Chapter VIII: THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED. Rest in the tomb, 190—in the nether (5)

You will probably ask how men succeeded in reconciling this solar immortality with the doctrine which made the moon the abode of the dead. The Greeks, following the Orientals, had been able to make a lunar-solar calendar, and they also constructed an eschatology in which the two great heavenly bodies both played part. They were the two divinities whose help the priests promised to “those who were about to die.”[243] This eschatology is founded on the astrological idea that the moon presides over physical life, over the formation and decomposition of bodies, but that the sun is the author of intellectual life and the master of reason. The doctrine also includes the belief we have already explained elsewhere,[244] that when souls leave the earth, they are still surrounded by a subtle fluid which retains the appearance of the persons whom they formerly animated. The pagan theologians thus admitted that the souls which came down to earth assumed in the sphere of the moon and in the atmosphere these aerial bodies which were regarded as the seat of the vital principle. Inversely, when they rose again to heaven, the function of the moon was to dissolve and to receive these light envelopes, as on earth its damp rays provoked the corruption of the corpse. The soul, thus becoming pure reason (νοῦς), ascended to the sun, the source of all intelligence. According to others the formation of the soul’s integument was begun and its reabsorption was completed in the planetary spheres, and this is why the Neo-Platonist Jamblichus[245] placed the Hades of mythology between the sun and the moon. These theories are not the product of pure philosophical speculations, but have their roots in the old astral religion of the Semites. The mysteries of Mithras, the Chaldaic oracles, and above all Manicheism shared the belief in a lunar-solar immortality of which the source certainly goes back to the tenets of the “Chaldean” priests.

* * * * *

Solar immortality is a learned doctrine, the fruit of the astronomical theories which made the king-star the centre and the master of the universe. It was such as to find acceptance with theologians and philosophers and to be spread by the Oriental mysteries. But it never succeeded in eliminating or overshadowing the old popular idea that the souls of the dead dwell in the midst of the glittering constellations. A trace of the double conception is found in the Stoic school. For certain of the masters of this school the directing reason of the world, the (ἡγεμονικόν), has its principal seat in the sun, for others in the sphere of the fixed stars. In the same way the poets, Lucan addressing Nero, and Statius addressing Domitian, hesitatingly ask if these emperors will ride in the flaming chariot of Phoebus or if they will assume Jupiter’s sceptre in the highest heaven.[246] The Neo-Pythagoreans admitted that souls could rise to the Most High (εἰς τὸν Ὕψιστον), that is to say, to the supreme God who was enthroned at the summit of the world.[247] It was, moreover, very anciently held among the Greeks that Olympus was in the outer circle enveloping the world, and until the end of antiquity we find the Elysian Fields were transported to the zone of the constellations and in particular to the Milky Way. This is, for instance, the doctrine of Cicero as shown in the dream of Scipio.

So the old popular idea that the soul became a star, which in Greece was accepted by the ancient Pythagoreans, still subsisted. According to mythology this was the happy lot reserved for heroes. We have whole books which tell us how these heroes at the end of their career were transformed to brilliant stars in reward for their exploits. “Catasterism” draws a moral conclusion from ancient tales. Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Perseus and Andromeda and many others had deserved such metamorphosis. It did not therefore seem bold to assign to the eminent men of the present the same destiny as to the great figures of the past, and no one was shocked by the supposition that their divine spirits might be added to the number of the “visible gods.” This was, in particular, a lot worthy of the princes who had deserved apotheosis. At the death of Caesar a comet appeared. It was thought to be the dictator’s soul which had been received among the Immortals, and Ovid[248] does not hesitate to show us Venus descending, invisible, into the senate, snatching this soul from the pierced body and bearing it aloft to the sky. There Venus feels the soul become inflamed and sees it escape from her breast to fly beyond the moon and turn into a trailing comet. Hadrian, in his grief for the death of Antinous, let himself be persuaded that a star had just appeared which was the deified soul of his favourite.[249] But as in Greece “heroification” was finally awarded by the will of families to every one of their members whose loss they mourned, so “catasterism” was in the end accorded to deceased persons of very moderate deserts. “Nearly the whole heaven,” says Cicero, “is filled with mankind.”[250] In an inscription of Amorgos[251] a young man, carried off by the Fates at the age of twenty, thus addresses his mother: “Weep not; for of what use is weeping? Rather venerate me, for I am now a divine star which shows itself at sunset.” And at Miletus[252] a child of eight years old, whom Hermes has led to Olympus, contemplates the ether and shines in the midst of the stars, “rising every evening to the horn of the Goat. By the favour of the gods he protects the young boys who were his playfellows in the rude palaestrae.”

Epitaphs so precise in expression are exceptional. On the other hand, numerous epigraphic and literary texts declare that the soul of some dead person has risen to the stars to live there with the Immortals, but leave the position of this soul undetermined. It is stated to have flown towards the vast sky, to have been received by the ether, to be living at the summit of the world and following the revolutions of the celestial armies. But the place where the blessed thus come together, that one of the upper spheres in which their meeting takes place, is left uncertain. Their dwelling was known to be somewhere very high above us, but men did not willingly venture to fix its exact situation.

