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inmates of tartarus

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Post  Guest Sat Sep 10, 2011 9:15 pm

Tartarus
...from Encyclopaedia Brttanica online:

Tartarus, the infernal regions of ancient Greek mythology. The name was originally used for the deepest region of the world, the lower of the two parts of the underworld, where the gods locked up their enemies. It gradually came to mean the entire underworld. As such it was the opposite of Elysium, where happy souls lived after death.

Tartarus
by Martha Thompson

Tartarus is the lowest region of the world, as far below earth as earth is from heaven. According to the Greek poet Hesiod, a bronze anvil falling from heaven would take nine days and nights to reach earth, and an object would take the same amount of time to fall from earth into Tartarus. Tartarus is described as a dank, gloomy pit, surrounded by a wall of bronze, and beyond that a three-fold layer of night. Along with Chaos, Earth, and Eros, it is one of the first entities to exist in the universe.
While Hades is the main realm of the dead in Greek mythology, Tartarus also contains a number of characters. In early stories, it is primarily the prison for defeated gods; the Titans were condemned to Tartarus after losing their battle against the Olympian gods, and the hecatoncheires stood over them as guards at the bronze gates. When Zeus overcomes the monster Typhus, born from Tartarus and Gaia, he hurls it too into the same abyss.

However, in later myths Tartarus becomes a place of punishment for sinners. It resembles Hell and is the opposite of Elysium, the afterlife for the blessed. When the hero Aeneas visits the underworld, he looks into Tartarus and sees the torments inflicted on characters such as the Titans, Tityos, Otus and Ephialtes, and the Lapiths. Rhadymanthus (and, in some versions, his brother Minos) judges the dead and assigns punishment.

map of the underworld
inmates of tartarus Underworldmap


Last edited by blue moon on Sat Sep 10, 2011 10:25 pm; edited 1 time in total

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Post  Guest Sat Sep 10, 2011 9:38 pm

Each inmate of Tartarus had a special punishment assigned to him

Sisphyus

Sisphyus was forced to roll a rock up a hill. As soon as he got close to the top, the rock rolled back down.

inmates of tartarus Sisyphus1


Literary interpretations
wiki:

Ovid, the Roman poet, makes reference to Sisyphus in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Orpheus descends and confronts Hades and Persephone, he sings a song so that they will grant his wish to bring Eurydice back from the dead. After this song is sung, Ovid shows how moving it was by noting that Sisyphus, emotionally affected, for just a moment, stops his eternal task and sits on his rock, the Latin wording being inque tuo sedisti Sisyphe, saxo.

Though purported to be one of the dialogues of Greek philosopher Plato, the Sisyphus is generally believed to be apocryphal, possibly written by one of his pupils.

Albert Camus, the French absurdist, wrote an essay entitled The Myth of Sisyphus in which he elevates Sisyphus to the status of absurd hero.

Franz Kafka repeatedly referred to Sisyphus as a bachelor; the Kafkaesque for him were those qualities that brought out the Sisyphus-like qualities in himself. According to Frederick Karl: "The man who struggled to reach the heights only to be thrown down to the depths embodied all of Kafka's aspirations; and he remained himself, alone, solitary."

The philosopher Richard Taylor uses the myth of Sisyphus as a representation of a life made meaningless because it consists of bare repetition.

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Post  Guest Sat Sep 10, 2011 9:44 pm

Tantalus

Tantalus was banished to Tartarus when he died. He was condemned to forever stand neck deep in a pool of water, but whenever he tried to cup his hands and drink some, the water level receded. There were branches bearing luscious fruits above him, but whenever he tried to pick one, the branches blew away.

inmates of tartarus Tantalus

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Post  Guest Sat Sep 10, 2011 10:08 pm

Ixion

Ixion is bound to a burning wheel, doomed to spin for all eternity.

inmates of tartarus Ixion_HT_lowres

inmates of tartarus Ixion+bound+to+the+Wheel

Ixion is bound to the Wheel of Fire
Engraving by Bernard Picart.

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Post  Guest Sat Sep 10, 2011 10:55 pm

Underworld and Afterlife
from http://www.maicar.com/GML/Underworld.html

"Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb …" (Socrates. Plato, Gorgias 492e).

" … it is not easy to believe that the gods possess any underground dwelling where the souls collect." (Pausanias, Description of Greece 3.25.5).

……..
There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
(Algernon Charles Swinburne 1837-1909, The Garden of Proserpine).

"Any more for Lethe, Blazes, Perdition, or the Dogs? Come along now, any more for a nice restful trip to Eternity? No more worries, no more cares, makes a lovely break!" (Charon in Aristophanes, The Frogs 210).

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Post  Old Mack Wed Sep 14, 2011 4:18 am

Whats it all* mean ?

* everything in the world

inmates of tartarus Burning-books
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Post  Guest Wed Sep 14, 2011 4:01 pm

Old Mack wrote:Whats it all* mean ?

* everything in the world

inmates of tartarus Burning-books

hello mack...not understanding how 'everything in the world' connects to the underworld scratch

...libricide "is generally motivated by moral, religious, or political objections to the material."
...is this image your way of saying this, and if so what does your comment mean?




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Post  eddie Wed Sep 14, 2011 11:34 pm

The hellfire sermon from Chapter 3 of Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man':

The preacher's voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted them. Then he resumed:

-- Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

-- They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

-- The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

-- But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

-- Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

-- And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the God-head.

-- Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned - there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss. The mouths of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their fellow sufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices in sin. In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey, and a serpent. The intention of those law-givers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful beasts. But what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching throats of the damned in hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who aided and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them from the path of virtue. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them. But they are helpless and hopeless: it is too late now for repentance.

