Chapter VIII: THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED. Rest in the tomb, 190—in the nether (6)

Pythagorism, which was closely connected with astrology, took possession of these ideas and adapted them to its speculations. According to this philosophy one and the same harmony presided over all physical phenomena and was, like music, subject to laws of number. These laws therefore were at work during pregnancy, and a complicated arithmetic was employed to show by a multiplication of days that a child might be born after seven or nine months with power to live, but not after eight, for such was the strange doctrine of the sect. Thus gestation became a melody in which abortion was a false note.

Nature was said to be like an artist who sometimes breaks an instrument of which he overstretches the chords, and sometimes leaves them too slack and can produce no tune. Now, these harmonic laws necessarily determined not only the formation but also the end of man: “There is a fixed relation of determined numbers which unites souls to bodies,” says a philosopher, “and while it subsists, the body continues to be animate, but so soon as it fails, the hidden energy which maintained this union is dissolved, and this is what we call destiny and the fatal time of life.”[309] When the term fixed by nature is reached, the soul departs without effort from the body in which it can no longer exercise its office. But when the soul is violently ejected from the body and the link connecting them is broken by an external force, it is troubled and is afflicted by an ill which will cause it pain in the Beyond.

These ideas had sunk deep into the popular mind. The distinction between an end in conformity with nature and one unexpectedly provoked by extraneous intervention is often expressed in literature as well as in inscriptions. Thus the epitaph of a young woman of twenty-eight, who was believed to have been the victim of witchcraft, states that “her spirit was torn from her by violence rather than returned to nature,”[310] which had lent it to her; the Manes or the celestial gods will be the avengers of this crime. Still more frequently an opposition is found between an early death and _Fatum_. The hour of death is determined at the moment of birth:

“Nascentes morimur; finisque ab origine pendet.”[311]

“At the moment we are born, we die; and our end is fixed from our beginning.” He who reaches this term fixed for his life ends “on his day” (_suo die_); otherwise he dies “before his day” (_ante diem_).[312] The vulgar belief was that the intervention of a human or divine will could oppose the fated course of things and abridge the normal duration of existence. Often the expression occurs of a belief that a demon or, what is more remarkable, an evil god has carried off innocent children or young men whose life has thus been shortened.[313] But pagan theology undertook the task of re-establishing the order of nature thus disturbed by fortuitous accidents and by individual and unregulated interferences. The breaking of the laws of the universe was only apparent: a soul might by mischance or by a malevolent act be suddenly severed from its body, but, remaining obedient to Fate, it had thereafter to linger on earth until its appointed time was accomplished.

Its lot was supposed to be analogous to that of the unfortunate who had been deprived of burial (ἄταφοι, _insepulti_) of whom we spoke in our first lecture.[314] It circled about the corpse, which it could not abandon, or fluttered here and there near the place of burial or on the spot where the body which it had occupied had been assailed. Excluded from the abode of the shades these wandering souls flitted near the earth or on the surface of the waters, miserable and plaintive. The fear of never being able to penetrate into the kingdom of blessed shades seems to have inspired the following prayer, which occurs in a metrical epitaph of Capri:[315]

“You who dwell in the country of Styx, beneficent demons, receive me too into Hades, me the unfortunate who was not borne away in accordance with the judgment of the Fates, but by a hasty and violent death provoked by unjust anger.”

These brutally disincarnated souls became like the swift and harmful spirits with which the air was filled: like them they belonged to the train of Hecate, the goddess of enchantment, and like them were subject to the power of magicians. At Lesbos, Gello, a young virgin carried off before her time, became a phantom which killed children and caused premature deaths.[316] The leaden tablets, which were slipped into tombs in order to injure an enemy, and the magic papyri of Egypt bear a large number of incantations in which these mischievous demons are invoked. In the same way a series of conjurations, dating from the third century and found in the island of Cyprus, appeal to the spirits of the dead thrown in the common ditch, “who have met their death by violence, or before their time, or who have been deprived of burial.”[317] In general the sacrifice of newly born children, and the use of their vital organs and bones, was, and not without reason, a most frequent charge against sorcerers. Formulas preserved on papyrus recommend as powerful means to work a charm “a baby’s heart, the blood of a dead maiden, and the carrion of a dog.”[318] Witches were believed to steal children in order to use the entrails in their occult operations, a ritualistic murder analogous to that attributed by popular belief, in some countries, to the Jews. Cicero, Horace in an epode, Petronius in his romance,[319] and other authors bear witness to the extent to which this opinion was entertained. The epitaph of a young slave of Livia, wife of Drusus, relates his misfortune. Before he was four years old he was cut off by the cruel hand, the “black hand” of a witch, who practised her noxious art everywhere. “Guard well your children, ye parents,” adds the epitaph.[320]

Likewise the murder of adults and the use made of objects which had belonged to executed or murdered persons is frequently mentioned. The wonder-workers believed that by practising with the bodies of this class of the dead, or with objects they had used, they became masters of their wandering souls and made them serve their designs. The nails of a crucified criminal, the bloodsoaked linen of a gladiator, were efficacious amulets.[321] Faith is still kept nowadays in the rope which has hanged a man.[322] The books which circulated under the name of Hostanes the Persian, Nectabis the Egyptian and other illustrious wizards dealt with evocations of ἄωροι and βιαιοθάνατοι.[323]

