god Telibinu is sent by spells to the underworld, it is observed that ‘what goes
in does not come out again’.^37
Crossing the waterThe boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead was marked by a
stream or a body of water, as frontiers between peoples often are in the upper
world.
Certain Indic texts imply that the dead have to cross a river. One funeral
ritual contains the verse, ‘On the fearful path to Yama’s gates there is the
fearful river Vaitaranı ̄: desiring to cross it, I offer the black cow Vaitaranı ̄’. In
a funeral hymn in the Atharvaveda we read, ‘by fords (tı ̄rtháih
̇
) they cross the
great down-courses (pravátah
̇
), the way the sacrificers, the well-doers, go’.
According to an Upanishad the lake A ̄ra and the river Vijara ̄ have to be
crossed on the way to the world of Brahman.^38
In the Homeric account of the land of the dead several formidable rivers
are mentioned; they include the Acheron, which appears in other authors as
a stream to be crossed by the dead.^39 From the late Archaic period we hear of
the ferryman Charon. In Aristophanes’Frogs he is evidently a figure already
well known to popular mythology. Here it is a great bottomless lake that has
to be crossed.
The Latin word tarentum‘tomb’, an archaism that survived in historical
times only in connection with two Roman cult sites, meant by derivation
‘crossing-place’.^40 It is cognate with Vedic tı ̄rthám, the word used in the
passage quoted above for the fords by which the meritorious dead cross
(taranti) the rivers on the way to the other world. It is natural to suppose that
tarentum had similar associations.
In Bohemia, Slovakia, and other south and east Slavic lands there are myths
of a ferryman of the dead, and over the whole Slavic area from the ninth or
tenth century onwards corpses were provided with coins in mouth or hand to
pay their fare. A Jesuit source of the early seventeenth century records likewise
(^37) MBh. 3. 131. 8 pantha ̄nam apunarbhavam; 7. 59. 18 apunardars ́anam ma ̄rgam; 13. 70. 19
vis
̇
ayam durnivartyam, ‘a domain hard to return from’; cf. RV 10. 95. 14 ána ̄vr
̇
t; West (1997),
154 f.; Sikojev (1985), 127 f. The idea is not distinctively Indo-European, however; a common
Sumerian and Akkadian name of the underworld was ‘the Land of No Return’, and the motif
also occurs in the Old Testament (West, loc. cit.).
(^38) A. Kuhn, ZVS 2 (1853), 316; AV 18. 4. 7; Kaus
̇
ı ̄takı ̄ Upanis
̇
ad 1. 3 f. Cf. Willem Caland, Die
altindischen Todten- und Bestattungsgebräuche (Amsterdam 1896), 64, 121; Oldenberg (1917),
546 n. 1; Hillebrandt (1927–9), ii. 339 f.; Thieme (1952), 53; B. Lincoln, JIES 8 (1980), 52 f.
(^39) Od. 10. 513 f.; Sapph. 95. 11–13, Alc. 38a. 2–3, 8; Aesch. Sept. 856.
(^40) Watkins (1995), 347–53, who takes it to refer to overcoming death.
- Mortality and Fame 389