Chapter VIII: THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED. Rest in the tomb, 190—in the nether (7)

These theories made it easier than the first one had done to establish a firm connection between ethical beliefs concerning future destiny and physical theories about the constitution of the universe and the nature of man. The soul is never conceived by these theologians as purely spiritual or immaterial, but when it abandons itself to the passions it becomes gross; its substance grows more corporeal; and then it is too heavy to rise to the stars and gain the spheres of light.[403] Its mere density will compel it to float in our mephitic atmosphere until it has been purified and consequently lightened. Thus the door is opened to all doctrines concerning punishment beyond the grave. We shall show in another lecture[404] how the soul was to be purified by passing through the elements which moved in sublunary space—air, water and fire.

But, side by side with physical ideas, mythological beliefs always retained their sway. According to the common creed, the air was peopled with troops of perverse and subtle demons. They were, it was thought, the guilty souls whose faults condemned them to wander perpetually near the surface of the earth. They took pleasure in inflicting a thousand tortures on their fellow souls, when these, by their impiety, were left defenceless against them. But succouring powers protected the good against these perverse spirits. Thus the atmosphere became the scene of an unceasing struggle between demons of every kind, a struggle in which the salvation of the soul was at stake.

The dangers to which the soul was exposed did not always end when, after having crossed the most dangerous zone of the air, it reached the moon.[405] Those who believed that souls must pass through the planetary spheres conceived these as pierced by a gate guarded by a commander (ἄρχων) or, as they were also called, by toll gatherers (τελώνια). The mystics claimed to supply their initiates with the passwords which caused the incorruptible keepers to yield. They taught prayers or incantations which rendered hostile powers propitious; by “seals” and unctions they made their followers immune against the blows of such enemies. These instructions, which were previously given to the dead in order to facilitate their descent to the nether world (p. 148), now served to make the ascent to heaven easy. In this matter the magicians emulated the priests, even claiming to show to their clients the way leading to heaven during life. The papyrus of Paris, wrongly called the “Mithraic Liturgy,”[406] affords the most characteristic example of this superstitious literature.

But, above all, the secret cults claimed to supply the soul with a guide to lead it during its risky journey through the whirlwinds of air, water and fire and the moving spheres of heaven. Plato in the _Phaedo_ had already spoken of this demon leader (ἡγεμών) of the dead,[407] and the same word is applied to the “psychopompos,” whether demon, angel or god, not only by Neo-Platonist philosophers but also in epitaphs. Thus the funeral inscription of a sailor, who died at Marseilles,[408] says: “Among the dead there are two companies; one moves upon the earth, the other in the ether among the choruses of stars. I belong to the latter, for I have obtained a god for my guide.” This divine escort of souls frequently retains the name of Hermes in conformity with the old mythology, for Hermes is the Psychopompos who leads the shades to their subterranean abode and moreover summons them and brings them back, in another migration, to the earth. An epigram belonging to the first century of our era apostrophises the deceased with these words: “Hermes of the winged feet, taking thee by the hand, has conducted thee to Olympus and made thee to shine among the stars.”[409] But often the rôle of escort devolved on the Sun himself. We have seen (p. 157) that at the end of paganism the star-king is figured as carrying mortals in his flying chariot; and the emperor Julian, at the end of his satire on the Caesars, represents himself as addressed by Hermes, who states that in causing him to know Mithras he rendered propitious to him this leader-god (ἡγεμόνα θεόν), who will enable him to leave the earth with the hope of a better lot.

In these beliefs we see persisting to the end of paganism the old conception that heroes could be carried off to heaven, body and soul.[410] It was never entirely given up by popular faith, and appears notably in ideas as to the apotheosis of the emperors, although learned theology rose in arms against it and affirmed that nothing terrestrial could be admitted into the ethereal spheres. Antinous and Apollonius of Tyana are thus said to have been borne away and to have continued without interruption the life they had begun on earth.[411]

* * * * *

We are thus brought to ask ourselves how, at the very time when the conception of the journey of the dead was being transformed, the idea entertained as to the physical character of the dead also underwent a change. Let us, in conclusion, seek briefly to trace the course of this evolution.

Originally, as we said at the beginning of these lectures, two beliefs as to life beyond the grave existed together. On the one hand, the illusion was kept that the corpse which lay in the grave continued in some obscure way to live, feel and nourish itself there. Side by side with this simple faith the idea was maintained that the soul is a breath, emitted by the dying man, which floats in the atmosphere and which reproduces, when it makes itself visible in dreams and apparitions or in remembrance, the outward appearance of the person from whom it issued.[412]

These two conceptions of life beyond the grave are combined in the nature with which the inhabitants of the infernal regions are credited, and give these fantastic beings a character full of contradictions. Cicero justly remarks that acts are attributed to them which would be conceivable only if they had bodies. Thus they are supposed to speak, although they have neither tongue, palate, throats nor lungs.[413] The common belief was indeed that the shades fed, even in their deep abode, on the offerings made on their burial places; and the pains which might be inflicted on them presupposed that they had retained the sensibility and needs of men; while the pleasures accorded to them in the Elysian Fields were in part very material—to participate in a banquet was an essential part of them.[414]

