Hermione's dead were buried without the coin for Charon because they didn't need it. The underworld was so close there — the chasm still open, Kerberos hauled back through it once already, the Acherusian lake sitting behind the temple like a permanent scar in the ground — that the long river crossing the Homeric dead required simply didn't apply. Distance had not yet been installed.

This is what Rohde is quietly tracking across the whole of *Psyche*: the progressive installation of distance between the living and the dead, between the upper world and the under one. Homer's theology requires separation, and that requirement is itself a theological position, not a neutral description of religious geography. Some communities — Hermione, the Areopagus cleft — resisted it long enough that we can still read the resistance in the ritual. They kept burying their dead without the coin. The gesture says: the journey isn't that long. The other side isn't that other.

What you meet in this passage is the moment before depth becomes distance, before the underworld hardens from a porous neighboring country into a jurisdiction requiring paperwork. That hardening will take centuries to complete. But its completion is what makes depth psychology possible as a discipline — because once the soul's country became somewhere else, it had to be recovered.