Elysium

Greek underworld
Residents
Geography
  • Acheron
  • Asphodel
    Fields
  • Cocytus
  • Elysion
Famous inmates
Visitors

In Greek mythology, Elysium (Greek: Ἠλύσια πεδία) was a section of the Underworld (the spelling Elysium is a Latinization of the Greek word Ήλύσιον Elysion). The Elysian Fields, or the Elysian Plains, were the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous.

Contents

Etymology

Elysium is an obscure name that evolved from a designation of a place or person struck by lightning, enelysion, enelysios.[1] This could be a reference to Zeus, the god of lightning/Jupiter, so "lightning-struck" could be saying that the person was blessed (struck) by Zeus (/lightning/fortune). Scholars have also suggested that Greek Elysion may have instead been derived from the Egyptian term ialu (older iaru), meaning "reeds," with specific reference to the "Reed fields" (Egyptian: sekhet iaru / ialu), a paradisaical land of plenty where the dead hoped to spend eternity.

Ruler

The ruler of Elysium varies from author to author; Pindar names the ruler as Kronos, released from Tartarus and ruling in a palace:

And those that have three times kept to their oaths,

Keeping their souls clean and pure,

Never letting their hearts be defiled by the taint

Of evil and injustice,

And barbaric venality,

They are led by Zeus to the end:

To the palace of Kronos

Other authors claim that Kronos remained in Tartarus for all eternity, and the judge was another, sometimes Rhadamanthys.

Classical literature

Two Homeric passages in particular established for Greeks the nature of the Afterlife: the dreamed apparition of the dead Patroclus in the Iliad and the more daring boundary-breaking visit in Book 11 of the Odyssey. Greek traditions concerning funerary ritual were reticent, but the Homeric examples encouraged other heroic visits, in the myth cycles centered around Theseus and Heracles.[2][3]

The Elysian Fields lay on the western margin of the earth, by the encircling stream of Oceanus, and there the mortal relatives of the king of the gods were transported, without tasting death, to enjoy an immortality of bliss (Odyssey 4.563). Lesser spirits were not quite as fortunate: an eerie passage describes the twittering bat-like ghosts of Penelope's slain suitors, led by Hermes:

down the dank

mouldering paths and past the Ocean's streams they went

and past the White Rock and the Sun's Western Gates and past

the Land of Dreams, and soon they reached the fields of asphodel

where the dead, the burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home

—Odyssey 24.5-9, translation by Robert Fagles

Hesiod refers to the Isles of the Blessed (makarôn nêsoi) in the Western Ocean (Works and Days). Walter Burkert notes the connection with the motif of far-off Dilmun: "Thus Achilles is transported to the White Isle, which may refer to Mount Teide on Tenerife, whose volcano is often snowcapped and as the island was sometimes called the white isle by explorers, and becomes the Ruler of the Black Sea, and Diomedes becomes the divine lord of an Adriatic island."[1]

Pindar makes it a single island:

And those that have three times kept to their oaths,

Keeping their souls clean and pure,

Never letting their hearts be defiled by the taint

Of evil and injustice,

And barbaric veniality,

They are led by Zeus to the end:

To the palace of Kronos,

Where soothing breezes off the Ocean

Breathe over the Isle of the Blessed:

All around flowers are blazing with a

Dazzling light:

Some springing from the shining trees,

Others nourished by the water from the sea:

With circlets and garlands of flowers they

Crown their hands,

Ruled by the steadfast councils of

Rhadamanthys:

Rhadamanthys,

The great Judge,

Whom the Father,

The husband of Rhea,

Whose throne is higher than all:

The great Father keeps him by his side,

His loyal advisor.

Peleus and Kadmos both are there,

And Akhilleus, brought there by his mother,

After she had conquered the heart of Zeus with her

Prayers

In Elysium where fields of the pale liliaceous asphodel, and poplars grew, there stood the gates that led to the house of Ais (in Attic dialect "Hades").

In Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas, like Heracles and Odysseus before him, travels to the underworld. Virgil describes an encounter in Elysium between Aeneas and his father Anchises. Virgil's Elysium knows perpetual spring and shady groves, with its own sun and lit by its own stars: solemque suum, sua sidera norunt (Aeneid, 6.541).

Hades is the ruler of the underworld, which includes the Elysian Fields, Tartarus, and Asphodel.

Post-classical literature

Elysium was a pagan expression that passed into the usage of the Christian patristic writers as a synonym for paradise.

In Dante's epic The Divine Comedy, Limbo is purposefully described to much resemble the Elysian Fields. This is due in large part to Limbo's being described as the resting place of, among others, virtuous pagans who lived before the time of Christ. Being the first and uppermost layer of Hell, Limbo is closed off from God; the mood is one of sadness, since heaven is close yet unattainable.

In the Renaissance, the heroic population of the Elysian Fields tended to outshine its formerly dreary pagan reputation; the Elysian Fields borrowed some of the bright allure of paradise. In Paris, the Champs-Élysées retain their name of the Elysian Fields, first applied in the late 16th century to a formerly rural outlier beyond the formal parterre gardens behind the royal French palace of the Tuileries.

