Underworld Theory

by **smash016** Wed Dec 24, 2014 3:32 pm

Underworld Theory is a half serious, half tongue-in-cheek idea of mine that basically says the narrative required Shepard to die at the start of ME2. I still think this is the biggest WTF moment of the trilogy. You don't kill off your hero and protagonist that lived to see in the end of the previous chapter (ME1), only to immediately resurrect him/her, and not even giving any decent in-universe explanation or narrative justification.

This idea is supported by tons of references to themes like underworld, afterlife, purgatory, immortality, redemption, et cetera, often in a religious and/or mythological context.

Well, today I read about Hades on Wikipedia:

"Realm of Hades

In older Greek myths, the realm of Hades is the misty and gloomy[32] abode of the dead (also called Erebus), where all mortals go. Later Greek philosophy introduced the idea that all mortals are judged after death and are either rewarded or cursed. Very few mortals could leave his realm once they entered: the exceptions, Heracles, Theseus, are heroic. Even Odysseus in his Nekyia (Odyssey, xi) calls up the spirits of the departed, rather than descend to them.

There were several sections of the realm of Hades, including Elysium, the Asphodel Meadows, and Tartarus. Greek mythographers were not perfectly consistent about the geography of the afterlife. A contrasting myth of the afterlife concerns the Garden of the Hesperides, often identified with the Isles of the Blessed, where the blessed heroes may dwell.
Aeneas's journey to Hades through the entrance at Cumae mapped by Andrea de Jorio, 1825

In Roman mythology, the entrance to the Underworld located at Avernus, a crater near Cumae, was the route Aeneas used to descend to the realm of the dead.[33] By synecdoche, "Avernus" could be substituted for the underworld as a whole. The di inferi were a collective of underworld divinities.

For Hellenes, the deceased entered the underworld by crossing the Acheron, ferried across by Charon (kair'-on), who charged an obolus, a small coin for passage placed in the mouth of the deceased by pious relatives. Paupers and the friendless gathered for a hundred years on the near shore according to Book VI of Vergil's Aeneid. Greeks offered propitiatory libations to prevent the deceased from returning to the upper world to "haunt" those who had not given them a proper burial. The far side of the river was guarded by Cerberus, the three-headed dog defeated by Heracles (Roman Hercules). Passing beyond Cerberus, the shades of the departed entered the land of the dead to be judged.

The five rivers of the realm of Hades, and their symbolic meanings, are Acheron (the river of sorrow, or woe), Cocytus (lamentation), Phlegethon (fire), Lethe (oblivion), and Styx (hate), the river upon which even the gods swore and in which Achilles was dipped to render him invincible. The Styx forms the boundary between the upper and lower worlds. See also Eridanos.

The first region of Hades comprises the Fields of Asphodel, described in Odyssey xi, where the shades of heroes wander despondently among lesser spirits, who twitter around them like bats. Only libations of blood offered to them in the world of the living can reawaken in them for a time the sensations of humanity.

Beyond lay Erebus, which could be taken for a euphonym of Hades, whose own name was dread. There were two pools, that of Lethe, where the common souls flocked to erase all memory, and the pool of Mnemosyne ("memory"), where the initiates of the Mysteries drank instead. In the forecourt of the palace of Hades and Persephone sit the three judges of the Underworld: Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus. There at the trivium sacred to Hecate, where three roads meet, souls are judged, returned to the Fields of Asphodel if they are neither virtuous nor evil, sent by the road to Tartarus if they are impious or evil, or sent to Elysium (Islands of the Blessed) with the "blameless" heroes.

In the Sibylline oracles, a curious hodgepodge of Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian elements, Hades again appears as the abode of the dead, and by way of folk etymology, it even derives Hades from the name Adam (the first man), saying it is because he was the first to enter there.[34]"

TL;DR -- This is just one subsection of the Wiki article. Notice how many proper nouns are directly / literally part of ME's universe, or indirectly / in a slightly altered form.

Jewish name for Hades is either Sheol or Gehenna. Check.

Even considering that other, non-underworld mythological names are present in ME, too, and that the names mentioned above are known for other things than just the underworld, the emphasis on underworld themes in ME is disproportional regardless.

Regarding our recent talks about memory, it might be worthwhile to again ponder the planet Mnemosyne and its moon Lethe, where we find the derelict Reaper in ME2. Mnemosyne is the personification of memory in Greek mythology, and about the river Lethe, Wiki says: "it is only when the dead have had their memories erased by the Lethe that they may be reincarnated" and "souls were made to drink from the river before being reincarnated, so they would not remember their past lives".