Hades meaning

Meaning

Invisible, Unseen; or Accumulated Knowledge

Etymology

From (1) the negative α (a), "not", or the positive one, "accumulated" or "shared", and (2) the verb ειδω (eido), to see.

The mysterious word αδης (hades) started out as the personal name of the Hellenistic god of the underworld, and hence became applied to the realm he governed, namely the realm of the dead. Hence Hades is somewhat an equivalent of Sheol in Hebrew thought, with the main and obvious difference that in Hebrew, the dead require little or no governance and whatever of that is available down there comes from the same God who rules the overworld and the heavens (Psalm 139:8). The name Hades occurs 11 times in the New Testament see full concordance.

The Greek idea of Hades, rather than the Hebrew idea of Sheol, became one of two major catalysts in the formation of the post-Biblical and Christian idea of hell (the other one being Gehenna). In Greek mythology, there was also an even deeper realm, namely Tartarus, which was as far below Hades as Hades was below the surface of the earth.

It's tempting to write this whole Hades thing off to superstition and barbarism but that would be a mistake. It's also a mistake to impose modern literalism upon ancient texts. Despite what the stories seem to imply to an otherwise poorly informed modern reader, Hades is not geographically below us, for precisely the same reasons why God does not abide in outer space. As we explain in more detail in our articles on the name YHWH and the verb υφαινω (uphaino), to weave, consciousness did not come out of matter but matter came out of consciousness (words do not represent things but things represent words: words came first and things came later, when God pronounced the words he had first produced), and "heaven" is a place of pure meaning, where words live, even words that correspond to very little physical manifestation on "earth" (the realm of matter): words like honor, love, thought, suspicion, hope. God has zero physical presence, and is entirely "meaning", which is why God can appear in the guise of a Word. This Divine Word is the "meaning of everything", which, as everybody knows, sums up all things seamlessly (Ephesians 1:10, Colossians 2:3), because the singularity from which the whole universe Big Banged forward was never compromised.

It's a tricky detail but God himself cannot be observed, and only the Throne of God can be. God is One (Deuteronomy 6:4), and the Oneness-Of-It-All (that's the Throne) comes before all things and governs all the goings on in the universe (Colossians 1:16-17), which is why what goes up must come down, things like energy, baryon number, electrical charge, information and momentum are preserved, and everything works together for those who love God (Romans 8:28).

A traveler who travels upward into the heavens and ever closer to the Throne of God, is not an astronaut who travels through outer space, but a reader who hones the words of things, and categories of words, and clusters of categories, and snaps more and more of those together so that while the entropy in the material universe is getting ever greater, the entropy in the mind of our pilgrim is getting ever lower.

Hades is in the opposite direction. In Hades we lose meaning and overlap and patterns, whilst chaos and war increase, and any trace of love and harmony fade. The Hebrew cosmological model (which, we shall repeat, tells of words and meaning and not of matter, objects and places), has at its core the Oneness Of All Things (that's the Throne upon which God is seated), with degrees of dynamic activity in concentric circles around it, until the distance between the things that move and the Oneness Of All Things has become so great that the individual energies of the moving things win from the attraction to the Oneness Of All Things, and the things fly away into the outer darkness, where the attraction of the Oneness is completely overwhelmed by the chaos of things bumping into each other.

In Hebrew, God is the center of everything, and everything derives its character and existence from its relative position to God. The opposite of the Throne of God is not another throne, but the complete lack of any rule or covenant or order. Law and lawfulness result in predictability. In traffic we know what the other guy is going to do because we trust that we both adhere to the same rules. In language we attain freedom of speech only when both speaker and audience submit to the same rules (see our article on ελευθερια, eleutheria, freedom-by-law). That means that in Hades, where law is diminished the further away from the enlightened overworld we descend, there is ever increasing chaos and lawlessness and unpredictability. Since law results in predictability, and predictability gives freedom, the deeper into Hades we go, the more firmly we get bonded and bound. But that does not mean that there is an entity at the heart of bondage (as the Greeks and people like Dante imagined). Instead, at the heart of bondage there is the howling infinite of nothingness, pure chaos and lawlessness, endless energies that whip about in a fury that knows neither reason nor relentance, which keeps no records and holds no memory, and yields to no authority other than its own wiles and reflexes.

Have you ever wondered what life is like for a fly or a mosquito? Creatures like that have no language, so they have very little conscious thought. But if — and this is an admittedly big "if", but one we very seriously propose — we assume that consciousness is as fundamental as energy and information, and neither goes away nor is created, and only changes form (and see for some tantalizing thoughts on this the mystic concept of Gilgul), then flies and mosquitoes have minds in them. And those minds are filled with the sort of feelings that we humans call fundamental or primitive: fear, anger and desire. That means that if a human mind is like Mona Lisa, then a fly's mind is like Composition With Red, Blue And Yellow. The former is much more detailed, but essentially the same as the latter.

