Tartarus

Tartarus (TAR-tuh-rus) is at once a place and a person — the deep Abyss that lies as far beneath the earth as the heavens are above it, and one of the very first beings to come into existence at the birth of the cosmos. In Greek thought these two aspects are never fully separated: the pit is a living, primordial power, and the primordial power is a pit. To the Greeks the name Τάρταρος (Tartaros) meant the lowest region of all, a chasm sunk beneath the realm of the dead itself, where the enemies of the divine order are shut away behind walls of bronze.

As a place, Tartarus is the ultimate prison of the universe. It lies below Hades, the realm of the shades, as Hades lies below the living earth — a gulf so profound that a falling bronze anvil would need nine days and nights to cross from heaven to earth, and nine more to fall from earth into its depths. Around it runs a wall of bronze, and Night is poured about its neck in a threefold band; through its bronze gates, set in place by Poseidon, pass the defeated Titans, the storm-monster Typhon, and — in the later tradition — the great sinners paying for their crimes.

As a being, Tartarus stands beside Chaos, Gaia (Earth), and Eros among the first powers of Hesiod's cosmos, come into existence without parent at the dawn of things. In this personified form he joins with Gaia, the Earth, to father Typhon (Typhoeus), the last and most terrible challenger to Zeus's rule. He is thus both the womb of a monster and the tomb where that monster is finally imprisoned — the dark foundation beneath everything, and the place from which nothing rightly escapes.

The measure of the depth

What most fixed Tartarus in the Greek imagination was its unfathomable distance below the world. Hesiod gives the famous measure twice over: a bronze anvil falling from the sky would take nine days and nights to reach the earth on the tenth, and a bronze anvil falling from the earth would take nine days and nights to reach Tartarus on the tenth (Theogony 720–725). Homer makes the same point in Zeus's own voice — Tartarus is "as far below Hades as heaven is above the earth" (Iliad 8.13–16), the deepest gulf beneath the ground, where the gates are iron and the threshold bronze.

Hesiod's fuller vision (Theogony 726–819) is one of awe and dread. A wall of bronze runs round the abyss, and Night is spread about its throat in three rows; above grow the roots of the earth and the barren sea. There stand the shining gates and the bronze threshold that Poseidon fixed in place, and there, before the murky pit, dwell the Hundred-Handers as faithful guards. It is a place the very gods loathe — a "great gulf," a "chasm" so vast that once past the gates a man swept inside would not reach the floor in a full year, but be carried to and fro by gust after gust of storm. Even the immortals shudder at it, for here rise the sources and ends of earth and sea and sky, "a dank and mouldering place which even the gods abhor."

The prison of the Titans

Tartarus is above all the prison-house of the losers of the great succession-wars. When Zeus and the young Olympians defeated Cronus and the Titans in the ten-year Titanomachy, the vanquished were bound in cruel chains and hurled down beneath the wide-pathed earth — "as far beneath the earth as heaven is above it" (Theogony 717–720). There the Titans are shut behind the bronze wall and gates, and there the three Hundred-Handers — Cottus, Briareus, and Gyges, the very allies whose hurled boulders had helped win the war — are stationed as their unsleeping wardens. So Tartarus becomes the cornerstone of Zeus's new order: the place where the old powers of the cosmos are sealed away so that the reign of the Olympians may stand secure.

The father of Typhon

In his personified aspect Tartarus is not only a prison but a progenitor. Hesiod relates that after the Titans were cast down, Gaia (Earth), in union with Tartarus, brought forth her youngest and most monstrous child: Typhon (also called Typhoeus), a being of immense strength with a hundred serpent-heads flickering fire and voicing every dreadful sound (Theogony 820–822). Had Typhon seized power, Hesiod says, he would have ruled over gods and men alike. But Zeus met the threat with the full storm of his thunderbolts, blasting the monster's hundred heads until the earth itself melted, and then hurled the crippled Typhon down — into Tartarus, the abyss that was also, in a grim symmetry, his own father. From him still blow the raging, ruinous storm-winds that torment sailors at sea. (Because Typhon is treated in prose across this reference and has no page of his own, he is discussed here rather than listed among Tartarus's children.)