The heathen theologians wished however to bring order and precision into this astral eschatology. As they had combined the doctrines of lunar and solar immortality, so they attempted to bring both into agreement with stellar immortality. When Lucian in the beginning of his “Icaromenippus” shows us his hero passing over three thousand stadia from the earth to the moon, where he makes a first halt, rising thence five hundred parasangs to the sun, and then ascending from the sun to heaven, Jupiter’s citadel, through the space travelled in a full day by an eagle in rapid flight, he is giving us a humorous parody of the journey which some men ascribed to souls. This idea that the soul thus rises to Paradise by three stages was widely entertained in the East, and it was notably held by Mazdeism. A trace of this belief seems to linger in the passage of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians in which Saint Paul tells that he has been lifted “to the third heaven.”[253]

The Platonists sometimes adopted the same conception and combined it with psychological ideas, a development of those we recalled in connection with solar immortality (p. 103). It was held that when the soul came down to earth it first received an ethereal garment of almost immaterial purity; then, imagination being added to reason, a solar fluid surrounded it; then a lunar integument made it subject to the passions; and finally a carnal body was the cause of its ignorance of divine truths and of its blind foolishness. It successively lost with these wrappings the inclinations or faculties which were bound with them, when after death it went back again to the place of its origin.[254]

The conception of the triple ascension of souls rested fundamentally on a rudimentary astronomy, for it confused the five planets with the fixed stars, discriminating from both only the sun and the moon. But for long the system which divided the heavens into seven superimposed spheres, enveloped by an eighth sphere which was the limit of the universe, had imposed itself not only on the learned but also on the authors of pagan apocalypses. The eschatological doctrine which triumphed at the end of paganism is in agreement with this theory, generally admitted by the science of the period. This doctrine is certainly of Chaldeo-Persian origin, and was spread in the first century especially by the mysteries of Mithras.[255] Then, in the second century, the Pythagorean Numenius introduced it into philosophic speculation. Man’s soul was held to descend from the height of heaven to this sublunary world, passing through the planetary spheres, and thus at its birth it acquired the dispositions and the qualities peculiar to each of these stars. After death it went back to its celestial home by the same path. Then as it traversed the zones of the sky, it divested itself of the passions and faculties which it had acquired during its descent to earth, as it were of garments. To the moon it surrendered its vital and alimentary energy, to Mercury its cupidity, to Venus its amorous desires, to the sun its intellectual capacities, to Mars its warlike ardour, to Jupiter its ambitious dreams, to Saturn its slothful tendencies. It was naked, disencumbered of all sensibility, when it reached the eighth heaven, there to enjoy, as a sublime essence, in the eternal light where lived the gods, bliss without end.

In the mysteries of Mithras a ladder composed of seven different metals served as a symbol of this passage of souls through the spheres, astrology placing each of the planets in relation with one of these metals, lead with Saturn, gold with the sun, silver with the moon and so on.[256]

But in opposition to this pantheism which, while identifying God with the universe, placed the chief home of divine energy in the celestial spheres and particularly in the highest of them, the sectaries of Plato transported the supreme Power beyond the limits of the world and made of him a Being no longer immanent, but transcendent and distinct from all matter. This conception became more and more predominant in pagan theology as Stoicism lost influence in favour of Neo-Platonism. This God, “ultramundane and incorporeal, father and architect” of creation,[257] had his seat, it was thought, in the infinite light which extended beyond the starry spheres. Religion called him sometimes the Most High (Ὕψιστος), sometimes Jupiter, but gave him at the same time the epithets “Uppermost,” “Insuperable” (_summus_, _exsuperantissimus_).[258] It was this celestial Father whom the elect souls aspired to join, but only those who had attained to perfection succeeded in doing so, as we shall see in our last lecture. The others stayed, in accordance with their degree of purity, in a lower zone of the successive stages formed by the atmosphere, by the planetary circles, and by the heaven of the fixed stars, which were the “visible gods,” opposed to the spiritual world.[259]

* * * * *

This was the last conception of paganism and on the whole it was to impose itself on men for many centuries. Judaism had already made concessions to the astronomical theories of the “Chaldeans,” and had borrowed from them the idea of seven stories of heavens, an idea which we find developed in particular in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. It also belonged to Christianity almost from the beginning, and the gnostics gave it a large place in their speculations. But especially Origen, who borrowed it directly from the Greek philosophers, lent the authority of his name to the doctrines of astral eschatology. According to him, souls, after they have sojourned in Paradise, which he imagined as a remote place of earth where they learn terrestrial truths, rise to the zone of the air and there understand the nature of the beings who people this element. But if they are free from all material weight, they cross the atmosphere rapidly and reach “the dwellings of the heavens,” that is, the celestial spheres. There they grasp the nature of the stars and the causes of their movements. Finally, when they have made such progress that they have become pure intelligences, they are admitted to contemplate the reasonable essences face to face and see invisible things, enjoying their perfection. Although Origen was condemned by the Church, his ideas were not abolished. Since the Christian lore adopted the ancient conception of the world’s structure, as formulated by Ptolemy, it had necessarily to admit that souls traversed the planetary circles in order to reach that “supermundane light” in which they found perfect beatitude. Dante’s Paradise, with its choirs of angels and its classes of the blessed, distributed among the superimposed spheres of the heavens, is a magnificent testimony to the strength of the tradition which antiquity bequeathed to the Middle Ages. Before this tradition could be destroyed, Galileo and Copernicus had to ruin Ptolemy’s system and open up to the imagination the infinite spaces of a limitless universe.

