The Cult
Greek cities kept Hádēs out of their temples almost by design — to invoke the Unseen was to admit the end of the conversation — and public cult of him was the rarest in the pantheon. Pausanias records one sanctuary, at Elis, opened once a year and dangerous to open otherwise (6.25.2): a god honored by being sealed away. Real cult ran in the chthonic register instead — black victims poured into pits, the sacrificer averting his face, as Odysseus does pouring blood for the dead in the Nekyia. The Nekromanteion of Ephyra on the Acheron received consultants of the dead, and at Hierapolis in Phrygia priests demonstrated before a suffocating fumarole that Plouton's breath killed birds yet spared the initiated. At Eleusis, as Plouton, he sat enthroned beside Persephonē at the center of the Mysteries; Locri Epizephyrii mass-produced his votives in clay. Rome, more literal, gave him a mundus — a ritual pit opened three days a year. The evidence converges: his cult addressed the boundary itself.