Now speaking of the Night’s Sky – this brings us to what’s probably the most ‘divergent’ area for our trifold TriPlanar schema. And I mean that in two senses – first, in terms of just how ‘different’ one of the Hellenic (and later Classical) conceptions for this Layer is as compared to ‘Everybody Else’ on this front. (Said ‘Everybody Else’ even including the other prominent Hellenic / Classical perspective upon the Layer – which, as with the Vedic, Eddic, and reconstructible Proto-Indo-European modellings, all have ‘Earth’ as the major perception here.)

And second, because even the conceptualization for the “Underworld” in this manner is actually, itself, a divergence from the more archaic Indo-European conceptry. Albeit, as with the ‘descent’ observed for elements associated with the Sea of Sky to the terrestrial ocean, something which seems to happen at varying rates almost as a ‘natural process’ in any case.

Confused? So, presumably, were the underpinnings drawn from in order to situate ‘Hades’ [ἅιδης – ‘Haides’] as an alternative to ‘Earth’ [γαῖα – ‘Gaia’].

Let me try to briefly explain.

I suspect that if you were to ask most people where the Realm of the Lord of the Dead would be … other than the occasionally slightly worried expressions which starting a conversation via metempsychosis can bring, you’d probably get answers roughly along the lines of “The Underworld”. And, if you prodded a bit further, it would likely turn out that what they had in mind would be a somewhat ‘pop-culturized’ vague recollection for what’s basically the prominent Greco-Roman one(s).

With this being located, rather pointedly, under the ground (hence, to the surprise of no doubt many, the “Under-World” designation).

Meanwhile, if we look into the archaic Vedic contemplation for such things … what we find is that the Realm of Yama is, in fact, in seemingly the entirely opposite direction – “Parame Vyoman”, states RV X 14 8 : the ‘Highest Heaven / Air / Sky’, with this same verse also confirming the Pitṛs (‘[Fore-]Fathers’ – Ancestors, the ‘Ancestral Dead’) are to be encountered therein as well . And likewise, what we might term the ‘Meritorious Dead’ are repeatedly attested (for instance, RV I 125 5-6, RV I 164 5-6, RV X 107 2, etc.) to attain an ascendance to such Heavenly stationing (“Nākasya Pṛṣṭhe” per RV I 125 5, “Uccā Divi […] Asthur” at RV X 107 2, and “Paramam Padam” as the highest of Vishnu’s ‘Three Paces’ at RV I 154 6), in consequence of their worthy actions within this life ‘down here’ upon this Earth.

(AV-S XVIII 2 48, as a point of interest, has the Heavenly Layer itself divided into three – the ‘Low Heaven’ (“Dyaur Avamā”) being ‘Watery’ (“Udanvatī”), the Middle (“Madhyamā”) being, per Whitney, “Full of Stars” (“Pīlumatīti” – as affirmed to contain such via Sāyaṇa, so the scholarly Nyāyaratnasiṃha attests for me), whilst the Third (“Tr̥tīyā”), which is the ‘Highest’ or ‘Fore-Heaven’ (“PraDyaur”), is likewise where the Pitṛs are to be found).

What ‘gives the game away’, so to speak, as to what’s going on here and how to ‘reconcile’ it with the Under World afterlife of the later (chronologically) Hellenic view, concerns what various of those august souls are described as doing ‘up there’ within their celestial attainments.

Shatapatha Brahmana VI 5 4 8 [Eggeling translation] features the following – “But, surely, these are the stars,—the women (jani) are indeed the stars, for these are the lights of those righteous men (jana) who go to the celestial world: it is by means of the stars that he thus bakes it.” RV X 68 11 has what I had earlier parsed as (to quote my own prior work): “the Pitrs (in the manner of Stars) adorn the Dark [veil of] Heaven [“Dyām”], the (Bright) Sky’s manifestation as Night, as a ‘Dusky’ / Dark Horse [“śyāvaṃ […] aśvaṃ “] with beautiful strings of Pearl [“kṛśanebhir”]” – which I had sought to link to Aditi, the Goddess Who is the Ruler of the Pitrs [SBr VIII 4 3 7]. RV X 14 8 (a key verse of probably the most prominent RigVedic Hymnal to pertain to Yama and His Realm, as well as the Pitṛs taking up resonance therein) has the departed soul attaining “parame vyoman” (‘highest sky’) enjoined to a “tanvā suvarcāḥ” – that is to say, a ‘body’ (or expression thereof, an emanation) of luminous, indeed ‘vigorous’, fiery or radiant character : you know, a star.