Thus a logical series of beliefs was pushed to its extreme consequence. At the moment of birth Fate fixed for each man the length of his career; if this were interrupted, the soul had to complete it in suffering, near the earth, and became a demon which lent its aid to diviners and sorcerers. This doctrine, supported by astrology and Oriental magic, imposed itself on many minds. Plato, who had found it among the Pythagoreans, alludes to it, and Posidonius seems to have dealt with it more at length in his treatise “On Divination” (περὶ μαντικῆς),[324] although we cannot tell in how far he supported it. But it encountered the objections of other Greek philosophers. The reproach made to this theory was that it left out of account morality and merited retribution, and brought together, as subject to the same misfortune, criminals condemned to capital punishment and children whose age had kept them from all sin. Feeling and reason at the same time protested against the cruel doctrine which vowed indifferently the innocent and the guilty to long torture. When accident or illness caused the death of a beloved son, could his parents make up their mind to believe that he would suffer undeserved chastisement? A distinction had to be made between categories of persons, and to this task the pagan theologians applied themselves. Let us follow them in their undertaking.

* * * * *

The ἄωροι are those who die “out of season,” that is to say, in the wide sense of the word, those whose existence ends abnormally, but more particularly those who die young, who die prematurely. They include the ἀνώνυμοι, those who have received no name, who have not, that is, reached the ninth or tenth day of life, the ἄτροφοι, _non nutriti_, or babes who are still being fed at the breast or, according to the astrologers, are not yet a year old, and the ἄγαμοι, the _innupti_, who have died before the age of marriage and have therefore left no posterity to render them funeral rites.

None of these children and adolescents deserved, in the opinion of the sages, any chastisement. The Pythagoreans placed the age of reason, at which man is capable of choosing between good and evil and may be made responsible for his faults, as late as sixteen, that is, the age of puberty. Until that age the “naked” soul, without virtue as without vice, was exempt from all merit and demerit which would later attach to it. We know the unhappy lot to which, according to these philosophers, they were doomed. But other theologians considered that these souls, which had not been weighted by a long contact with matter, should fly more easily to celestial heights. Unsullied by earthly pollution, their purity allowed them to rise without difficulty to a better life in a happier abiding-place.[325]

It is hard to determine to what degree these moral ideas had penetrated the popular mind. The reaction against a superstitious belief often led to pure negation. Those who held that death put an end to all sensibility, were content to affirm that the child they wept had gone down into everlasting night, and that nothing was left of him but dust and ashes. Certain epitaphs hope that, if his Manes still have some feeling, his bones may rest quietly in the tomb. But mother’s love was not to be satisfied with this negative assurance or to resign itself to anxious doubting. The people kept an unreasoning fear of the evils which awaited the ἄωροι, and of those which might be expected from them. Some also believed that an ancestral fault—such as was, according to the Orphic doctrine, the murder of Zagreus, by the Titans—made all humanity guilty from birth, and that this hereditary sin had to be effaced by purifications.[326] Religion offered a remedy for the ill to which, to speak with Lucretius, it had itself lent persuasion. The custom of initiating children to the mysteries which was, at least at Eleusis, originally connected with the family or gentile cult, became a means of preserving them from the fatal lot which threatened them and of ensuring their happiness in the other life. Thus _pueri_ and _puellae_ are found admitted at the most tender age among the adepts of the secret cults, both Greek and Oriental, perhaps even consecrated from birth to the godhead. They are imagined as partaking in the Beyond of the joys which these cults promised to those whose salvation they ensured. A child who has taken part in a ceremony of Bacchus lives endowed with eternal youth in the Elysian Fields in the midst of Satyrs.[327] Others continue the games proper to their years in another life, or if they have reached the age of first love they still sport with young Eros. Above all, however, the influence of the astral cults, added to that of philosophy, brought about an admission that innocent creatures ascended to the starry heavens. An epitaph of Thasos[328] speaks of a virgin, flower-bearer (ἀνθοφόρος) probably of Demeter and Kora, who was carried off at the age of thirteen by the inexorable Fates, but who, “living among the stars, by the will of the immortals, has taken her place in the sacred abode of the blessed.” At Amorgos, a child of eight was, we are assured, led by Hermes to Olympus, shone in the ether, and would henceforth protect the young wrestlers who emulated him in the palaestra. Even the precise spot in which he twinkled was fixed, the horn of the constellation of the Goat—an appropriate place for this little fighter.[329] Curiously, an epitaph of Africa, which repeats Virgil’s very expression (p. 129), states, in contradiction to the poet, that a baby, “cut off on the threshold of life,” has not gone to the Manes but to the stars of heaven,[330] and a relief of Copenhagen shows the bust of a little girl within a large crescent surrounded by seven stars, thus indicating that she has risen towards the moon, the abode of blessed souls.[331]