The classical hell: place of punishment

In Hesiod and Homer, Tartarus is a prison for divine and monstrous enemies, not yet a place where human sinners are tortured for their deeds. That idea develops later. Already Homer names two great offenders suffering below — Tityos, stretched across nine acres while vultures tear at his liver, and (in the Odyssey's vision of the underworld) Tantalus, forever parched and starving amid receding water and fruit, and Sisyphus, endlessly rolling his stone uphill only to watch it roll back down (Odyssey 11.576–600). Over time these figures — together with Ixion, bound to his ever-turning fiery wheel, and the Danaids, condemned to pour water eternally into a leaking jar — came to be gathered specifically in Tartarus as the archetypal damned.

By the classical period Tartarus had become the true "hell" of Greek thought: the place of judgment and punishment for the wicked. (Flagged as later/philosophical development.) In Plato's myths, Tartarus is where the incurably wicked are cast down forever after judgment, while lesser sinners are punished for a season and released — see the Gorgias (523a–526d) and the great eschatological myth closing the Phaedo (112a–114c). (Flagged as Roman.) Roman poetry fixes this image for good: in Aeneid 6.548–627 Virgil gives Tartarus a triple wall girt by the fiery river Phlegethon, an adamantine gate no power can break, the sleepless Fury Tisiphone as its guard, and within it the Titans, the great blasphemers, and every class of the damned groaning under torment — the direct ancestor of the medieval and later Western picture of hell.

A power feared, not courted

Tartarus had almost no cult in the ordinary sense. Unlike the Olympians, or even Hades and Persephone, he was not a god one built temples to, held festivals for, or sought favours from — he was a place and a power of dread, invoked rather than worshipped. His role in religious life was chiefly that of a name of ultimate depth and finality: the furthest and darkest destination to which a thing could be sent, and therefore a fitting term in oaths, curses, and the language of binding.

In oath and curse

Because Tartarus marked the absolute bottom of the cosmos, it lent weight to solemn speech. To wish an enemy "cast down to Tartarus" was to call for the most complete of dooms, beyond even ordinary death. In the chthonic and magical tradition — the world of curse-tablets (katadesmoi) and binding-spells — the powers of the deep earth were called on to seize and hold a victim, and Tartarus stood at the far end of that downward geography. Where the depths were honoured at all in ritual, it was in the manner of all chthonic powers: with black victims offered in holocaust (burnt whole, given entirely to the powers below rather than shared as a feast) and with libations poured directly into the earth at night, the offerings turned downward toward the realm they were meant to reach.

In poetry and philosophy

Tartarus lived most vividly not on the altar but on the page. Poets from Hesiod onward used it to mark the limit of the world and the ultimate sanction of the gods; philosophers such as Plato made it the destination of the unjust in their pictures of the soul's fate after death. Its "worship," such as it was, lay in the awe it commanded — the sense that beneath the bright order of Olympus and the grey realm of the dead there lay a deeper darkness that even the immortals feared.

Approaching Tartarus today

A modern polytheist does not "worship" Tartarus as one honours Zeus or Demeter — there is no request to make of the Abyss, no favour it grants. But Tartarus can hold a real place in a contemplative or chthonic practice as the power of ultimate depth, limit, and finality: the dark foundation beneath all things, where what must be bound is bound. Any honouring of it belongs to the quiet, nocturnal, downward-facing register of the chthonic gods, not the bright upward rites of the Olympians.

Offerings and manner

If a devotee wishes to acknowledge Tartarus, the traditional idiom of the powers below is the guide. Make the gesture at dusk or in darkness. Rather than raising the hands to the sky, turn the offering downward — pour a libation of water, or of dark wine, honey, or barley directly onto the earth or into a vessel set aside and later returned to the ground. Keep the mood grave and brief. Nothing is asked back; what is given to the deep is wholly given.

As symbol and meditation

Many will find Tartarus most meaningful not as a recipient of offerings but as a symbol to sit with — the image of the deepest place, the anvil falling nine days into the dark, the bronze wall and the threefold night. It can serve as a focus for reflection on limits and consequences, on what a person chooses to bind away and seal off, and on the sobering thought, as old as Hesiod, that beneath every ordered world there lies an abyss the gods themselves hold in awe.