Hence, when the dead showed themselves, they were sometimes given the appearance not of the living being but of the corpse: it was the body, as it was when buried, which issued from the entrails of the earth. Ennius, when he showed Homer appearing to him in a dream, said that the shades were “of prodigious paleness,”[415] and the idea is often expressed that ghosts are bloodless in colour. Not only are their faces wan: their mouths are mute; they are the _taciti_, the silent Manes. Much more, it is sometimes in the form of skeletons that they return to terrify men. The most usual way of figuring the soul in funeral sculpture is to show a person completely wrapped, save for his face, in a long garment, the shroud in which his body was buried.[416]

But on the other hand, side by side with this more or less unconscious belief as to a survival of the body, the soul continued to be regarded as a light breath. The beings who peopled the infernal regions were imagined as almost immaterial forms. They were called “shades” (σκιαί, _umbrae_) or “images” (εἴδωλα, _simulacra_). The former term implies, besides the idea of a subtle essence, the notion that the inhabitants of the dusky spaces underground were black, and this is in fact the colour often given to them. It is also the colour of the victims offered them and of the mourning garments worn in their honour. These sombre phantoms, which passed unnoticed in the darkness of night, returned after the sunset to haunt the houses of men, and this is why the _Inferi_ or beings of the nether world are above all appeased by nocturnal sacrifices.

The words εἴδωλον, _simulacrum_, _imago_, especially express the complete resemblance of the dead to the living. Are not the beings who return to talk with us in dreams exactly like the persons we have known? This tenuous image was compared to the reflection seen on limpid waters or on the polished surface of metal.[417] Both alike reproduced the features and colour and imitated the movements of those whom they faithfully expressed. This is why magicians often made use of mirrors in order to evoke the spirits of the departed.[418] As to the nature of these _simulacra_, the ancients agree in declaring them to be material, for how otherwise could they convey sensual impressions? But their substance is of an extreme subtlety. They are forms which are corporeal but empty, flimsy, impalpable, often of such rarity that they remain invisible. They are compared to the wind, for the wind is the air in motion, to a vapour, to a smoke which escapes so soon as its restraint is attempted.

This shade, formed of a light fluid, has a form which is necessarily malleable and yielding. The fact is thus explained that souls can take on various appearances and sometimes let themselves be seen as terrible monsters, especially if they are the souls of criminals who have become maleficent spirits.[419] Heroes, on the contrary, whose virtue has enabled them to be borne to heaven, appear to be of more than natural stature when they descend from the ether; they are surrounded by a radiant nimbus, and their resplendent beauty strikes with admiration those who perceive them.

But here the ancients were faced with the question as to whether that part of the human composition which won to heaven was the same as that which descended to the infernal regions.

As to this puzzling question there arose in the Alexandrian period a theory unknown to ancient Greece,—we have already touched on this point[420]—the theory that man is formed not of two elements but of three, namely, the soul (ψυχή, _anima_), the shade (σκιά, εἴδωλον, _umbra_, _simulacrum_) and the body (σῶμα, _corpus_). This doctrine claimed to be justified by a passage in Homer, in fact an interpolation, as to the apotheosis of Hercules, but it was manifestly borrowed from Egyptian religion by the Pythagoreans of Alexandria. For Egyptian religion is “polypsychic” and distinguishes different kinds of souls. So the _ka_ or “Double” has been explained as a living and coloured projection of the individual whom it reproduced feature by feature, which inhabited the tomb, but could leave it and return to it as freely as a man to his house. The _baï_, on the other hand, is thought to be a more refined matter which enclosed a portion of the celestial fire and which departed to another world. Certain Alexandrian Pythagoreans therefore admitted that when the soul was not entirely purified, it remained joined to its idolon in the infernal regions, which were for them situated in the atmosphere, but they held that when it had entirely freed itself from matter it rose towards the ether, and left only the _idolon_ in the neighbourhood of the earth.[421]

This theory was to be variously transformed, but it is at the foundation of all the subsequent development of the doctrines as to the return of the soul to heaven. The triple division most usually adopted is not the one I have just cited but the division into reason (νοῦς or πνεῦμα), soul (ψυχή) and body. What becomes in this case of the image (εἴδωλον)? The theologians assimilated it to the irrational soul or ψυχή, as opposed to the higher understanding. This image thus became the seat not only of vegetative and unconscious life—a theory which would be in conformity with the Homeric sense of the word—but also of sensitive and emotional life. This soul or shade at first remained united to the _nous_, which it surrounded with its vaporous envelope. Even after it had left the earthly body, reason was still imprisoned in an aerial body: the two dwelt in the infernal regions, that is, in sublunary space, until they had been purified by the elements. They then, as we have seen elsewhere,[422] left the atmospheric Hades in order to be admitted into the Elysian Fields, that is to say, into the moon. There the thin veils in which reason was still wrapped were dissolved. Reason, a sublime essence, rose again towards the sun and the higher spheres.

