Charon - Lesser God of the Dead

Diodorus Siculus claimed that near Memphis, within Lake Acherousia, there was a House of the Dead to which, under the Egyptian rites of the dead, there was a ferryman called Charon whose boat would take the body of the deceased to its new home. There was a death demon of the Etruscans called Charun. But neither story convinces many as the origin of the myth.

Burn the body, close the grave, pay the ferryman, place the coin in the mouth (since the soul departs through the mouth at its last breath), the ritual is all necessary, and so the deed is finally done. An apple or honey cake, a ribbon or a wreath are all signs of the passing. Later (when people might have believed that the dead were going to a better life), the departed would be given perfume, garlands of flowers and food to take on the journey to their new life in death. 

There is also a prayer to be made to the spirits of the River Styx since, without their help, Charon himself cannot easily cross the river and may be forced to wait outside the entrance to Hades’ realm. The mourners cry and as they cry the soul passes into the hands of the God of Death. Their wailing is a call to tame and calm Death and to ask for his care and protection of those they love or to whom they have a duty. 

Imagine him! – very aged and close to senile but strong and horrible in his filthy cloak and proletarian tunic, the hair around his bald pate still black and wild but with white hairs both there and on his bearded chin, eyes that glow and flicker with a radiant soft flaming and skin wrinkled and scorched black by Phlegethon.

Insatiably hungry to get the job done, instinctively harsh and merciless, a supernatural demonic creature, a lesser God, he visibly enjoys preparing the places for the dead in the boat, gently placing the corpses of the innocent to ensure an easy passage while forcing the less than innocent to come to sufficient zombie-like life to row the boat forward.

He is a terrible creature, who takes pleasure in the tears of the grieving. He steers the black boat of the dead, decked in trailing river weed, across the Styx, the howling, wide and bottomless Acheron Lake and across the Lethe towards a place which Apollo never visits. Charon thus removes us from the exhaustion that is life. He takes slaves and freemen, putting all at the oars or at least those he dislikes and he hears no claims for precedence.

For the journey, all we need is a jug, the clothes we are buried or burnt in, a bundle of necessaries and the ‘obol’ – the coin that is the price of a day’s wage, the last day on earth. Hades is a mercenary place. Hermes Psychopompos who guides the soul to the boat, wants his payment from the obol he gives Charon (which suggests that change has to be given somewhere in the transaction), so does Charon, of course, often considered greedy, and so does Aeacus the greedy gatekeeper into Hades.  The chthonic gods are human traffickers. It is a business.

We might add the greed of Pluto (though not the Greek Hades) though how one obol would cover all these costs is another mystery. It must be a bulk commodity business. War must be profitable. This mercenary side may just reflect a late Roman obsession with contracts and consideration (we pay, we get entrance). Some in the lower classes would put in more coins into the grave than a Greek would have needed.

Some have said that there is no fee, some just the obol and some, though they are wrong, two. For the Greek, the real price is the burial rite or the funerary pyre. Those who have no burial rites, no mourning, no pyre, are left to wander on the near shore of the Acheron pursued remorselessly by vicious beasts and demons, not on life’s shore but another shore altogether.

The obol is symbol of all our earthly wealth being transferred to the ferryman and lost to us forever. It is our passport and also the confiscation at the frontier. As refugees from life, we go into the shadow world with nothing. The payment is also the closing of the grave as much as the tombstone being in place. What you can take with you (according to the philosophers) is your wisdom, your integrity and your true nature.The payment may also reflect a far more ancient fear of the dead as avaricious, hungry ghosts. If you pay them now then perhaps they won't come back and ask for payment later.

There are two sides to this coin – the obverse is the remembrance of the dead by the living and the reverse is a new existence in the realm of the dead or non-existence. It is the representation of a new mode of existing at the cusp of two worlds – mental and supernatural. If a man refuses to die willingly, Death will give him a nudge. He will execute all who refuse to die and without mercy. He kidnaps the young. All are equal in his attention even though he will show unaccustomed grace, gentleness, kindness and tenderness to young mothers and their babes, to the innocent who may even be exempted of their fee. 

