Chapter VIII: THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED. Rest in the tomb, 190—in the nether (4)

The Greek doctrines were also introduced among the Etruscans and combined with the beliefs of this people as to an underworld in which the Manes of the dead were threatened by horrible demons and protected by beneficent genii. This Greek influence and its alliance with the native traditions appear in Etruria in a great number of funeral monuments on which we find represented many figures which, according to mythology, peopled the kingdom of Pluto. One of the most significant is the fine sarcophagus, discovered a few years ago at Torre San Severo near Bolsena, which seems to date from the third century B. C.[178] The two long sides hold corresponding reliefs, the one showing Achilles’ sacrifice of the Trojan prisoners on the grave of Patroclus, the other the sacrifice of Polyxena, last of Priam’s daughters, on the tomb of Achilles. These scenes, borrowed from the Greek epic poetry, are placed between two Etruscan demons, winged figures which bear serpents and are male on one side and female on the other. The small sides are decorated by two scenes from the Odyssey, the myth of Circe changing the companions of Ulysses into animals—perhaps an allusion to metempsychosis—and Tiresias’ evocation of the shades of the dead, the Elysian Fields being curiously indicated. This instance—and many others might be cited—shows how closely the Hellenic legends of Hades had been intermingled with Etruscan demonology.

This Greek conception of the infernal regions, which literature and art were to popularise and perpetuate even after credence had ceased to be given to it, remains familiar to us. Taken altogether and in the large, it is that of a kingdom imagined as an imitation of the cities of our world, in which, however, there reigns such a rigorous justice as is on our poor earth no more than a dream of minds morally disposed. This underground state, of which the frontier is defended by an unbridged river, the Styx, is governed by powerful rulers, Pluto and Proserpina. It has its judges, Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus; its executioners, the Erinyes or Furies; and its prison, Tartarus, surrounded by high walls. This jail, in which the guilty, laden with chains, suffer the torments enacted in Greece by the penal laws or others more atrocious,[179] is distinctly contrasted with the abode of the good citizens who freely enjoy in delightful gardens all the pleasures which make the joy of human beings.

Books treating of the “Descent into Hades,” of which a considerable number were in circulation, and the poets’ descriptions embroidered various patterns around this central design. There was a whole mythological and theological efflorescence which peopled with more and more numerous figures the fantastic kingdom occupying the great cavern of the earth. Infinite variations were imagined on a traditional theme, of which, however, even certain details were preserved from age to age with a surprising fidelity. Lucian in his satirical description of Charon and his boat reproduces types fixed in the sixth century before our era, for, as has been observed, his picture is in exact agreement with the recently discovered fragment of a black-figured vase.[180]

Although in our sources infernal topography is occasionally somewhat confused, certain essential features, which we will here merely indicate, can be recognised in it. We will return to them one after the other, and speak of them in greater detail, in later lectures. When the souls, or rather the shades, descend to the depths of the earth, they reach first a provisional abode where they await a decision as to their lot, an intermediate region through which all of them pass but in which some are kept for a considerable time.[181] They then cross the Styx, and a road which is also common to all of them leads them to the court which determines their lot.[182] This judging of the dead is foreign to Homeric poetry: the idea of it was perhaps borrowed by Greece from Egypt, but from ancient Orphism onwards it was an essential element of infernal eschatology. Infallible judges, from whom no fault is hid, divide into two companies the multitude of the souls appearing before them. The guilty are constrained to take the road to the left which leads to dark Tartarus, crossing its surrounding river of fire, the Pyriphlegethon. There those who have committed inexpiable crimes are condemned to eternal chastisement.[183] But the road to the right leads the pious souls to the Elysian Fields where, among flowered meadows and wrapped in soft light, they obtain the reward of their virtues, whether, having attained to perfection, they are able to dwell for ever with the heroes, or whether, being less pure, they are obliged to return later to the earth in order to reincarnate themselves in new bodies after they have drunk the water of Lethe and lost the memory of their previous existence.

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The philosophical criticism of the Greeks had early attacked these traditional beliefs, but such negative attitude became more definite among the thinkers of the surpassingly rationalistic period which came after Aristotle.[184] The Peripatetics, who admitted at most the survival of reason, rejected in consequence all the myths dealing with the descent of the shades into the kingdom of Pluto. The Epicureans were even more radical, for, as we have seen (p. 7), they condemned the soul to dissolution at the moment of death, thus destroying the very foundation of the belief in Hades. Their campaign against stories in which they saw only the lugubrious inventions of priests and poets, was one of the capital points of their polemics against popular religion, and they flattered themselves that by destroying faith in the pains of Tartarus they freed mankind from vain terrors which obsessed its minds and poisoned its joys. The Stoics, we know (p. 13), taught that the soul is a burning breath of the same nature as the ether and as the stars which shine in the sky. As to whether this ardent fluid was lost after death in the universal fire, or kept its individuality until the final conflagration of the world, the doctrine of the Porch varied. But one thing was certain: the fiery nature of the soul must prevent it from going down into the underground and impel it to rise to higher spheres. If it were weighed down by its contact with the body and laden with matter, it might float for some time in the dense air surrounding the earth but could never descend into its depths.[185] The impossibility of admitting literally the truth of the stories as to the infernal realm was thus proved.

