Chapter VIII: THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED. Rest in the tomb, 190—in the nether (2)

It would certainly be a mistake to look upon Pythagorism as a pure philosophy, like Epicureanism and Stoicism. Its sectaries formed a church rather than a school, a religious order, not an academy of sciences. From a recent discovery in Rome, if my interpretation of the monument is right,[64] we have learnt that the Pythagoreans met in underground basilicas, constructed on the model of Plato’s cavern, in which, according to the great idealist, the chained men see only the shades of the higher realities.[65] A foundation sacrifice, that of a dog and a young pig, was made before this basilica was constructed. Its stucco decoration is borrowed almost entirely from Greek mythology or the ceremonies of the mysteries. Secret rites and varied purifications had to be accomplished in it; hymns accompanied by sacred music were sung; and from a chair within the apse the doctors gave esoteric teaching to the faithful. They taught them the symbols in which the truths of faith and the precepts of conduct, formerly revealed by Pythagoras and the other sages, were handed down in enigmatic form. These remote disciples interpreted all the myths of the past, and especially the Homeric poems, by psychological or eschatological allegories. They laid down, as definite commandments, a rule of strict observance which included all the acts of daily life. At dawn, after he had offered a sacrifice to the rising Sun, the pious man must decide on the way in which his day was to be employed. Every evening he must make a threefold examination of conscience, and, if he had been guilty of any sin of omission or commission, must make an act of contrition. He was obliged to follow a purely vegetarian diet and to practise many abstinences, to make repeated prayers, to meditate lengthily. This austere and circumstantial system of morals would ensure happiness and wisdom on earth and salvation in the Beyond.

All the Neo-Pythagoreans agree in stating that the human soul is related to God and therefore immortal. Many, like the Stoics, look upon it as a parcel of the ether, an effluvium of burning and luminous fluid which fills the celestial spaces and shines in the divine stars. Others, who are nearer to Plato, believe it to be immaterial and define it as a number in movement. Always, generation is regarded as a fall and a danger for the soul. Enclosed in the body as in a tomb, it runs the risk of corruption, even of perishing. Earthly existence is a hard voyage on the stormy waters of matter, which are perpetually rolling and surging. Thus a fundamental pessimism looked upon life here below as a trial and a chastisement; a radical dualism placed the body in opposition to the divine essence residing in it. The constant care of the sage was to keep his soul from pollution by its contact with the flesh. He abstained from meat and other foods which might corrupt it; a series of tabus protected it against all contagion. Ritual purifications restored to it its purity (ἁγνεία) which was continually threatened. The unwearying exercise of virtue, the scrupulous practice of piety preserved its original nature. Music, which caused it to vibrate in harmony with the universe, and science, which lifted it towards divine things, prepared its ascension to heaven. Meditation was a silent prayer, which placed reason in communication with the powers on high. Seized by love for the eternal beauties, it rose in its transports even in this life to God, identified itself with Him and so rendered itself worthy of a blessed immortality.[66]

When the death determined by destiny occurred, the soul escaped from the body in which it was captive but kept its bodily form and appearance, and this simulacrum (εἴδωλον) appeared to men in dreams and after evocations. According to some Pythagoreans, this subtle form was distinct from the soul (ψυχή), which ascended immediately to the higher spheres. Others believed that, like a light garment, it wrapped the soul, which was for some time constrained to dwell here below.[67] After this shade had remained beside the body or somewhere near the tomb for a certain number of days, it rose in the atmosphere in which contended winds, water and fire, and was purified by the elements. This zone, the lowest circle of the world, was what fable had called hell (_Inferi_), and it was of this passage from one circle to that next it that poets spoke when they told of the Styx and Charon’s boat.[68] When the soul had been purified it was borne, uplifted by the winds, to the sphere of the moon. Here lay the boundary of life and death, the limit which divided the residence of the immortals, where all was harmony and purity, from the corrupt and troubled empire of generation. Thus the luminary of the night was the first dwelling of the Blessed, and there lay the Elysian Fields of the poets, Proserpina’s kingdom where rest the shades. And the Fortunate Islands, of which the ancients sung, were no other than the sun and the moon, celestial lands bathed by the waters of the ether.[69]

The shade remained in the moon or was dissolved there, and pure reason rose to the sun whence it came forth, or even reached the summit of the heavens where reigned the Most High. A helpful escort, called by mythology Hermes the Soul-Guide, or _psychopompos_, led the elect to these Olympian peaks. There they regained their true country, and as birth had been to them a death, so their death was their rebirth. They enjoyed the contemplation of the luminous gods. They were rapt by the ravishing tune of the harmony of the spheres, that divine melody of which earthly music is but a feeble echo.[70]

