Totenpass

Totenpass (plural Totenpässe) is a German term sometimes used for inscribed tablets or metal leaves found in burials primarily of those presumed to be initiates into Orphic, Dionysiac, and some ancient Egyptian and Semitic religions.

The inscription instructs the initiate on how to navigate the afterlife, including directions for avoiding hazards in the landscape of the dead and formulaic responses to the underworld judges.

Although the term "leaf" to describe metal foil is a modern metaphorical usage,[3] these lamellae were in this case cut in the shape of cordate leaves probably meant to represent ivy; most Totenpässe of this type are rectangular.

[6] Philologist Richard Janko proposed that Group B from Zuntz's collection derived from a single archetype, for which he offered a hypothetical Greek text and the following English translation while attempting, he emphasized, not to rely on preconceptions about underlying theology:[7] You will find on the right in Hades' halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives.

Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will themselves give you water from the spring divine; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory.

These tiny gold sheets employ a formulaic consolation that appears regularly on funerary steles in the area: θάρσει, (here the name of the deceased is inserted), οὐδεὶς ἀθάνατος ("Take courage, [name], no one is immortal").