Charon: The ferryman to Underworld

Jose Benlliure y Gil, 1919

In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on the mouth of a dead person.

Luca Giordano, 1684-1686

Some authors say that those who could not pay the fee, or those whose bodies were left unburied, had to wander the shores for one hundred years. In the catabasis mytheme, heroes — such as Heracles, Orpheus, Aeneas, Dionysus and Psyche — journey to the underworld and return, still alive, conveyed by the boat of Charon. (wikipedia)

Konstantin Petrovich Pomerantsev, 1860

Alexander Dmitrievich Litovchenko, 1889

Joachim Patinir, 1515-1524

Michelangelo, 1534–154
(lower detail from The Last Jugdement)

Pierre Subleyras, 1735

Gustave Dore, 1857
(From his Divine Comedy illustration)