-- Last of all consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters and tempted alike, of the company of the devils. These devils will afflict the damned in two ways, by their presence and by their reproaches. We can have no idea of how horrible these devils are. Saint Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has written that, rather than look again for one single instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk until the end of her life along a track of red coals. These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful. They mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn aside from your pious practices and good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not give up that lewd habit, that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the counsels of your confessor? Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins? Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field, for they, at least, are but brutes and have no reason to guide them: time was, but time shall be no more. God spoke to you by so many voices, but you would not hear. You would not crush out that pride and anger in your heart, you would not restore those ill-gotten goods, you would not obey the precepts of your holy church nor attend to your religious duties, you would not abandon those wicked companions, you would not avoid those dangerous temptations. Such is the language of those fiendish tormentors, words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred and of disgust. Of disgust, yes! For even they, the very devils, when they sinned, sinned by such a sin as alone was compatible with such angelical natures, a rebellion of the intellect: and they, even they, the foul devils must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself.

-- O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels!

He came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and shapeless. And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he was plunging headlong through space.
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Post  eddie Wed Sep 14, 2011 11:38 pm

Keep 'em coming. Moony. Very useful.
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Post  Guest Thu Sep 15, 2011 1:03 am

eddie wrote:The hellfire sermon from Chapter 3 of Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'
Shocked i have never...read anything even remoteltely like that. Thanks eddie. How...powerfully expressive. Shocked

I'd never thought of hell as a suburb, till I read about Tartarus.

When I started this thread I wanted to write a brief intro on each inmate's crime, to show how ironic the punishments were...but I'm moving from part-time to overtime at work...am just too tired to paraphrase...

Thanks for the post eddie.

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Post  Old Mack Thu Sep 15, 2011 5:20 am

blue moon wrote:...not understanding how 'everything in the world' connects to the underworld scratch
It was meant to question peoples / gods, behavior / actions as a whole ? or just another way of saying...'what is the meaning of life.'

It was interesting reading but when people took that stuff as seriousness it's a little crazy.

As a Christian I don't believe sinners that go to hell, shovel coal 24-7 into the fiery furnaces.

That autumn chill sent a shiver, girl, it shook us to the bone.
And we still had February frozen on the phone.
Spring thaw, would it find us with our lips frozen blue?
Love calls, but do we really live the time we're running through?
Or like a dream, do we let it die and drift away to sleep.
Until it screams like an echo in the history books you keep.
'Cause that stream running from the corners of my mind.
Looking back I find like a river it unwinds.

Running straight outta time, straight outta time.'


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Post  Guest Thu Sep 15, 2011 1:48 pm

pinhedz wrote:
Old Mack wrote:As a Christian I don't believe sinners that go to hell, shovel coal 24-7 into the fiery furnaces.
There was that Australian movie with the priest that said: "If God did that to people, it would be a bit like pulling the wings off flies, wouldn't it?"
...I think he did that to some angels...

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Post  Guest Thu Sep 15, 2011 2:27 pm

Old Mack wrote:
blue moon wrote:...not understanding how 'everything in the world' connects to the underworld scratch
It was meant to question peoples / gods, behavior / actions as a whole ? or just another way of saying...'what is the meaning of life.'
It was interesting reading but when people took that stuff as seriousness it's a little crazy.
As a Christian I don't believe sinners that go to hell, shovel coal 24-7 into the fiery furnaces.
Hi Mack,
this thread isn't a comment on religion or the meaning of life. I don't take stories about the underworld or the afterlife literally, I just enjoy them as stories, and the geography of the underwold and the hierarchy of hell are great stories. I'm curious about symbols and mythology. Many pagan and christian myths intersect, and I look for the intersections because I'm wired that way. There are lots of songs about hell, but most of them present a diluted place where you just feel pretty bad...that's why that fictional sermon eddie posted was so profound
...the horror!


Last edited by blue moon on Thu Sep 15, 2011 3:53 pm; edited 1 time in total

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Post  Guest Thu Sep 15, 2011 3:19 pm


The three Furies (sisters) live in Tartarus, where they torture the inmates. They also attack mortals on earth.

They are foul hags with bats' wings, hair of snakes and they smell foul.

They are:
Allecto, unceasingly angry, who punishes moral crimes, Magaera the jealous, who punishes infidelity, and Tisiphone, nemesis to murderers, and guardian of the gates of Tartarus.

An engraving by Gustave Dore...the Furies Before Gates of Hell scene from Dante's Inferno:
inmates of tartarus Gates+of+Hell

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Post  Guest Thu Sep 15, 2011 8:46 pm

I didn't know there was hell before there was sin.

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Post  Guest Thu Sep 15, 2011 9:07 pm

...those pesky Greek gods needed somewhere to send people who pissed 'em off inmates of tartarus Girl-blow-up

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Post  Guest Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:43 am

blue moon wrote:map of the underworld
inmates of tartarus Underworldmap
I look at this and wonder who are those red people around Lethe.

"all those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness."

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Post  eddie Fri Sep 16, 2011 8:41 am

One of the scariest moments in cinema over the last few decades occurs in "Gimme Shelter"- the documentary account of the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont concert- when what appears to be a WOLF strolls casually from stage-left to stage-right, in the midst of the mounting chaos.

Thinking rationally now, the beast is obviously the 'pet' of one of the attendant Hell's Angels- but, just for a second, it's as though the Lord of the Flies himself has stepped in to say 'Hi! Here I am!'.

I've been having a bit of trouble posting links since I changed my ISP, but if anybody could find and post that moment, you'll see just what I mean. Failing that, the band's rendition of 'Sympathy for the Devil' at the same concert should suffice.

It was years before the Stones played that song again live.

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