DeConick A.D

201
HELL WALKS AND STAR TREKS
the dead. Er watches as the judges mark the deceased with their verdicts,
whether their souls had been found righteous or not.
The righteous are guided into one of the sky portals, carrying their
judgments on their chests. The unjust are ordered to climb down one
of cavernous entrances into the earth, bearing their judgments on their
backs. The portals were guarded by fierce gatekeepers who screamed horribly
and seized and flayed anyone who tried to sneak through the sky
portals without serving their allotted time in the bowels of hell.
This cavernous place is an afterlife triage center, souls going up into
heaven or down into hellish Tartarus according to their moral fitness. But
Er soon understands that the souls don’t stay put in these other realms.
After the souls have been punished in Tartarus or purged in heaven for an
allotted time, they journey back to triage through the other two portals.
These new arrivals from Tartarus and heaven throng together and set up
camp in a nearby meadow, preparing to be reincarnated.
According to Er, this part of the cycle of reincarnation begins with
the journey of the purged souls to a shaft of light, a rainbowlike pillar
stretching from earth to heaven. This is the Milky Way, which serves as a
spindle for the orbit of the seven heavens and the realm of the fixed stars.
In the ancient world the earth, not the sun, was at the center of the universe,
and the planets revolved around it. The ancients listed the planets
as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, the sun, and the moon. It was
believed that the sun moved in the ecliptic, a path through the center of
the fixed stars.
The souls ascend the Milky Way shaft and arrive at the ecliptic, where
they meet the three Fates, Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, and their
mother, Anagkê, gods who control birth and death and the lot of life.
At their stations along the ecliptic, the Fates throw lots before the souls.
Each soul selects a lot that reflects the moral fiber of its former life. Each
soul is given a guardian spirit that will guide the soul throughout its new
life so that its destiny will be fulfilled. As the zodiac turns, the thread of
the travelers’ destinies are woven on the cosmic spindle and made irreversible,
spun into the fabric of their souls, bodies, and lives. Their horoscopes
are cast.
Er recalls that, after this, the souls camp by the River of Forgetting,
from which they are compelled to drink, to lose their memories of their