The Land of the Dead and the Otherworld

Epona on the paths of the dead.
Funeral stele from ancient Gaul

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Akhilleus: “I’d rather slave on earth for another man -

Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive -

Than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”

Odyssey Book IX

The hero of the Iliad drained of his life blood,

So a Greek view of the Land of the Dead,

The shades no more than that - shadows

Of their living selves, dwellers neither in

Paradise nor any place of horrific torture

Beyond the emptiness of their deaths.

Odysseus feeds them blood to bring them 

Into his living world, but soon again they fade.

Some Greeks thought the druids of the Keltoi

Had no Land of the Dead, believing instead

In reincarnation, reviving from death as

One or more others, a creaturely exchange

Of life for life, or lives - anything that dies

Becoming again and again in one world.

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[the Gauls] “do not fear death  ….. 

the human spirit is immortal and will enter a new body”  

Diodorus Siculus 

For the Greeks numphai live in forests, groves, 

Rivers, streams and springs of our world. 

For Brythons there is the Otherworld - Annwfn

From which otherness comes to us,

And returns.

The Otherworld’s a world within world,

Without world, a not-world (that negative

Does not deny but asserts a presence) 

But animate life is eternal in Thisworld, 

Before and after.

What then of our many dead,

 Passing on roads of transformation, re-configuration?

Here a present life continues to know itself absolutely, 

Uniquely, not recognising past or future selves

Though they share a time that is Forever

With a sense of an also world that is Other.

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It is not possible to be absolute about what was believed in a particular place and time, let alone in the wider arcs of space and time encompassed by ‘the Greeks’, ‘the Celts’ etc. Certainly, centuries after Homer, and far longer still after the origins of the stories from which he distilled his poem, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras advanced the theory of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls to new physical bodies. Even the Odyssey, with its vivid portrayal of the Greek Land of the Dead in Book IX, also tells us in Book XXIV, where this land is revisited, that Hermes, leading the ghosts of the dead with his golden wand, “charms the eyes of men or wakens those he will”. But the main thrust of the historic heritage of such belief sees the Greek Land of the Dead as a place of gloom which transmutes and becomes overlain over time into later views and of the nature of Hell in the Middle Ages. The Celtic Otherworld, by comparison, though sometimes viewed as an Underworld, seems to originate in a quite different sense of a parallel realm to that of everyday between which exchanges are possible and, indeed, often occur.