The same psychological doctrine as to the soul’s kinship with the fire of the heavenly bodies was admitted in the Alexandrian age by the sect which paid one and the same veneration to Pythagoras and to Plato and was thus more attached than any other to belief in immortality. It gave in, to some extent, to contemporary rationalism and was brought to modify its ideas as to life beyond the grave. Ancient Pythagorism, the heir of Orphism, made much of the sufferings reserved for sinners in the infernal abysses. A book attributed to Periktione still shows the daughter who has despised her parents as condemned to suffer, beneath the earth and in the company of the impious, the eternal evil inflicted by “Dike and the gods of down below.”[186] But in the first century before our era the pseudo-Timaeus of Locri declares that such tales are fictions—salutary, it is true—imagined by Homer in order to divert from evil those to whom truth alone was not a sufficient guide.[187] The only penalty which can overtake the sinning soul is, according to these Neo-Pythagoreans, metempsychosis, which forces it to reincarnate itself in a fleshly prison.[188]

This doctrine of transmigration claims to transport hell to earth and to explain, as moral allegories, all the fables which the poets had invented.[189] The _Inferi_ are nothing else than the dwellings of our globe, which is the lowest of the nine circles of the world. The true Hades is the wicked man’s life in which he is tortured by his vices. The rivers of hell—Cocytus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon and Styx—are anger, remorse, sadness and hate, which cause man to suffer. The Furies are the passions, scourging him with whips and burning him with torches; and similarly an ingenious interpretation is given to each of the pains suffered by Tantalus, Sisyphus, the Danaïdes and the others.[190]

This exegesis led finally to an absolute denial of the existence of hell, but such radical scepticism was in too flagrant contradiction to the old beliefs to be willingly accepted by the minds which remained attached to them. Hence arose attempts to bring these beliefs into harmony with the psychology generally admitted.

A first theory, to which we will have to return when speaking of the nature of the surviving souls,[191] seems to have been invented in Alexandria and to have been inspired by Egyptian religion.[192] The authors who first allude to it, one Greek and one Roman, are contemporaries who wrote about the year 200 B. C., the critic Aristarchus and the poet Ennius, but the transmission of the doctrine can be traced through literary traditions down to the end of antiquity. It divides the human composite not into two but into three parts—the body, the soul and the shade. The body is destroyed beneath the earth; the soul, which is a particle of the divine ether, rises after death towards its place of origin; but a form (εἴδωλον) of subtle matter detaches itself from the corpse, and it is this semblance (_simulacrum_) or shade (_umbra_) which goes down to the infernal regions. The existence of these regions could thus be maintained, but they were no longer held to receive the celestial principle which gave intelligence.

Others allowed that it was impossible that the earth should contain subterranean caverns large enough to hold Tartarus, the Elysian Fields and the infinite multitude of the dead. But they explained that the word subterranean (ὑπόγειος) had been misunderstood, that it denoted not the bowels of the earth but the lower half of the terrestrial globe, the southern hemisphere, which was unknown to the ancients, or even the whole celestial hemisphere, curved below this globe which hung motionless in the centre of the universe.[193] This hemisphere is always invisible,—so the ancients might say,—which is exactly the sense of the word Hades (= ἀειδής). The Axiochos, an apocryphal work attributed to Plato, was first to reveal this doctrine, claiming that it had been communicated to Socrates by the Mage Gobryes. It was in reality borrowed by the Greeks of the Alexandrian age from the astral theology of the Semitic peoples. According to this theology the world is divided into two halves by the line of the horizon; the upper hemisphere is the domain of the living and the higher gods, the lower that of the dead and the infernal gods. Descent to it and ascent from it are by way of two gates, situated west and east, where the sun appears and disappears. The marshes of the Acheron, the river Styx, and Charon and his boat are constellations which the souls cross when they have passed through the “gate of Hades.”

The ancient Greeks had placed the Islands of the Blessed, whither the heroes were borne by the favour of the gods, somewhere far away in the ocean. These islands were now supposed to lie in the Antipodes, in the unknown half of the earth. All the poets’ stories of the fragrant and melodious gardens of this abode of delights were applied to these marvellous countries which no sailor had ever reached.[194] On the other hand, Tartarus was placed at the bottom of the celestial abysses, near the lowest point of the lower hemisphere, that is, diametrically opposite to Olympus, the dwelling of the gods, who were throned on the summit of the starry vault. It was into this sombre gulf that the wicked were flung; there yawned the bottomless pit in which the demons of the dusky world inflicted eternal torture on the guilty.

This theory claimed to bring the ancient Hellenic beliefs into agreement with the cosmography of astronomers, but this cosmography itself undermined the foundations of the system, in so far as it refuted the hypothesis of a physical opposition between the two halves of the universe. It was observed that a single sky revolved about our earth; that the same atmosphere, composed of the same elements, enveloped it entirely; that every part of it was, in turn, equally in the light and in the shade. Therefore physical phenomena must be identical over the whole surface of our globe; the climate of the Antipodes must be like that of our lands; if the Antipodes were peopled, it was by races like those of men and the beasts. Their inhabitants therefore were not the dead but living beings. The marvels of the Fortunate Isles did not exist and there was no reason for regarding the lower rather than the upper part of the heavens as the vast reservoir of souls.