Examples of these premature apotheoses might be multiplied. I shall merely show, by a characteristic case, how it was possible for old popular beliefs to be combined with the new astral doctrine. The ancients attributed to the rustic nymphs the strange powers which the Greek peasant today recognises in beings which he still designates as the Nereids.[332] Sometimes these fantastical goddesses possess themselves of the spirit of men and change them into seers or maniacs νυμφόληπτοι; sometimes their fancy is caught by handsome youths whom they carry off and oblige to live with them. But above all they love pretty children and steal them from their parents, not to harm them but in order that they may take part in their own divine pastimes. Doubtless it was at first to mountain caverns, near limpid springs, in the depths of tufted woods, that they bore him whom they made their little playfellow. Such were the archaic beliefs of the country folk. But the mysteries of Bacchus taught that an innocent child, thus rapt from the earth, mingled in the train of the Naiads in the flowery meadows of the Elysian Fields;[333] and when Paradise was transferred to the sky it was in the “immortal dwelling-place of the ether” that the nymphs, we are told, placed a little girl whose charm had seduced them.[334]

Transported thus to heaven, these loved beings were transformed by the tenderness of their relatives into protectors of the family in which their memory survived, or of the friends who shared regret for them. Whether they were called “heroes” in Greek, or as elsewhere “gods,”[335] they were always conceived as guardian powers who acknowledged by benefits the worship rendered them. Thus in the middle of the second century the _familia_ of a proconsul of Asia, C. Julius Quadratus, honoured a child of eight years as a hero, at the prayer of his father and mother;[336] and at Smyrna the parents of a dearly loved child of four, raised to this baby as their tutelary god, a tomb on which an epitaph described in detail all his illnesses.[337]

These sentimental illusions are eternal. Nothing is more frequently seen on tombstones in our own Catholic cemeteries than such invocations as “Dear angel in heaven, pray for us,” or even a figure of a winged baby flying away among winged cherubs. This faith is perhaps touching, but its orthodoxy is doubtful. For the doctors of the Church, except Origen, have, I think, never adopted the doctrine of Philo the Jew that human souls can be transformed into angelic spirits. But in the oldest Christian epitaphs the conviction is already expressed that, since children are without sin, they will be transported by angels to the dwelling of the saints and there intercede for their parents. “Thou hast been received, my daughter, among the pious souls, because thy life was pure from all fault, for thy youth ever sought only innocent play,”[338] says a metrical epitaph, once under the portico of St. Peter’s. And another and older epitaph is as follows, “Eusebius, a child without sin because of his age, admitted to the abode of the saints, rests there in peace.”[339] Still others end with the words “Pray for us,” “_Pete pro nobis_.”

* * * * *

Thus little by little in antiquity the conviction gained strength and became predominant that, as Menander said with another meaning, whom the gods love die young.[340] As to individuals whose days were cut short by a violent blow, they were not uniformly in the same case. The theorists here distinguished among different categories of the _biothanati_.[341] The classification seems to have originated with the astrologists who claimed to enumerate, in accordance with the position of Mars and Saturn, all the kinds of death reserved for victims of these murderous planets, and to foretell whether these unfortunates were to be drowned, burnt, poisoned, hanged, beheaded, crucified, impaled, crushed to death, thrown to the beasts, or given over to yet more atrocious tortures. But the moralists here also made a point of separating the innocent from the guilty. Only the guilty were to suffer after death and only their souls were to become demons. For, side by side with those who had deserved capital punishment for their crimes, or who administered death to themselves, were others cut off by a fatal accident, perhaps even killed while performing a sacred duty.

Such was the case of soldiers slain in battle. Logic ordered the theologians to place them among the _biothanati_, and so they are, for instance, in Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid.[342] But death on the field of honour could not be a source of infinite ills for them, and it was generally admitted that, on the contrary, their courage opened for them the gates of heaven.

“Virtus recludens immeritis mori
Caelum,”

as Horace says.[343] The Greek theory of the divinity of the heroes here comes to temper the severity of an unreasonable and dangerous doctrine. According to Josephus,[344] Titus, when haranguing his soldiers, promised immortality to such as fell bravely, and condemned the others to destruction. “Who does not know,” he asked, “that valiant souls, delivered from the flesh by the sword in battle, will inhabit the purest of ethereal elements, and, fixed in the midst of the stars, will make themselves manifest to their descendants as good genii and benevolent heroes? On the other hand, souls which are extinguished when their body is sick, vanish, even if they are free from all stain and defilement, into subterranean darkness and are buried in deep oblivion.” In the military monarchies of the Hellenistic East, as in the Roman Empire, eternal life was certainly promised to those who had perished arms in hand, faithful to their military duty. We know that the same belief was transmitted to Islam: a Mussulman who dies in battle “in the way of Allah” is a martyr (_shahîd_) to whom the joys of Paradise are assured. The Jews, who had been reluctant to admit such ideas before, from the time of the Maccabees onwards associated with warriors those who sacrificed themselves in order to be faithful to their persecuted religion, and to these especially they promised a glorious immortality. Faith in this celestial reward was later to cause the Christians, who won the martyr’s crown, to face all sufferings.