So the shades of the old mythology had become a garment of which reason rid itself, when it left this lower world to attain to its celestial home. But the theologians disputed at length on the origin of this psychic integument. When it was admitted that the passions and emotions were due to the action of the planets, the εἴδωλον, being conceived, as we have said, to be the seat of sensitive life, had necessarily to be formed in the seven spheres, through which the soul passed as it descended to earth, and to be decomposed when it passed through them again in its ascension.[423] This is the doctrine supported by the Neo-Platonists. They merely apply a new name to this cloak of reason, that of vehicle (ὄχημα), which is at first synonymous with εἴδωλον as this word was last accepted. Plato in his myths had several times spoken of the chariot (ὄχημα) in which souls ascended, especially in the famous passage of the Phaedrus, where he depicted them as trying to follow the course of the gods towards the summit of heaven,[424] and above all in the Timaeus, where he says that God, having made men equal in number to the stars, caused them to mount on these stars as on a chariot.[425] This vehicle was, according to the philosopher’s late interpreters, an ethereal envelope, analogous to the “astral body” of modern theosophists, which grew thicker and thicker by the accession of new elements, as the soul was gradually lowered to the earth;[426] and it was by the composition of these elements that the temperament of the newly born child was determined. This luminous body was attracted after death by stars of the same nature as those whence it derived its origin, and in particular by the sun, and it thus acquired a force of ascension which once again bore divine reason to the highest point of the heavens. We will not lay stress on the speculation of the last masters of the school, such as Jamblichus or Proclus, who imagined, on the subject of this subtle matter, yet more subtle distinctions and transformed the former conception of the “vehicle.” It is enough that we have shown how the old belief in the shades who peopled Hades was modified, when it came to be thought that souls travelled in the air and among the constellations, until at last the Platonist theory of the psychic vehicle was reached.

VII

THE SUFFERINGS OF HELL AND METEMPSYCHOSIS

How did belief in the sufferings of hell develop? of what elements was it formed? through what vicissitudes has it passed?—these are questions which it is difficult to answer precisely, for the reason that the pains reserved for the impious in the Beyond were in the Greco-Latin world taught especially by mystic sects, who placed them in contrast to the bliss granted to the initiate. It is possible, however, to note the genesis and general evolution of the opinions on this point which reigned in the Roman Empire.

Already in the Odyssey three who are surpassingly guilty detach themselves from the grey crowd of the shades who lead an uncertain life in Hades—Tityus, Tantalus and Sisyphus.[427] All three committed grave assaults on the gods, who in revenge condemned them to eternal torture: the gigantic body of Tityus is unceasingly gnawed by vultures; Tantalus is plunged in a pond the water of which flees from his eager lips, while above him is a tree of which the fruit escapes from his hand as he wishes to seize it; Sisyphus unendingly rolls to the top of a hill a rock which always tumbles back down the slope. These souls, in order that their suffering may be more cruelly felt, have in Hades a vitality beyond that of the common run of the dead, who are pale, flimsy, half animate phantoms.[428]

To this Homeric triad of sufferers especially chastised by the divinity, further unhappy souls, whom an inexpiable crime had vowed to everlasting pains, were afterwards added: Ixion turning on the wheel to which he was fixed, Theseus and Pirithous enchained, the Danaïdes carrying water in a leaking vessel, and others. Thus was formed a group of legendary personalities whose crimes and punishments came to be the traditional themes of every description and representation of Tartarus in poetry and art until the downfall of paganism.

But these convicted souls were no longer conceived, as they were by Homer, to be exceptional offenders on whom the gods avenged a personal insult. They had come to be the prototypes of men who, for like faults, would be similarly chastised, the terrible examples of the lot which divine wrath reserved for all who provoked it. They were explained as the incarnations of the different passions and vices, the representatives of the various classes of sinners on each of which a determined punishment was inflicted.

The first authors of this new conception seem to have been the Orphic and Pythagorean theologians. Homer names only one class of criminals whom the Erinyes torture beneath the ground, the perjurers. But here again the motive of the punishment is a direct provocation of the gods; by the formula of execration which ended their oath, the perjurers had surrendered themselves to divine vengeance, if they broke their faith; and this is why a place apart among the sufferers of the underworld was always kept for them.

