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As the face of the planet Pluto, Hades embodies death, the hidden, and rebirth. Hades is the Greek god of the underworld and the dead, the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea, who received the realm below when the three brothers divided the cosmos among them. So dreaded was his name that people called him instead Plouton, the wealth-giver, for the riches beneath the earth, and he wore a cap of invisibility. He carried off Persephone to be his queen, and her return to the upper world for part of each year marks the turning of the seasons. He is lord of the dead but not death itself, ruling also the mineral wealth of the deep. His Roman counterpart is Pluto, and sacred to him are the bident, the dog Cerberus, and the cypress. He embodies death, the hidden depths, and rebirth.
Facts
Cult
Principal Cult CentreFew; a sanctuary of Hades near Elis was opened one day in the year 1 Attributes and Iconography Attributes and IconographyEnthroned and bearded with sceptre or bident 1 Attributes and IconographyThe cap of invisibility, a cornucopia 1 Worship and PracticeBecause he received no regular cult of his own, Hades was worshipped chiefly through his consort Persephone at sanctuaries such as Eleusis. 3 Practice
LineageHesiod and Homer alike count Hades a son of Cronus and Rhea, brother to Zeus and Poseidon; Homer's Iliad has Poseidon himself recall that the three brothers divided the cosmos by lot, with the underworld falling to Hades. 3 Attributions
Mythic AssociationHades carried off Persephone to be his queen, and her return to the upper world for part of each year marks the turning of the seasons, the myth that ties the underworld god directly to the cycle of the harvest above. 2 Origins
Origin of the NameOne ancient etymology reads Hades as a idus, the unseen one, reflecting a Greek reluctance to name the god of the dead directly. 3 Sources
Textual NoteThe Homeric Hymn to Demeter, though centered on Demeter and Persephone, is also the fullest surviving connected narrative naming Hades directly as an active participant, describing his abduction of Persephone and the bargain of the pomegranate seed that fixes her seasonal return. 4 Function
Domain / Function Domain / Function Domain / Function Attestation
Era of Attestation Veneration TodayHistorically attested; no continuous cult 1 HistoricityNot a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 3 Belief
TheologyPolytheistic: many gods 1 Learn More
The God Whose Name You Did Not Say
Hades holds an unusual place among the Olympians: he received the underworld as his share when the three brothers divided the cosmos, yet he was barely worshipped in the ordinary way, and Greeks were wary even of naming him. To speak the name of the lord of the dead was to draw his attention, so they used euphemisms, above all Plouton, the wealthy one, from which Latin Pluto comes. The wealth was literal and agricultural: everything that grows and everything that is buried belongs to the ground he rules.
His realm took his name; the Greeks spoke of going down to the house of Hades rather than to a place called by another word. It was not, in the older conception, a place of punishment. Most of the dead were simply shades, drained of strength, existing without reward or torment, the picture the Odyssey gives when Odysseus meets them and Achilles says he would rather be a landless labourer among the living than king over all the dead.
Cult reflected the caution. Sacrifices to Hades and the underworld powers were chthonic: offered at night, over a pit, with the victim's head turned down and the offering burned entire rather than shared, the mirror image of a feast for the Olympians above.
Persephone, the Seasons, and a Promise of More
The one great myth of Hades is the seizing of Persephone. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells how Hades, with Zeus's quiet consent, carries the maiden down to be his queen; her mother Demeter, goddess of grain, mourns and withholds all growth until the earth starves. A settlement is reached, but Persephone has eaten pomegranate seeds in the underworld and so must return there for part of each year. The Greeks read the pattern into the agricultural calendar, her descent is the barren season, her return the growth, though the details of which season vary by region.
This myth carried more than an explanation of the year. It was the charter-story of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most important initiatory cult of the Greek world, celebrated near Athens for roughly a thousand years. Initiates, sworn to secrecy that antiquity largely kept, were promised through Demeter and Persephone a better hope for their lot after death.
So the same underworld that the Odyssey paints as a grey diminishment became, through Eleusis, the ground of a genuine hope. The two pictures coexisted; the Greeks did not resolve them, and different Greeks leaned on different ones.
In the Texts
Theogony 453-458Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Loeb Classical Library)theogony
But Rhea was subject in love to Cronos and bare splendid children, Hestia, Demeter, and gold-shod Hera and strong Hades, pitiless in heart, who dwells under the earth, and the loud-crashing Earth-Shaker, and wise Zeus, father of gods and men, by whose thunder the wide earth is shaken.
The birth of Hades.
Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Loeb Classical Library). translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White.
About This Passage
Correspondences & Relations
Archetypes
Pantheons
Planetary Faces
Hades holds this body because the object found in 1930 was named Pluto, his Roman title and one also used in Greek as Plouton. The underworld reading of the planet in astrology dates from the 1930s and after.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The ferryman of the dead belongs to the underworld over which Hades rules.
This source names Hades directly: "Rhea bears him, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon in turn, warned by Gaia and Uranos that his own son would depose him exactly as he had deposed Uranos; Rhea saves the youngest, Zeus, by..."
This source names Hades directly: "of Persephone, whose abduction by Hades is the central episode of Demeter's own myth."
Hades, Realms He rules the house that carries his name, and the Greeks used the one word for both.
This source names Hades directly: "Tate Donovan voices the adult Hercules, James Woods voices Hades, Danny DeVito voices the satyr trainer Philoctetes, Susan Egan voices Megara, Rip Torn voices Zeus and Samantha Eggar voices Hera."
This source names Hades directly: "Titanomachy, Zeus receives the sky, Hades the underworld and Poseidon the sea, which he rules from an undersea palace and stirs with the trident that is his sign."
Rhea, Figures This source names Hades directly: "When each child she bears him, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon, is swallowed at birth on Cronus's fear of being overthrown, Rhea travels to Crete to bear her sixth child, Zeus, in secret..."
Child Of
Hades is named among the six children Rhea bore to Cronus.
Rhea, Deities Hades is named among the six children Rhea bore to Cronus.
Depicted In
Confirmed card in the deck's corrected multi-pantheon scope (Greek); jrriveracorner.wordpress.com full card list, corroborated independently for this figure.
Identified with (Interpretatio)
Aita, Deities Aita is the Etruscan god of the underworld, his name taken directly from the Greek Hades, corresponding to the Roman Dis Pater or Pluto.
Interpretatio Of
Pluto, Deities Interpretatio romana: Greek underworld-god Hades identified with Roman Pluto/Dis.
Passages on This
Worshipped In
Sources
1. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition
Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2012s.v. HadesView the Source 2. Theogony
3. Greek Religion
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1985On the name taboo, chthonic sacrifice, and the Eleusinian MysteriesView the Source 4. The Homeric Hymns
Anonymous; ascribed in antiquity to HomerThe Homeric Hymn to Demeter: the seizing of Persephone and the seasonsView the Source Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. HadesView the Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A History
Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, Cambridge University Press, 1998View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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