Night speeds by, And we, Aeneas, lose it in lamenting. Here comes the place where cleaves our way in twain. Thy road, the right, toward Pluto’s dwelling goes, And leads us to Elysium. But the left Speeds sinful souls to doom, and is their path To Tartarus th’ accurst.
Aeneid (6.539)
According to tradition, Mercury leads souls to the underworld after death. The river Styx is the entrance to the underworld and the ferryman Charon ferries people across to the other side. For Charon’s payment , a coin is placed with the dead before burial.
The Underworld is ruled by Pluto and his wife Proserpina, the daughter of Ceres.
There are 3 judges who hold trial over souls to determine their place within the underworld: Aeacus, Rhadamanthus and Minos.
These judges punish crimes in order to drive away vice by repentance; they do not annihilate the Essence of the soul and reduce it to be no more. On the contrary, they restore it to its true Being by purging it of all vices that corrupt it.
Hierocles
In this trial, Souls review their life and are afterward sent to one of three places:
Elysium
This is the heavenly resting place for people who led heroic and virtuous lives. After 1000 years in Elysium, souls drink of the river of forgetfulness and return to a new life.
The good receive a life free from toil, not scraping with the strength of their arms the earth, nor the water of the sea, for the sake of a poor sustenance. But in the presence of the honored gods, those who gladly kept their oaths enjoy a life without tears, while the others undergo a toil that is unbearable to look at. Those who have persevered three times, on either side, to keep their souls free from all wrongdoing, follow Zeus’ road to the end, to the tower of Cronus, where ocean breezes blow around the island of the blessed, and flowers of gold are blazing, some from splendid trees on land, while water nurtures others. With these wreaths and garlands of flowers they entwine their hands according to the righteous counsels of Rhadamanthus, whom the great father, the husband of Rhea whose throne is above all others, keeps close beside him as his partner
Pindar, Odes
Asphodelum
This is the resting place for people who led average lives. Souls dwell as shadows of their former selves, awaiting reincarnation. Some may continue to feel the echoes of their former lives until they drink of the river of forgetfulness and are born again into a new body. While in this place, your living loved ones can pray for your purification and swift return. By honoring our ancestors, we can make their time in Asphodelum better.
Tartarus
This is where souls that were consumed by vice and evil are purified by the torments of the Furies and Titans. Once purified, these souls too may forget their former lives and incarnate again. Some exceptionally evil people are kept in Tartarus indefinitely as an example to humanity.
Hence groans are heard, fierce cracks of lash and scourge,
Aeneid (6.548)
Loud-clanking iron links and trailing chains.
Aeneas motionless with horror stood
o’erwhelmed at such uproar. “0 virgin, say
What shapes of guilt are these? What penal woe
Harries them thus? What wailing smites the air?”
To whom the Sibyl, “Far-famed prince of Troy,
The feet of innocence may never pass
Into this house of sin. But Hecate,
When o’er th’ Avernian groves she gave me power,
Taught me what penalties the gods decree,
And showed me all. There Cretan Rhadamanth
His kingdom keeps, and from unpitying throne
Chastises and lays bare the secret sins
Of mortals who, exulting in vain guile,
Elude till death, their expiation due.
There, armed forever with her vengeful scourge,
Tisiphone, with menace and affront,
The guilty swarm pursues; in her left hand
She lifts her angered serpents, while she calls
A troop of sister-furies fierce as she.
Then, grating loud on hinge of sickening sound,
Hell’s portals open wide. 0, dost thou see
What sentinel upon that threshold sits,
What shapes of fear keep guard upon that gloom?
Reincarnation
There is no everlasting eternal damnation in Romanism. All souls will reincarnate Indefinitely until they have attained liberation through Union (Henosis) with God.
The souls exchange their lives, now following cycles, and they often enter into bodies of humans, now in one, then another:
‘The same are the fathers and sons in the palaces
as the orderly wives and mothers and daughters;
they come about changing into each other through the generations.’
“For in these verses, he imparts (the teaching of reincarnation) from human bodies to the occupants of them into humans… thereafter (he explains) that there is also migration of souls of humans into the other living beings, and this Orpheus explicitly teaches, when he declares:
‘Because the soul changing through the circles of time,
from humans into the living creatures, from one place to another:
sometimes a horse, but then it becomes …
at another time a cow, at times a dreadful bird to see!
…at another time in the shape of a dog with its strong bark,
and the cold race of snakes crawling upon the sacred earth.’
Proclus, Quoting Orpheus