Everybody knows by now I think that harrow’s name comes from the (early) Christian concept of the harrowing of hell.
To summarize briefly, in Christian mythology, when Jesus died on the cross, he descended into the underworld for the three days that he stayed dead. I say the underworld—the word they use is Hades, not Hell, although some translations use the word hell. This pre-dates the Christian conceptions of hell that we are more familiar with—fire and brimstone and punishment etc—and reflects the idea that it was more of a neutral place where everyone went when they died, stemming from other traditions like the Greco Roman hades (obviously, which it took the word from) or the Jewish Sheol. The harrowing of hell refers to what Jesus does when he gets to this place. He descends and he kills death itself (using the cross as a weapon)—the death of death—and he leads ALL of the dead people there up out of the mouth of hades. He frees them from the shackles of death. This is all laid out in the early apocryphal text the gospel according to nicodemus. You should read it it’s fun.
When I say mouth, I mean that literally. In art and literature, even in the gospel of nicodemus, hades was characterized as an actual living creature, and in the harrowing, Jesus kills it and leads the souls out of its gaping mouth. This has lead to some frankly excellent art:
Okay, back to the locked tomb. Why am I bringing this up (other than the fact that I partially wrote my thesis in this so I will talk about it whenever possible)? Well, we know harrow’s name is… significant. We also know that in Alecto, she will find herself in hell. Okay. Where do we see ^ this imagery pop up in the universe of the locked tomb? What place does John call hell? The Soma, under the river. Soma, which means body in Greek. The body that houses the dead in its belly, the body of hades, the living body of hell. And we’ve seen it’s mouth already, a gaping mouth lined with teeth.
EDIT: it was pointed out it’s called the stoma not the soma, but. Stoma means fucking mouth in Greek so…. The point stands. The point very much stands.
I think harrow is gonna go into the stoma. I think harrow is going to kill death—or maybe, in a delicious inversion the likes of which Tamsyn Muir loves so much, she is going to kill necromancy. The death of the death of death. And she’s going to lead out the souls in there. All the people—Augustine? Cassiopea?—and all the fucking planets too.
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