The Acheron, or the river of woe, is, in fact, a real river in the Epirus region of northwestern Greece, one that flows through dark gorges and goes underground in several places, which may explain its long association with liminality. The unfortunate souls who didn’t have a coin (because their bodies hadn’t received a proper burial) were condemned to wander along the banks of the Cocytus, the river of lamentation, for all eternity.
Roman skull with an obol in the mouth, by Falconaumanni (own work) via Wikimedia Commons.Īlthough the messenger-god Hermes escorted the dead to the river Acheron, once they reached it they were at the mercy of Charon’s moods. But when we think of him now, we imagine a hooded, silent figure in a scene that seems taken from Arnold Böcklin’s most intriguing painting, The Isle of the Dead Charon’s role as a psychopomp, a guide for souls in the afterlife, has determined his assimilation with the image of the Grim Reaper, the personification of Death. In a fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Michaelangelo portrays him as a corpulent creature, more beastly than human. Centuries later, Dante, drawing from Virgil’s work, presents him as a surly old man who refuses to take people on his boat. The Roman poet Virgil describes him as ‘a sordid god’ with ‘uncombed, unclean’ beard, and eyes ‘like hollow furnaces on fire’ Seneca mentions his ‘sunken cheeks’. Attic funerary vases of the fifth century B.C. Inspite of his charming epithet, Charon was a fearful sight for those who found themselves alone in an unknown realm. Gustave Dore, illustrating Canto III of Dante’s Inferno, written circa 1310. His name was Charon, he of the keen gaze. It was a perilous journey, and there was only one guide to take the recently departed to their final destination. In Ancient Greece, this was the realm of Hades, separated from the land of the living by five rivers. The coins had a purpose: to allow the dead to pay for their passage to the Otherworld. It has become a part of our collective subconscious, possibly because the ritual appeared in different traditions, and it survived, although marginally, until as recently as the 20th century. The image of metal glinting over lifeless lips still makes us shiver.
There was a time when the living covered the mouths of their dead with a single coin before their final goodbye.
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