The point we are making is that Hades is not located in a hole in the ground, but in the minds of creatures that have little or no language. On earth and in heaven, life is about finding ways to cooperate with others, and settle on words for things and then laws and then cities. In Hades, life is about being food and trying to escape getting eaten — hence also the final fate of the unfortunate Wormwood, whose failure to impose chaos onto the world results in him being predicted, caught and eaten by his "ravenously affectionate" uncle Screwtape (C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1942, 1961).

If you are a beetle or a grasshopper, then you live in a hell where every spider and praying mantis is a lurking demon. If you are a wide-eyed deer, then lions are devils. If your only language is English, then the chances are about 99% that you believe that slavery has been abolished and you are a free person in a free world, whilst working every day to the point of exhaustion, for a boss who exploits you for your labor, whose house you live in (and you rent from him), whose food you eat (and buy in the supermarket that he owns), whose children you feed (a "father" is he who imposes his ways on any available kids, via schools and media: you are just here to breed and feed), and on whose land you pay to live (people who patriotically claim that their country is "their" country are deluded: when you pay tax, you pay tax to the people whose country it is, and you just live there by the grace of your commercial worth).

Any animal, from a buzzing fly to a faithful dog, can recognize the animal in a man, and can buzz or waggle about our buildings and streets. But only a human can recognize the humanity in another human, and in a human city — and appreciate that bricks were baked and pipes were lain and windows were molded by other humans for other humans, and that the traffic is regulated by human laws, and the whole thing is paid for by a common treasury into which everybody deposits. Animals can see the animal that we are, but cannot see the human that we are. In between sits a χασμα (chasma) that can only be crossed by creatures who can and will submit to the rules of liberty, which is a great gift to be born with and a mindboggling crime to squander (Luke 16:26).

The world as depicted by John the Revelator is certainly urban (Revelation 21:2), but it is a Republic in which all men are free. This freedom derives from the "perfect law of liberty" (James 1:25, Galatians 5:1), which is the law that is demonstrated by the Hebrew language. So no, the Bible cannot be translated into a creed or set of rules to follow, because the rules that one can extract from the Hebrew Bible and convey into English cause bondage (see our article on the verb βασκαινω, baskoino, to bewitch, as used in Galatians 3:1). Such rules are leashes and leashes are for dogs. The law of liberty, to the contrary, can by its very nature not be enforced, and results not in obedience but in participation (Hebrews 3:14, 2 Peter 1:4). For more on the Hebrew Republic, see our article on Gog and Magog.

When a person is alive, their deeds and words continuously radiate out from them and into the environment around them, so that the environment is continuously pervaded and reformed by that person's ever flowing words and deeds. If that person is very famous, then their words and deeds may even cross borders and seep out into countries and peoples that the person has never even heard of. And you may very well say that the "person" is not the handsome hunk of flesh one sees in the mirror, but rather that stream of words and deeds that permeates the world.

This becomes especially prominent when there is no handsome hunk of flesh to be seen in a mirror. Then that person is only their flow of words and deeds. Also when a living and flesh-bearing person dies, then the stream of words and deeds stops, like a star that goes super-nova, and the circular echo of the words and deeds settle like an ever fading smoke ring in the world at large.

Our human world is continuously formed by the networks of words and deeds of everybody around us, like stars in the night sky. But our present world is also shaped by the vast networks of stars that have already burned out, whose visible light has gone out and whose legacies hang around us like slowly fading clouds. These people can no longer speak directly to us, and have entered Hades. Unless, of course, their words were recorded and have retained their living soul and continue to speak to us (Psalm 16:10).

The name Hades is so old that it's no longer clear to which recorded Greek words it may correspond. But the forces of popular discourse have shaped it into αδης (hades), which looks tellingly alike a form constructed from (1) the particle α (a), which is either a negative (meaning without, as in "atypical"), or an affirmative (meaning coupled, shared or accumulated, like αδελφος, adelphos, brother or womb-mate, from δελφυς, delphus, womb), plus (2) the verb ειδω (eido), to see:

Socrates voiced against the then popular belief that our name was indeed constructed from the particle of negation, α (a), and the verb ειδω (eido), to see, so that Hades would mean Invisible or Unseen, and insisted that our name rather meant the opposite, and reflected the Accumulated Knowledge of Hades. This would explain the link between the name Hades, as initially applied to the king of the underworld, also known as Pluto, from πλουτος (ploutos), meaning Wealth.

In Greek mythology, Hades was a full brother of Zeus (the god of the day and dry land) and Poseidon (the god of the sea), and it takes no great leap to see the parallel with what we moderns call conscious knowledge and rationality (for Zeus), the subconscious and intuition (for Poseidon), and cultural legacy and social memory (for Hades).

Here at Abarim Publications we surmise that the concept of Hades originally reflected the collective knowledge of the whole of humanity from the caves up. Indeed, much of this knowledge was wrought by our long dead ancestors, by means and motivations that are as removed from our modern minds as the motivations of a toddler are. The key to all this is that some of our ancestors' efforts remain with us until today, while others have been utterly rejected and ultimately forgotten. This same principle Jesus referred to when he discussed the "living" Abraham (Matthew 22:32), and the fact that his audience was baffled demonstrates that Socrates' arguments had not been popularly accepted.