To the River by Olivia Laing

be trusted. Flimsy, that’s how I was taught the earth is, straw-walled, so that one good huff will bring it down. The books I read as a child didn’t help. They were obsessed with Neverlands and Narnias, places reached by rabbit holes or wardrobes, by lingering near woods and rivers or plunging through a mirror. The notion of a world within our world, set deep, a world that can be entered only with difficulty by mortals, is not of course the sole possession of Catholicism, and nor does it belong exclusively to those escapist stories that Kenneth Grahame and his ilk used to spin in the innocent endless days before the First World War. There are older sources for these ideas, and in that spoiled wood they seemed very near.
    The word hell comes from the Anglo-Saxon helan , meaning to hide; it is related to hole and hollow . Hel, the afterlife of the Norse, was a concealed place, as the land of the dead by its nature must be. Its analogy for the Greeks was Hades – which itself means unseen – and for the Romans Dis. Nor were these realms always freighted with connotations of punishment and damnation. The older hells seem closer to vast waiting rooms where the dead, unsleeping, bide their time.
    Whatever names they go by, these places weren’t often visited by the living. Perhaps six or seven mortals made the journey to the underworld in classical mythology. Aeneas, the founder of Rome, went to visit his dead father, descending through the entrance in the marsh of Cumea. Odysseus, slick Odysseus, went only to the brink, sailing to the edge of Persephone’s realm and summoning the dead to visit him by the banks of the river Acheron. He wanted blind Tiresias to guide him home to Ithaca but the ghosts of heroes also came, drawn by the blood he poured, and he saw among them the hunter Orion driving a crowd of all the wild beasts he’d ever slain. Orpheus went down to reclaim Eurydice, who’d been bitten by a snake, and Hercules to steal the dog Cerberus, who guarded the gates to Hades. And then there was Psyche, who in order to win back her lover Eros had to carry out three tasks, the third of which was to bring home in a box some of the beauty of Proserpine, queen of the underworld.
    The translation of this last story by Robert Graves offers helpful advice for finding one’s way into Hades, which is linked to the mortal realm by means of all sorts of riddling tunnels and shafts:
    The famous Greek city of Lacedaemon is not far from here. Go there at once and ask to be directed to Taenarus, which is rather an out-of-the-way place to find. It’s on a peninsula to the south. Once you get there you’ll find one of the ventilation holes of the Underworld. Put your head through and you’ll see a road running downhill, but there’ll be no traffic on it. Climb through at once and the road will lead you straight to Pluto’s palace. But don’t forget to take with you two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water, one in each hand, and two coins in your mouth.
    The two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water are sops for the dog Cerberus. Psyche is also told to refuse all offers of food except a piece of common bread, for eating in the underworld means you must never leave. It was this taboo that entrapped Prosperpine, whom the Greeks called Persephone or Kore. After being abducted by Hades – for the king is named after his realm – she ate three pomegranate seeds – but some say it was four and some five or six – and though she was allowed to return to the earth’s surface for the summer months, in winter she had to return as Hades’s consort. The high goddess Persephone, Odysseus called her, the Iron Queen.
    These were stories from far away and very long ago. But our native folklore is full of odd echoes that suggest familiarity with the maps and mores of Hades, as if those ventilation shafts reached up through the caves and barrows of these damper islands too. There are thousands upon thousands of local ballads