Myth
The underworld as an idea. Hades and Sheol and Xibalba, hollow-earth theories and the people who believed them, the journey down and back in myth and literature, and the persistent human conviction that something is under there.
Part of Underground
18 moments in this segment.
- - The Maya underworld. Diving the Yucatan cenotes used by pre-Columbian Maya for offerings and human sacrifice.
- - The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The spells written to guide a spirit through the Duat and past the weighing of the heart.
- - The cult of Mithras explained. What the archaeology of the mithraea shows about a religion that left almost no texts.
- - A Roman temple under the City of London. The Temple of Mithras, first uncovered in 1954, reopened to the public beneath a modern office block.
- - Orpheus and Eurydice. The myth of the singer who descended into Hades to bring his wife back, and lost her at the threshold.
- - The afterlife and Hel in Norse myth. Old Norse scholar Jackson Crawford on what the sources actually say about Hel, and how translators have distorted it.
- - The Eleusinian Mysteries and the afterlife. Prof. Elizabeth Vandiver on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and its ritual link to the Eleusinian rites.
- - Reconstructing the Roman mystery religion of Mithras. Roman archaeologist Matthew McCarty on what can and cannot be recovered about Mithraic practice.
- - Cenote: passage to the Maya underworld. Diving the flooded limestone sinkholes the Maya treated as entrances to Xibalba.
- - Hellmouths in Christian art. The recurring medieval image of Hell's entrance as a giant set of jaws, and where it came from.
- - The myth of Hades and Persephone. The abduction myth that explained the seasons and bound the underworld to the agricultural year.
- - Mystical initiation in ancient Greece: the Eleusinian Mysteries. The rites at Eleusis, what little the initiates left on record, and how much of the rest is speculation.
- - What was the Book of the Dead?. British Museum curator Ilona Regulski explains the funerary papyri and how they were used.
- - A tour of the ancient Greek Underworld. The geography of Hades as the Greeks described it: the rivers, the ferryman, the fields of the dead.
- - Mysticism in ancient Greece. Sacred rites and esoteric belief across the Hellenic world, from Eleusis to Orphism.
- - Was the Oracle of Delphi stoned on vapours?. Archaeologist Flint Dibble weighs the geological gas hypothesis against the actual evidence from the sanctuary.
- - The cult of Mithras and London's lost temple. The London Mithraeum and the underground initiatory cult that met in windowless rooms across the Roman empire.
- - The history of Mithraism. The spread of the Mithraic mysteries through the Roman army and its rivalry with early Christianity.