After the Renaissance, an even cheerier Elysium evolved for some poets. Sometimes it is imagined as a place where heroes have continued their interests from their lives. Others suppose it is a location filled with feasting, sport, song; Joy is the "daughter of Elysium" in Friedrich Schiller's ode "To Joy".

When in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night shipwrecked Viola is told "This is Illyria, lady.", "And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium." is her answer: "Elysium" for her and her first Elizabethan hearers simply means Paradise. Similarly, in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, Elysium is mentioned in Act II during Papageno's solo while he describes what it would be like if he had his dream girl: "Des Lebens als Weiser mich freun, Und wie im Elysium sein." ("Enjoy life as a wiseman, And feel like I'm in Elysium.")

In John Ford's 1633 tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore Giovanni, after sealing his requited love for his sister Annabella with twin oaths, states' "I would not change this minute for Elyzium."

The New Orleans neighborhood of Elysian Fields in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is the declassé purgatory where Blanche Dubois lives with Stanley and Stella Kowalski. New Orleans' Elysian Fields provides the second act setting of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine.

In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Elysian Undying Lands, the home of the gods, elves, and a select few others, can only be reached by crossing the western sea, much as one would have to cross the stream of Oceanus to reach the Fortunate Isles.

In his poem Middlesex, John Betjeman describes how the heroine Elaine hurries "... Out into the outskirt's edges, Where a few surviving hedges Keep alive our lost Elysium - rural Middlesex again". The poem, considered by many to be one of his best, harks back to a time when the suburbs of modern London (Perivale and Harrow-on-the-Hill, for example) were fields and meadows, with all the pastoral imagery that they convey.

In Spring and All, William Carlos Williams describes a dying woman's "elysian slobber/upon/the folded handkerchief".

In his poem An Old Haunt, Hugh McFadden sets an Elysian scene in Dublin's St. Stephen's Green park.[4]

Very slowly solitude slips round me

in St. Stephen's Green. I rest:

see pale salmon clouds blossom.

I'm back in the fields of Elysium.

In David Gemmell's Parmennion series (Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince) and his Troy trilogy, his characters refer to Elysium as the "Hall of Heroes," a Valhalla-like connotation.

In Siegfried Sassoon's "Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man", Sassoon writes "The air was Elysian with early summer". Its use in this context could be prolepsis, as the British countryside he is describing would become the burial ground of his dead comrades and heroes from World War I.

In Jean Genet's The Balcony, the Judge, who is equating himself with Minos during his session at the brothel, cites that some souls he "consigns to the boredom of the Elysian fields" while others to the flames.

Modern Place Names

The Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the most prestigious avenue in Paris and one of the most famous streets in the world, is French for "Elysian Fields." The nearby Élysée Palace houses the President of the French Republic, for which reason "l'Élysée" frequently appears as a metonym for the French presidency.

In Los Angeles, California, Elysian Park is the name of a 600-acre (2.4 km2) public open space area—the second largest park in Los Angeles -- established in 1781, the year of the city's founding. It retains much of the idyllic natural chaparral and coastal sage scrub present in the area since prehistoric times, in addition to hiking trails, picnic areas, barbecue pits, a small man-made lake, a children's play area, and baseball diamonds referred to as, "The Elysian Fields".

In Mexico City, Campos Eliseos (Spanish: Elysian Fields) is a street in the Polanco neighborhood where several of the city's embassies, luxury hotels and restaurants are located.

Elysian Fields is a street in New Orleans. It is the only one that goes from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain.

Science

Classical music

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,

Tochter aus Elysium,

wir betreten feuertrunken,

Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

Deine Zauber binden wieder,

was die Mode streng geteilt:

alle Menschen werden Brüder,

wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Approximate English Translation:
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,

Daughter of Elysium,

Touched with fire, to the portal,

Of thy radiant shrine, we come.

Your sweet magic frees all others,

Held in Custom's rigid rings.

All men on earth become brothers,

In the haven of your wings.

Dann schmeckte mir Trinken und Essen;

Dann könnte' ich

Mit Fürsten mich messen,

Des Lebens als Weiser mich freun,

Und wie im Elysium sein.

In English:
Then drink and food would taste good to me;

Then I could

Measure myself with princes,

Enjoy life as a wiseman,

And feel like I'm in Elysium.

Samuel Barber set part of the text of American poet James Agee's Description of Elysium to music in the well-known piece Sure on this Shining Night. The excerpted text of the Barber piece is as follows:

Sure on this shining night
Of star-made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.

The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.

Sure on this shining night
I weep for wonder
Wandering far alone
Of shadows on the stars.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, 1985. p. 198.
  2. ↑ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1948.
  3. ↑ Carl A.P. Ruck and Danny Staples, The World of Classical Myth, 1994.
  4. ↑ Hugh McFadden, Cities of Mirrors (Beaver Row Press, Dublin), 1984.