Modern audiences have a lot of different versions of Hades to enjoy, and it should be noted that not all of them make him into a Greek devil-figure. Indeed, many are very good and generally not too satanic. That’s not to say all modern conceptions of Hades are bad. So too has their design of Hades himself as blue and glowing, which is honestly fine and I like that everyone just makes Hades blue now. Now, I don’t really begrudge Disney getting rid of the parts of Hercules story where he, for instance, murders his wife and children, but their choice to really lean into making Hades essentially the devil who wants to overthrow the nice shiny gods has resonated throughout the culture. Enter Disney and their take on Hades in 1997’s Hercules.Īs a kid’s movie, Hercules is fine, but as an accurate take on mythology, it’s complete garbage. The heroes become more heroic for our modern sensibilities and to be heroic they need a proper villain. That’s why when Greek myths get adapted for modern audiences, the horrible stories of things like sexual assault and the tragic endings brought on by hubris often get sanded away. Tartarus, originally denoting an abyss far below Hades and the place of punishment in the lower world, later lost its distinctness and became almost a synonym for Hades.” Centuries passed, and Christianity, with its focus on hell and demons, became a primary religion, and Hades remains associated with hell and then gets saddled with the idea of Satan/The Devil.Ĭhristianity and its ideas of sin, hell, and one good God eternally punching down against a single evil not-God influences a lot of people’s thinking and popular depictions, and we just … tend to view things in a good/evil binary. In Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, the word “Hades” was used for “Sheol, denoting a dark region of the dead. So why is Hades always portrayed nowadays as a baddie? Well, there are a lot of reasons, including the way we generally fear death, but monotheism and Disney are the big two. Yes, he abducted Persephone, but that was because Zeus said to and their relationship was remarkably functional by Olympian standards. In general, Hades was one of the better-behaved Gods in Greek myth. The Gods could help people and were powerful, but they were worshipped because they were Gods, not paragons of perfect morality. All of the Olympian Gods were flawed and spiteful: just look at Zeus’s constant myths involving sexual assault, many a vengeful, murderous God, or you know, the entire Trojan war. In fact, the concept of any God being “evil” (or even what we’d now consider morally “good”) doesn’t really fit with Greek religion and myth. Underworld, gold, wealth, jewels, it makes sense. Over time, as Greek culture absorbed gods and from other areas and was in turn adopted by Rome, Hades also became conflated with the potentially separate figures of Aidoneus, as well as the Roman Gods Plutus, who was a god of wealth and the bounty of the earth and Pluton a separate god of the underworld. Some roughly translate it as “unseen” and Hades itself has come to mean his rule of the underworld, as well as its ruler. We don’t even know very well what the name Hades even means or its etymology. We don’t really know where he came from before that, but it’s interesting to see his as a relatively new edition to the Greek pantheon in context. Hades didn’t exist in Mycenaean Greece and showed up sometime in those dark ages. We know more about the Mycenaean civilization than we do about Greece during those dark ages, including that the Mycenean god of the underworld was … Poseidon. After the collapse of Mycenaean Greece, there are centuries of history with little to no records (hence a dark age).
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