The Orphics, who were the first to separate in the underworld the region of Tartarus from the Elysian Fields, were also innovators as regarded the character of these contrasting dwelling-places. Notably, there was among their books a Descent into Hades (Κατάβασις εἰς Ἅιδου), which described its joys and pains. If the blessed were admitted to the flowery meadows where they enjoyed the delight of a perpetual feast, the profane, those who had not been purified by the rites of the sect, were plunged in darkness and mire, which was either intended to recall the moral uncleanness of all who had not taken part in the cathartic ceremonies, or else implied that these shades were figured like the penitents who, seated in the mud of the road, proclaimed their sins to passers-by.[429]

Orphism conceived the suffering undergone beyond the tomb as an expiation. The soul which had not been able on earth to keep itself from the pollution of matter and to escape from the passions, thus found again the qualities which it had lost. After a fixed term, it returned to another life wherein it had another chance to render itself worthy of the lot of the Blessed—we shall speak presently of this transmigration. Moreover, the intercession of the living in favour of the dead, the sacrifices offered up on their behalf, could, according to the Orphics, deliver them from their pains.

But the Orphics taught also that side by side with those who thus purified themselves in infernal regions before returning to earth, there were others, more guilty, who were vowed to eternal punishment. The old Homeric belief was thus taken up and developed. The evil souls, whose ways nothing could mend, were immured for ever in the underground prison, where they became the companions of the great criminals whom mythology plunged in Tartarus. This capital distinction between the two classes of the inhabitants of hell, those condemned for a time and those condemned in perpetuity, was transmitted down to Virgil and appears distinctly in the Aeneid.

Infernal justice is a court of appeal from earthly justice. Like the City,[430] Hades has its tribunal, but the judges who sit there are infallible; it has its laws which are unremittingly applied to whoever has broken those of his country; it has its executioners, responsible for carrying out its sentences—the Furies, and later the demons. Similarly, the pains of Hades are always conceived as an imitation of those which were every day inflicted on criminals. The guilty were bound in unbreakable chains, as in the prisons; the Erinyes struck them with their whips, as they were flogged at the order of the magistrates; fierce monsters bit them, as their bodies were thrown to the beasts or devoured by them in an infamous charnel-place. The old custom of retaliation continued to be followed in the other world, where the dead were treated as in life they had treated their victims.[431] Elsewhere we can recognise an imitation of the torments inflicted on the accused, who were subjected to torture to make them confess their fault.

Penal law enacted a determined punishment for every kind of offence; the law which ruled in Hades had similarly to inflict particular pains for each kind of fault. This logical deduction led to a new development of penalties beyond the grave. As gradually the moralists and criminalists detailed and classified the breaches of divine and human law, so the authors of apocalypses multiplied the categories of those who suffered in the nether world. They imagined the most fearful tortures, in order to frighten sinners and drive them to seek in some religious purification a means of escape from so terrible a lot. In a myth which Plutarch has introduced into his book on the belated vengeance of the gods,[432] he shows us hypocrites, who have hidden their wretchedness under the appearance of virtue, obliged to reverse their entrails so that the inner side of them may be seen, haters who devour each other, and misers plunged into and plucked out from lakes of burning gold, icy lead and jagged iron.

The text which describes these sufferings of the other world in greatest detail is the fragment of the apocryphal apocalypse of Peter, which was found in Egypt some thirty years ago and dates at least from the second century of our era. The vision of hell here opposed to that of heaven is like a first sketch for the tragic picture of the dwelling of the damned which Dante was to draw in his Inferno. The fragment enumerates a long series of criminals who are punished by black-robed angels and receive the treatment appropriate to the nature of their faults. Blasphemers are hanged by the tongue; the mouths of false witnesses are filled with fire; the rich who have been merciless to the poor roll, clothed in rags, on sharp and burning pebbles. Other tortures are like the sports of macabre fancy: thus adulterers are hanged by the feet, their heads plunged in burning mud; murderers are flung into a cave filled with serpents that bite them, the shades of their victims watching their anguish.

A learned philologist[433] has undertaken to prove that this repulsive picture of the dwelling of the damned had its origin in the Orphic books. If, however, he refers to ancient, genuine Orphism, he is certainly mistaken. The light fantasy of the ancient Greeks never laid heavy stress on the horrors of Tartarus; their luminous genius took no pleasure in describing these dark atrocities.[434] There is no evidence that they ever formulated, point by point, a penal code which applied in the kingdom of Pluto. The Romans, whose legal mind might have led them to do so, were kept from such aberrations by their lack of imagination. Their infernal mythology remained rudimentary: even Virgil, who is the interpreter of the Hellenic tradition, never alluded except in passing to the infinitely diverse forms of crimes and their punishments.[435] The Etruscans peopled the infernal regions with awful monsters: they gave Charon and the Erinyes a wild semblance which recalls the devils of the Middle Ages, but we never find them drawing up an inventory of the breaches of the moral law in order that a punishment might be applied to each of these.