IV

THE WINNING OF IMMORTALITY

A fundamental difference distinguishes the conception of immortality as it appears in the religion of the Roman Empire from our modern ideas. Immortality, as we conceive of it, follows on the very nature which we ascribe to the human soul. It is affirmed by some, denied by others, in accordance with the character which each one attributes to the principle of conscious thought, but whenever credence is given to it, it is generally supposed to be absolute, eternal, universal. For the ancients, on the other hand, immortality was no more than conditional: it might not be perpetual and it might not belong to all men. According to the Platonists the soul, an incorruptible essence, a principle of life and movement, survived necessarily;[260] according to the Epicureans, being composed of atoms, it was dissolved at the moment of death.[261] But between these extreme opinions of the philosophers, the religion of the people remained faithful to the old belief that the shade must be nourished with offerings and sacrifices, that if it lacked sustenance it was condemned to waste away miserably. This conception, like not a few others which were fading away in the West, was revived when the Orientals imposed on the Roman world their more primitive and sometimes very crude beliefs. The normal destiny of the soul was therefore to survive the body for a certain time, then in its turn to disappear. A second death (δεύτερος θάνατος) completed the work of the first which gave the corpse over to corruption. The spiritual essence which had abandoned the body was annihilated after it. Such was the inevitable necessity imposed on mankind. Immortality was a privilege of divinity. The man who was exempted from the common lot of his kind was therefore the equal of the gods; he had risen above his perishable condition to acquire the everlasting youth of the Olympians, the unlimited duration of the stars which travel the heavens, the eternity of the Supreme Being.

If he became a god after his death it was sometimes because he had been one ever since his birth. For men were not all born equal: if each of them possessed the _psyche_ which nourished and animated the body, yet all men did not equally receive the divine effluence (πνεῦμα) which gave reason. This reason, which distinguished man from the beasts, was akin to the fires of the stars; it established between man and heaven a community of nature (συγγένεια) which alone made it possible for him to acquire a knowledge of divinity,[262] the “gnosis” of God and of the world which He animated. This special grace also exempted him who obtained it from the passions and weaknesses to which the inclinations of the flesh exposed him. It made him pious, temperate and chaste: he was holy (_sanctus_).[263] It communicated to him a lucidity and power lacking to the common run of mortals. He penetrated the secrets of nature and commanded the elements; he received revelations and was capable of prophetic divination. Inversely, every exceptional quality was regarded as superhuman; every extraordinary act seemed a miracle. The most enlightened spoke merely of celestial inspiration. “_Nemo magnus vir sine quodam adflatu divino_,” said Cicero.[264] The many saw in these privileged beings earthly incarnations of all the Olympians. From the moment of their appearance on the earth these men were really gods; their soul kept its higher nature in all its purity; it would indubitably return after death to its place of origin. Such are the leading ideas which explain the belief in the immortality of the heroes.

Among those who escaped the common law of death because they were divine, first of all, were the kings. In all times kings have been looked upon as of superior essence to the rest of mankind, and the ancient East approximated them or made them equal to the heavenly powers. The Hellenistic realms, in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, raised the cult of the monarch to the rank of a state institution; and the Caesars inherited this homage, which was rendered to them by their subjects even in their lifetime, first in the East and then throughout the Empire. The powerful chief who delivered his state from the scourge of invasion and ensured it peace and welfare, accomplished a work which seemed to be beyond the ability of man, and he was adored as a present god (ἐπιφανὴς θεός, _praesens numen_), a saviour (σωτήρ). Sometimes the god incarnate in him was specified; and he was looked upon as a manifestation of Zeus, Apollo, or another. Very ancient but still active beliefs gave him the power to command nature as well as men. If the fields were fertile, if the flocks and herds had increased, these were benefits received from the godlike sovereign. No miracle was beyond his accomplishment. He was the providence of his people, having indeed the power of foreseeing and foretelling the future. According to Manilius,[265] it was to kings, whose lofty thoughts reached the heights of the sky, that nature first revealed her mysteries. The pagan theologians affirmed, indeed, that the souls of kings came from a higher place than those of other men, and that these august personages borrowed more from heaven than the common crowd of mortals.[266] And thus, death had no sooner carried them off from the earth than their souls once again rose to the stars, who welcomed them as their equals (_sideribus recepti_). It was thought that an eagle or the chariot of the sun bore them away.[267] It may seem strange that the senate should deliberate as to whether or not a deceased emperor deserved apotheosis, and should refuse or accord him official canonisation. But this act is in conformity with all the ideas we have described, since the monarch’s benefits and victories were the proof of his divine origin, and since, if he had committed crimes and caused misfortunes, he was thus shown to be in no respect a god.