Some souls were kept on the banks of the Styx and could not cross it: in other words, they were constrained to remain on the earth. The dead who had not had religious burial must linger beside their neglected bodies for a hundred years, the normal span of a human life, before they were admitted to the place of purgation, where they would sojourn for ten times that period.[71] In the same way those who had died young or whose days had been cut short by violence would not enter the purgatory before the due term of their life.[72] But especially the souls of the criminal and the impious were thus condemned to wander, restless and in pain, through the lower air, which they filled with their multitude. It was these demoniac spirits who returned as dismal phantoms to frighten the living, who were evoked by wizards and who revealed the future in oracles. Demonology accounted for all the aberrations of magic and divination. These spirits rose to the aerial purgatory after they had for long years tormented and been tormented, but they could not reach the moon, which repelled them; they were condemned to reincarnation in new bodies, either of men or of beasts, and were once again delivered to the fury of the passions. These passions are the Erinyes, of whom poets sung, that in Tartarus they burnt criminals with their torches and scourged them with their whips. For there was no subterranean hell: Hades was in the air or on our earth, and the infernal sufferings described by mythology were the various tortures inflicted on the souls condemned to transmigration.[73]

This religious philosophy, which, by a symbolism transforming the meaning of the traditional beliefs, reconciled these with men’s intelligence, did more than any other to revive faith in immortality. Many enlightened men, like Cicero and Cato, had sought consolation for the misfortunes of this world and a hope for the Beyond in reading Plato, but Plato’s proof of immortality could convince only those already convinced.[74] Pythagorism, on the other hand, offered to restless souls a certainty founded on a revelation made to ancient sages, and it satisfied at once the Roman love for order and rule, and the human love for the marvellous and the mysterious. The evidence of the effect of this philosophy is still recognisable, although it often has not been recognised, in the compositions decorating many sepulchral monuments and in the wording of several epitaphs. A tombstone found at Philadelphia in Lydia is particularly curious.[75] It bears a representation of the Y symbol, that is, of the diverging roads between which man must choose when he leaves childhood behind him. On the one side earthly travail leads the virtuous man to eternal rest; on the other softness and debauchery bring the vicious man to a gulf into which he falls. A metrical epitaph, found at Pisaurum (Pesaro), hints covertly at the ideas of the school. This commemorates a child who, in spite of his youth, had learnt the dogmas of Pythagoras and read “the pious verses of Homer” as well as the philosophers, and had studied in Euclid the sacred science of numbers. His soul, runs the inscription,[76] “goes forward through the gloomy stars of deep Tartarus towards the waters of Acheron,” a sentence which can be understood only on the supposition that Tartarus and Acheron had for the author a figurative meaning and lay in the depths not of the earth but of the sky.

* * * * *

The belief in a celestial immortality which was thus propagated by the half philosophical, half religious sect of the Pythagoreans was to find a powerful interpreter in a thinker who had a predominant influence over his contemporaries and the succeeding generation—in Posidonius. We know little of his life. Born at Apamea in Syria, about the year 135, he early left his native country, of which he seems to have kept a poor opinion, and as a young student in Athens he attended the lectures of the older Stoic Panaetius. The universal curiosity which was to make him a scholar of encyclopaedic knowledge soon impelled him to take long journeys, in which he even reached the shores of the Atlantic and studied the tides of the ocean. Upon his return he opened a school in the free city of Rhodes and there numbered Cicero among his hearers. When he died at the age of eighty-four the prestige he enjoyed both in the Roman world and among the Greeks was immense. He owed his intellectual ascendancy as much to the marvellous variety of the knowledge which he displayed, as philosopher, astronomer, historian, geographer and naturalist, as to his copious, harmonious and highly coloured style.

A theologian rather than a logician, a scholar rather than a critic, he did not construct an original metaphysical system comparable to those of the great founders of schools. But Posidonius was the most prominent representative of that syncretism which, as we have seen, showed itself in the Pythagoreans before his day and which reigned in the world about him, because men were weary of the sterile discussions of opposing thinkers. He gave the support of his authority and his eloquence to the eclecticism which reconciled the principles of the ancient Greek schools. Moreover, his Syrian origin led him to combine these doctrines with the religious ideas of the East, which had with astrology given the Hellenes a new conception of man and of the gods.[77]

It is exactly here that Posidonius is important from the point of view of our subject: his tendencies represent a direct reaction against the scepticism of his master Panaetius, who denied both the survival of the soul[78] and the possibility of divination. Posidonius introduced into Stoicism momentous ideas derived at once from Pythagorism and from Eastern cults, and sought to establish them firmly by connecting them with a system of the world, which his vast intelligence had sought to understand in all its aspects. His faith in immortality is strictly related to his cosmography and receives support from his physics.

It was this system of the world which was, thanks to Ptolemy’s authority, to perpetuate itself on the whole until the time of Copernicus. We will here give a broad outline of its essential features, because the eschatological doctrines were to remain for centuries connected with it. The terrestrial globe was held to be suspended, motionless, in the centre of the universe, surrounded by an atmosphere formed of the three other elements and reaching to the moon. That part of the atmosphere which was near the earth was thickened and darkened by heavy vapours rising from the soil and the waters. Above, there moved a purer and lighter air which, as it neared the sky, was warmed by contact with the higher fires. Still higher were ranged the concentric spheres of the seven planets, wrapped in ether, a subtle and ardent fluid—first the moon, which still received and gave back the exhalations of the earth,[79] then Mercury and Venus, the two companions of the sun in his daily course. The fourth place, that is, the middle point of the superimposed heavens, was occupied by the luminary of the day,—here Posidonius forsakes Plato and follows the Chaldeans,—the burning heart of the world, the intelligent light which is the source of our minds.[80] Above the sun moved the three higher planets—Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And these seven wandering stars were surrounded by the sphere of the fixed stars, which were animated by constant and uniform movement. That sphere marked the world’s boundary: beyond it there was only void or the ether.

