Hades is the son of Cronus (or Cronos) and Rhea
See Family tree 17
Hades holding the cornucopia (or Horn of plenty) – Louvre Museum
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This Titan couple, Cronus and Rhea, was responsible for the birth of the six main gods who govern human consciousness: Hestia, Hera, Demeter, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus. Let us remember that this consciousness identifies itself with mental consciousness when Zeus, the supraconscient, swallowed Metis, ‘intelligence turned towards discernment’, thus imposing the dominance of the mind on the vital.
Rhea, the wife of Cronus, was the object of a cult centered on Mount Thaumasion, a name formed from the base of the name of Pontos’ second son, Thaumas, a symbol of the plane of the ‘true vital’. This confirms the name given to the rule of Cronus, ‘the Golden Age’, during which the reflecting mind which brings distortions and limitations to life was not yet dominant.
We have already discussed here those who are considered the Olympian gods. Over the course of his evolution man must integrate the forces which they represent so as to become their equal. The heroes of the Trojan war witnessed this, for they were able to inflict injuries on the combating gods. Once he has reached this stage of evolution, man is no longer submitted to the mental forces which scour the world in cyclical waves. He has then attained the plane of the Overmind of the Pleiad Maia, the mother of Hermes, and the corresponding realisations with the sixth son of Aeolus, Perieres, ‘he who acts in a just manner’, or ‘he who has moved beyond cycles’.
We must still discuss the sixth child of Cronos and Rhea, Hades, who has till now been set aside for he was not amongst the Olympian gods, at least not in the Homeric period. (We will discuss Dionysus later on because he holds a place apart, not being given the rank of a god and being barely mentioned in Homer’s works. This initiate probably considered the Dionysian path to be one of the several ways possible, but chose not to give it importance due to the potential mixing with vital energies.)
HADES
Let us remember that at the time of the victory over the Titans, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades divided the world amongst themselves, Hades being granted power over the underworld, the kingdom of the invisible (invisible to man).
The name Hades, Αιδης, has as structuring characters ΙΔ. It is therefore a place of reunification (Δ) of consciousness (Ι), the last stage of which is carried out in the body (once union has been realized in the mind and in the vital). The initiates of ancient times considered Hades to be ‘α-ίδε(ιν), he who is not visible’, and his kingdom is a place in which human ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate, where union is carried out in the inconscient. To reach it one must triumph over Cerberus, and not only as Heracles had done in bringing him into the conscious realm. Then one must cross over the Styx, a feat which no hero ever accomplished. When the Styx will have been crossed, when the work of Persephone will have been completed, then Man will touch upon the ‘eternal’ world (Αιδιος) of total unity. (As is commonly done, we will maintain here the masculine gender for Styx, an Oceanid assimilated into the river of Hades’ world.)
Hades’ domain is that which we refer to here as the ‘inconscient’ in keeping with Sri Aurobindo’s definition, a domain which therefore pertains to the body and its silencing of the records and memories of evolution. It is also here that dwell the ‘shades’, symbols of experiences which have fulfilled their role.
This ‘inconscient’ is in no way equivalent to that of modern psychology; the latter refers to the more superficial layers which we refer to here as the subconscious, the domain of Poseidon in which is accumulated every sensation as well as all the distortions resulting