And, though fearful of Charon, men still praise him when a tyrant dies. A cult of Charon emerged from Palestine to Mauretania and up to Milan and coins were widely placed in the mouths of the dead in the Second Century AD. Just saying the name Charon could inspire fear by then. He becomes Charondas in much later Greek folklore. 

Once in the boat, there is no return. Only the dead can cross the Acheron. With so many sallow-faced souls on board, the boat threatens to sink but it never does. Some say that the boat expands to fit the dead and grows to huge size after major battles. Some say Charon even carries the souls of all the animals as well. And some say that there are places on earth which provide a shortcut to Hades – such as the land of the Hermionians. 

Very rarely a hero such as Hercules (the only hero strong enough to beat Charon in a fight), Orpheus or Aeneas or heroine such as Psyche may enter Hades as a living soul and return, but for the rest of us there is no golden branch or road money that will allow us to enter and return to the land of the living. 

We cannot pass in and out of death or ride on Charon’s boat and enter Hades before our time. Even Orpheus was denied a second visit until his time was due and Charon was himself punished once for letting Hercules through, albeit that he probably had little choice in the matter. 

And if we think this is a fairy tale and there is no Hades and no Charon, still it is true that Death subsists in any case, as an eternal exile from Existence, irrevocable. But we cannot accept the late glosses that merge into the Christian mythos in which Dionysos represents the triumph of life over death. Perhaps many Romans (though not the Greeks who had a grim view of the underworld) believed that Charon was taking their souls to a better world beyond the grave. But belief is not truth.

Modern Mythologies and the Social

Joseph Campbell in his Occidental Mythology wrote that

"In the long view of the history of mankind, four essential functions of mythology can be discerned. The first and most distinctive – vitalizing all – is that of eliciting and supporting a sense of awe before the mystery of being. ... The second function of mythology is to render a cosmology, an image of the universe that will support and be supported by this sense of awe before the mystery of the presence and the presence of a mystery. ... A third function of mythology is to support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group ... The fourth function of mythology is to initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him toward his own spiritual enrichment and realization."

The unknowability of Being, the invention of meaning around this core of unknowability, the maintenance of social order and personal individuation are 'mythologised' in integral societies. Conservatives pine for this. They think we were both better and happier when these functions were integrated despite the probability that each whole system was inevitably built on invention. There was a disconnect between the actual nature of material reality, society and the individual in their relation to Reality (or Being) as soon as anyone began to think about what was going on. Deep thought does not work well for serious traditionalists. Mythical societies were static societies, not necessarily, despite the claims of the ideologies making use of myths, very ordered or mentally healthy. Trying to construct a myth to restore total order - to the material world, society and the person in an integrated way - may be the dream state of the conservative and it may be true that our species clings to irrational pseudo-order out of fear and anxiety but it is not necessarily true that the species needs to cling to anything that extensive at all.

In our contemporary world, the, four functions have separated out and then fragmented within themselves. It may be that the fragmentation within the functions is the problem rather than the disconnect between the functions. It may be that the disconnection of function is, in fact, a healthy state of affairs and that it is the fragmentation within each function that makes us 'unhealthy'. The attempt, by conservatives and the religious, to integrate forcibly the four functions misses this essential point - that we can live well enough by seeing each function as having a separate purpose but still yearn to have each function function well which it cannot do if it is not coherent in itself.

The contemporary world has an opportunity to accept this situation instead of fighting it. Our mythology of awe is now either simple existentialism or the choice by individuals from a smorgasbord of 'faith-based' choices that can be insulated from the other functions if we wish - New Age beliefs if we insist, Our cosmology can be that of science - the most coherent mythology now on offer even if some may choose incoherent ones existentially - even as, in our heart of hearts, we know that this, at its furthest reaches when it leaves the world of technology and demonstration, has its faith-based aspects. Our current mythology of social order is most in disarray because atomised individuals now know that they cannot easily trust to the competence let alone benignity of their priestly and warrior castes (if ever they could) while the mythology of the person, the narrative that helps construct our individuality, might be talked up by psychotherapists but is, in fact, simply the story we tell ourselves to navigate a society that is fluid and unnerving. 