The doctrine which placed the subterranean kingdom of Pluto and Proserpina on the other side of the earth and in the other celestial hemisphere, made a poor resistance to this criticism of the Alexandrian geographers. If it did not entirely disappear, if its transmission can be followed down to the end of antiquity and even to the Middle Ages, it never was so widespread nor so active as another doctrine claiming to reconcile the beliefs of the past with accepted science.

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This bold doctrine transported the whole subterranean world above the earth’s surface. We shall see, in the next lecture, on celestial immortality (p. 96), that the Pythagoreans conceived the idea of placing the Elysian Fields in the moon, and that the Fortunate Isles were similarly explained by them as being the sun and the moon bathed by the fluid of the ether. The _Inferi_ were thus the lower space, that is, the space extending between the sphere of the moon, which was the limit of the world of the gods, and our globe, which was the centre of the cosmic system. In the _Inferi_ the souls which had to suffer the chastisement of their faults were kept prisoners; they could not win to the stars but wandered plaintively on the earth’s surface and especially about their own tombs, and then rose through the atmosphere in which, little by little, they were purified by the elements. Allegorical interpretations found a place for the infernal rivers in this new topography of the Beyond: Acheron was explained as being the air, the Pyriphlegethon as the zone of hail and fire, and the meanderings of the Styx became the circles of the universe. We shall have occasion to return to the passage of the soul through this aerial purgatory and its ascension to the Elysian Fields of the sky.[195]

This cosmological interpretation of the tales referring to Hades had a more powerful influence than the moral allegory which did too much violence to tradition in claiming to make our earthly life the mythological hell. The doctrine that the _Inferi_ were in the atmosphere was adopted by Stoicism at least from the time of Posidonius and was therefore widely believed from the end of the Roman Republic onwards. Even the mysteries, which first kept alive the belief in a subterranean kingdom of the infernal gods, did not escape the influence of these new ideas and were brought to adapt their esoteric teaching to them.[196]

The transformation of ancestral beliefs by this theology cannot today be better apprehended than from the sixth book of the Aeneid. Virgil, when he relates the descent of Aeneas into the abode of the shades, is inspired by the _Nekyia_ of the Odyssey and other poetic tales. He remains apparently faithful to mythological and literary tradition, retaining the conventional decoration, the unvarying geography of the infernal kingdom; but he does not admit the literal truth of these beliefs of an earlier time; he is aware of the figurative sense given by the philosophers to the old fables of Hades. At the risk of seeming to contradict himself, he recalls this learned eschatology—the purification, the ascension and the transmigration of souls—in connection with what might have been no more than the story of a marvellous journey to the country of the dead. The unity of the conception and the composition is the less seriously compromised because it was believed that the ancient poets themselves had wished to indicate these truths in their verses under the veil of allegory. The descent to the nether world has therefore a much loftier bearing in Virgil than a mere embellishment. It is the expression of a conviction or at least a hope, not only a brilliant fiction based on an old poetic theme.

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However, the symbolical interpretations of the pagan theologians who respected tradition and the purely negative criticism of the sceptics led finally to a common result, to the destruction, namely, of the ancient beliefs, even when it was claimed that they were being saved. Whether the souls were held captive in the other hemisphere or in the atmosphere, or whether they were condemned to reincarnation in a body, Hades was transformed either to the lower sky, the air or the earth, and the early conception of a subterranean world, whither the dead who had been laid in the grave descended, was abolished. There are abundant texts to prove that from the end of the Roman Republic this belief had lost its grip on many minds. Cicero[197] claims that there was not an old woman left foolish enough to fear the deep dwellings of Orcus and the gloomy regions peopled by the livid dead. “No one is childish enough,” Seneca repeats,[198] “to fear Cerberus and the phantoms which appear in the form of skeletons.” “That there are Manes,” says Juvenal,[199] “a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman armed with a pole, and black frogs in the gulfs of the Styx, that so many thousands of men can cross the dark water in a single boat,” these are things in which everyone had ceased to believe except very young children. Pliny[200] brings forward a paradoxical argument, that, had there been infernal regions, the zeal of the miners who had dug deep galleries in the ground would have pierced their boundaries; and even the devout Plutarch, when he comes to speak of the punishments reserved by mythology for the wicked, sees in them only nurses’ tales to frighten babies.[201]

The multiplicity of this testimony and its precision allow no doubt that not only the educated classes but a large portion of the population rejected the fables as to the nether world. These fables were in any case a foreign importation in the Latin world. Moralists, while they ceased to believe in them for themselves, sometimes pretended to retain them in order to inspire the people with salutary fear, but Tartarus had lost much of its terror for those it should have kept from ill-doing.