* * * * *

The treatment which the gods reserved for another class of _biothanati_ was more uncertain. In the Greek cities, as in Rome, moral reproof and posthumous penalties were anciently attached to suicide. The old pontifical law refused ritualistic burial to persons who had hanged themselves; and instead of funeral sacrifices it prescribed for these dead merely the hanging up of small images (_oscilla_) consecrated to their Manes,[345]—probably a magical, “sympathetic” rite, which was intended to purify their wandering souls by air, as other souls were purified by water and fire. The horrible appearance of men who died by strangulation had given rise to the belief that the breath of life had vainly sought to issue from their tightly closed throats.[346] A rich inhabitant of Sarsina in Umbria granted land for a graveyard to his fellow citizens, but excluded from the benefit of his gift those who had hired themselves as gladiators, had died by the rope by their own hand, or had followed an infamous calling.[347] This association shows how loathsome this kind of death was. Funeral colleges founded under the Empire introduced into their rules a clause stipulating that if anybody had for any motive whatsoever put himself to death, he should lose his right to burial.[348] This provision seems to have been inspired less by the fear that fraud would be practised on this society of mutual insurance against supreme abandonment, than by the conviction that funeral honours cannot deflect the curse which weighs on the suicide and renders his company undesirable for other dead.

But there was against popular opinion and religion, which attached an idea of infamy to self-murder, a philosophical reaction which, among the Stoics, led to an entirely contrary moral judgment. The powerful sect of the Porch caused the doctrine to prevail that suicide was in certain cases commendable. It saw in this end the supreme guarantee of the wise man’s freedom, and praised those who by voluntary death had withdrawn from an intolerable life. Cato of Utica, who killed himself lest he should survive liberty, was held to be the wise man’s ideal, and as worthy of apotheosis as Hercules. He himself, who is shown to us by the historians as reading and rereading Plato’s _Phaedo_ before he pierced himself with his sword,[349] certainly hoped for the immortality of heroic souls. Here, as on other points, the Neo-Pythagoreans, and the Neo-Platonists after them, brought the minds of men back to the old religious beliefs. Plotinus, yielding to the opinion which still prevailed in his time, still authorises suicide in certain cases, but we know that his exhortations dissuaded his pupil Porphyry from putting an end to his days, when he was seized with a disgust for life. This latter philosopher afterwards resolutely opposed the Stoic doctrine. Although the soul, said the Pythagoreans and Platonists, is enclosed in the body as in a prison, in order to suffer chastisement, it is forbidden by God to escape therefrom by its own act. If it do so escape, it incurs from the masters of its fate infinitely harder penalties. It must await the hour willed by these masters, and then it can rejoice in the deliverance which it obtains at the term of old age. If it itself break the link which joins it to the body, far from ridding itself of servitude, it remains chained to the corpse, for necessarily it is subject to passion at the moment of death and thus contracts impure desires. The only liberation worthy of the wise man is that of the soul which still dwells in the body but succeeds in freeing itself from all fleshly leanings and in thus rising, by the force of reason, from earth to heaven.[350]

The prohibition of voluntary death anticipating the hour fixed by Providence for each man, was strengthened and enforced everywhere by the Christian Church.

With yet more cause did those who had been condemned to capital punishment seem to deserve posthumous torment and the pains reserved for the impious. These maleficent spirits, transformed to demons, continued to work harm to the human race. The odium which attached to the word _biothanati_ ended by concentrating itself on these two classes—those who had committed suicide and those who had been executed. The horror which both inspired was marked by the withholding of honourable burial. Even in pagan times, sacred or civil law in many places denied funeral honours to children who died young, and to suicides—in order, says a text,[351] that those who had not feared death might fear something after death—and, above all, to criminals, whose corpses were not deposited in a tomb but were thrown without any ceremony into a common ditch (πολυάνδριον). In Rome persons executed in prison were dragged with a hook through the streets to the Tiber, where they were flung into the water. There was in the fact that they were deprived of funeral rites a second reason, besides their guilt, for their suffering in the Beyond.[352] Families and friends of the condemned endeavoured therefore to spare them this fearful penalty, and could obtain from the magistrates the surrender of their bodies to them. But the authorities often refused this supreme consolation to Christians who wished to pay this last duty to their martyred brothers. By scattering abroad the ashes of martyrs the pagans hoped to prevent their graves from becoming the sites of cults.

The denial of a religious funeral was also from the earliest time onwards ordered by Church discipline and sanctioned by the Councils in the case of suicides, and was similarly extended, in virtue of the law in force, to malefactors. In the Middle Ages the corpses of criminals were still to be seen carried to a shameful charnel-place in Byzantium. For instance, the chronologist Theophanes[353] relates indignantly that in 764 the iconoclastic Emperor Constantine Copronymus caused the arrest of a hermit of Bithynia, who supported the cult of the images. The emperor’s guards tied a cord round the monk’s foot and dragged him from the praetorium to the cemetery, where, after cutting him to pieces, they flung his remains into the ditch of the _biothanati_. Curiously this word, _biothanati_, was derisively applied to the Christians themselves, either because they adored a crucified Saviour, or in mockery of the martyrs, who believed that through death by execution they earned a glorious immortality. The poet Commodianus returns this insult by applying the term to the pagans, whose way of life condemned them to everlasting flames.[354] The opprobrious word remained in use until the Middle Ages, when it denoted all whose crimes deserved capital punishment, so that the final meaning of _biothanatus_ was gallows-bird, gallows-food.[355]

If the meaning of the word _biothanati_ was thus restricted in the Latin world, the old ideas which it called forth have had a singular vitality in folk-lore, especially among the Greeks. The Greeks believe even today that such as perish by a sudden and violent death became _vrykolakes_.[356] Their bodies can again be reanimated, can leave the grave, and can travel through space with extreme rapidity as vampires and become so maleficent that mere contact with them causes loss of life. Suicides and victims of unavenged murders are particularly fearful. It was the custom as late as the eighteenth century to open the grave of a dead man suspected of being a _vrykolakas_, and if his body had escaped corruption, thus proving his supposed character, it was cut into pieces or burnt in order to prevent it from doing further harm. So lively did the belief remain that the _biothanatus_ could not detach himself from his body, and that his existence, which had been too soon interrupted, was prolonged in the tomb.