As shall come as a surprise to precisely no-one (not least due to the referencing from RV X 68 11 immediately above), these ‘Stars’ should seem to come out most pointedly at Night – they are associated with the Darkness. As SBr II 1 3 1 [again, Eggeling translation] puts it: “The Day represents the Gods, and the Night represents the Fathers.” SBr XIII 8 4 7 has those returning to the village (the world – indeed, more directly, the city we might say, of the Living) reciting VS XXXV 14 (which, parsed by Eggeling): “From out of the gloom have we risen …”, with this explicated [again, Eggeling’s translation for the aforesaid SBr verse] as “from the gloom, the world of the Fathers, they now indeed approach the light, the sun.”

And we should further make interested note for that detailing recounted later in SBr XIII 8 4 at verse twelve concerning the making of a ‘boundary’ (or, as Griffith’s translation for VS XXXV 15 has it, a “rampart”) – per Eggeling’s translation: “Having fetched a clod from the boundary, he deposits it (midway) between (the grave and the village), with (Vāj. S. XXXV, 15), ‘This I put up as a bulwark for the living, lest another of them should go unto that thing: may they live for a hundred plentiful harvests, and shut out death from themselves by a mountain!’–he thus makes this a boundary between the Fathers and the living, so as not to commingle; and therefore, indeed, the living and the Fathers are not seen together here.” This division, perhaps, resonating with that boundary erected by Romulus (i.e. Manu) about the archaic and Palatine (i.e. ‘walled’) hill-situated core of Rome (i.e. the ‘City of the Living’ – in contrast to the Remuria / Lemuria that was the ‘City of the Dead’ ruled over by Remus, in older iteration known as ‘Iemus’, i.e. Yama).

The Direction for the Fathers, however, is not always ‘upward’ – as one might, perhaps, be forgiven for anticipating. Instead, whilst it is evidently ‘upward’ during that phase of timing where the Stars are to be visible in such direction … during the daylight hours, something else seems to be the pertinent orientation. Namely, straight down. As Keith notes, the Path of the Dead should appear to be “described as pravat, which may denote either a downward path as of a stream, or, at any rate, a path forward to the horizon, rather than one rising erect to the heaven.” And we are also treated to a range of Vedic ritualine instructions wherein one’s digging of a hole within which to mount the Post (perhaps in the manner of roots to a ‘tree’ – c.f. SBr XIII 8 1 20), can involve the Ancestral Demesne – TS II 6 4 2 (Keith translation), for instance, noting: “If dug too deep, it has the Pitrs for its deity”. Think of it, so to speak, as something vaguely akin to that old American children’s idiom about having “dug a hole clear through to China” – which, down here in New Zealand, would instead run through to somewhere around Great Britain.

(The situation for roots to be both ‘in the Dark’ and ‘in the Sky’ … for what should obviously otherwise be ‘within the Earth’, may perhaps help us to explicate what is going on with the famously ‘inverted’ Aśvattha tree described at Katha Upanishad II 3 1, and most prominently at RV I 24 7. And, now that I think upon it … Roots to a (Worlds-)Tree [being] in the Sky, would certainly aid us in explicating the otherwise curious and difficult-to-reconcile ‘Three Roots’ formulations for Yggdrasil (a name which, as with ‘Aśvattha’, bears a ‘horse’ within it, so to speak) as encountered at Gylfaginning XV & Grimnismal XXXI, not least as several of these also seem to arc up into the air in most decidedly un ‘root-like’ fashion – but more upon that, perhaps, in due course)

So how to reconcile these two seemingly oppositional dynamics ? That of being ‘Up in the Sky’ and that of also being ‘Down Below’. Well, for a start by observing that these aren’t necessarily intended to be true at the same time.