Is this to say that these ideas no longer found credence anywhere? A faith which has long dominated minds disappears hardly and leaves persistent traces behind it in customs and feeling. Thus we find that, more or less everywhere, the practice was perpetuated of placing in the mouth of the corpse a piece of money which served, it was said, to pay Charon for the crossing of the Styx.[202] Excavators have found these coins in many Roman tombs. But they are doubtless evidence of no more than a traditional rite which men performed without attaching a definite meaning to it.

Moreover, the metrical epitaphs continue to speak of the Elysian Fields and of Tartarus, of Styx and of Acheron; they complain of the cruelty of Pluto who bears away mortals before their time, or of the Parcae or Fates who cut the thread of their days; they mention the avenging Furies, the sufferings of Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion. But these are no more than ready-made formulas of poetical language, literary reminiscences or traditional metaphors. Yet sometimes this infernal mythology is curiously developed. Thus a long inscription on a Roman tomb describes a young man descending from the ether in order to announce to those near and dear to him that he has become a celestial hero and has not to go to Pluto’s kingdom. “I shall not wend mournfully to the floods of Tartarus; I shall not cross the waters of Acheron as a shade, nor shall I propel the dusky boat with my oar; I shall not fear Charon with his face of terror, nor shall old Minos pass sentence on me; I shall not wander in the abode of gloom nor be held prisoner on the bank of the fatal waters.”[203] This epitaph dates from the century of Augustus, but did its author, any more than the writers of that time, believe in the reality of the beings with which he peoples Hades? He decorates his language with a literary ornament which Christian poetry was later to inherit. This poetry did not hesitate to employ these pagan commonplaces, which had passed from hand to hand until they were so worn out that their first meaning had been effaced. The Renaissance and the age of modern classicism were again to use and to abuse them.

The sculpture of tombs continued in the same way often to reproduce the ancient models. Sarcophagi sometimes show us the dead man led by Hermes, guide of souls, and coming into the presence of Pluto and Proserpina.[204] We also see on funeral monuments Charon in his boat, the typical sufferings of Tantalus, whose eager lips cannot reach the flowing water, Ixion turning on his wheel, Sisyphus labouring under the weight of his rock and, above all, the Danaïdes eternally pouring water into a perforated vase.[205] But it is probable that these traditional figures were repeated without any very strong faith being held as to the real existence of the personages which they represented; indeed it was proposed only to show them as symbols which had to be interpreted allegorically.

If we had no other evidence than funeral poetry and art of the persistence of the beliefs of the past, the testimony would have to be accepted very cautiously. But other more convincing proofs assure us that popular faith clung, with characteristic tenacity, to the ancient conception of the _Inferi_. Without believing precisely in the strange tortures inflicted on the wicked heroes of mythology, the man in the street was still vaguely persuaded that the souls went down from the tomb to some deep places where they received rewards and punishments. Suetonius[206] relates that when the death of Tiberius became known in Rome the people “prayed Mother Earth and the Manes gods to give the dead man no other dwelling than that of the impious.” The Oriental slaves brought the same convictions from their countries like many other old beliefs which had faded away in the West. The romancer Heliodorus, a Syrian priest, shows us in his novel his heroine invoking “the demons who on the earth and under the earth watch over and punish unrighteous men,”[207] her prayer being that, after the iniquitous death which threatened her, they might receive her. The same conviction appears in the funeral inscriptions of the East. Thus an epitaph of Elaiousa in Cilicia[208] adjures “the heavenly god, the Sun, the Moon and the subterranean gods who receive us.” The common idea was that a dead man can be excluded from the dwelling of the shades and condemned to wander miserably on the earth. In the same way the thought is often expressed in the magic papyri of Egypt that the deceased were plunged into the dark gulfs underground and there became demons whom the wizard called up, when he summoned them by his incantations. Even in Greece, where rationalistic criticism had penetrated far deeper among the people, Plutarch, while he reports that few people were still really afraid of Cerberus, the lot of the Danaïdes and other bugbears of Hades, adds, however, that for fear of such pains recourse was had to purifications and initiations.[209]

This belief in the existence of Hades, maintained in the lower strata of the population in spite of the inroads made on it and of its partial supersession by other doctrines, was to acquire new strength from the rebirth of Platonism, which looked upon the writings of the “divine” master as inspired. In several passages Plato spoke with so much precision of the dwelling of the souls in the bowels of the earth that even the subtlety of his later interpreters found difficulty in giving another meaning to his text, although the attempt was made by some of them. Therefore effort was directed to defending the doctrine of the infallible sage by refuting the objections raised against it by his adversaries. The Stoics had held, as we have seen (p. 77), that the soul, being a “fiery breath,” had a natural tendency to rise in the air and could not sink into the ground. But Porphyry[210] objected that in lowering itself from heaven towards our world it had become impregnate with the atmospheric damp and thus had grown heavier, and that if during its passage in the body it became laden with the clay of a sensual life, if it wrapped itself in a material cloak, its density came to be such that it was dragged down into the dusky abysses of the earth. “It is true,” says Proclus,[211] “that the soul by force of its nature aspires to rise to the place which is its natural abode, but when passions have invaded it they weigh it down and the savage instincts which develop in it attract it to the place to which they properly belong, that is, the earth.” According to Proclus,[212] who claims to interpret Plato faithfully, the soul after death is judged somewhere between the sky and our globe; if it be declared worthy it enjoys a life of blessedness in the celestial spheres; if, on the other hand, it deserve penalties, it is sent to a place beneath the ground. Elsewhere, defining his thought,[213] he affirms that the various parts of Hades and the subterranean courts and the rivers of whose existence Homer and Plato appraise us, should not be regarded as vain imaginations or fabulous marvels. As the souls which go to heaven are distributed among several and different resting-places, so we must believe that for souls still in need of chastisement and purification underground dwellings, whither penetrate numerous effluvia of the super-terrestrial elements, are thrown open. It is these effluvia that are called “rivers” or “currents.” Here too various classes of demons hold empire, some of them avengers, some chastisers, some purifiers and some executioners. Into this abode, the farthest from that of the gods, the sun’s rays do not penetrate. It is filled with all the disorder of matter. Therein is the prison, guarded by demons who ensure justice, of the guilty souls hidden beneath the earth.

