Hades

Hades was the Greek god of the underworld, the realm of the dead. He was the son of Cronos and Rhea, and the brother of Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter and Hestia. He forcibly married Persephone, Demeter's daughter. At the division of the universe after the overthrow of their father, Zeus took the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld; the earth was to be shared among them. Another name for Hades was Polydegmon ("receiver of many guests") on account of the multitudes who had died and come to his kingdom. The ghosts of the dead were escorted by Hermes, the messenger god, to the boatman Charon who ferried across the Styx, a subterranean river, only those ghosts who could pay the fare. Cerberus, the three-headed dog, guarded the entrance to the underworld and prevented anyone from returning to the land of the living.

As in Egyptian mythology, the Greeks associated the underworld with the west, the place where the sun sets. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans, however, ever thought of Hades as an evil force like Satan in Christianity. He was certainly a grim and implacable deity, and worshippers always averted their eyes when making a sacrifice. In order to avoid any reference to the nature of the underworld it was usual to call Hades by the title of Pluto ("the giver of wealth").

Hades chief myth concerns the abduction of Persephone, who was the daughter of Demeter and his brother Zeus. Persephone was abruptly taken underground by Hades when she beheld a special narcissus planted by the earth mother Gaia to please the god of death. The conflict between Hades and Demeter over Persephone's fate was decided by Zeus, who gave the husband and the mother equal shares of her time. As a dying-and-rising goddess, Persephone sank and rose annually from the underworld, in tune with the natural cycle of sowing and harvesting.

Although usually a faithful husband, Hades at one time became enamoured of the nymph Minthe. When Persephone discovered this, she became so jealous that she turned the nymph into the sweet-smelling herb, mint.