The ‘Up in the Sky’ directional should seem to be particularly pertinent for the Sky at Night. Which, per a certain concept which had been picked up by Professor Witzel from Kuiper, should appear to situate the darkened sky of night as not simply the sky of the day but sans Sun (as a modern perspective should have it – and ironically, with the brightness of the Sun acting as ‘veil’ and preventing us from seeing the Stars ‘behind’ such) … but instead, as the sky which had been ‘under-ground’ only to revolve up to above ground (i.e. actually in the Sky) with the passing of Day into Nightfall.

A position for which, funnily enough, we should seem to possess some measure of evidentiary support coming to us from Hesiod in his Theogony as it seeks to describe the cavernous space beneath the Earth. There we hear of not only ‘Roots’ (“ῥίζαι”) to what are otherwise ‘Worlds’ (727-8 : “αὐτὰρ ὕπερθεν / γῆς ῥίζαι πεφύασι καὶ ἀτρυγέτοιο θαλάσσης” – “while above it [Tartarus] grow the roots of the Earth and of the undraining Sea”, per West’s translation; his commentary notes the repeat for the concept with the addition of ‘Sky’ “and Tartarus, for the sake of completeness” at 736-9), along with the (hound-guarded) Realm of “mighty Hades & awesome Persephone” [767-9, quoted section from Calland’s translation] and Sky-reaching station of the dread Styx [778-9] … but most particularly (for our purposes) of the situation of both ‘Night’ and ‘Day’ (748 – “ὅθι Νύξ τε καὶ Ἡμέρη”) proximate to all of these.

What’re They doing down there? We’ll let West’s translation [744-754] take over:

“And there stands the fearful house of gloomy Night, shrouded in clouds of blackness. Next to that the son of Iapetos [Atlas] stands holding the broad Heaven firmly upon his head and untiring hands, where Night and Day approach and greet each other as they cross the great threshold of bronze. One goes in, one comes out, and the house never holds them both inside, but always there is one of them outside the house ranging the earth, while the other waits inside the house until the time comes for her to go.”

Phrased more directly – this is fairly much in-line with what Kuiper & Witzel had inferred should be there. Except with one perhaps rather crucial difference … that being the fact that whereas the whole thing moves in their Vedic view – here in this skein of Hellenic cosmological structuring it’s only the Night (and Day) which do so. Leaving everything else – the ‘Roots’, the Realm of the Dead, and that certain River also seeming-irreducibly linked to same (ref. RV X 17 8 viz. the Sarasvatī with relation to the Pitṛs) to have evidently become somewhat ‘Stuck’. Moving not from the ‘Under Ground’ positional even with the passage of Day into Night (via that ‘great threshold of bronze’ which we would infer to be the Dawn/Dusk colouration which accompanies the movement across the threshold of horizon for the relevant phases of Light and Dark within our Skies).

We shall, at this point, refrain (with some great effort) from engaging in a serious and sustained contemplation for just why this shift had prospectively occurred. Suffice to say the sector of material excised from this manuscript which had sought to address such a thing – and, as a necessary part to the process, explicate also the certain other ‘Zone’ which does not appear within the bounds of the Three Worlds [this being the ‘Outer Darkness’ expressed in Classical terms as Tartarus, and with various ‘Dark Abyss’ etc. styled labelings in the Vedas, etc.] – was somewhat lengthy … and may reappear in due course as a subsequent (semi-separate) piece.

Although it is worth noting that the circumstance for the relevant ‘Afterworld’ undergoing what we might, perhaps, and perhaps aptly enough, refer to as a ‘Katabasis’ (‘κατάβασις’ – literally ‘Down-Going’, and most prominently encountered as the thematic labelling for a descent into the Underworld) … is not something to only be exhibited by our Classical IE spheres.

In the later evolutions for the Hindu cosmology, Yama and His Realm undergoes similar (Dis-)placement to become an ‘Underworld’ – and, at the same time, it seems also to acquire a different function as its major saliency within the popular imagination. That being, more specifically, Yama’s (now ‘properly’ Underworld, as in under-the-world all the time) dominion becoming the place of post-mortem punishment for the sins and shortcoming of the (formerly-)living, in a manner not unreminiscent of some of the later treatments of Tartarus (indeed, the term for the tortures in question, Yātanā (यातना), is effectively a correlate of meaning to that Dante-popularized concept of ‘Contrapasso’).

