Quote:
Originally Posted by toretorden
Hm, not sure I believe all this. I don't know mesopotamian faith very well, but as far as I know, the greek also had an equivalent to heaven where the virtous and heroic would spend the afterlife - which was Elysium or the Elysian fields.
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The Elysian fields have been widely misinterpreted as a the Greek equivilent of Valhalla, which it is in no way like. What I mean when I say everyone goes to the same place is that both the most immoral kings and purist peasants both went to the Underworld, where Elysium is located. Even Achilles, when he died, said that he would rather have lived in obscurity forever than to die young and famous. Greek mythology had no moral values, it had no central text, and it certainly didn't have the gods handing down orders like most Judeo-Christian religions. Most of the ideas concerning the judgement of man comes from Roman interpretation of ancient Greek myths. It's really only in Virgil's Elysium that we see the idea of a pleasant afterlife in Greek mythology.