The Elysium fields.
Elysium was a section of the Greek Underworld. In Elysium were fields of the pale liliaceous asphodel, and poplars grew. There stood the gates that led to the house of Hades.
Description[]
Elysium is seen as a multi-layered paradise, or Heaven, to many modern neopagans. Some believe that the outer layer of Elysium is composed of great and beautiful fields, often envisioned in imaginative descriptions as having green glowing blades of grass and bubbling springs of glowing water and wine, often made from the nectar of Ambrosia. Beyond the fields of Elysium, reserved only for the most righteous and virtuous, is the Golden City where spirits exist in a state of constant euphoria.
Overview[]
The Elysian Fields lay on the western margin of the Edenian Gardens, by the encircling stream of Oceanus, and there the mortal relatives of the king of the gods were transported, without tasting death, to enjoy an immortality of bliss. Hesiod refers to the Isles of the Blessed in the Western Ocean.
The Elysian fields were the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous. Two passages in Homer established for Greeks the nature of the Afterlife: the dreamed apparition of the dead Patroclus in the Iliad and the more daring boundary-breaking visit in the Odyssey. Greek traditions concerning funerary ritual were reticent, but the Homeric examples encouraged other heroic visits, in the myth cycles accreted upon Theseus and upon Heracles.