VI

THE JOURNEY TO THE BEYOND

As soon as belief took shape in an underground kingdom where gathered the shades which were separated from the body and from the grave, the idea also arose of a perilous journey which the soul must make in order to win to this distant abode. Such an idea is common to many peoples of the world. In California, the Mojave Indians are said to believe that the departed have to find their way through a complicated maze in search of the happy hunting grounds, which only the good souls can reach, while the wicked wander painfully and endlessly. We know what minutely detailed rules are contained in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, rules to which the deceased had to conform in order that they might travel safely to the Fields of the Blessed. The Orphic tablets, discovered in tombs in Italy,[357] have preserved fragments of another guide to the Beyond. For instance, the tablet of Petelia, which goes back to the second or perhaps the third century B. C., begins thus: “Thou shalt find to the left of the house of Hades a well-spring, and by the side thereof standing a white cypress. To this well-spring approach not near. But thou shalt find another by the lake of Memory, cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it. Say ‘I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven. But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves. And so I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly the cold water flowing from the lake of Memory.’ And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy well-spring; and thereafter among the other heroes thou shalt have lordship....”[358]

These instructions, which accompanied the member of the sect to his grave,—he bore them about his neck like an amulet,—were supposed to enable him to keep from straying in his posthumous wanderings and help him to accomplish exactly all the acts necessary for his salvation. They were a sort of liturgy of the other side of the grave which would ensure eternal happiness to the faithful. “Courage (εὐψύχει); be valiant (θάρρει); no man is immortal on earth,” such is the exhortation frequently expressed in epitaphs. It probably reproduces a ritualistic formula intended to sustain the shade which had to blaze its path in the Beyond.

The Etruscans also had _libri Acheruntici_, books of Acheron which were attributed to the sage Tages and which treated of the fate of the dead. These made known, in particular, what were the rites by which souls could be transformed into gods (_di animales_). Their very title betrays a Greek teaching, and there are reasons for believing that the teaching of the Pythagoreans was not without influence on their composition.[359] It is hardly doubtful that they were concerned with the path which the Manes of human beings must follow in order to go down into the infernal regions. The Etruscan _stelae_ and cinerary urns often show this journey to Hades: sometimes the dead are placed, like heroes, in a war chariot; sometimes in a cart protected by a canopy and exactly copied from the peasants’ carts; and often nothing would indicate that these travellers are but shades, were not the significance of the scene defined by the presence of some deity of the nether world, like Charon. The great sarcophagus of Vulci in the Boston Museum bears a fine representation of this type, where the character of the travellers is shown by a winged Fury standing behind their carriage.

Thus the idea that the dead have to tramp a long road descending into the depths of the earth before they reach their last abode, was accepted in Italy as in Greece from a very ancient period. How did men imagine this road? Their conception of it is connected with a whole group of Pythagorean doctrines which go back to a remote age.

The old poetry of Hesiod already speaks of two roads of life, a short and easy road which is that of vice, and the path of virtue, which is at first steep and rugged but becomes less hard as soon as the top of the slope is reached. Everyone knows the use which the sophist Prodicus makes of this ancient comparison in the famous myth of Hercules at the crossroads.[360] In it, two women appear to the youthful hero, and one seeks to draw him to the path of deceitful pleasures while the other succeeds in conducting him to the path of austere labours which leads to true happiness. This same conception, which is transmitted through the whole of antiquity, inspired the Pythagoreans with the symbol of the letter Y, formed of a vertical spike topped by two divergent branches. The spike is the road common to all men until they have reached the age of reason and responsibility. Subsequently they must choose between the right and the left branches. The former, say these moralists, is steep and rough and at first requires strenuous effort, but when those who climb it have gained its summit they obtain a well-deserved rest. The other road is at first level and pleasant, but it leads to harsh rocks and ends in a precipice over which the wretched man who has followed it is hurled. This symbol was popular in antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages, a fact of which a curious proof, additional to those in the texts, has lately been found. This is a relief, accompanied by an inscription, dating from the first century of our era, which has been discovered at Philadelphia in Lydia.[361] It decorated, as the epitaph shows, the tomb of a Pythagorean, and it is divided into compartments by mouldings in the form of the letter Y. Below, to the right, a child is seen, in the care of a woman who is designated as Virtue (Ἀρετή); above, a ploughman, driving his plough, stands for the hard and persevering labour of the good man, who, still higher, lies on a couch before a table like the guest at a “funeral banquet” because he has obtained the reward of his toil. On the left side there is also, below, a woman with a child, but she stands for wantonness (Ἀσωτεία); above her a figure is indolently lying on a bed; and still further above, the same figure is seen falling into a gulf, head downwards, in chastisement of his vices.