The universe, as this philosophy imagined it, had therefore well-defined limits: when men raised their eyes to the constellations of the firmament, they thought they perceived its end. The depths of the sky were not then unfathomable; he who sank his gaze in them was not seized with giddiness at the abysses nor bewildered by inconceivable magnitudes, and was not tempted to cry with Pascal:[81] “The eternal silence of these boundless spaces affrights me.” Nor was the universe then a multiplicity of heavenly bodies moving to an unknown goal and perpetually transformed, transitory manifestations of an energy developed for undiscoverable ends. The conception formed of the world was static, not dynamic. It was a machine of which the wheels turned according to immutable laws, an organism of which all the parts were united by reciprocal sympathy as they acted and reacted on each other.

This organism was alive, penetrated throughout by the same essence as the soul which maintains our life and thought. This soul was an igneous breath of which the moral corruption was conceived quite materially. When it gave itself up to the desires of the senses, to corporeal passions, its substance thickened and was troubled, and the mud of this pollution adhered to it like a crust. When the soul left the body at the time of death, it became a spirit like the multitude of demons who peopled the atmosphere. But its lot varied in accordance with its condition. If it were laden with matter, its weight condemned it to float in the densest air, the damp-charged gas which immediately surrounded the earth, and its very composition then caused it to reincarnate itself in new bodies.[82] But if it had remained free from all alloy its lightness caused it to pass immediately through this heavier layer of air and bore it to the higher spaces. It stopped in this ascension when, within the ether which was about the moon, it found itself in surroundings like its own substance. Some elect beings, the divine spirits of the sages, kept such purity that they rose through the ether as far as the highest astral spheres. In this system the doctrine of immortality is seen to be closely knit up with cosmography.

If Posidonius has largely borrowed these ideas from the platonising Pythagorism of his period, he forsook this philosophy on an essential point. As a Stoic he did not admit the transcendency of God. For him, God was immanent in the universe; the seat of the directing reason of the world (ἡγεμονικόν) was the sphere of the fixed stars, which embraced all other spheres and determined their revolutions. There too, at the summit of the world but not outside it, the spirits of the blessed gathered; from these high peaks they delighted to observe earthly happenings; and when a pious soul tried to rise to them, these succouring heroes, like our saints, could lend their aid and protection.

This philosophy did not draw its power of persuasion only from its logical consistency, which satisfied reason, but it also made a strong appeal to feeling. Posidonius caused a broad stream of mystical ideas, undoubtedly derived from the beliefs developed by the astral religions of the East, to flow into the arid bed of a Stoicism which had become scholastic. For him, reason was not enclosed in the body, even when it sojourned here below; it escaped from it to pass with marvellous swiftness from the depths of the sea to the ends of the earth and the top of the heavens; it flew through all nature, learning to know physical laws and to admire the divine order ever more and more. Above all it could never weary of the sight of the glowing constellations and their harmonious movements. It felt with emotion, as it gave itself up to contemplating them, its kinship with the celestial fires; it entered into communion with the higher gods. In enthusiastic terms, echoed by his imitators, Posidonius described the ecstasy which seized him who left the earth, who felt himself transported to the midst of the sacred chorus of the stars and who followed their rhythmic evolutions. In these transports, the soul did not only win to infinite power, but also received from heaven the revelation of the nature and cause of the celestial revolutions. Thus even in this life it had a foretaste of the beatitude which would belong to it after death when reason, rid of the weak organs of the senses, would directly perceive all the splendours of the divine world and would know its mysteries completely.[83]

This theology attributed to man a power such as to satisfy his proudest feelings. It did not regard him as a tiny animalcule who had appeared on a small planet lost in immensity, nor did it, when he scrutinised the heavens, crush him with a sense of his own pettiness as compared with bodies whose greatness surpassed the limits of his imagination. It made man king of creation, placed him in the centre of a still limited world of which the proportions were not so vast that he could not travel all over his domain. If he could tear himself from the domination of his body, he became capable of communicating with the visible gods who were almost within his reach and whom he might hope to equal after his passage here below. He knew himself to be united to them by an identity of nature which alone explained how he understood them.

“Quis caelum possit, nisi caeli munere, nosse
Et reperire deum, nisi qui pars ipse Dei est?”[84]

“Who could know heaven save by heavenly grace, or find God if he were not himself a part of God?”—words of the Roman poet who echoes Posidonius’ teaching.

* * * * *

It is easy to understand that such ideas were readily adopted at a time when human minds, tired of inconclusive disputes, despaired of ever reaching truth by their own strength. The astral mysticism eloquently preached by Posidonius was to influence all the later Stoicism. Seneca in particular, in the numerous passages in which he speaks of the misery and baseness of life in the body and celebrates the felicity of the pure souls who live among the stars, shows the imprint of the philosopher of Apamea. And this philosopher also exerted a far-reaching action beyond the narrow circle of the school. The erudition of the antiquarian Varro, the poems of Virgil and Manilius and the biblical exegesis of Philo the Jew, all drew on him for inspiration. But the author in whom we can best discern his influence is his pupil Cicero, the abundance of whose writings allows us to follow the evolution of his thought, which is characteristic of the whole society of his time.

