In my experience, chthonic (underworld) gods really appreciate hearing “thank you.” (This includes Hades and Persephone as well as Hecate, Hermes in his psychopomp aspect, Hypnos, Thanatos, Morpheus, and others.) They all do incredibly dirty, difficult, and vitally important jobs and rarely get recognition for it.
Things you can thank them for:
Sheltering, protecting, and taking care of the dead
Treating everyone fairly, meting out divine justice to people who escaped it in life
Allowing us to extract precious metals and material resources from the earth (I usually pair this with a commitment to do what I can to be a responsible steward of the earth, and follow the principle of xenia rather than hoarding wealth)
Maintaining the boundaries between this world and the next, and allowing people to pass through when appropriate
Making new growth possible by clearing away that which is no longer useful (this can be both literal and metaphorical)
Guiding and looking after people who are going through grief, depression, or “dark nights of the soul,” enabling personal rebirth and transformation
Protecting and nourishing the roots of plants, making all plant life and agriculture possible
Things that come from or are sheltered in their world include: sleep, dreams, precious metals, plant life, reincarnated or newly incarnated souls, magic, purpose and destiny — and according to interpretation, vaccination, EMDR, anesthesia, X-rays and MRIs, mass social movements, psychology, shadow work**
Also, please do something nice for Charon. I’ve long thought of him as the patron of customer service workers who are frequently yelled at.
*sources: Greek Religion by Walter Burkert, Ancient Greek Cults by Jennifer Larson, The Greek Way of Death by Robert Garland – these three books are my go-to’s for info about the roles the chthonic gods and the underworld played in ancient Greek religion and culture. Add to this the underworld as metaphor in Jungian psychology and archetypes (I’m less well read in this area, but see also The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell)
**I once read a great series of essays on the rivers of the Underworld (which I can not find right now) that posited the principle of vaccination comes from the Styx. According to myth, Achilles was dipped in the river as a baby and this protected his body from injury — just as exposure to a dead pathogen grants our bodies protection from a live version of that same pathogen. Along these lines, things like anesthesia and EMDR would come from the Lethe and/or the Acheron, psychology and self-reflection from the Mnemosyne, and so on. And modern astrology understands Pluto (Hades) as a god of invisible forms of power, which makes him also the ruler of things like X-rays and MRIs, nuclear energy, mass movements, and lots of other things…
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