In the remote ages of ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs were the first whom Osiris consented to identify with himself, or whom their father Ra bore away in the solar boat, but little by little the rites practised in order to ensure eternity to the sovereign were extended to the magnates surrounding him. Thus immortality was a kind of posthumous nobility bestowed on the great servants of the state, or usurped by them, long before the rest of the people obtained it. In Greece, also, kings were the first to be the objects of a cult as protecting heroes, but after them other classes of eminent men received the same title and the same adoration, in particular the founder of a city, its lawmaker who had given it a constitution and the warrior who had victoriously defended it. In the same way as fabulous demigods, Castor and Pollux or Hercules, had in heaven become brilliant stars as a reward for their earthly deeds, they also were public benefactors who by their works and their virtues had shown themselves worthy of the same “catasterism.” These ideas passed to Rome with the Stoic philosophy. After having given a list of those who had triumphed in the wars of the Republic, Cicero lays down as a fact that not one of them could have attained so far without the help of God;[268] and elsewhere he states more explicitly:[269] “To all who have saved, succoured or aggrandized their country, a fixed place in which they shall enjoy everlasting bliss is assigned in heaven, for it is from heaven that they who guide and guard cities have descended, thither to reascend.” The ex-consul Cicero claimed apotheosis for the great men of the state: this was the republican transformation of the doctrine of the divinity of kings.

Pagan theology was to give much wider extension to this doctrine. In a curious passage Hermes Trismegistus[270] explains that there are royal, that is to say divine, souls of different kinds, for there is a royalty of the spirit, a royalty of art, a royalty of science, and even a royalty of bodily strength. All exceptional men were godly, and it was not to be admitted that the sacred energy which animated them was extinguished with them.

Pious priests, like kings, were judged, or rather judged themselves, to be worthy of immortality. Who could more justly deserve a share in the felicity of the gods than those who on the earth had lived in their company and known their designs? He who had thus been in communication with the godhead and learnt his secrets was raised above the condition of humanity. This sacred knowledge, this gift of prophecy, this “gnosis,” which was inseparable from piety, transformed him who had obtained it, set him free even in life from the condemnation of fate; and after death he went to the immortals whose confidant he had been here below.

The philosophers and theologians who treated of the nature of the Divine Being shared the blessed lot of the priests and soothsayers who interpreted His will. Their doctrine came to them by inspiration from on high, or at least so they readily believed. Their intelligence, which was lit by a divine ray, penetrated the world’s mysteries and subjected it to their will. _Philosophus_ became a synonym for thaumaturge. Even in this life the superior mind of the philosophers allowed them to escape the necessities by which other men were oppressed, and this reason returned after death to the source of all intelligence.

But all knowledge came from God. It was He who gave light to the wise man, absorbed in austere research, and caused him to discover truth. It was He too who inspired the poet, who worked in him when enthusiasm carried him away; He likewise who gave to the artist the faculty of apprehending and expressing beauty, to the musician the power to recall by his chords the sublime harmony of the celestial spheres. All who gave themselves up to works of the intellect had a part in the godhead. They were purified by the high pursuit of spiritual joy and freed thereby from the passions of the body and the oppression of matter. For this reason the Muses are frequently represented on tombs; beautiful sarcophagi are decorated with the figures of the nine sisters. Thanks to these goddesses, mortals were delivered from earthly misery and led back towards the sacred light of the heavens.

Thus the spirits of all men distinguished above their fellows were one day to find themselves gathered together in the dwelling-place of the heroes. This conception made the future life a reward for eminent service rendered to the state or humanity. Its origin certainly went very far back: it is found among primitive peoples, in reference to the famous warriors of the tribes, and it never ceased to be accepted in ancient Greece. But towards the end of the Roman Republic it was more generally admitted than ever before. It was in harmony with the constitution of an aristocratic society in which it seemed that even posthumous honours should be reserved for the elect. Some modern thinkers and poets have shared the ancient feeling which inspired it. Carducci, who disliked the critics of Milan, thought that they might well perish wholly, but that the great spirits like Dante, whom he interpreted,—and doubtless also this interpreter himself,—were saved.[271] Matthew Arnold also in an admirable sonnet strongly defends the faith in a limited immortality. Let me recall to you the last verses:

“And will not then the immortal armies scorn
The world’s poor routed leavings? or will they
Who fail’d under the heat of this life’s day
Support the fervours of the heavenly morn?
No! The energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun,
And he who flagg’d not in earthly strife,
From strength to strength advancing—only he,
His soul well-knit and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.”

* * * * *

But this proud doctrine vowed to final destruction the mass of humble men, the multitude of the miserable, that is to say, those who, because they endured most in this world, must most aspire to seek in another the happiness which was here denied them and the retribution which should repair the injustice of their earthly lot. This doctrine of the immortality of the few made low station in life a misfortune which was prolonged beyond the grave. To the immense company of the wretched, who suffered without consolation, the religions of the East brought a “better hope,” the assurance that by certain secret rites the mystic, whatever his rank, whether senator or slave, might obtain salvation. The virtue of the liturgical ceremonies made him equal to the immortals (ἀπαθανατίζειν). This was the secret of the rapid spread of these exotic cults in the Latin world.

Every day the stars disappear beneath the horizon to reappear in the east on the morrow; every month a new moon succeeds the moon whose light has waned; every year the sun is reborn to new strength after his fires have died away; every winter vegetation withers to bloom again in the spring. The gods of nature—Attis, Osiris, Adonis—also rose again after they had been slain; the gods of the stars resumed their glowing ardour after darkness had overwhelmed them. Their essential quality was to be for ever “living” or “unconquered” (_invicti_). Their career was a perpetual triumph over death. The struggle implied was, under the influence of dualism, recognised to be an unceasing battle between two powers disputing possession of the world. Thus the mystic who had become god, who had part in the divine energy, also acquired the power to conquer death. Oriental religions looked upon earthly existence as a fight from which the just man issued victorious. Immortality was a triumph won over the powers of evil, of which the most implacable was death. The souls of the elect were crowned like athletes and soldiers; their wreath was the “crown of life,” often represented on funeral monuments.[272] The Greeks sometimes, and the Etruscans frequently, had personified death as a horrible monster who frightened those whom he approached. But the idea of making death into the adversary of mankind, from whose empire pious and strong souls might escape, spread only with the reception of the Oriental beliefs.