It is not by their faithfulness to Plato’s doctrine, which in truth they alter, but by the mere logic of their system that the last Greek philosophers are led to admit what their predecessors rejected. Sometimes, more or less unconsciously, they were under a religious influence. The Platonist Celsus believed in the eternal pains of hell but invoked only the authority of “mystagogues and theologians” in support of this article of faith.[214] The opposition between the obscure retreats of the Manes and the bright dwellings of Olympus is old, and naturally became prominent as the belief spread, first that heroes, and afterwards that all virtuous spirits, rose to the eternal spaces.[215] But the religion which formulated the strictly consequent doctrine of an absolute antithesis between the luminous kingdom where the divinities and the beneficent genii were seated, and the dark domain of the Spirit of Evil and his perverse demons, was Persian Mazdeism. The resplendent heights where the gods had their thrones were to be after death the abode of those who had served piously. On the other hand, those who had contributed to increase evil on the earth, were to be flung into the murky abysses in which Ahriman reigned. Iranian dualism imposed this eschatological conception on a section of Alexandrian Judaism; it was admitted by many Pythagoreans, then by the gnostic sects and later by Manicheism. But above all it was widely propagated under the Roman Empire by the mysteries of Mithras. We find then put forth the doctrine that the demons are divided into two armies, incessantly at war with each other, one good and one evil. The good army is subject to celestial powers and comes down to earth to give succour and support to the faithful. The evil army obeys an anti-god (ἀντίθεος) and issues from the bowels of the earth in order to scatter misery, sin and death among men.[216] The souls of the dead become like one or the other of these two opposing classes of demons. When they are virtuous and pure they rise to the luminous ether where dwell the divine spirits. If, on the contrary, they are vicious and defiled they go down into the underground depths where the Prince of Darkness commands; like the maleficent demons who people this hell they suffer and cause to suffer.

It was at this compromise that paganism stopped when it reached the term of its evolution. Oriental dualism imposed on it its final formula. It no longer admitted, like the ancients, that all the dead must go down from the grave into immense hollows dug in the bowels of the earth, and it no longer made the Elysian Fields and Tartarus two contiguous domains of the kingdom of Pluto. Nor did it transport them both, side by side, as the pagan theologians of the beginning of our era would have done, to the atmosphere and the starry spheres. It separated them radically, cutting the abode of the souls into two halves, of which it placed one in the luminous sky and the other in subterranean darkness. This was also the conception which, after some hesitation, became generally accepted by the Church, and which for long centuries was to remain the common faith of all Christendom.

III

CELESTIAL IMMORTALITY

The astral religion which became predominant in the Roman Empire may be considered as an intermediary, a connecting link, between the old anthropomorphic paganism and the Christian faith. Instead of moral—or, if you prefer, immoral—beings, stronger than man but subject to all the passions of man, it taught the adoration of the heavenly powers who act on nature, and so led mankind to the worship of the Power who is beyond the heavens. This influence of the astral cults of the East can be clearly perceived in the evolution of the ideas as to future life, and this above all constitutes the historical importance of the subject which I venture to treat in this lecture.

Beliefs which are spread among many peoples of the world relate the immortality of the soul to the heavenly bodies. It was for long naïvely imagined that a new sun was created every evening, or at least every winter, and a new moon born each month, and traces of this primitive idea survived in the religion of antiquity and persist even in our modern speech. But when it was realised that the same celestial luminaries reappeared and resumed their ardour after their fires had died and they had ceased to shine, that the stars which were lit at sunset were those which had been extinguished at dawn, their lot was related to that of man, destined like them to be reborn, after death, to a new life. Various savage tribes thus associate the heavenly bodies, and especially the moon, with the resurrection of the dead. The wan circle which sheds its vague light in the darkness of night causes phantoms to appear to haunt vigils and dreams, and is therefore the power which presides over life beyond the tomb. Among the Greeks of the most ancient period Hecate was at one and the same time the goddess of the moon, the summoner of ghosts and the queen of the infernal realm. In the East astrological ideas mingled with this mythology. It was taught that the moon’s cold and damp rays corrupted the flesh of the dead and thus detached from it the soul which finally abandoned the corpse. The Syrians, at the critical times in which the moonbeams exercised a more active influence on this separation, offered sacrifices on tombs, and the threefold commemoration of the dead on the third, the seventh and the fortieth day in a part of the Eastern Church had its earliest origin in these offerings of the sidereal cults.[217]