It is beyond doubt that Cicero was an agnostic for the greater part of his life. His mind found satisfaction in the scepticism of the New Academy, or rather he adopted towards the future life the received attitude of the world in which he lived, where the problem of the soul’s origin and destiny was regarded as not only insoluble but also idle, as unworthy to absorb the minds of men who should devote their energies to the service of the state. The question of the cult to be rendered to the Manes had been settled once for all by the ancient pontifical law. Old Rome distrusted speculations as to the Beyond because they dangerously diverted thought from actual realities. But Cicero, by his study of the writings of his master Posidonius and by his intercourse with the senator Nigidius Figulus, a fervent adept of Pythagorism,[85] had been brought into contact with the stream of mystical ideas which was beginning to flow through the West. Gradually, as he grew older and life brought him disappointments, his thought was more attracted to religious ideas.[86] In 54, when he had given up political life, he composed the _Republic_, an imitation of Plato’s work on the same subject. As Plato had introduced the myth of Er the Armenian at the end of his work, so his Roman imitator concludes with the puzzling picture of “Scipio’s Dream,” where the destroyer of Carthage receives the revelations of the conqueror of Zama. The hero, from the height of the celestial spheres, expounds that doctrine of astral immortality which was common to the Pythagoreans and to Posidonius. It is given as yet only as a dream, a vision the truth of which is in no way guaranteed. But in 45 B. C. Cicero suffered a cruel loss in the death of his only daughter Tullia. His grief persuaded him that this beloved being still lived among the gods. Even while he accused himself of unreasonable weakness, he ordered that not a tomb but a chapel (_fanum_), consecrating her apotheosis, should be raised to this young woman. The letters he wrote at this time to Atticus, from the shores of the Pomptine Marshes, in the solitude of Astura, apprise us of his most intimate feelings. He gave vent to his sorrow in writing a _Consolatio_, and in its preserved fragments we see him strangely impressed by the Pythagorean doctrines: he speaks of the soul, exempt from all matter, as celestial and divine and therefore eternal, of the soul’s life here below as a penalty inflicted on it because it is born to expiate anterior crimes (_scelerum luendorum causa_).

Cicero’s sensitive spirit, troubled by the perplexing problem of our destiny, did not turn to the old discredited beliefs but to the new conceptions which a mystical philosophy had brought from the East. _Hortensius_ and the _Tusculans_, written in this period of his life, show us the empire which the Neo-Stoicism of his master and the Neo-Pythagorism of his fellow-senator then exercised over his mind, saddened and disillusioned as he was, and show us too how he sought consolation for the private and public ills which were overwhelming him in the luminous doctrine of a blissful survival.

This spiritual evolution is an image of the great change which was about to take place in the Roman world.

* * * * *

Stoic philosophy, although its maxims had been popularised by education and literature, was almost as incapable of exercising a wide influence on the deep masses of the people as the esoteric theosophy revealed in the aristocratic conventicles of the Pythagoreans. The urban “plebs,” to which slavery and trade had given a strong admixture of Eastern blood, and the peasants of the rural districts, where the gaps caused by depopulation were filled up by a foreign labour supply, were beginning at the end of the Republican period to hear new dogmas preached, dogmas which were winning an ever increasing number of believers. The ancient national cults of Greece and Rome aimed above all at ensuring civic order and earthly welfare, and paid small regard to the spiritual perfection of individuals and their eternal future. But now exotic cults claimed to reveal the secret of immortality to their adepts.[87] The Oriental mysteries, propagated in the West, united in the promise of securing holiness in this life and felicity in the next, while they imparted to their initiates the knowledge of certain rites and required submission to certain precepts. Instead of the fluctuating and disputable beliefs of philosophers as to destiny in the Beyond, these religions gave certainty founded on divine revelation and on the faith of countless generations attached to them. The truth, which the mysticism of the thinkers looked to find in direct communication with heaven, was here warranted by a venerable tradition and by the daily manifestations of the gods adored. The belief in life beyond the grave, which had in ancient paganism been so vague and melancholy, was transformed into confident hope in a definite beatitude. Participation in the occult ceremonies of the sect was an infallible means of finding salvation. A society that was weary of doubt received these promises eagerly, and the old beliefs of the East combined with an eclectic philosophy to give a new eschatology to the Roman Empire.

The salvation ensured by the mysteries was conceived as identification with the god venerated in them. By virtue of this union the initiate was reborn, like this god, to new life after he had perished, or, like him, escaped from the fatal law of death which weighs on humanity. He was “deified” or “immortalised,” after he had taken part, as actor, in a liturgical drama reproducing the myth of the god whose lot was thus assimilated to his own. Purifications, lustrations and unctions, participation in a sacred banquet, revelations, apparitions and ecstasies—a complicated series of ceremonies and instructions helped to bring about this metamorphosis of the faithful whom a higher power absorbed or penetrated with its energy. We shall return to this sacramental operation which made pious souls equal to the divinity.[88]

There is another point on which, in the course of this historical introduction, we must dwell a little longer, namely, the evolution undergone by the conception of the Beyond taught in the different mysteries and the share of philosophy in the transformation. For if in the various sects the liturgy was usually preserved with scrupulous fidelity, its theological interpretation varied considerably as time passed. In paganism much doctrinal liberty was always combined with respect for rites.