This mythological conception of salvation was combined in the mysteries with another, which was more scientific, that of fatalism, which was the chief dogma imposed by astrology on the Roman world. Death is for man the most inevitable and the hardest necessity. _Fatum_ often denotes the unalterable term of life; and this end, which diviners could foresee but could not delay, ought, according to the law of our kind, to overtake the soul as well as the body. But the Oriental cults never ceased to claim that the celestial powers who escaped the rule of Destiny, which extends only to the sublunary world, were also able to withdraw thence their faithful followers. As the emperor was not subject to Fate because he was god, so he who had been initiated and had acquired the same quality was, as a funeral inscription expressed it, “exempt from the lot of death.”[273] Those who had taken part in the occult ceremonies of the sect and were instructed in its esoteric doctrines were alone able to prolong their existence beyond the term fixed by the stars at their birth. By the virtue of these rites pious souls were withdrawn from this fate-ridden earth and were led, enfranchised from their servitude, to a divine world.

Thus those who had acceded to a religious initiation obtained eternal life, like the great men whose celestial origin had predestined them thereto. By what rites was wrought this “deification” (ἀποθέωσις), or rather this “immortalisation” (ἀπαθανατισμός)?

The soul, enclosed in the body, was by its very contact with matter exposed to pollution, “as pure and clear water poured into the bottom of a muddy well is troubled.”[274] The mysteries never conceived the soul as absolutely immaterial: it was a subtle and light essence, but one coarsened and weighed down by sin, which thus altered its divine nature and caused its decomposition and loss.[275] In order therefore that immortality might be ensured to the soul, it must be cleansed of its stains. The pagan religions employed a whole set of ablutions and purifications for restoring his first integrity to the mystic. He could wash in consecrated water in accordance with certain prescribed forms. This was in reality a magic rite: the cleanliness of the body wrought by sympathy a veritable disinfection of the inner spirit, the water clearing off its taints or expelling the evil demons which caused pollution. Or else the initiate sprinkled himself with or drank the blood either of a slaughtered victim or of the priests themselves. These rites arose from the belief that the fluid which flows in our veins is a vivifying principle, able to communicate new existence.[276] The man who had received baptism by blood in the _taurobolium_ was reborn for eternity (_in aeternum renatus_),[277] and when, foul and repulsive, he left the sacred ditch, he was adored as a god by those present. Elsewhere purifications by air and fire were found united to that by water, so that the different elements all had part in the purgation.[278] All these cathartic ceremonies had the effect of regenerating him who submitted to them, delivering him from the domination of the body, making him a pure spirit, and rendering him fit to live an immaculate and incorruptible life.

A similar belief in a transference to the soul of bodily effects partially explains why unctions were still employed in the liturgy of the mysteries. By rubbing himself with perfumed oil the wrestler in the palaestra and the bather after the perspiration of the sweating-room strengthened their limbs and rendered them supple. Ancient medical science deals at great length with the propitious action of numerous ointments, and by their means magic worked not only sudden cures but also prodigious metamorphoses. The aromatic unguents, which had marvellous antiseptic qualities, served to ensure the conservation of an embalmed corpse. Similarly, in the cult of the mysteries, unctions gave the soul an increase of spiritual force and made it capable of prolonging its existence for ever. As rubbing with unctuous substances was a practice of the thermae, so it was of the temples after the liturgical bath. In the anointing of kings and the ordination of priests they communicated to man a divine character and higher faculties, and this idea has been preserved down to modern times. But, above all, as ointments preserved mortal remains from putrefaction, so the consecrated oil and honey became a means by which the soul was rendered incorruptible and immortality was bestowed upon it.

The most efficacious means of communicating with the godhead which the mysteries offered was, however, that of participation in the ritual banquets. These banquets are found in various forms in all these religious communities. We have seen that among the votaries of Dionysos his feasts, in which the consecrated wine was drunk, gave a foretaste of the joys reserved for the initiate in the Elysian Fields.[279] Drunkenness, which frees from care, which awakens unsuspected forces in man, was looked upon as divine possession, as the indwelling of a god in the heart of the Bacchantes. Wine thus became _par excellence_ the drink of immortality, which flowed for the sacred guests in the meals of the secret conventicles. The heady liquid not only gave vigour of body and wisdom of mind, but also strength to fight the evil spirits and to triumph over death.

Sometimes honey, which was according to the ancients the food of the blessed, was offered to the neophyte and made him the equal of the Olympians. Elsewhere bread consecrated by appropriate formulae was held to produce the same effects.