There was also a very widely held belief, which has survived in European folk-lore, that each man has his star in the sky. This star is dazzling if his lot be brilliant, pale if his state of life be humble. It is lit at his birth and falls when he dies. The fall of a shooting star therefore denotes a person’s death. This popular idea existed in antiquity. Pliny the Naturalist reports it, although he denies its truth,[218] and it was again combated in the fifth century by Eusebius of Alexandria. “Were there then only two stars in the time of Adam and Eve,” asks the bishop, “and only eight after the Flood when Noah and seven other persons alone were saved in the Ark?”[219] The formulas of epitaphs and the very usages of language show how current was the belief that each man was, as we still say, born under a good or an evil star. _Astrosus_ was the Latin equivalent of our _unlucky_. This doctrine of a rudimentary astrology was incorporated in the general system of learned genethlialogy. Although this latter attributed a predominant influence to the planets and the signs of the zodiac, it also taught, in accordance with popular opinion, that each of the most brilliant stars (λαμπροὶ ἀστέρες) ensures riches, power and glory to the newly born child, if it be in a favourable position at his birth.[220]

But side by side with this general conception of a relation between the life of the stars and that of men, a much more precise idea is met with from the first. The soul was, as we shall see,[221] often conceived by the ancients as a bird preparing for flight. Where would it alight when it had passed through the air except on the heavenly bodies which were still imagined as quite near the earth? The paintings on an Egyptian tomb of a late period, found at Athribis, show us the soul of the dead man fluttering with those others like him in the midst of the constellations.[222]

The belief was widely spread that the spirits of the dead went to inhabit the moon. In the East this faith retained a very crude form which certainly went back to a most primitive paganism. We find it in India as well as in Manicheism, which arose in Mesopotamia in the third century, but which admitted many ancient traditions into its doctrine. “All who leave the earth,” says an Upanishad, “go to the moon, which is swollen by their breath during the first half of the month.” The Manicheans similarly affirmed that when the moon was in the crescent its circumference was swelled by souls, conceived as luminous, which it drew up from the earth, and that when it was waning it transferred these souls to the sun. Using an idea much earlier than his time,[223] Mani also stated that the boat of the moon, which plied in the sky, received a load of souls which every month it transferred to the sun’s larger vessel. The association established in Syro-Punic religions between the moon and the idea of immortality is marked by the abundance in Africa of funeral monuments bearing the symbol of the crescent, either alone or associated with the circle of the sun and the star of Venus.[224] These astral symbols are identical with those already used by the Babylonians. But it is not only among the Semitic peoples that we find the crescent on tombs, either alone or accompanied by other figures: it is of frequent occurrence, notably in Celtic countries. Possibly the Druids placed in the moon the other world where men pursued an existence uninterrupted by death.

As for the sun, the idea most commonly accepted was that the dead accompanied him on his course and went down with him in the west to an underground world. There, during the night, this enfeebled heavenly body recovered his strength, and there the dead too were revived. The power of this faith in ancient Egypt is known: the souls embarked on the boat of Ra, and with him, after they had accomplished the circle of the heavens, went down through a crevice of the earth or beyond the ocean. This was the first origin of the rôle of “psychopomp” which we shall find attributed to the solar god.

Finally many peoples believed that souls, after plying through air and space, inhabited the sky in the form of brilliant stars. The multitude of the stars scintillating in the firmament was that of the innumerable spirits who had left the world. They pressed in a dense crowd, especially in the long luminous track of the Milky Way, which was, _par excellence_, the dwelling of the dead. Other traditions saw in this band across the sky the highroad which the dead travelled to gain the summit of the world.[225] A vestige of this ingenuous conception is retained in the very name, “Milky Way.”

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These ideas as to the lot of the soul after death, which were spread among a number of different peoples, may also have existed in primitive Greece but we have no proof that they were current there. As the Hellenes granted to the stars only a restricted and secondary place in their anthropomorphic religion, so in early times they had no belief, or scarcely any, in the ascent of souls to the starry sky. This doctrine was entirely strange even to the earliest Ionian thinkers. Recent research has made it more and more probable that these conceptions were introduced into Greece from the East, where astrolatry was predominant.[226] Pausanias[227] claimed to know that the Chaldeans and the Magi of India were the first to assert that the human soul is immortal, and that they convinced the Hellenes, and in particular Plato, of this doctrine. Such an affirmation, in this form, is certainly false, but it contains an element of truth. The tenet of astral immortality is ancient in the East: it probably took form in Babylon about the sixth century, when Persian Mazdeism, which believed that the righteous were lifted up to the luminous dwelling of the gods, came into contact with the sidereal religion of the Chaldeans. It was propagated in Greece especially by the Pythagoreans, for whom the soul had a celestial origin, being, as we have seen (p. 24), a fiery principle, a particle of the ether which lights the divine fires of heaven. This spark, which descended at birth in the body, which it heated and animated, reascended after death to the upper regions, whence it had come forth. Aristophanes in his _Peace_[228] greets the apparition of a new star, that of the Pythagorean poet, Ion of Chios, who had recently died, asking ironically if it be not true that “when someone dies he becomes like the stars in the air.” This is the most ancient precisely dated mention of stellar immortality (421 B. C.), and it cannot be doubted that the doctrine was that of Ion himself. Plato received it from the Pythagoreans and makes very clear allusions to it.

