the.com/underworld
Where ancient myths filed criminal activity and dead people under the same address.
means The hidden world of organized crime, or the realm of the dead in myth and legend.
from A straightforward compound of 'under' plus 'world,' dating to roughly the medieval period for the mythic sense — the land beneath the earth where the dead resided, as in Hades or Hel. The criminal-underworld meaning is a much later extension, emerging in the 1800s, when the shadowy, below-the-surface world of thieves and gangsters got mapped onto the same old geography of hell.
- original tenants
- Hades, Persephone, Egyptian god Osiris ran competing versions
- rebrand timeline
- organized crime borrowed the name around 1800s London
- geography fail
- supposedly below Earth, yet nobody has ever dug there
- pop culture leak
- vampires and werewolves rented it out in 2003