Some of the mysteries often gave in their beginnings a rather coarse idea of the future life, and the pleasures which might be enjoyed therein were very material. The ancient Greek conception, going back to Orphism, was, as we have seen, that of a subterranean kingdom divided into two contrasted parts—Tartarus where the wicked, plunged in a dark slough or subjected to other pains, suffering the chastisement of their faults, on the one side; on the other, the Elysian Fields, those flowered, luminous meadows, gay with song and dance, in which the blessed pursued their favourite occupations, whether they were allowed to dwell there for ever, or whether they awaited there the hour fixed for their rebirth on earth.[89] This eschatology, which had become the common possession of the Hellenes, was certainly that of the mysteries of Greece and in particular of the mysteries of Eleusis. But these mysteries were never more than local religions: however numerous were the initiates attracted by their renown, they were bound to the soil where they were born. Thus their influence was very limited in the Roman period and cannot be compared with that of the universal cults which were propagated throughout the Mediterranean world. As for Orphism, which was never connected with any one temple, it is doubtful whether it still constituted an actual sect, and if it did, it certainly spread over a very narrow field. Its influence was perpetuated chiefly because it was absorbed by Pythagorism.

Among the mysteries propagated in the West, the most ancient were those of the Thraco-Phrygian gods, Dionysos and Sabazios, who were indeed looked upon as identical. We know that in 186 B. C. a _senatus consultum_ forbade the celebration of the Bacchanalia in Italy, and in 139 some sectaries of Jupiter Sabazius, who identified this god with the Jahve-Sabaoth of the Jews, were expelled from Rome by the praetor at the same time as the “Chaldeans.” The cult practised by the votaries of Bacchus or Liber Pater, whose confraternities were maintained until the end of paganism, differed profoundly from the Dionysos worship of ancient Greece: a number of Oriental elements had been introduced into it; in particular, the relations between Dionysos and Osiris, which go back to a very remote period, had become singularly close in Egypt. However, many reliefs on tombstones and the celebrated paintings found in the catacombs of Praetextatus prove that the cults of the Thraco-Phrygian gods remained faithful to the old idea of a future life. The shade went down into the bowels of the earth, never again to leave them. If judged worthy, it took part in an eternal banquet, of which the initiate received a foretaste on earth, in the feasts of the mysteries. Sacred drunkenness, a divine exaltation, was the pledge of the joyous intoxication which the god of wine would grant in Hades to the faithful who had united themselves to him.[90]

In 205, towards the end of the second Punic war, the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, and of Attis, her associate, was transported from Pessinus in Phrygia and officially adopted by the Roman people. The great feasts of this religion were celebrated in March about the equinox and commemorated the death and resurrection of Attis, the emblem of vegetation, which, after it has withered, flowers again in the spring. The faithful associated their own destiny with the lot of their god: like him they would be reborn to a new life after they had died. Their doctrines on this point were certainly transformed as time passed, for no Oriental cult which spread in the West underwent more evolution, since none was more fundamentally barbarous when it came from Asia. Originally, Cybele was the goddess of the dead, because Mother Earth receives them into her bosom. Every Phrygian tomb is a sanctuary and its epitaph a dedication: often the graves are consecrated to the goddess and bear her image or that of the lion, her substitute. Often too the tombstone has the shape of a door, the door of the subterranean world whither the dead descend. The belief seems to have been held that the deceased were absorbed in the Great Mother who had given them birth, and that they thus participated in her divinity. She brought forth corn and grapes for men and thus sustained them day by day, and the bread and wine, taken in the meal which was the essential act of the initiation, would ensure immortality to those who were of the mystery. “Thou givest us the food of life with unfailing constancy,” says a prayer, “and when our soul departs we will take refuge in thee. Thus all that thou givest, always falls to thee again.”[91]

Towards the end of the Republic the mysteries of Isis and Serapis, which had come from Alexandria and had already spread through the south of Italy, established themselves in Rome and maintained themselves there in spite of opposition from the senate. Under the Empire, the Egyptian religion displayed all the pomp of its liturgy in magnificent temples and had a number of votaries in every province. The cult of Osiris, of which that of Serapis was a form, was originally a cult of the fields, like that of Attis, and the great feast which its adherents celebrated in autumn recalls the Phrygian spring feasts. The death of Osiris, whose body had been torn to pieces by Seth, was mourned; and when Isis had found the scattered fragments of the corpse, joined them together and reanimated it, noisy rejoicing followed the lamentation. Like the initiates of Cybele and Attis, those of Isis and Serapis were associated with the passion and resurrection of their god. And, in the same way, the oldest conception of immortality in these mysteries was that the departed went down into the infernal regions, where a man became another Serapis, a woman another Isis, which is to say that they were assimilated to the gods who had granted them salvation.[92] This is why on numerous funeral reliefs the dead man, who has become a hero and is shown lying on a couch, bears on his head the bushel (_modius_) which is the attribute of Serapis. In consequence, however, of the identification of this god with Dionysos, the joys beyond the grave are also represented as a feast in the Elysian Fields at which the great master of banquets presides.[93]

All these mysteries conceive immortality as a descent of the dead into Hades. For them, the kingdom of the dead lies in the bosom of the earth. Those who have been initiated will there enjoy a felicity made up of purely material pleasures, or they will be identified with the powers who reign over the nether world and will have part in their divine life. It will be noticed how closely this last conception approached to that of ancient Stoicism, according to which the various parts of the human organism, dissociated by death, were to regain their integrity in the divine elements of the universe.