It is possible to create a myth of non-meaning, trust blindly in science and construct a personal mythology that permits the first two and live well. The problem child in Campbell's short litany is the lack of a viable myth of the social since it is not easy to live well if society is unstable or works against individuation (as most conservative spiritual, religious and social mythologies work against it for many people). In a world that permits the possibility of existentialism (alongside faith-based essentialism), science and psychotherapy and free choice, it is the social that has become problematic. It is the failure of the social to reconstruct itself without God, with Science and yet respectful of 'human rights' that is the crisis of our time. The social does not need the mythologies in the other three areas to be in accord with its own necessary mythology any more than any of those other mythologies require any of the others to function effectively. The revolutions provided by the Enlightenment, Nietzsche and Freud (discredited though he is in detail) provided, eventually, a new coherence but the opportunities provided by Marx were squandered by the Marxists, leaving little behind.

So, this is the next stage - having established that there are things we cannot know and which must be faced with pagan equanimity, that there is no God but only Science as our Faith and that we are captains of our own souls until we die, we now need to establish some kind of social order that requires no deities, can make use of science and technology and respects autonomous individuals but yet has its own independent mythology that can hold it together for the next stage in human development. A mythological 'faith' in the good society is the last of the four corner stones to be put in place before we can move forward as a species. After the current time of troubles, our species will probably construct this new myth once ideological liberalism has gone the way of communism and fascism ... but not before.

In Praise of Freyja

If a divine figure is associated with love, beauty, fertility, gold, 'seidr' (sorcery), war and death, then you can be pretty sure that it is a she and that it represents the 'elan vital' that surges within the best of humanity. So it is with the Nordic Goddess Freyja (or Freya and its many variants).

The Prose Edda calls Freyja 'the most glorious' of goddesses. She rules over the heavenly Folkvangr, where that half of those who die in battle who do not go to Odin's Valhalla will go after death. She is also the most approachable of the Aesir/Vanir to ordinary mortals, especially in prayers about matters of love.

Odin is Aesir and Freyja and her brother Freyr are Vanir - two separate clans of gods who clearly have separate constituencies amongst men. To shift allegiance from Freyja to Odin would be a serious matter.

Her hall is Sessrumnir. She pines for her often absent husband-god Odr and is sought after as a wife by the nature spirits, the Giants or Jotnar. Her slot was eventually and weakly filled with the worship of the Virgin Mary after Christianisation but there is no reason to assume an original Nordic virgin matriarchy, merely appropriation.

Frigg being wife of Odin and both Frigg and Freyja speculatively drawn from a single original Germanic goddess, the question arises whether a clan led by the masculine principle of Odin and one led by the feminine principle of Freyja does not in some way suggest a 'decision'. Certainly Frigg and Freyja share the position of highest goddesses.

Since Odr is cognate with Odin and Odin represents a different form of elan vital - furious, excited, imaginative, declamatory, the world of the mind as well as magic, war and death - then the polarities of a masculine clan with a cypher wife and a feminine clan with an absent husband asks for a unification of Aesir and Vanir as a mystic marriage.

Already we can see what Odin and Freyja share - struggle for resources, battle, magical powers - but Freyja's sexuality and possession (love, beauty, fertility, gold) contrasts with Odin's mental powers of prophecy, imagination and wisdom. The female/male contrast of function within a shared struggle ends with Odin representing ultimate victory and the hunt.

After the war, the Aesir and Vanir maintain cordial relations, mostly in alliance against the raw nature spirits of the Giant world. In one story from the popular Trimskvida, Freyja's refusal to comply with the demands of Thor to fit in with his plans ensures that he has to come up with an alternative one which forces both Thor and Loki into drag - an interesting reversal to say the least.

Was this true to something deep in the human condition that warriors might choose this clan rather than that clan (or be chosen by their nature) for though the two clans are separate, they are unified after a war which neither wins, mirroring the merging of supposedly feminine and masculine values in one good society?

Freyja is the Lady. Her values are aristocratic and high-born, not those of the wife of a carpenter. Her name is cognate with Frau but she is Scandinavian - her cognate Frigg is to be found amongst Germans and Scandinavians alike.

The two clans might as much be about the unification of tribes as having some mystic or hermetic import but, whatever the background, the Scandinavian Freyja, set against the Scandinavian Odin represents a certain purity and power in the unified polarities fitted to the culture.