Everything points to the conclusion that this infernal theology developed in the East. The Egyptians described at length in the “Book of the Dead” the pains of those who despised the precepts of Osiris, and illustrated these sufferings with pictures. The only pagan writing in which we find a classification of sinners and of their torments, analogous to that contained in the revelation of the apocryphal gospel of Peter, is the Mazdean “Book of Arta Viraf,” which, although of late date, has antecedents which certainly go back very far. The Persian religion, which more than any other brings the Spirit of Evil and his hordes of demons into relief, was certainly not unconnected with the development of infernal eschatology, even in the West, as is indicated by the fact that these demons succeeded the Furies as executors of the divine sentences. It was under the influence of these exotic religions that the descriptions were propagated of refined tortures, terrifying to the adepts of the conventicles in which they were revealed. The mysteries which spread under the Roman Empire accentuated the contrast between the delights of heaven and the sufferings of hell. These esoteric sects gave birth to the literature which was to be perpetuated through the Middle Ages, and inspire numbers of visionaries, poets and artists. Certain authors of treatises on demonology in antiquity must have revelled in inventing unheard-of atrocities, as later the hagiographers took pleasure in describing the inconceivable torments inflicted on martyrs.

Among all the forms of punishment that by fire predominates. The idea that the Erinyes burnt the damned with their torches is ancient, and the Pyriphlegethon is an igneous river surrounding Tartarus. Certain authors went beyond this. Lucian in his “True Histories” describes the island of the impious as an immense brazier whence rise sulphurous and pitchy flames. Thus was born into the world in the Greco-Roman period a doctrine which was to survive its fall and last to modern times. The ancients certainly connected this infernal fire with the treatment inflicted on those condemned to be burnt alive; but this exceptional punishment could not inspire an eschatological conception which included all the dead. The opinion has been advanced that the choice of fire was due to the belief that this element purifies.[436] Fire would have been at first the means of destroying, in the Beyond as in this world, the uncleanliness of souls, before it became the instrument of their eternal torture. But a scientific theory seems here to have influenced religious faith. The physicians admitted the existence of an incandescent mass in the interior of the earth, which produced volcanic eruptions and hot springs. As Tartarus was situated in the uttermost depths of the underworld, it was conceived as a vast brazier in which the sulphur and bitumen vomited by the volcanoes were boiling for the punishment of sinners.[437]

But this adaptation of the pains of Tartarus to contemporary physics could not save them from philosophical criticism. While the pagan priests, to the terror of credulous minds, imagined more and more inhuman punishments for the guilty souls, the reaction of reason against these cruel inventions necessarily gathered strength. We have seen elsewhere how the polemics of philosophers forcibly attacked these life-poisoning beliefs and succeeded in a great measure in destroying them.[438] Even those who did not deny the future life rejected these fables of hell. There was an attempt to save the principle of posthumous retribution by replacing the doctrine of chastisement in Hades by that of the metempsychosis. We now will try, while considering this theory of transmigration in its various aspects, to show how such substitution was effected.

* * * * *

The mind of savages does not, like our science, distinguish between three kingdoms of nature. It supposes the same energy to animate all the beings who surround us, all of whom are taken to be like ourselves. The primitives often attribute human or even divine intelligence to beasts; and the belief is found throughout the two hemispheres that the spirits of the dead can incarnate themselves in animals and even lodge in plants. Men refrain from the slaughter or gathering of certain species, from eating their flesh or fruit, for fear of hurting a chief or relative who has gone to inhabit them. This animistic basis is common to a number of different peoples and is at the foundation of the system of metempsychosis.

But that which makes the grandeur of this theory, which won countless adepts throughout the centuries and the world, is that it transformed this naïve idea, which had no moral bearing, into a doctrine of retribution and liberation. To come back to the earth, to imprison itself in a body which soiled and tortured it, became a punishment inflicted on the guilty soul. The soul could not attain to supreme felicity until it had purified itself by long suffering and had gradually, through a cycle of rebirths, freed itself from carnal passions.

It is infinitely probable that this doctrine of reincarnation in the bodies of animals was in Greece a foreign importation. Herodotus thought that it came from Egypt,[439] but it does not seem to have existed in that country in ancient times in the form of a regular succession of transmigrations. On the other hand, Greek metempsychosis shows a resemblance, striking even in details, to one of the fundamental conceptions of the religious thought of India, that of _samsâra_, which was accepted as a dogma there long before the birth of Buddhism. The most probable opinion is that this idea made its way across the Persian Empire and thus reached the Orphics and Pythagoreans. It is, however, not unlikely that, like Babylonian astrology, Hindu eschatology was propagated as far as Egypt at a comparatively recent date, that is, about the sixth century B. C., and that the information given by the father of history may be at least partly correct, Egypt having served as an intermediary between India and Greece.

We have not, however, to discuss here this problem of the origins of metempsychosis, nor to follow the development of the doctrine in ancient Greek philosophy. In the period with which we are concerned, it had already long been traditional in the Pythagorean and Platonic schools, it was not only a philosophical theory but also a tenet admitted by several religions. We can leave unanswered the questions of whether, as the ancients affirm, the Druids believed in it, being in this particular disciples of Pythagoras, and of whether the Etruscans were persuaded to it by the teaching of the philosopher of Croton. It is, however, certain that transmigration was in the East an article of widely held belief. We find it accepted by the mysteries of Mithras and by Manicheism, and it survives to our own day in Syria among the sects of the Druses,[440] the Yezidis and the Nosaïris.[441]

What was its form in the Roman period, and how was it brought into harmony with traditional or acquired ideas as to the future life?

