The Afterlife

The Afterlife was the realm to which the dead passed, called the Underworld in the Greek world and Helheim in the Norse. Existing as physical places as much as spiritual ones, the afterlives were home to powerful gods such as Hades and Hraesvelgr, who ran the affairs of the dead, and they were a place that Kratos entered and escaped many times across his long life.

A realm for the dead#

The Afterlife was the main destination for all deceased people and creatures after death, differing for each mythology of the known world. It was home to powerful deities, the chthonic gods and death gods who acted as a kind of celestial bureaucracy, bringing the dead to their proper place and judging their fates. Because the afterlives were physical locations as much as spiritual ones, it was possible to find ways to enter them while still alive and to come back again, as Kratos did many times.

A soul had to be whole to pass on. A damaged or incomplete soul could not properly enter the afterlife, and so was doomed to remain trapped between the world of the living and the world of the dead for all eternity, ceasing to exist in either realm. This fate was feared greatly by Odin, who did everything he could to avoid it. Souls whose substance was destroyed outright met the same end, losing any chance of life after death.

The Greek Underworld#

The Greek Afterlife, the Underworld, was ruled over entirely by the god Hades, with all the chthonic gods answering to him as their lord and master. It was divided into separate areas for different souls according to what they had been in life. Elysium awaited the heroic and the virtuous, Tartarus held the wicked, and the Fields of Asphodel received those who fell between the two. It was implied that Poseidon, lord of the oceans, could claim the souls of those who perished within his infinite domain. Time itself was said to run differently in the realms below, moving more slowly than in the world of the living.

The Norse realms of the dead#

The Norse Afterlife was vast and layered, but unlike the single Greek Underworld it was splintered across Yggdrasil, each realm of the dead ruled by a different faction. The Vanir presided over Folkvangr, the Jotnar over Helheim, and the Aesir, chiefly Odin, over Valhalla, though never entirely. Helheim, the realm of the dishonorable dead, shared with the Greek Underworld the property that time moved more slowly there than in the realms of the living. A watery afterlife also existed, the domain and hall of Aegir and Ran, who together ruled the seas of the Nine Realms, comparable to Poseidon's claim upon those lost at sea.

Many afterlives, one cosmos#

Though each afterlife was separate, all were connected, parts of a single cosmic order spanning the mythologies of the known universe. The afterlife a soul reached was dictated solely by the culture in which it died, without regard to any other connection the soul had borne in life. Beyond these realms there existed the rare astral form, a state in which a god could exist without a physical body, appearing as a higher, transcendent version of itself. Only Athena and, briefly, Zeus were known to have reached it, each through extraordinary circumstances, and in that form a god could still interact with the world in spirit, freed from the limits of the flesh.