Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

I have ‘discovered’ that there was a specific formula for creating scary monsters in ancient Greek and Roman stories. Take a creature you already know, make it really big, and toss a couple of extra heads on it for good measure.

Sure, there are a few exceptions, like Medusa (who got the extra heads, snake style, but skipped the super-sizing) or Scylla and Charybdis (which were probably exaggerations of actual ship-wrecking ocean features), but most follow this rule. It makes the legends more exciting if you also include special ‘features’ on your monsters, like acid blood, regenerating heads, etc..

Which, oddly enough, brings me to the underworld. Monsters have a habit of killing people, and dead folks do end up in the underworld, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this is where I find myself.

If you’re dead, it’s an easy enough place to get into. Slip the ferryman a couple of coins, he’ll pole you across the river Styx, and then you go on to whatever fate it was that you earned in life. For the living, things are a bit more complicated.

Either Hades got tired of losing souls he’d collected, or he really hates solicitors, because he’s got some serious ability to filter the living out of his kingdom. First, of course, you have to find the entrance, and that is no simple task. There is only one, and as expected, it is in the middle of a most inhospitable nowhere.

Unfortunately, finding the entrance is the easy part.

In most legends, the ferryman won’t carry the living, which leaves you to figure out how to cross the river Styx on your own. Of course, if you’re the big, strapping hero type, you could just swim the damn thing, right? Styx, or Lethe, is just a river, and any hero worth his salt should be able to conquer a bloody river.

Except that the tiniest drop of the water will cause mortals, living or dead, to forget everything from their former lives. For the dead, this can be a blessing, as it washes away their grief. For the living? Well, good luck completing your quest if you can’t remember who you are, how you got here, or what the shiny pointy thing strapped to you is for.

To make things more fun, you can’t eat or drink in the underworld, or you will be trapped there forever. Remember good old Persephone? Kidnapped by Hades, so her grieving mother tossed the world into winter? Yeah, well, we still have winter because she ate six pomegranate seeds while she was there, and now has to spend six months of every year as Hades’ bride. That was the deal that a Goddess got, in order to save the mortal world. A run of the mill hero isn’t going to rate squat.

So if you do manage to find the place, cross the river with your memories intact, and avoid eating or drinking anything, you still have to deal with the guardian before you can try to bargain with Hades himself.

If you’ve played any video games at all, you know the guardian is Cerberus, the three-headed dog. Of course, he’s enormous, vicious, and never sleeps, just as one would expect the monster in a myth to be.

But there is a little twist to this story, one that I certainly never knew, nor expected. The name Cerberus derives from the Greek word Kerboros which appears to mean speckled or spotted . If you translate that literally, then big, bad, King of the Dead Hades named his vicious three-headed monster guard dog ‘Spot’.

Somehow, I find the idea of facing down Spot considerably less worrisome than facing Cerberus.

Cheers,

Michelle