These naïve scenes decorated, as we have said, a burial place. Many other tombs are not so elaborate, but express the same symbolism by opposing the hard labour of man, represented on the lower part of the stele, to the rest which this same man enjoys on the upper part of the stone, that is, in heaven.[362] The symbol of the Y was early applied to the future life by the Pythagoreans, who transferred the roads representing the courses of the moral and the immoral life to Hades. Their stories of the descent to the nether world depicted the journey of the dead in the same way, and it is still thus described in the sixth book of the Aeneid. The dead first follow a common road; and those whose lot is still undetermined wait in this first abode, just as on earth children are not yet separate at the uncertain age at which they have not yet made their decision for virtue or for vice. At the crossroads of earthly existence the choice must be made; at the crossroad of the infernal regions (τρίοδος) the judges of souls are seated,[363] and send to the right those who have by their merits made themselves worthy to enter the Elysian Fields, while they drive to the left the wicked who are to be hurled into Tartarus. For in both worlds “right” is to the Pythagorean, as to the soothsayers, synonymous with “good,” and “left” synonymous with “evil.”

The original conception was necessarily transformed and explained symbolically when the abode of virtuous souls was transported to heaven. The stories of the ancients were no longer taken in their literal sense, but an allegorical meaning, allowing them to be brought into harmony with the new beliefs, was given to them. Henceforward one of the two roads leads to the higher regions, the road, namely, of the Blessed (ὁδὸς μακάρων) or of the gods. The other, the path of men, is that which after long windings brings back to earth the impure souls who accomplish the cycle of their migrations and must be reincarnated in new bodies.

A passage of Cicero’s _Tusculans_,[364] which is directly inspired by the _Phaedo_ of Plato, is instructive as to the transformation which ideas underwent. “There are,” it says, “two roads and two courses for souls which issue from the body. The souls which are sullied with human vice and have abandoned themselves to passions ... follow a crooked path which leads them away from the dwelling of the gods; but for the souls which have kept their innocence and purity and have, while in human bodies, imitated the life of the gods, there is an easy return to the beings from whose abode they descended to the earth.” In the same way Virgil, as we have said elsewhere,[365] is apparently faithful to the traditional topography of Hades, but does not regard it as really situated in the underground. There were even attempts to fix precisely the itinerary which souls had to follow in the upper spheres. Seneca pleasantly ridicules these beliefs in his satire on the apotheosis of Claudius, affirming that emperors went to heaven by the Appian Way. The Milky Way, originally regarded as the path of the sun, remained, according to an opinion which persisted until the end of antiquity, the road by which gods and heroes rose to the zenith.[366] It was said to cut the zodiac in the tropical signs of Cancer and Capricorn, and it was there that those gates opened by which souls went down from heaven to earth and rose from earth to heaven.[367] The former of these gates was called the Gate of Men, the other the Gate of Gods.

We will return later (p. 162) to the theories which assign different dwellings in the starry spheres to pure spirits and tell of their passing through the celestial gates. We would merely note that the allegory of the two roads, of which one is the road of God and heaven and eternal life and the other that of Satan, hell and death, is found in the most ancient Christian literature, and is justifiably likened by Lactantius[368] to the Pythagorean Y, which is at the origin of all the later symbolism.

* * * * *

But when the idea of a journey to the underworld had been transformed into that of a journey to heaven, how was the power of the dead to reach the upper spheres explained? What force or what vehicle raised them thither? Originally they made use of all the means of locomotion. They went on foot, in a ship, in a carriage, on horseback, and even had recourse to aviation.

Among the ancient Egyptians the firmament was conceived as being so close to the mountains of the earth that it was possible to get up to it with the aid of a ladder. The early texts of the Pyramids describe the gods helping the king to climb the last rungs of the ladder, when he ascended to their high dwelling. Such ideas are found elsewhere, among the Chinese as well as in Europe. We are told that a priest-king of a people of Thrace joined tall wooden ladders together in order that he might go to Hera to complain of his unruly subjects.[369] Although the stars had been relegated to an infinite distance in space, the ladder still survived in Roman paganism as an amulet and as a symbol. Many people continued to place in tombs a small bronze ladder, which recalled the naïve beliefs of distant ages. This means of attaining to the upper world has been given to the dead man in several graves of the Rhine border. In the mysteries of Mithras a ladder of seven steps, made of seven different metals, still symbolised the passage of the soul across the planetary spheres.[370] Philo, and after him Origen,[371] interpreted Jacob’s ladder as the air through which the disincarnate souls ascended and descended; and the patriarch’s dream in the symbolism of the Middle Ages was still considered as a pledge of the ladder of salvation leading the elect to heaven. A naïve miniature of the illustrated manuscripts of St. John Climacus—one of them is preserved in the Freer collection—shows monks climbing the heavenly ladder of virtues and welcomed at the top by Christ or by an angel, while winged demons try to pull them down and make them fall into the jaws of a dragon below, which represents hell.[372] On the other hand, even in antiquity the emblem of the ladder had been adopted by magic,[373] which retained it throughout the centuries, and to this day little ladders are sold in Naples as charms against the _jettatura_ or evil eye.