Quite another doctrine was propagated by the Syrian cults and the Persian mysteries of Mithras, which spread in the West in the first century of our era. These religions taught that the soul of the just man does not go below the ground but rises to the sky, there to enjoy divine bliss in the midst of the stars in the eternal light. Only the wicked were condemned to roam the earth’s surface, or were dragged by the demons into the dusky depths in which the spirit of evil reigned. Opinions differed as to the region of heaven in which the souls of the elect dwelt. The “Chaldeans,” who looked upon the sun as the master and the intelligence of the universe, made him the author of human reason, which returned to him after it had left the body, while for the priests of Mithras the spirit rose, by way of the planetary spheres, to the summit of the heavens. We will have to examine later the different forms of astral immortality.[94] But you will already have noticed how nearly this immortality, as formulated by the Iranian and Semitic sects, approximated to the doctrine taught by Pythagorism and adopted by Neo-Stoicism.

This meeting of the two doctrines was not an effect of chance. The idea that souls are related to the celestial fires, whence they descend at birth and whither they reascend at death, had probably been borrowed by the ancient Pythagoreans from the astral religions of the East. Recent research seems to have established the fact of its Chaldeo-Persian origin. But the Greek philosophers, according to their wont, defined and developed this idea in an original way. In the Hellenistic period, when they adopted astrology, they were subject for the second time to the ascendancy of the scientific religion of the “Chaldeans”; and, in their turn, they reacted on the Oriental cults when these spread in the Graeco-Roman world. We have sure evidence that the mysteries of Mithras were, in particular, strongly affected by the influence of the Pythagorean sect, which was itself organised like a kind of mystery. In a more general way, philosophy introduced into the mysteries ethical ideas and, instead of the purely ritualistic or rather magical means of salvation, some moral requirements became necessary to earn immortality.

There is here a mass of actions and reactions of which the details escape us; but we can form some idea of such a syncretism from the remains of the theological writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, from the writings, that is, which are supposed to contain the revelations of the Egyptian god Thot. This professedly Egyptian wisdom includes a number of ideas and definitions which are characteristic of Posidonius and Neo-Pythagorism. The Greek and the Egyptian elements are so closely associated in it that it is very difficult to separate the one from the other. We find another example of the same mixture in the “Chaldaic Oracles,” which were probably composed about the year 200 of our era and which became one of the sacred books of Neo-Platonism. Unlike the Hermetic writings, this collection of verses does indeed seem to have belonged to a sect practising an actual cult: its greater part is taken up with mythology, and the fantastic mysticism of the East is more prominent here than in the Hermetic lore, but the mind of the compiler of these revelations was also penetrated by the ideas which the Greek masters had widely circulated.

The tenet of astral immortality, which philosophy shared with the cults emanating from Syria and Persia, imposed itself on the ancient world. It is curious to notice how it was introduced into the theology of the very mysteries to which it was at first foreign: Attis ended by becoming a solar god, and thenceforward it was in the heights of heaven that Cybele was united to the souls she had prevented from wandering in darkness and had saved from hell. The priests of the Alexandrian divinities were similarly to explain that the dead had not their dwelling in the interior of our globe, but that the “subterranean” (ὑπόγειος) kingdom of Serapis was situated beneath the earth, that is, in the lower hemisphere of heaven, bounded by the line of the horizon.[95]

According as the Oriental religions were more largely propagated, faith in a new eschatology spread gradually among the people; and although memories and survivals of the old belief in the life of the dead in the grave and the shade’s descent into the infernal depths may have lingered, the doctrine which predominated henceforward was that of celestial immortality.

The distance separating the age of Augustus from that of the Flavians on this point can be measured by reading Plutarch’s moral works (about 120 A. D.). A constant preoccupation with religious matters, and in particular a learned curiosity as to the cults of the East, shows itself in this Greek of Chaeronea, living in a country which, in its pride in its own past, had more than any other resisted the invasion of exoticism. Further, the eclectic philosopher likes to insert in his dissertations myths in which, after the fashion of Plato, he expounds the lot of souls in the Beyond and their struggle to rise heavenwards. An attempt has been made to prove—wrongly, I think—that he is here inspired by Posidonius. These apocalyptic visions, which claim to reveal truths previously ignored, are not taken from that well-known writer; they have a religious imprint which betrays sacerdotal influence, and the philosophic ideas they contain are those which were part of the common wisdom of the Pythagoreans and the mysteries.