But still another conception is discernible in the feasts of the mysteries and mingles with the first: it is thought that the god himself is eaten when some sacred animal is consumed. This idea goes back to the most primitive savagery, as is seen in the rite of “omophagy” in which certain votaries of Bacchus fiercely tore the raw flesh of a bull with their teeth and devoured it. Undoubtedly there was originally a belief that the strength of the sacrificed animal was thus acquired, like the superstition of the native African hunters who eat a slain lion’s heart in order to gain his courage. Similarly, if a victim be regarded as divine, to consume it is to participate in its divinity. “Those,” says Porphyry,[280] “who wish to receive into themselves the soul of prophetic animals absorb their principal vital organs, such as the hearts of crows, moles or hawks, and thus they become able to speak oracles, like a god.” Similarly, the Syrians ate the fish of Atargatis, a forbidden food which was, however, provided for the initiate after a sacrifice; and those who partook of these mystic repasts were not, like the rest of men, vowed to death, but were saved by the goddess.[281]

All means of attaining to godliness were not so crude as these. An important part of the mysteries was the instruction which gave the sacred lore, the “gnosis.” This “gnosis” included the whole of religious learning, that is to say, it was the knowledge of rites as well as of theological and moral truths. It taught above all the origin and the end of man, but it covered all the works of God, and, inasmuch as it explained creation, it formed a system of the world and a theory of nature. In fact the world, being wholly penetrated by a divine energy, was itself a part of God. The close alliance which exists between philosophy and the mysteries, and which is revealed to us especially in the Pythagorean and Hermetic literature,[282] is shown in the value thus given to science. This science, which in the East had always been sacerdotal, was not looked upon as a conquest of reason but as the revelation of a god. Illumined by this god, the initiate entered into communication with him, and consequently himself became divine and was withdrawn from the power of Fate. “They who possess the knowledge (γνῶσις) have deification as their happy end,” said Hermes Trismegistus.[283]

The highest degree of this “gnosis” is the sight of the godhead himself, or to use the Greek word, “epoptism.” By artifice or illusion apparitions were evoked and “epiphanies” produced.[284] A whole system of fastings and macerations placed the mystic in a fit state to attain to ecstasy. In the temple of Isis the faithful devotee merged himself “with inexpressible delight”[285] in the silent adoration of the sacred images, and when the rites had been accomplished and he felt himself transported beyond the confines of the world, he contemplated the gods of heaven and hell face to face. He who had had the vision of this ineffable beauty was himself transfigured for ever. His soul, filled with the divine splendour, must when its earthly captivity had ended live eternally in contemplation of the radiant beings who had admitted it to their company.[286]

* * * * *

The mysteries have thus a number of processes, some material and some spiritual, for producing the union with god which is the source of immortality. This union is first conceived as effected with the particular god honoured by a sect. As this god has died and has risen again, so the mystic dies to be reborn, and the liturgy even marks by its ceremonies the death of the former man and his return to a glorious life.

The fervent disciple to whom the god has united himself suffers a metamorphosis and takes on divine qualities. In magic this process is sometimes very grossly indicated: “Come into me, Hermes,” says a papyrus,[287] “as children do into women’s wombs, ... I know thee, Hermes, and thou knowest me; I am thou and thou art I.” The old Egyptian doctrine of the identification with Osiris, which goes back to the age of the Pharaohs, was never given up in the Alexandrian mysteries, and the whole doctrine of immortality rested on it. As on the earth the initiate who piously observed sacred precepts received in his bosom the godhead, so after death the faithful became a Serapis if a man, an Isis if a woman. This beatification seems to have been conceived sometimes as an absorption into the heart of the divinity, sometimes as a multiplication of the divinity, who left to the deceased his own personality.

It was above all from Egypt that apotheosis in the form of a particular divinity spread first in the Hellenistic and then in the Roman world. As the Pharaohs became Osiris on the earth and after their death, so among the Ptolemies such names as Isis-Arsinoë and others similar are found, and the emperors were adored even in their lifetime as epiphanies of Apollo, Zeus or Helios.[288] Their subjects could obtain a lot as happy as that of the sovereigns. The mystics of Dionysos were early made divine, in imitation of those of Serapis, and became as many emanations of Bacchus; and finally under the empire a cult was rendered to the dead under such titles as Mars, Hercules, Venus, Diana and other Olympians.

Conceptions less in conflict with reason were taught by the astral cults of the Semitic East. The celestial powers here were higher, more distant, less anthropomorphic, and it was not imagined that a man could assume their form. Here the action of the god on the mystic recalled that of the stars in nature: it was regarded as an effluence, fallen from the ether, which penetrated the initiate, as an energy which filled him, as a luminous ray which lit his mind. Virtue from on high entered into the neophyte and transformed him into a being like the divinities of heaven.[289] He was glorified (δοξασθείς) as a conqueror who had triumphed over demons and smitten down death; he was illuminated (φωτισθείς) and penetrated by a supernatural light which disclosed to him all truth; he was sanctified (ἁγιασθείς) and acquired unfailing virtue; he was exalted (ὑψοῦται), that is to say his soul rose in rapture to the stars. Glory, splendour, light, purity, knowledge: all these ideas were confounded until they became almost synonymous and together denoted the transfiguration which was undergone by the soul called to rise to ethereal regions, even on this earth and while it was still joined to the body.

