any one either when going or when discharging their freight. But, as they testify, they can hear a voice on the shore calling out the names of those who are to disembark with those of their parents, their followers, and their character. When women’s souls are on board, then the names of their husbands are given.
Claudian also had heard this story, but he confused the northern shipping of the dead with the nether world practices when Ulysses descended. On the extreme coast of Gaul as a place sheltered from the ocean, where Ulysses by sacrifice summoned the spirits of the dead about him. There he could hear the faint wailing of the vaporous spirits that surrounded him, forms like the dead on their travels.
There are numerous German stories of ferrymen shipping invisible fares over the Rhine, the Weser, and the Elbe.
The Greeks and Roman believed in the Elysian fields knee-deep in asphodels, where wandered souls, and to which they were ferried across the river of Styx by Charon.
Now let us examine the genesis of these beliefs.
The conception of a region of the gods above the clouds, to which access was had by the rainbow bridge, is not primitive.