There doubtless still were in the second century Stoics, like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, for whom the future life was a mere hypothesis, or at most a hope (p. 14), as well as sceptics, like Lucian of Samosata, whose irony mocked all beliefs. But gradually their number diminished and the echo of their voices grew feebler. Faith in survival deepened as present life came to seem a burden harder and harder to bear. The pessimistic idea that birth is a chastisement and that the true life is not that passed on earth, imposed itself in proportion to the growth of public and private ills and to the aggravation of the empire’s social and moral decline. In the period of violence and devastation which occurred in the third century, there was so much undeserved suffering, there were so many unjust failures and unpunished crimes, that men took refuge in the expectation of a better life in which all the iniquity of this world would be retrieved. No earthly hope then brightened life. The tyranny of a corrupt bureaucracy stifled every attempt at political progress. Science seemed exhausted and no longer discovered unknown truths; art was struck with sterility of invention and reproduced heavily the creations of the past. An increasing impoverishment and a general insecurity constantly discouraged the spirit of enterprise. The idea spread that humanity was smitten by incurable decay, that society was on the road to dissolution and the end of the world was impending. All these causes of discouragement and pessimism must be remembered in order to understand the dominance of the old idea, then so often repeated, that a bitter necessity constrains the spirit of man to enclose itself in matter, and that death is a liberation which delivers it from its carnal prison. In the heavy atmosphere of a period of oppression and powerlessness, the despondent souls of men aspired with ineffable ardour to the radiant spaces of heaven.

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The mental evolution of Roman society was complete when Neo-Platonism took upon itself the office of directing minds. The powerful mysticism of Plotinus (205–262 A. D.) opened up the path which Greek philosophy was to follow until the world of antiquity reached its end. We shall not undertake to notice in this place the discrepancies of the latest teachers who theorised about the destiny of souls. In the course of these lectures we shall have occasion to quote some of the opinions of Porphyry, the chief disciple of Plotinus, and of his successor Jamblichus, who was, like himself, a Syrian. We will here do no more than indicate broadly what distinguished the theories of this school from those which had hitherto been dominant.

The system generally accepted, by the mysteries as by philosophy, was a pantheism according to which divine energy was immanent in the universe and had its home in the celestial spheres. The souls, conceived as material, could in consequence rise to the stars but did not leave the world. The Neo-Pythagoreans themselves had not had a very firmly established doctrine on this point: while some of them stated that reason was incorporeal, others, as we have seen (p. 24), admitted with the Stoics that it was an igneous substance. It is true that even in paganism the appearance can be discerned of the belief in a Most High (Ὕψιστος) or an unknown god Ἄγνωστος, whom some people supposed to dwell above the starry heavens, beyond the limits of the world, and towards whom pious spirits could rise. The revivers of Platonic idealism asserted the transcendence of God and the spirituality of the soul more strongly and clearly. A whole chapter of the _Enneades_ of Plotinus is taken up with refuting those who held the soul to be material.[96] As a principle of life and movement, it is stated to be immortal by its very essence, so that if it kept its purity perfect, it would find after its passage here below eternal felicity in the intelligible world.

The Neo-Platonists preserved the idea, which had previously been admitted, that this intellectual essence comes down to earth through the planetary spheres and the atmosphere, and that as it sinks in the luminous ether and the damp air, it becomes laden with particles of the elements through which it passes. It surrounds itself with a garment or, as it is sometimes called, with a vehicle (ὄχημα) which thickens as it gradually draws near us.[97] This subtle body, the seat of the passions and of feeling, is intermediary between the spiritual principle which has issued from God and the flesh in which it is to enclose itself, and for certain philosophers it survives death and accompanies the soul to the Beyond, at least if the soul, not being free from earthly admixture, cannot wholly leave the world of sense, and therefore rises only to the planetary circle or to that of the fixed stars.

When the soul has suffered even more from the taint to which its contact with matter, the source of evil, exposes it, it is doomed to reincarnate itself in a new body and again to undergo the trial of this life. When it has become incurably corrupt and burdened with evil, it goes down into the depths of Hades.

Following Plato, Plotinus and his successors have adopted the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. They have even developed it, as we shall see,[98] together with the whole pessimistic and ascetic conception of life, the conception which looks at birth as a pain and a fall, a temporary subjection to a body from which emancipation must be sought. It is only after this liberation that the soul can reach perfect wisdom; it must no longer be troubled by the senses if it is to attain to the end of existence, to union with God.

This union can be realised even during this life in moments of ecstasy, in which the soul rises above thought and gives itself up entirely to love for the ineffable Unity in which it is absorbed. Like many other mystics, Plotinus disdains the ceremonies of positive cults: they were superfluous to the sage who could of himself enter into communion with the supreme Being. But even his disciple Porphyry conceded a greater value to rites and initiations. If they were powerless to lead the partakers of mysteries to the highest degree of perfection, their effect yet was to render men worthy to live among the visible gods who people heaven.[99] But only philosophical wisdom could rise to the intelligible world and the Unknowable.

The principle of a mystical relation between man and the divinity was to lead Neo-Platonism to more and more reverence for religious traditions. For it was held that in the past the revelation of truth had been granted by Heaven not only to divine Plato and the sages of Greece, but to all the founders of barbarous cults and authors of sacred writings. They all communicated profound teaching, which they sometimes hid beneath the veil of allegory. Inspired by the symbolism of the Pythagoreans, the last representatives of Greek philosophy claimed to rediscover the whole of Platonic metaphysics and the Platonic doctrine of immortality in the myths and rites of paganism. The speeches of Julian the Apostate on the Sun-King and the Mother of the Gods are characteristic examples of this bold exegesis, destitute of all critical and even all common sense, which was adopted by the last champions of the old beliefs.