The fundamental idea on which it rests, the idea that the psychic essence is the same as the fire of the heavenly bodies, is at the root of all oriental astrology, which claims to explain by astral influence the formation of character. This idea of a relationship (συγγένεια) between the soul and the stars does not in Greece belong to the old basic popular beliefs. It was introduced thither by the philosophers, who, as we shall see, drew from it very important theological conclusions. According to them, it was owing to this identity of nature that the soul was capable of knowing the gods and of aspiring to join them.[229] This doctrine took on new power when astrology succeeded in imposing itself on the Alexandrian world, and it is significant that we find it clearly formulated by an adept of this pseudo-science, the famous Hipparchus, in the second century before our era. “Hipparchus,” says Pliny,[230] “will never receive all the praise he deserves, since no one has better established the relation between man and the stars, or shown more clearly that our souls are particles of the heavenly fire.” Pythagorism and Stoicism, and after them the Syrian and Persian mysteries, were to popularise this conception throughout the ancient world. In certain regions, as in Gaul, it undoubtedly found pre-existing native beliefs with which it combined, and in religion and among theologians it assumed multiple forms. We shall try to distinguish its chief aspects, dealing successively with lunar, solar and stellar immortality.

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The Pythagoreans, perhaps transforming a belief of the Greek people as to Selene’s rôle, but more probably inspired by Oriental speculations, held that souls, when they had been purified by air, went to dwell in the moon. To the question, “What are the Isles of the Blessed?” the orthodox doctrine of the sect answered, “The sun and the moon.”[231] For them the heavenly bodies were moving islands washed by a luminous fluid, which their swift motion caused to sound about them. These thinkers, who debated all the scientific hypotheses, accepted the plurality of worlds. The heavenly bodies were other earths surrounded by air and rolling in the boundless ether. The moon in particular was designated as the “ethereal” or “Olympic earth,” and in the moon lay the Elysian Fields, the meadows of Hades, in which the shades of the heroes rested. Pythagoras himself, promoted to the rank of an immortal spirit, rejoiced there among the sages. Persephone, assimilated to Artemis, reigned over this kingdom. Did not the moon, like her, transfer itself alternately above and below the earth? The planets were this huntress’s hounds which, ever in chase, were scouring the fields of space around her in every direction.

The authors of Pythagorean apocalypses peopled the mountains and valleys of the moon with fantastic animals, stronger than ours, and with strange plants, more vigorous than those of our globe. The inhabitants of the moon, fed on the vapours of the atmosphere, were not liable to human needs. In his “True Histories,” Lucian[232] parodied these mad imaginings with comic exaggeration and ludicrous obscenity.

A curious fragment of Castor of Rhodes gives an instance of an unexpected application of these beliefs.[233] This historian, who lived at the end of the Republic, had the idea of interpreting Roman customs by the Pythagorean doctrines which Nigidius Figulus and his circle of theosophists had brought back into fashion (p. 22). In particular he explained by this method the ivory _lunulae_ (crescents) which decorated the senators’ shoes. They recalled, he says, that noble souls inhabited the moon after death and trod on its soil.

The eclectic Stoics of the same period, and especially Posidonius of Apamea, gave this lunar eschatology a place in their system, and undertook to justify it by the physical doctrines of the Porch. According to them, souls, which are a burning breath, rose through the air towards the fires of the sky, in virtue of their lightness.[234] When they reached the upper zone, they found in the ether about the moon surroundings like their own essence and remained there in equilibrium. Conceived as material and as circular in form, they were, like the heavenly bodies, nourished by the exhalations which arose from the soil and the waters. These innumerable globes of a fire endowed with intelligence formed an animated chorus about the divine luminary of night. The Elysian Fields did not, in this theory, lie in the moon itself, which was no longer an earth inhabited by fantastic beings, but in the pure air _about_ the moon whither penetrated only souls no less pure. This idea was to last until the end of paganism, although other eschatological doctrines then met with more favour. The emperor Julian in the beginning of his satire on the Caesars describes them as invited to a banquet held, as was proper, on a lower level than the feast of the gods, who met at the summit of heaven. “It seemed fitting,” he says,[235] “that the emperors should dine in the upper air just below the moon. The lightness of the bodies with which they had been invested and also the revolutions of the moon sustained them.”