But this divine action, which tended to become purely spiritual, was originally much more material. A very coarse substratum to the theological ideas is still apparent in the texts which mention them. Magic, which was addressed to the credulity of simple men, did not conceal it at all. Here the ascension of the spirit appeared as a journey to heaven. By appropriate formulae and processes the sorcerers pretended to secure immortality for their adepts, making them fly, body and soul, through the higher spheres to reach the dwelling of the gods.[290]

* * * * *

In short, the initiate of the mysteries believed that they found in them a warrant of immortality. By the virtue of the rites their souls were united to their god; thus they became themselves divine, and were ensured an everlasting life. Inevitably, every Oriental religion affirmed that it held the only sacred tradition leading surely to eternal felicity. Outside the sect there was no certain salvation. But philosophy always opposed these claims. Philosophy, too, thought itself able to lead through wisdom to happiness in this world and in the next, and there was rivalry between it and the positive cults, as soon as it took on a religious character and set up religious claims. The Neo-Pythagoreans who formed esoteric communities opposed their purifications and initiations to those of the mysteries. But the eschatological doctrine, of which Posidonius was, if not the author, at least the powerful promoter, and which was to be taken up again and transformed by the Neo-Platonists, exempted the wise man from any obligation to religious observances as ensuring his immortality. He was no longer in need of sacraments and sacrifices, but could by his own unaided force become a pure intelligence, win the complete mastery of himself by reason, and thereafter be certain of raising himself to the godhead.

At the most, certain thinkers granted a “propaedeutic” or preparatory value to ritual observances, and saw in them a means of predisposing the soul to ecstasy, but the mystic philosophers, of whom Plotinus represents the purest type, discarded for themselves all religious practices. Their proud doctrine places man alone face to face with God.[291] Or else, like Porphyry, they admit that sacred ceremonies can purify the spiritual or pneumatic soul but not its highest part, the intellectual soul; that they can raise it to the region of the stars but not bring it back to the Supreme Being. The late pagan philosophy asserts constantly and forcibly that the wise man’s reason is able by itself, or rather through a celestial grace, without the intervention of any liturgy, to ensure its own return to its divine source. “As,” says Porphyry, “he who is the priest of a particular god knows how to consecrate his statues, celebrate orgies, perform initiations and lustrations, so the true philosopher, who is the priest of the universal God, knows how to make His sacred images and to carry out His purifications and all the processes which will unite him to this God.”[292]

Philosophers were therefore the priests of the world. Their functions were parallel to those of the actual priests but higher. They tended more and more to form a sacerdotal order which was separated from the rest of human society by its customs and its way of life. Like the mysteries they taught that piety, temperance and continence were the indispensable conditions of obtaining true knowledge. This “gnosis” was no longer a traditional theology revealed in the shadow of the sanctuary, but a scientific truth perceived by a grace-illumined reason. The philosopher took no part in the ceremonies of a complicated ritual, but his prayer was the silent supplication of his intelligence seeking to understand creation. He did not become absorbed in the contemplation of idols but in the sight of the divine world and in particular of the starry heavens. The end which this lonely cult strove to attain was analogous to that sought by others in the conventicles of the initiate—a divine revelation which would give to the perfect wise man superhuman power, which would make him a prophet, sometimes a wonder-worker; and after death, already a god on earth, he went to live in the company of the gods on high.

The lifting of the reason to heaven, source of all intelligence, was thus the pledge of astral immortality, as the liturgical banquet was of the celestial feast. As physical drunkenness, being divine possession, was a prelude to the joy of the eternal repast, so spiritual ecstasy was the sign of future deification.[293]

The ancients found impassioned words to depict this communion of man with the starry heavens, and to express the divine love which transported the soul into radiant space.[294] In the splendour of night the spirit was intoxicated with the glow shed on it by the fires above. Like the possessed and the Corybantes in the delirium of their orgies, it abandoned itself to ecstasy, which set it free from its fleshly wrappings and lifted it up to the region of the everlasting stars. Borne on the wings of enthusiasm it sprang to the midst of this sacred chorus and followed its harmonious movements. Reason, illumined by the divine fires which surrounded it, understood the laws of nature and the secrets of destiny. It then partook of the life of the light-flashing beings which from the earth it saw glittering in the radiance of the ether; before the fated term of death it had part in their wisdom and received their revelations in a stream of light which dazzled even the eye of reason. This sublime rapture was an ephemeral foretaste of the endless felicity reserved for the sage when, after his death, rising to the celestial spheres, he penetrated all their mysteries.[295]

V

UNTIMELY DEATH

In the last lecture we endeavoured to show that in the ancient world immortality was at first conceived as being precarious and conditional, and that only the heroes, the exceptional men, who were in truth gods on earth, obtained apotheosis after their death. We afterwards saw that the mysteries extended the promise of eternal salvation to all the initiate, who by virtue of the rites were made equal to the gods, and finally that the philosophers contested the necessity of sacred ceremonies and affirmed that human reason by its own unaided power could win union with God.

We will now consider in more detail what lot was reserved for a special class of the dead, those whose life had been interrupted by an untimely end, and how in their case philosophy modified the old traditional beliefs.

If we turn over collections of ancient inscriptions we find, as when we go through our own cemeteries, a number of epitaphs in which the grief caused by the early death of a friend or relative is expressed. But in antiquity this sorrow was called forth not alone by regret for a loved being, too soon lost to sight, and by painful disappointment because of the irreparable ruin of the hopes to which his youth had given rise. Along with these human feelings, which are of all time and all societies, there were mingled in antiquity ideas which caused the loss of those who died before their time to seem more fearful and bitter.

