Every mythology fills its world with powers, and almost every one asks what happens after death. This level visits several traditions, looking at how they imagined their gods and the realm of the dead.
Egypt: Osiris and the weighing of the heart
In Egyptian myth, Osiris, a good king, was murdered by his jealous brother Set; in later accounts his body was cut into pieces and scattered. His wife Isis searched them out and restored him long enough to conceive their son Horus, who grew up to defeat Set. Osiris became lord of the dead. Egyptians hoped to join him, and texts placed in tombs, which we call the Book of the Dead, guided the way. Its best known scene is the judgment, in which the dead person's heart is weighed against the feather of Maat. The dead recite a "negative confession," declaring before the judges that they have not stolen, killed, lied or caused others to weep. A heart heavy with wrongdoing was devoured by Ammit, a beast part crocodile, part lion and part hippopotamus. Maat meant truth, justice and cosmic order together, an early sign that ideas about the afterlife were also ideas about how to treat other people.
Mesopotamia: Inanna's descent
The Mesopotamian underworld was gloomy for everyone, good or bad, a land of no return where the dead ate dust. In a Sumerian poem, the goddess Inanna descends to visit her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld. At each of seven gates she must give up a garment or ornament, until she arrives naked and powerless, and she is killed and hung on a hook. Rescued through the god Enki's cleverness, she may return only if someone takes her place, and she chooses her husband Dumuzi, who had not mourned her. In the end he spends half of each year below.
Greece and the Norse world
The Greek underworld, ruled by Hades, was mostly a place of pale shades, though later writers added rewards in the Elysian Fields and punishments in Tartarus. The singer Orpheus went down to win back his dead wife Eurydice and lost her by looking back. In Norse myth the dead went to several places. Warriors who fell in battle could be chosen for Odin's hall Valhalla or the goddess Freyja's field, while many others went to the realm of Hel. Odin himself paid dearly for wisdom. In the Havamal, in Henry Adams Bellows's 1923 translation, he says: "I ween that I hung on the windy tree, / Hung there for nights full nine; / With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was / To Othin, myself to myself." By this self-sacrifice on the world tree, Odin won knowledge of the runes.
India: Yama and the many gods
Hindu traditions name an enormous number of deities, often understood as forms of one ultimate reality. Three are often grouped together: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer and renewer. Vishnu descends in avatars, such as the fish Matsya and the hero Rama, when the world needs restoring. In the Vedas, Yama was the first mortal to die, and so became king of the dead. In the story of Savitri, told in the Mahabharata, a devoted wife follows Yama as he carries off her husband's soul, and wins it back through wisdom and persistence.
Yoruba orisha
In Yoruba religion, the high god Olodumare is distant, and worship turns to the orisha, powers who act in the world. Ogun is god of iron and war, and so of tools and roads; today some honor him as patron of drivers and mechanics. Shango wields thunder and is said to have been a king of Oyo. Oshun, goddess of rivers and love, has a sacred grove at Osogbo that is a World Heritage Site. Carried by enslaved Africans to the Americas, the orisha live on in religions such as Santería in Cuba and Candomblé in Brazil, often blended with Catholic saints.
Maori: the lady of night
In Maori tradition, Hine-nui-te-po was once Hine-titama, the dawn maiden, daughter of the forest god Tane, who took her as his wife. When she learned that her husband was also her father, she fled to the underworld, becoming the great lady of night who receives her children when they die. In Maori telling it is she, not Maui, who has the last word on death.
Worked example: two goddesses go down
Compare Inanna and Persephone. Both are goddesses who go below, both return, and in both someone must spend part of the year in the underworld, a pattern often tied to the seasons. Yet Inanna goes by choice, perhaps to extend her power, and the poem is about the limits that even a great goddess meets: she is stripped at every gate. Persephone is seized against her will, and her story centers on a mother's grief. A Frazer-style reader might lump both with dying-and-rising gods; a closer reader notices that the details point in different directions.
The Egyptian judgment, meanwhile, is not about seasons at all but about conduct: whether a person lived truthfully and did no harm. Underworld myths can be read as a society's way of saying what a life is worth, and what we owe one another while we live it.