The descent of the soul from heaven to earth is a fall; the body is a grave in which this soul is buried, a prison in which it is captive. These old Pythagorean doctrines were unceasingly renewed and repeated down to the end of antiquity. But the Orphic idea that this degradation was the chastisement for an original sin, the consequence of a crime committed by the Titans, who were the authors of our race, and that this hereditary taint of guilt had to be atoned for by their descendants, was either entirely forgotten or else, at the least, hardly regarded. The equally ancient conception that a bitter and cruel necessity constrained souls to incarnate themselves, was, on the contrary, emphasised in consequence of the spread of astrological fatalism. Their alternate descent and ascent was conceived as governed by a cosmic law, like the progress and regress of the planets.[442] The cycle of eternal generation (κύκλος γενέσεως) which is eternal, like the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, causes mind to circulate through matter which it animates.

This transmigration could be conceived in various ways. A first theory, in which the influence of Stoic pantheism can be recognised, lays stress on the identity of individual souls with the universal soul, of which they are particles. One single divine principle awakens life in all nature. It passes from being to being, quickening their various forms, and that which is said to be death is no more than a migration. The number of the souls that people the earth is determined from the beginning; they change their dwellings but not their essence. Hardly has the human soul left one body before it enters another. This continuous travelling causes it to go through all the degrees of the animal hierarchy. It will pass, successively, into a bird, a quadruped, a fish, a reptile, and then return to man. This is why it is impious to devour the flesh of our “lower brothers” and why the sage must practise vegetarianism. Some thinkers, however, drawing logical conclusions from the admitted premises, asserted that the life of the vegetable kingdom derived from the same migration as that of the animal kingdom and that the soul of man could enclose itself in plants. It was to this teaching that Seneca alluded when he gave the name of _Apocolocyntosis_, “Transformation to a Pumpkin,” to his satire on the apotheosis of the emperor Claudius.

This eschatological doctrine had in reality nothing in common with morality. If an uninterrupted chain unites the existence of all species, if life propagates itself fatally from man to the lower beings, this necessity seems to exclude all hope of posthumous reward. In order to bring the need of a retribution in after life into agreement with the belief in the fatal circle of migrations, it was stated that the good entered the souls of peaceful and tame animals, the wicked those of wild beasts. This is why Alexander of Abonotichos predicted to a devotee that he would be in after life first a camel, then a horse, and end by being a great prophet like himself.[443] Hermes Trismegistus even claimed to know that the just became eagles among birds, lions among quadrupeds, dragons among reptiles, dolphins among fish.[444] But the lot even of these privileged souls might not seem very enviable. The moralists, therefore, relaxed the rigour of the system and exempted noble spirits from bestial degradation. All souls were no longer condemned to dwell in the bodies of animals, but only those whose low inclinations had assimilated them to brutes. They inhabited the species which best conformed to their instincts. Thus debauchees became hogs in another life; cowards and sluggards, fish; the light-minded and frivolous, birds.[445] The pagan theologians ingeniously and laboriously interpreted the story of Circe’s changing the companions of Ulysses into beasts as an allegory of metempsychosis. _Circe_ became the _circle_ of the reincarnations which were undergone by those who emptied the magic cup of pleasure, and whence the wise Ulysses escaped, thanks to Hermes, that is, to reason which instructed him.[446]

Transmigration thus became less an inevitable law of nature than a punishment of the guilty. But this punishment did not overtake only those who were reborn in animal shape. All physical defects and moral taints, which afflict man from his entry into the world, were the consequence of his crimes in an earlier life. The old Pythagoreans combined the doctrine of the metempsychosis with that of the pains reserved for the wicked in a hell beneath the earth. But we have seen how the belief in the tortures of Hades was combated until it yielded and was discredited.[447] Metempsychosis dared to do without these incredible subterranean tortures and thereby acquired a new importance. It supplied the means of maintaining the dogma of posthumous retribution without imposing a blind faith in the foolish fables of the poets: souls were held to pass immediately from one body to another without leaving the earth, rising or sinking in the scale of beings in accordance with their merits or demerits. Thus Hades becomes our corporeal life in which we expiate the faults of a previous life. The Furies are the passions which strike us with their whips and burn us with their torches.[448] The ingeniousness of the theologians found an explanation for each of the tortures described by the old mythology. Tantalus threatened by the rock is the man obsessed by the fear of heavenly wrath; Tityus, whose entrails are devoured by vultures, is the lover whose heart is gnawed by care; Sisyphus rolling his rock becomes the ambitious man who exhausts himself with vain efforts; the Danaïdes carrying water in a leaking vessel, which empties as it is filled, are the insatiable souls who give themselves up to pleasure and never have enough of enjoyment. Even the old precepts of the Pythagorean school were twisted from their ordinary meaning and became symbols of this eschatology. A popular tabu, admitted by the sect, was formulated in the sentence, “If thou leave thy dwelling, turn not round lest the Erinyes pursue thee.” The first meaning of this prohibition, which is known to the folk-lore of many places, is that to turn round as one leaves one’s house is to run the risk of being assailed by the spirits who haunt the threshold. But the doctors of Neo-Pythagorism did not thus understand the saying. For them, the dwelling was the body, the Erinyes the passions: when souls left the body they must not return thither or the passions would attach themselves to them and make them their victims.[449]