Freyja will stand up to Loki with great force when Loki slanders each of the goddesses in turn. The exchange in the Lokasenna (part of the late Poetic Edda) is interesting because Loki's taunts are the taunts of the devil yet the devil's morality is conventional whereas the old gods, represented by Njordr, Freyr's father, take a very different view.

Njordr says that a woman having a lover who is not her husband is harmless and that it is Loki who is the pervert. The precise meaning of this is lost in time except that the reversal of the role of the devil at a time when Scandinavia was being Christianised suggests that a free and relaxed sexuality was good and taunting and moralising was bad in the displaced culture.

May we deduce that Loki here is a satirical over-turning of the incoming Church's claims to legislate for sexual propriety amongst the Viking aristocrats of the Middle Ages - in which case, the Devil (Loki) won and Sweden came to have one of the most repressive and unpleasant of official sexual cultures under Protestantism many centuries later.

Even today, Swedish culture is depressingly earnest and po-faced about sexuality - still apparently free in the sense of permitting anything between consenting adults but then taking away what it gives by making consent so tightly defined by essentialist Christian values that its peculiar brand of feminism demonises sex workers and de-erotises anything it touches.

Like all pre-Christian war band deities, Freyja will grant boons to loyal servants but will expect sacrifices to be made of ox blood on stone altars (Hyndluljod).

It was said that she introduced (Heimskringla) 'seidr' (sorcery) to the Vanir. This suggests that her magic (feminine) is different from that of Odin (masculine). Since seidr is a distinctive type of magic, close to shamanism, this argues for Freyja and the Vanir as culturally distinct, speculatively the indigenes of Scandinavia before Germanic farmers arrived though nothing is certain here.

Her animals, unlike Odin's ravens, wolves (later tamed in folklore into dogs) and a monstrous horse, are domesticates, cats that pull her chariot. She may struggle but it is from the hearth. The exception is her many searches for her absent husband which, unexplained, echo the wanderings of Orpheus.

Freyja is also intellectually dominant and an independent domain holder. She not merely stands up to gods like Thor using reason and with strength of purpose but she develops into the last surviving goddess during the era of transition from paganism to Christianity. Somehow Ragnarok is forgotten and she is left standing.

In the fourteenth century, a saga represents the final struggle between Odin and Freyja in allegorical terms in a tale of competing wives who pray to the respective god and goddess - the candidate of Freyja wins.

By the end of that century though, in the Christian-inspired Sorla Tattr, Freyja has become little more than a high class prostitute, concubine to Odin and bartering sex for gold with the dwarves. The story comes from an era when the old gods have been purposefully 'degenerated' into sleazy folk-tales.

The Church did what it could, in this tale and through the pulpit, to diminish Freyja. Her free and noble sexuality was clearly to be used against her in yet another case of Christian cultural dessication. As a folk goddess, regardless of the pastors, she survived in Iceland until the eighteenth century and in rural Sweden until the nineteenth.

Evidence from 1880 suggests that rural Swedes still considered Freyja to be a kind goddess, linked to agricultural fertility and contrasted with the murderous moody Thor, whose name the Christians had fully succeeded in blackening, helped by his character, no doubt, as God of marauders, his hammer symbol once a more direct challenge to the cross.

So, in a manner of speaking, Freyja only 'died' 120 years ago, a remarkable survival even if she was a pale shadow of her strong, feisty, feminine self of the Early Middle Ages. A new 'romantic' Freyja re-emerged in the early nineteenth century but this was an artistic phenomenon amongst the middle classes.

Most famously, the gods and goddesses were re-born in Wagner's Ring Cycle. Late romantic Northern European artists frequently depictic her in quasi-erotic terms that said more about the lust for her elan vital amongst repressed males than it did about the goddess herself.

Is she relevant today? At one level, she has degenerated into an artistic meme for late romantics and symbolists with no meaningful allegiance amongst the folk. But at another the dynamic of her existence as a strong role model for equality, amongst free gods and goddesses fighting raw nature and living life to the full, stands.

This is a goddess who is both everywoman in a free state - in command of her property, intellectually engaged, equal - and an object of respectful desire by any man who would command a tribe or a household. This is the open, tribal society that the Roman crushed with guile and lies and not by force and made closed-in, repressive and cruel.

Perhaps she should be invited back to rule men and gods alike ....