The zone of the moon, the lowest of the seven planetary spheres, in which the serene ether touches our own foggy atmosphere, is the frontier between the world of the gods and that of men, the border between immortality and the generated, the line of demarcation between the life of blessedness and the death which our earthly existence really is. Aristotle had already noted the distinction between the two halves of the universe, the one active and the other passive, the heavens formed of unalterable ether and subject neither to progress nor to corruption, and our sublunary world composed of four elements, our world in which all is born, is transformed and dies. Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-Stoics liked, in insisting on this opposition, to show the contrast between the splendour and the darkness, the serenity and the trouble, the constancy and the mutability, the truth and the error, the happiness and the misery, the peace and the war, which reigned respectively in the dwelling of the gods and in the abode of men, whither souls descending to earth penetrated so soon as they had crossed the circle of the moon. In imitation of Plato[236] this sublunary world is shown as a dark cave in which the captive souls, plunged in obscurity, aspire to see again the light from on high.

The funeral monuments of the imperial period have retained numerous traces of these beliefs. As we have already said (p. 94), the crescent often appears on them, either alone or together with other symbols. Other tombstones are still more expressive. A Roman relief, preserved in Copenhagen, is particularly characteristic: the bust of a little girl appears on it placed on a large crescent and surrounded by seven stars.[237] On this an inscription recently found at Didyma might serve as a commentary: “Standing before this tomb, look at young Chorô, virgin daughter of Diognetos. Hades has placed her in the seventh circle,”[238] that is, in the circle of the moon, which is the lowest of the seven planets.

We see that philosophy and physics had united to transform the old belief in the ascent of souls to the moon. The intervention of theories claiming to explain the systems of the world is still more marked in the other doctrines of astral immortality. It was this blending which made them strong enough to impose themselves on the minds of men. By their agreement with contemporary science, they satisfied reason and faith at the same time. But as all this theology really rested on a wrong cosmography, its lot was bound up with that of a false conception of the universe, and the two fell together.

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The first of these doctrines appears to us the most reasonable because it is founded on the primordial rôle of the sun in our world. It was born in the East when the Chaldean priests deprived the moon of the pre-eminence originally ascribed to it, and recognised the unequalled importance of the sun in the cosmic system.[239] These astronomical theologians deduced from this recognition a theory which includes something like an anticipation of universal gravitation, and which was to prove seductive both by its greatness and by its logic. It spread through the ancient world in the second and first centuries B. C. There are some signs that the Pythagoreans, who were much addicted to the study of the heavenly bodies, were the first to adopt it, and with the propagation of Oriental astrology it obtained a wide diffusion in the West.

The sun, placed in the fourth rank or the middle of the planetary spheres,[240] like a king surrounded by his guards, was believed alternately to attract and repel the other celestial bodies by the force of his heat, and to regulate their harmonious movements as the coryphaeus directed the evolutions of a chorus. But since the stars were looked upon as the authors of all the physical and moral phenomena of the earth, he who determined the complicated play of their revolutions was the arbiter of destinies, the master of all nature. Placed at the centre of the great cosmic organism, he animated it to its utmost limits, and was often called the “heart of the world” whither its heat radiated.

But this well-ordered universe could not be directed by a blind force, and therefore the sun was an “intelligent light” (φῶς νοερόν). The pagan theologians looked upon him as the directive reason of the world (_mens mundi et temperatio_). The Pythagoreans saw in him Apollo Musagetes, the leader of the chorus of the Muses, who were placed in the nine circles of the world and whose accord produced the harmony of the spheres. Thus he became the creator of individual reason and director of the human microcosm. The author of generation, he presided over the birth of souls, while bodies developed under the influence of the moon. The radiant sun constantly sent down sparkles from his flaming circle to the beings he animated. The vital principle which nourished men’s material envelope and caused its growth was lunar, but the sun produced reason.

Inversely, when death had dissolved the elements which formed the human composite, when the soul had left the carnal prison which enclosed it, the sun once more drew it to himself. As his ardent heat caused vapours and clouds to rise from the earth and the seas, so he brought back to himself the invisible essence which animated the body. He exercised on the earth both a physical and a psychical attraction. Human reason reascended to its original source and returned to its divine home. The rays of the god were the vehicles of souls when they rose aloft to the higher regions.[241] He was the anagogue (ἀναγωγεύς) who withdrew spirits from matter which soiled them.

Just as he sent the planets away from him and brought them back by a series of emissions and absorptions, so he caused his burning effluvia to descend to the beings whom he called to life, and so he gathered them after their death that they might rise to him once more. Thus a cycle of migrations caused souls to circulate between the sky and the earth, as the stars alternately drew away from and returned to the radiant focus, heart and spirit of the Great All, which called forth and directed their eternal revolutions. It is easy to understand how this coherent and, it may be said, magnificent theology, founded on the discoveries of ancient astronomy at its zenith, imposed on Roman paganism the cult of the invincible Sun, the master of all nature, the creator and saviour of man.

A mass of literary evidence and a number of figured monuments prove how powerful became, under the Roman Empire, the belief that the sun was the god of the dead. Old mythological traditions combined with Chaldean theology and were propagated with the Eastern religions. It was imagined that the deceased, and in particular the emperors, were borne to heaven on the chariot of Helios, or that the eagle, the king of the birds and the servant of the sovereign sun, carried off their souls to bear them to his master. Elsewhere it was the griffin of Apollo or the solar phoenix who was the bearer of the dead or the symbol of immortality. A funeral altar of Rome even bears the characteristic inscription, “_Sol me rapuit_,” “the Sun has seized me up.”[242]