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These aberrations of Neo-Platonic thought must not hide the school’s historical importance from us, any more than the excesses of the superstitious theurgy which invaded it. When it revived Plato’s idealism, it produced a lasting change in the eschatological ideas which prevailed in paganism, and it deeply influenced even the Christian doctrines of immortality held since the fourth century. This will be better seen, we hope, in the course of these lectures.[100] It may be said that the conception of the lot of souls which reigned at the end of antiquity persisted on the whole through the Middle Ages—the immaterial spirits of the just rising through the planetary spheres to the Supreme Being enthroned above the zone of the fixed stars; the posthumous purification of those whom life has sullied in a purgatory intermediary between heaven and hell; the descent of the wicked into the depths of the earth where they suffered eternal chastisement. This threefold division of the universe and of souls was largely accepted at the time of the Empire’s decline by pagans and by Christians, and after long centuries it was again to find magnificent expression in Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Before it could be destroyed astronomy had to destroy the whole cosmography of Posidonius and Ptolemy on which it was based. When the earth ceased to be the centre of the universe, the one fixed point in the midst of the moving circles of the skies, and became a tiny planet turning round another heavenly body, which itself moved in the immensity of space, among an infinity of similar stars, the naïve conception formed by the ancients of the journey of souls in a well-enclosed world could no longer be maintained. The progress of science discredited the convenient solution bequeathed to scholasticism by antiquity, and left us in the presence of a mystery of which the pagan mysteries never had even a suspicion.

I

AFTER LIFE IN THE TOMB

When Cicero in his _Tusculans_[101] first touches on the question of the immortality of the soul, he begins by citing in its support the fact that belief in it has existed since earliest antiquity. He states that unless the first Romans were convinced that man was not reduced to nought, when he left this life, and that all feeling was not extinguished in death, there could be no explanation of the rules of the old pontifical law as to funerals and burials, rules the violation of which was regarded as an inexpiable crime. This remark is that of a very judicious observer. There subsist in the funeral rites of all peoples, in the ceremony of mourning established by the religious law or by tradition, customs which derive from archaic conceptions of life beyond the tomb and which are still followed although their original meaning is no longer understood. Modern learning has sometimes successfully sought to elucidate them, borrowing light from the practices of savage peoples and from European folk-lore. We will not enter the domain of these researches, for since our special purpose here is to expound the ideas as to immortality held in later times, we have to consider only the beliefs which were still alive in that period. A false interpretation supplied by a philosopher may have more historical value for us than the true explanation of an institution which had lost its meaning.

But even among the ideas which were neither obliterated nor discredited, conceptions which originated at very different dates have to be distinguished.

The doctrines of paganism, like the soil of our planet, are formed of superimposed strata. When we dig into them we discover successive layers under the upper deposits of recent alluvia. Nothing was suddenly destroyed in ancient religions; their transformations were never revolutionary. Faith in the past was not entirely abolished when new ways of believing were formed. Contradictory opinions could exist side by side for a long time without any shock being caused by their disagreement; and it was only little by little and slowly that argument excluded one way of thinking to give place to the other, while there were always hardy survivals left, both in thought and in customs. Thus the beliefs as to the future life which were current under the Roman Empire present a singular mixture, coarse ideas going back to the prehistoric period mingling with theories imported into Italy at a late date.

We will today examine the oldest of all the ways of considering survival in the Beyond: life in the tomb.

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Ethnology has proved that among all peoples the belief that the dead continue to live in the tomb has reigned, and sometimes still reigns. The primitive man, disconcerted by death, cannot persuade himself that the being who moved, felt, willed, as he does, can be suddenly deprived of all his faculties. The most ancient and the crudest idea is that the corpse itself keeps some obscure sensitiveness which it cannot manifest. It is imagined to be in a state like sleep. The vital energy which animated the body is still attached to it and cannot exist without it. This belief was so powerful in Egypt that it inspired a whole section of the funeral ritual and called forth the infinite care that was taken to preserve mummies. Even in the West it survived vaguely, and traces of it might still be discovered today. Lucretius combats this invincible illusion of men who, even while they affirm that death extinguishes all feeling, keep a secret uneasiness as to the suffering which their mortal remains may undergo and are frightened by the idea that their bodies may be eaten by worms or carnivorous animals. They cannot separate themselves from this prone body, which they believe is still their self. Why, continues the poet, would it be more painful to be the prey of wild beasts than to be burnt by the flame of the pyre, to freeze lying on the icy slab of the grave or to be crushed by the weight of heaped-up earth?[102] This very fear that the earth may weigh heavily on those who are deposited in the grave shows itself among many peoples who inter their dead, and was expressed in Rome by a formula so very usual that it was recalled in epitaphs by initials only: “_S(it) t(ibi) t(erra) l(evis)_,” “May earth be light for thee.” Until the Empire Stoic philosophers could be found who upheld that the soul endures only for the time for which the body is preserved.[103]