invented poetry and music." "He was particularly adept with the lyre which was an ancient stringed musical instrument shaped like a "U" with a bar across the top and the strings coming down." "One of the important things you need to remember about the word "music" in Greek, "aoidos", it means both "song" but it also means magical incantation, so Orpheus engaged in magic when he sung." "There is only one thing Orpheus loves more than music, his stunning young bride, Euridice." "One of the profoundly sad things about the Orpheus and Euridice story is how perfectly happy and in love they were." "And one of the things about the Greeks is that if you're happy something's gonna happen, because it doesn't belong to mortals to be that happy." "One day, as Euridice picks fruit in the grove, she is spotted by a satyr, a hideous half-goat, half-man beast known for his uncontrollable sex drive." "Satyrs represented the male force of nature uncontrolled, it was pure appetite, it was a desire to procreate and mate." "The satyr lunges for Euridice." "She tries to escape." "But the satyr corners her." "She backs away terrified... and slips into a pit of poisonous vipers." "This is where Orpheus finds her, but he is too late." "She is in the clutches of Hades." "Orpheus is so in love with Euridice that he grieves her as no human being has ever grieved anyone." "Orpheus refuses to accept his wife's death." "He resolves to challenge Hades and bring back his wife alive." "Life cannot possibly go on without Euridice." "With his lyre as an only weapon he resolves to go down to the underworld." "Orpheus begins a treacherous descent into the depths of the Earth." "Failure in his quest will doom his wife forever." "Success will make him a hero." "It's almost as if you can't be a truly Greek hero unless you have been to the underworld and back." "It is a very frequent thing in Greek literature, it was something they liked to think about, death is something that everyone shares." "We can't help but think about it." "With his beautiful and sad songs" "Orpheus charms his way past the boatman Charon and across the river Styx." "But another terrifying obstacle awaits him on the other side..." "Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of Hades." "Cerberus was stationed at the gates of the underworld." "He was there to monitor those who came in and out." "No one could get in or out without getting past this dog." "This ferocious dog had three heads and was big, much bigger than other dogs and much stronger than other dogs." "It's a beast that they see and tremble before." "With trembling fingers, Orpheus strums his lyre." "Cerberus is spellbound and the musician has his opening." "But his true test is inside the gates," "Hades himself." "He is going up to the great god Hades and just hoping that his command of music will make Hades do what he wants." "But his faith, his confidence is not in him as the musician but in the power of music." "Orpheus will attempt to do what no mortal ever has, to enchant the lord of the dead." "His song was so beautiful and so grief-stricken that everyone, including Hades, wept." "And this is the god of the dead, he doesn't weep easily." "Another figure watches from the shadows." "Orpheus' dead wife, Euridice." "Hades is so moved by the music he decides to give Orpheus a chance to win his wife's freedom." "Hades recognises the power of love and loss for the first time." "He cannot understand lost love because he's immortal." "But the song connects with him and because of that power, because of that song," "Orpheus is allowed to bring Euridice back." "On one condition, Orpheus has to walk out of Hades and trust that Euridice is following behind him." "But if he looks back to make sure, he will lose her forever." "As Orpheus and Euridice are making their way to the world above, Orpheus begins to doubt." "He begins to wonder, is Euridice really there, is Hades playing some kind of terrible trick on him, and as he gets closer and closer to the world above this doubt grows and grows in him." "And eventually, just when they are about to break through to the surface he can't take it any more and he turns around and he sees Euridice." "And when he does and catches eyes with her, she instantly gets dragged back down into the underworld." "Hades has proven once again that his power over the dead is absolute." "But his authority will soon be challenged by a power far greater than him." "It will be the ultimate clash of the gods." "Recorded for all time in the book of Revelation." "Hades has proven once again that his power over the dead is absolute." "He has taken Orpheus' wife Euridice." "Orpheus is desolate." "After returning from the underworld the musician travels deep into the wilderness, and sings to everyone he meets about the tragedy of death." "This is the myth, but what is the connection to reality?" "An amazing archaeological find is shedding new light on how the ancient Greeks viewed the master of death and his domain." "Over the last two centuries, mysterious gold inscriptions have been discovered in ancient grave sites." "Many of them have been found in a place that suggests they were originally put on the mouth of the corpse when it was buried." "And they're shaped like lips, so it's almost as if the inscription on the tablet is meant to be speaking on behalf of the dead." "They are covered with references to Hades, the god and the place." "They read like directions into the underworld from someone who's been there." ""You will find to the left of the House of Hades, the Spring." ""As soon as the soul has left the light of the Sun," ""go to the right, being very careful."" "These texts have been described as passports to the underworld, and they described what happened, what stages the dead would go through, what guardians they would meet and what they had to say to the guardians in order to pass and to reach the underworld." "They are real-life inscriptions inspired by myth." "Visions of the afterlife believed to be derived from the mythical poems of Orpheus." "It was believed that while he was in the underworld he learnt a great deal about the way it worked." "So when he came back to the upper world without his wife, he wrote poems about the underworld." "And these poems then were passed down from person to person, what they should do in the underworld, what they shouldn't do, and it's in fact portions of these poems that are inscribed upon the gold tablets." "The ancients used the poems of Orpheus as an instruction manual for life after death." "A way to understand and navigate the realm of Hades." "For thousands of years, this Greek vision of the afterlife endured, but in the first few centuries AD, a new set of ideas revolutionised the way the ancient world looked at death." "The god Hades was about to come face to face with a powerful new force..." "Jesus Christ." "Christian tradition tells of an epic battle between the old order and the new." "A final clash of the gods." "At the centre of the showdown stands Hades." "And Christ has come to collect his souls." "There's a re-writing of the gospel in Nicodemus called the "Descensus Christi", the descent of Christ into Hades." "After Jesus' death, he goes in and confronts Hades." "Jesus comes in as the king of glory and opens the gates and leads all of the people in Hades into paradise." "In Hades, Jesus preaches to Greece's dead souls." "The message is clear to both the living and the dead." "Reject Hades and embrace the new saviour." "But what will become of the master of the dead in this new order?" "The final moments of Hades are described in the Bible's book of Revelation, which foretells the end of days." "To show his power over death, according to Revelation," "Jesus will destroy Hades and death itself." "When Christ returns for the last judgement, he will cast the warden of death into a lake of fire." "He gives, by the destruction of Hades, the destruction of the realm of the dead, a victory over death, not for the individual, but for all of creation." "Ultimately, Hades is destined to share in the fate of all the souls under his command." "Even he can't escape the clutches of death." "The potency of the stories about Hades is we can see how we, as humans, look at death." "How we, as humans, hope perhaps to either cheat death or to find a way to survive what we fear is our existence coming to an end." "The underworld is fascinating." "People like to imagine what might happen there because it's creepy, it's eerie, it's utterly unlike anything that happens in this world." "The stories, they're more than just local myths, local stories to scare children or to make you feel better." "They're what it is to be human in that most fundamental way,"