Atonement was to be made to the chthonic gods, for they were displeased at ritual uncleanness, and the chthonic cults had the other world in view.
The offerings made to them were both vegetable and animal; the sacrificed animal was slaughtered in the same way as in the sacrifices to chthonic deities--the dead were, in fact, regarded as underground deities.
She was also "a queen over death and the dead," a chthonic characteristic.
The affinities of the former lie rather with Hades--not as a chthonic being, properly speaking, but as lord of the spirit world.
In Classical Greece chthonic worship and hero worship seem on the whole to be more prominent than that of the gods.
References to chthonic deities are not very frequent.
In Germany and England, where Christianity was adopted during the Heroic Age or soon afterwards, the gods disappear at once, while forms of chthonic worship survive for centuries.
Chthonic deities are more prominent in later literature than in the Homeric poems; and many authors describe the worship paid to them down to a comparatively late period.
But Melito reports that water was emptied into a well in the city in order to subdue a subterranean demon--evidently some earlier chthonic deity.
Thesmophoria, the caves and vaults in the Greek area connected with Demeter and Proserpine, and the use of the pig in mystic rites of chthonic and agricultural deities.
This is the essence and meaning of the Chthonic or Earth-myth, as universal as the Sun-myth, but of which different features have also been unequally developed by different races according to their individual tendencies.
Such was particularly the case with the solar and Chthonic Myths--the poetical presentation of the career of the Sun and the Earth--as connected with the doctrine of the soul's immortality.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "chthonic" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