In Egypt the souls also travelled to the dwelling of the gods in the boat of Ra, the solar deity. This idea does not seem to have passed into the mysteries of Isis in the West but in the East it was retained by the Manicheans. The moon and the sun were the ships which plied through the heavenly spaces carrying the luminous spirits.[374] For the Greeks it was to the Islands of the Blest, situated somewhere in the distant ocean, that ships transported the dead. This crossing of the sea, peopled by monsters of the deep, was one of the favourite subjects of the decorators of Roman sarcophagi. But under the Empire the Fortunate Islands, we know,[375] were often explained as being the moon and the sun, washed by the ether, and it was therefore to the moon that the bark of salvation had to bear souls across the stormy waters of matter. The Styx had become a celestial or aerial river; Charon, with the help of the winds, caused pious souls to pass not to the subterranean world but to the heavenly dwelling of heroes.[376] The bark which should bear the Blessed to the abode of delight, where they would live together, is often represented in funeral sculpture,[377] and continued to be in Christian art, the symbol of a happy passage to the shores of Paradise. Epitaphs sometimes cause the passer-by to wish the dead “Εὐπλοῖ,” “A happy voyage!”[378]

The Etruscan tombs often show the dead man on horseback on the road of the underworld, and in early Greek tombs terra cotta shoes and horses have been discovered which were intended to make easier the long and dangerous journey to the country whence there is no return. But in order that a rider may win to heaven his horse must be provided with strong wings. Primitively these wings were probably intended to indicate only the swiftness of this mythical steed.[379] But in Roman times they undoubtedly meant that it could fly up to the sky. The great Paris cameo, said to represent the apotheosis of Augustus, shows a prince of his house, Germanicus or perhaps Marcellus, thus borne away by a winged courser.[380] There is a similar representation on a coin which commemorates the apotheosis of an empress, probably Faustina. The same Pegasus, who probably has nothing in common with Bellerophon’s steed, appears again on a fragment of a relief recently discovered in England at Corstopitum (Corbridge-on-Tyne).[381] He is carrying off a personage, probably an emperor, who wears the _paludamentum_ or military cloak and has his head bound with a radiate crown, on either side of whom are the Dioscuri, the symbols of the two celestial hemispheres. The dead are mounted on Pegasus because he was brought into relation with the Sun, who is the creator and saviour of souls.

For the same reason, because he was the sacred animal of Apollo, the gryphon served this purpose. Thus in the medallion which decorates the stucco vault of a tomb on the Latin Way this winged monster carries on his strong back a veiled figure, covered with a long garment, who can be no other than the shade of the dead man wrapped in the shroud.[382]

Throughout antiquity, however, the departed travelled most frequently in a chariot, which had in the Roman period become the chariot of the Sun-god.[383] The idea that the divine charioteer drives a team across the heavenly field existed in very early times in Babylon and Syria, as well as in Persia and in Greece. “The horses of fire and the chariot of fire” which carried up the prophet Elijah in a whirlwind[384] are very probably the horses and the chariot of the Sun. In the same way when Mithras’ mission on earth was fulfilled, he was conveyed in the chariot of Helios to the celestial spheres over the ocean, as we see on the reliefs found in his temples, and the happy lot which the hero had won for himself he granted also to his followers. The emperors in particular were commonly reputed to become companions of the Sun-god after death, as they had been under his protection in life, and to drive with him up to the summit of the eternal vaults. According to a papyrus recently found in Egypt,[385] Phoebus, when informing the people of the death of Trajan and the accession of Hadrian, stated in set terms, “I have just risen with Trajan on a car drawn by white horses, and I come to you, O people, to announce that a new prince, Hadrian, has made all things subject to him, by his virtue and by the fortune of his divine father.” The writers and the figured monuments show us other deified rulers winning to heaven in a similar way. At the very end of paganism an oracle, addressing Julian the Apostate, predicted that he would be “conducted to Olympus in a flaming chariot shaken by stormy whirlwinds, and would reach the paternal palace of ethereal light.”[386] It was not only princes who were privileged to be drawn by the swift team of the royal star. The chariot appears on tombs of very humble persons to suggest their lot in after life.[387]

Yet more rapid was another method of mounting up to the stars. Among all the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean basin the idea was anciently spread that the essence or the spirit which animates man escapes from the body in the shape of a bird, especially a bird of prey, for in order not to perish this soul must feed on blood, the principle of life. The gravestones and funeral vases of Greece give us a large number of representations of the bird-soul.[388] In the Roman period vestiges of this conception persisted. In Syria an eagle with spread wings occupies on tombs the place filled elsewhere by the portrait of the dead man.[389] Magic had retained this ancient belief with not a few others, for superstition picks up many ideas that have dropped out with the progress of religion. Sorcerers asserted that they could cause wings to grow from the backs of their dupes, so as to enable them to soar up to heaven. One of the marvels which miracle-mongers most frequently boasted of working was that of ascending into the air. The phenomena of levitation are said to be produced at all periods. When writers tell us that the pure soul “flies away” to the sky on swift wings, the expression, which since Plato[390] has been often repeated, and is still in use nowadays, is no mere metaphor but rather a traditional expression, first taken in its material sense and preserved in language, ultimately acquiring a figurative meaning. A late epigram composed on Plato’s burial place[391] says: “Eagle, why art thou perched above this tomb and why dost thou look at the gods’ starry dwelling?—I am the image of Plato’s soul who has flown away to Olympus. The earth of Attica holds his earth-born body.” Lucian in his Icaromenippus ridiculed the claims of the philosophers, showing Menippus attaching wings to his shoulders in order that he might take his flight to the stars and thus learn the secrets of the world.

