Charon the Ferry Master

In old Greek Mythology, when you died you were given a ceremonial rite of passage. At the end of the ceremony, a coin was placed in your mouth, and you were delivered to Charon, the ferry master who would receive the body, take the coin for payment, and ferry the body from the land of the living, across the River Styx, to Hades.  Hades was the land of the dead where souls go if your survivors had the means to pay the ferry master for safe passage (“passed away”), otherwise you’d be stuck as a ghost haunting the land of the living for 100 years. 

At some point in more modern Greek mythology, Charon went from the ferry master (simply transporting souls) to the Angel of Death or the Grim Reaper himself.  It was said that he hunted his victims and killed them by slitting their throats.

The throat is the symbolic place where we express ourselves, we communicate, where we are creative.  It’s how others know who we really are.  When we grow up, we are socialized to behave a certain way.  Psychologist and author Terrence Real says it best: “women lose their voices in our culture and men lose their heart” (Real, T., 2022). Often therapy is to help men find and fully inhabit their hearts, becoming capable of the full range of human emotions after years of destructive stuffing and to help women regain their voices and learn who they are in the absence of societal pressure to be small, compliant, “nice”, and people-pleasing.  For people who are gender non-conforming, that conditioning is even more impactful.

What if Charon got a bad rap?  What if there isn’t any Grim Reaper hunting you down and slitting your throat to permanently silence you, but only symbolically so?  How do YOU silence yourself?  How do you fail to communicate or express your real true self?  Do you avoid conflict? Do you turn to substances or distractions to avoid feeling? When are you not yourself – and why? 

Psychoanalyst and author James Hollis said, “rather than ask, what does my tribe demand of me, what will win me collective approval, what will please my parents, we ask, what do the gods intend through me? It is a quite different question, and the answers will vary with the stage of life, and from one person to another. The necessary choices will never prove easy, but asking this question, and suffering it honestly, leads through the vicissitudes of life to larger places of meaning and purpose. One finds so much richness of experience, so much growth of consciousness, so much enlargement of one’s vision that the work proves well worth it.” 

As a living human being, this is your work.