* * * * *

Here, however, we touch on another form of metempsychosis. The ancients make a distinction between the doctrine of reincarnation or “reincorporation” (translating exactly the Greek word μετενσωμάτωσις), and rebirth or palingenesis (παλιγγενεσία). This latter word is not here taken in the Stoic sense of the eternal return of things, a series of cosmic cycles in which the same phenomena are exactly reproduced.[450] It is used to designate a transmigration separated by intervals, a process which is not continuous. In the first kind of metempsychosis there is, properly speaking, no rebirth, for the soul does not leave the earth, but there unceasingly accomplishes its circular journey through the living world. On the contrary, according to the second theory, it does not immediately resume possession of a body. It remains disincarnate for a long period of years—for Virgil as for Plato the number is one thousand—and thus leads a double existence of which its passages to this world take up only the lesser part. It is not even fatally constrained to redescend to the earth: if it has kept itself free from all corporeal defilement, it will soar to heaven and dwell there for ever.

But if, during his sojourn on the earth, man has given himself up to the pleasures of the senses, his soul becomes attached to his body. At first it cannot separate itself from the corpse, around which it circles, plaintively regretting the joys it has lost. It desires again to enter the flesh which was the instrument of its voluptuousness; it seeks a dwelling which will allow it to continue the sensual habits which have become its second nature. And so, when the time is accomplished, it is seized with an irresistible love for the body in which it is to enclose itself again; a fascination, like a magic charm, draws it to this object of its desires, which is to cause its misery. The fatality driving it to incarnation and suffering is not here an inevitable law of the universe but an inner necessity, a destiny which it has made for itself. The cosmic _Ananke_ has become psychic.

Thus every vicious tendency contracted by the soul during its abode in this world has for this soul consequences which their long duration makes more momentous. If virtue enables it to rise upward at each new birth and to acquire, as the ages revolve, an ever increasing perfection, perversion of character produces effects which are calamitous not only in this life but also in several other lives through the centuries. Moral laws are no less infallible than physical laws. Right or wrong, every act has to be paid for with harm or benefit in the long chain of incarnations. By his acquired disposition, man determines his future throughout a sequence of generations; the evil he suffers is to be imputed not to the creator but to himself. A bust of Plato found at Tivoli and now preserved in San Francisco[451] has graven on it the following sentence of the Master as to the lot of immortal souls: “The fault is the chooser’s; God is without fault”—Αἰτία ἑλομένω, ὁ θεὸς ἀναίτιος.

The very fact of birth was a pain for the soul, since it tore it from its celestial home and plunged it into a soiled and troubled world; consequently it was not necessary for the soul’s chastisement that it should descend into the body of animals. Indeed, certain thinkers rejected this kind of metempsychosis: a reasonable spirit could not, they held, dwell in a being deprived of reason. Transmigration occurred therefore exclusively from man to man and from beast to beast. Such was the opinion defended by Porphyry and Jamblichus, who, in order to dispose of the texts of Plato which were contrary to this theory, upheld that he spoke figuratively, and that his “asses,” his “wolves” and his “lions” signified persons who resembled these beasts in ignorance or ferocity.[452]

It is seen that this metempsychosis was getting far away from that which had its origin in the primitive beliefs. The “cycle of generation” was no longer conceived as a flux of life circulating throughout the variety of the animate beings peopling the earth, but as the descent and the ascent of a psychic essence, passing alternately from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven.

It is to these doctrines that Virgil alludes when in the Aeneid he shows us, gathered in a remote place of the Elysian Fields, the shades whom after a thousand years a god calls to come in a great troop to the river Lethe, there to drink the forgetfulness of the past, whereby “they begin again to wish to return to the body.”[453]

* * * * *

But the poet also gives us precious hints as to the lot reserved for the soul in the interval between its incarnations. For palingenesis, unlike the doctrine of perpetual reincorporation, left a place for chastisement in the infernal regions. These were however situated, as we have seen, for the Pythagoreans and Posidonius, whom Virgil interpreted, not on earth but in the air. It was there that the soul had to purify itself from the stains acquired while it was in touch with the flesh. This pollution, we know,[454] was conceived in a very material form. The texts speak of a thickening of the subtle substance of which the soul is formed, of concretions encrusting it, of indelible marks with which the vices stain it. When the soul left the corpse, of which it kept the form, it first, as we have seen, floated in the ambient air. When it was not weighed down by the matter with which it had become impregnated, the breath of the atmosphere raised it gently and, gradually warming it, bore it to the heavens, and this is why the Winds are often represented on tombstones.[455] But these Winds, fierce divinities, could also cause the soul to expiate its faults bitterly. If it had lost its purity and lightness, the whirlwinds drew it into their vortex, the storms rolled and buffeted it, thus violently tearing away the crust which had become attached to it. The souls were thus freed from defilements contracted during life just as linen hung in the air is bleached and loses all odour.