The original idea of the bird-soul was transformed into that of the soul lifted aloft by a bird. It was in Syria that this change took place.[392] A widely held belief in the Roman period was that the soul was carried away by an eagle, which in Syria was the bird of the sun. The sun being conceived as a winged disk which flew through the celestial spaces could easily be connected with an eagle. The king of birds was the servant or the incarnation of the star-king, to whom he bore his precious burden. This is why an eagle, preparing for flight and holding the crown of victory, is a usual motif of sepulchral decoration at Hierapolis and throughout northern Syria. The powerful bird of prey lifted not with his claws, as he did Ganymede, but on his back, mortals who rose to heaven. This soul-bearing eagle passed to Italy with the ceremonial of the apotheosis. At the funeral rites of emperors at Rome there was always fastened to the top of the pyre, on which the corpse was to be consumed, an eagle which was supposed to bear aloft the monarch’s soul, and art frequently represents the busts of the Caesars resting on an eagle in the act of taking flight, by way of suggesting their apotheosis. The eagle, which is the bird of the Baals, solar gods, carries to his master those who have been his servants and representatives in the world below. This kind of aviation was not peculiar to monarchs. The eagle often has this meaning in funeral art. I will instance a stele, found in Rome and preserved in the museum of Copenhagen.[393] On this a young man, draped in a toga, is comfortably seated on an eagle, which is rising to the sky; to his right a winged child, bearing a torch, seems to point out the way to him. It is Phosphorus, the morning star, whom Roman art often represented in this form, before the chariot of the Sun. An altar recalls the cult of which the dead man will henceforth be the object on earth, and a wreath on the pediment stands for the victory which he has won over death.

All these supposed methods of reaching heaven are most primitive: they start from the supposition that a _load_ has to be lifted up; they hardly imply a separation of body and soul; and they are antecedent to the distinctions which philosophers established between different parts of man’s being. They are religious survivals of very ancient conceptions which only vulgar minds still interpreted literally. These mechanical means of raising oneself to the starry vault carry us back to an extremely low stage of beliefs. Hence theologians no longer accepted them save as symbols. Other doctrines of a more advanced character were developed and these constituted the true teaching of the great Oriental mysteries, just as they had secured the adhesion of thinking men. They connected the ascent of the soul after death with physical and ethical theories and thus caused sidereal immortality to enter into the order of the universe.[394]

The first of these theories was that of _solar attraction_. We have already described the doctrine, certainly of eastern origin, that the sun by a series of emissions and absorptions projected souls onto the earth and drew them back to itself.[395] This unceasing action of the resplendent luminary of day was exercised through the force of its rays,[396] and very old Greek ideas here mingled with the “Chaldean” theory. The Pythagoreans already believed that the glittering particles of dust which danced ceaselessly in a sunbeam (ξύσματα) were souls descending from the ether borne on the wings of light. The air, they said, was “full of souls,” we might say “of germs” or “microbes.”[397] They added that this sunbeam, passing through the air and through water down to the depths of the sea, gave life to all things below.[398] This idea persisted under the Roman Empire in the theology of the mysteries. Souls descended upon the earth and reascended after death towards the sky, thanks to the slanting rays of the sun which served as the means of transport. The sun is the ἀναγωγεύς, “he who brings up from below.” On Mithraic reliefs one of the seven rays which surround the head of Sol Invictus (θεὸς ἑπτάκτις) is seen disproportionately prolonged towards the dying Bull, in order to awake the new life that is to spring from the death of the cosmogonic animal. “The Sun,” says the Emperor Julian, “by the invisible, immaterial, divine and pure essence which dwells in its rays, attracts and raises the blessed souls.”[399]

In this theory it is to the power of the Sun, the great cosmic divinity, that the ascension of the soul is due. According to another doctrine the cause of this ascension is the physical nature of the soul.

This latter doctrine is set forth with great precision by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, and by Sextus Empiricus, doubtless after Posidonius.[400] The soul is a fiery breath, that is to say, its substance is the lightest of the four elements which compose our universe. It necessarily therefore has a tendency to rise, for it is warmer and more subtle than the gross and dense air which encircles the earth. It will the more easily cleave this heavy atmosphere since nothing moves more rapidly than a spirit. It must therefore in its continuous ascent pass through that zone of sky where gather the clouds and the rain and where blow the winds,[401] and which by reason of exhalations from the earth is moist and misty. When finally it reaches the spaces filled by an air which is rarefied and warmed by the sun, it finds elements similar to its own substance and, ceasing to ascend, is maintained in equilibrium.[402] Henceforth it dwells in these regions which are its natural home, continually vivified by the same principles as those that feed the everlasting fires of the stars.

We shall presently see how the Platonists modified this Stoic doctrine, and substituted that of the “vehicle” (ὄχημα) of souls.