Elysium
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
e-liz'ium, or The Elysian Fields, in Greek mythology, the abode of the souls of heroes. It is a region in the far west where there is neither snow nor storm, heat nor cold. Gentle zephyrs and balmy breezes blow continually, and healing odors are spread abroad. Hesiod describes these Islands of the Blessed as located in the far Atlantic. The climate is so mild and propitious that the soil yields three crops a year, a description not in appropriate to the Bermudas. It is thought that the idea of an Elysium was suggested to the Greek mind by the glories of a western sunset. The conception of Elysium is mingled with ideas of the spotless purity of heaven, cloud islands tinged with gold and floating in a deep blue sky, and asphodel meadows, which none but the pure in heart may tread. To this blissful abode, warriors who had deserved well of the gods might pass without encountering death, and live in perpetual happiness. The idea has its parallel in the happy hunting ground of the American Indians. The words Elysium and Elysian are in common use in literature. Elysium is used often as synonymous with heaven, or to designate any delightful abode; Elysian to describe that which is superlatively pleasant or beatific. Who, as they sung, would take the prison'd soul, And lap it in Elysium. --Milton. There is no death! what seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life Elysian, Whose portal we call Death.--Longfellow.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account of the Elysian Fields still describes the myth accurately, and its literary examples from Milton and Longfellow are as apt now as then. What has fallen away is the speculation around it: the guess that the idea was "suggested to the Greek mind by the glories of a western sunset," the aside about the Bermudas, and the comparison with the "happy hunting ground of the American Indians" all belong to a comparative mythology that scholars no longer practise in that form. Modern work looks instead at Egyptian and Near Eastern parallels, at a possible pre-Greek origin for the name, and at physical evidence such as the inscribed gold funerary leaf found at Hipponion in southern Italy in 1969, which gives an initiate directions to the meadows of the blessed. The word itself has kept its everyday sense, though it now attaches to a Los Angeles suburb, a Cape Town township and a 2013 science-fiction film as readily as to Greek heroes.
Written for this edition, 2026.