In effect, this seems to have ‘brought together’ two different (at least, per the underlying milieu – and separate in the more archaic Vedic conceptualization) Zones, potentially upon the basis of their both having at least something to do with the concepts of death and what comes next, and the directional saliency of ‘down’ through the ground along with ‘darkness’ (and perhaps also, come to think of it, the punishing saliency of Varuna … but more upon this, perhaps, at some other juncture).

Hence the circumstance for Sāyaṇa’s commentary to RV IV 5 5 – which utilizes “Narakasthānam” (i.e. Naraka, the Kingdom of Yama per Pauranika-era reckoning) in order to explicate that which is otherwise clearly an abyssal fate of obliteration (indeed, of Nirṛti; “padam […] gabhīram” – the “deep abyss (of Hell)”, per H.H. Wilson’s rendering for RV IV 5 5; “vavrāṃ anantāṃ” or “endless caverns” / “unbounded caverns” at RV VII 104 17, per Griffith & H.H. Wilson respectively; or the relatively matter-of-fact “Kartam” – ‘Pit’ – per RV I 121 13; etc.), intended for those whose crimes were directly against the Divine Order or who were (in various senses) ‘Demonic’ (ref. various verses at RV VII 104, etc.), prospectively out beyond the (riverine) bounds of the ‘civilized / habitable’ Cosmos (per RV I 121 13) and with no linkage to Yama as applies this place (or, rather, ‘non-place’) in ready evidence from the earlier Vedic cosmological perspective. But more, as I say, upon this in a future work which intends to look at the matter in greater depth itself (wherein we may also seek to more actively ‘integrate’ various of the Nordic ‘underworld’ locales which should also seem to fit this broadly pertinent typology).

To return to the Hellenic and broader Classical sphere(s), one might be tempted to suggest that there is an obvious shortfall within that milieu for our contemplations for a ‘stellar’ or ‘night-sky’ sphere ‘afterworld’ for the souls of the (better) Dead. Except this is not the case. Leaving aside the most obvious expressions for this concept – in the form of the ‘immortalization’ of certain worthies amidst the Stars (an act referred to as καταστερίζω – and we note the ‘Kata-‘ prefix, which whilst it can mean ‘into’, had as its most prominent sense ‘downward’), there actually existed a surprisingly salient array of supporting materials for what we might term a more ‘celestial’ post-mortem than that more well-known via Homer.

Trépanier does a fine job collating various of the pertinent material, and we shall not seek to reproduce that work here. But suffice to say he can draw from Aristophanes (‘Peace’), Empedocles, and Pindar to show that contrary to the contentions that such a concept only appeared “correlated with the rise of astrology” and was unattested prior to Plato, “the celestial afterlife, including astral immortality, was already well established by the second half of the fifth century. In other words, the celestial afterlife did not have to wait for astrology to get going.”

Given the concordance with what we can demonstrate for the Vedic afterworld understanding (and, for that matter, with relevant detailings to the cosmology and post-mortem conceptry for the Norse – as we shall endeavour to encompass in a subsequent installment), we might plausibly infer that the Hellenic occurrences for ‘souls amidst the Aether’ and the like … could be an archaic Indo-European traditional understanding which had been carried forward ‘adjacent’ to the more familiar perspectives of the Hellenic sphere upon these matters. Certainly, the seemingly tri-planar (or, at least, tri-layer) cosmology which Trépanier references from Plutarch (well, Hippolytus’ ‘Refutatio Omnium Haeresium’ quoting Plutarch), should seem to fit rather harmoniously with the skeletal outlines for same.