Virgil’s celebrated lines, in which he describes the descent of Aeneas to Hades, will be remembered:[296]

“Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens,
Infantumque animae flentes in limine primo,
Quos dulcis vitae exsortes et ab ubere raptos
Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo.”

“Ever were heard, on the outermost threshold, voices, a great wailing, the weeping souls of infants bereft of sweet life and torn from the breast, whom the ill-omened day swept off and whelmed in bitter death.”

In an eschatological myth of Plutarch,[297] the traveller beyond the grave also sees a deep abyss, in which moan the plaintive voices of a multitude of children who had died at the moment of their birth and were unable to rise to heaven. It has been shown that the Latin poet and the Greek philosopher are here interpreters of an old Pythagorean belief, to which Plato alludes:[298] children who died young, like persons who met with violent deaths, the ἄωροι καὶ βιαιοθάνατοι, found no rest in the other life, but their souls wandered on the earth for the number of years for which their life would normally have lasted. The souls of the shipwrecked who perished at sea roamed the surface of the waters and sailors believed that they were incarnated in the seagulls.[299]

How did this belief in the miserable lot of innocent children arise? Its origin should probably be sought in that fear of death which haunts all primitive peoples, and it developed owing to the frequency in antiquity of infanticide by abandoning or “exposing” newly born infants. Remorse provoked terror. This conclusion is especially suggested because the fate of those who died prematurely was approximated to the lot of those who died violent deaths. Beings who had been prevented from completing the natural span of life were feared; their shades were conceived as being unquiet and in pain, because it was believed that they could return to disquiet and pain the living. The idea was entertained that a spirit brutally separated from the body came to hold it in horror and did not consent to inhabit the tomb until a reconciliation had been disobtained by expiatory ceremonies. Being grievously disincarnated, the soul became harmful. Souls, said the ancients, whom a cruel and untimely end has violently or unjustly torn from their bodies, themselves tend to be violent and unjust in order that they may avenge the wrong they have suffered.[300] It is no rare thing to find evidence in the inscriptions of a suspicion that a person cut off in the flower of his years has been the victim of some foul play; the curse of Heaven is called down on the head of his assumed murderer. The Sun, who discovers hidden crimes, is often invoked in Roman epitaphs against this unknown offender:[301] “Towards the Most High god, who watches over everything, and Helios and Nemesis, Arsinoë, dead before her time, lifts up her hands; if any one prepared poison for her or rejoices in her end, pursue him,” says an inscription of Alexandria. But the victim was himself believed to be capable of vengeance. It seemed incredible that one still full of strength and life should be entirely blotted out and that the energy which had animated him should also have disappeared suddenly, and the reprisals of this mysterious power were apprehended. This spirit pursued above all the murderer and, more generally, those who had given it cause for complaint. It showed itself to them in the form of terrifying monsters which tormented them. “As soon as I shall have expired, doomed to death by you,” says the child in Horace whom the witches sacrificed, “I will haunt your nights like a Fury, I will tear your faces with my hooked nails, as the Manes gods can, and weighing on your unquiet hearts I will take sleep from your affrighted eyes.”[302] Suetonius[303] relates that after the death of Agrippina, Nero was, on his own confession, often troubled by the vision of her spectre and attempted to calm her spirit by a sacrifice and an evocation which he caused his magicians to make. The same historian gravely recounts that the house in which Caligula was murdered was every night haunted by dreadful apparitions until the time when it was destroyed by fire.[304] A scholiast defines the _lemures_ as “the wandering shades of men who died before their normal time and are hence redoubtable.”[305] Even today popular belief in many countries attributes a maleficent power to the spirits of those who have died a violent death.

These disquieting superstitions acquired new force through the teachings of astrology, which by incorporating them in its system gave them a doctrinal foundation. Astrology spread the belief, which was and is common to all ancient and modern peoples of the East, that each soul has a predetermined number of years to spend on earth. The _mathematici_ multiplied calculations and methods in order to be able to predict the instant of death predetermined by the horoscope. “This is the great work of astrology, held by its adepts to be its most difficult and by its enemies to be its most dangerous and blameworthy operation.”[306] But by an internal contradiction this pseudo-science admitted that the natural end could be hastened by the intervention of a murderous star (ἀναιρέτης): Saturn and Mars can in certain positions call forth sudden death by accident, killing, execution. A fragment attributed to Aristotle asserts that a Syrian mage predicted to Socrates that he would meet such a fate.[307] Sometimes the maleficent planets tear a nursing child from its mother’s breast before a single revolution of the sun has been accomplished. All astrological treatises devote chapters to these “unfed” children (ἄτροφοι) and also to the _biothanati_ whose life has been interrupted by misfortunes of any kind. Petosiris was even concerned to discover—Ptolemy declared such preoccupation to be ridiculous[308]—what the stars reserved until the end of their life for those who had gone through only a portion of it. The texts which have been preserved—and often expurgated—by the Byzantines give no more than a bare indication of astral influences on the lot of men. In antiquity other more religious and more mystical works doubtless existed in which the inauspicious action of the murderous star, still affecting after death the souls torn from their mortal wrappings, was shown.