We would also draw attention, as applies the Roman sphere, to relevant material collated via the Third of the ‘Vatican Mythographers’ [Mythographi Vaticani Mythographus Tertius], presented here in the Pepin translation:

“Truly, among the philosophers there is a remarkable explanation of the return of souls. [They explain] how or why the souls of the guilty, according to some of them, just as of the innocent, return to the stars after they have been freed from the body. The souls do this so that they might either be presented with the greatest reward of eternal light as the wages of life, or they might be banished from these stars for deeds committed wickedly, or taken up, not to perish, but that they might be cast down. So also that same Vergil, not a stupid man, says: ‘‘Certainly, all things, now released, are returned and then brought back hither; there is no place for death, but alive, they fly up to join the number of stars and climb to the high heaven.’’ And Lucan says: ‘‘He made the innocent in life endure the lowest ether and gathered the souls to their eternal orbits.’’ […]

[…] Also, those whom prudence raises up, that is, ‘‘whom ardent virtue carries up to the stars.’’ And religious men, who are born of the gods, he says, for it follows that the offspring of the gods are open to religions.”
[VI 17 & 20] [the citations for quotes therein are given as Virgil’s Georgics IV 227-229; Lucan IX 8-9; Virgil’s Aeneid VI 129-131]

The Second Vatican Mythographer [II 24], meanwhile, speaks of the ‘Blessed Isles’ of Elysium [“Elisium est insule fortunate […]”] as referenced in Homer to have been ‘located by theologians’ [“secundum theologos”] in the vicinity of the ‘circle of the Moon’ [“circa lunarem circulum”], amidst supposed ‘purer air’ [“ubi aer est purior”] – this suite of description seemingly having been ‘borrowed’ from Maurus Servius Honoratus’ commentary upon Virgil’s Aeneid [V 735], and therefore quite fittingly also incorporating the “Aeris in campis” from a later Aeneid section [VI 887], which Connington (linking the situation also with the positive afterworld presented at Statius’ Silvae V 3 286) had declared to be “a general expression for the place of the dead, “the shadowy plains,” ‘aer’ probably including the notion of mist as well as of air.” One might also make mention for that famous hailing for Elysium per Aeneid VI 541, viz. – “solemque suum, sua sidera norunt”; that is to say, the place having its own Sun and knowing [“norunt”] [their] own Stars (Dryden’s translation, intriguingly, posits Suns – plural – rather than Sun, singular).

The Third Mythographer [III 6 4] also makes reference to a perception for the ‘Underworld’ to begin in the Sky [“caelo infernum incipere”], and with this linked to the Elysian Fields [“quos apud inferos fabula constituit” – in the Underworld, as per myth, the text reminds us] as amidst the “circulum Jovis”. Which would certainly be in-line with our nascent anticipation.

The Vatican Mythographers are, of course, a very late source – as the name implies, well post-Christianization; however, as we can see – they are not engaging in wholesale flights of authorial fancy with their inferences, but instead are working to weave together strands from various archaic source-material (a task not unlike our own, in some respects, as it happens – only with an entirely different, and indeed, definitely more archaic essence to our “Vāticinārī”), which they handily often directly quote in order to enable us to ‘check their working’. In other words – when they have extended sections extolling the situation of the souls of the noble departed amidst the stars … it’s because this was, indeed, a (mytho-)poetically and philosophically salient awareness amidst Classical antiquity.

Now there are several further particular areas highlighted through the Roman frame of reference which should prove pertinent to our cause herein (and not least as they demonstrate not only a prospective ‘support for’, but seemingly an outright religiously conservative Roman remembrance for the more archaic (P)IE arrangement which we have proposed). These include the attestations concerning correlates to our ‘Glorious / Ancestral Dead’ appearing quite pointedly upward, as well as certain detailing with relation to both the theonymy and various other characterization elements for the God & Goddess Who Rule the Afterworld Realm.

We have, however, elected to refrain from launching into all of that just right at this moment – and shall instead look to present the sections which elucidate these as subsequent installments. Along with, of course, the somewhat conspicuous through hitherto absence Nordic afterworld(s) conceptry and how these figure within our comparative Indo-European schema.

We may be seeking to encompass an entire universe with our efforts – but that’s no reason to try and illuminate it all at once.

[Artwork is ‘Soul Ascending’ by Josh Hutchinson]

Part One –

TRI-LOKA : The Three Worlds Of Indo-European Cosmology

Part Two –

TRI-LOKA : The Three Worlds Of Indo-European Cosmology – Part Two: Sailing The Sea Of Sky