Their passage through the air did not complete their purification. In the East the idea was old that above the firmament was found the great reservoir of the waters which fell to the ground as rain. Beyond, a burning zone must extend, where the heavenly bodies were lit, and a river of fire, identified with the Pyriphlegethon of the Greeks, was imagined. These old mythological ideas were brought into relation with Stoic physics: above the region of the winds stretched that of the clouds, in which the rain, the snow and the hail were formed, and higher still there was the burning air, in which the lightning flashed and which touched the starry spheres. The souls must blaze a path through these obstacles. After being tossed and blown about by the winds, they were drenched by rain and plunged into the gulf of the upper waters. They reached at last the fires of heaven, of which the heat scorched them. Not till they had undergone this threefold trial, in the course of which they had passed through countless years of expiation, did they at length find peace in the serenity of the luminous ether.[456]

Virgil,[457] in the passage already quoted, alludes to this doctrine when, in speaking of the souls, he says:

“... Aliae panduntur inanes
Suspensae ad ventos, aliis sub gurgite vasto
Infectum eluitur scelus, aut exuritur igni.”

“Some are exposed, hung lightly to the winds; as to others, the crime infecting them is washed away in a deep gulf or burnt by fire.”

In an eschatological myth, which Plutarch[458] borrows from Demetrius of Tarsus, he shows us guilty souls who seek to reach the moon and who do not arrive thither, but are hunted and buffeted as by swelling billows, and others who have reached the goal, but are rejected and plunged from on high into the abyss. Similarly, Hermes Trismegistus depicts souls flung from the height of heaven into the depths of the atmosphere and delivered to the storms and whirlwinds of warring air, water and fire. Their eternal punishment is to be tossed and carried in different directions by the cosmic waves which roll unceasingly between earth and heaven.[459]

The passage of souls through the elements is represented symbolically on a funeral monument almost contemporary with the verses of Virgil, which was discovered near Scarbantia in Pannonia.[460] Above the portraits of the deceased, there appear first in the spandrels of this _cippus_ two busts of the winds facing each other. Higher up, on the architrave, are two Tritons, and on each side of a trident two dolphins, which evidently represent the idea of the watery element. Finally, at the top of the stone, in the pediment, we see two lions. The lion, for physical and astrological reasons, was considered as the symbol of fire, the igneous principle.

We have seen[461] that for the doctrine which placed the limit of the dwelling of the gods and the elect in the zone of the moon, another was substituted according to which the souls, in order to regain the purity of their original nature, had to traverse the spheres of the planets to reach the heaven of fixed stars. The trials of purgatory had to be prolonged up to the entry into the dwelling of the blessed. The idea was, therefore, conceived of attributing each of the planets to one of the elements. The moon was the ethereal earth, Mercury the water, Venus the air, the sun the fire: and inversely, Mars was the fire, Jupiter the air, Saturn the water, and the sphere of the stars the celestial earth, in which lay the Elysian Fields. Thus the soul, in order to be saved, had to be reborn three times in virtue of a triple passage through the four elements.[462]

This last doctrine, which is connected with astrological speculations, seems to have had only a limited vogue and to have been of ephemeral duration. On the other hand, the idea of a purgatory situated in the atmosphere between our earth and the moon, a place in which souls were purified not only by fire but also by air and water, was long to survive the fall of paganism and to be propagated through the Middle Ages in the West as in the East. For Dante, purgatory still occupied a fiery zone stretched between the terrestrial and the celestial circles.

* * * * *

Was the soul which, after a long expiation, had reached the Elysian Fields and the sphere of the stars, always to descend thence, seized with a blind love for the body, and to pass again through the trials of another earthly life? No, the ancient Orphics already flattered themselves that by their cathartic rites they obtained for the soul an escape from the fatal cycle of generation and regaining of heaven for ever. The Pythagoreans inherited this doctrine, which they kept until the Roman period. In spite of the contrary opinion of certain thinkers, pagan philosophers and priests generally taught that after pilgrimages, more or less long, after a succession of deaths and rebirths, the purified spirits returned to dwell for ever in their celestial country. It was to this goal that the mysteries promised to lead their initiate; this was the end which the sages flattered themselves that they attained by their virtue.

It will be understood that such a hope, combined with the suppression of eternal damnation in Hades, led necessarily to the doctrine of the eventual salvation of all souls. We know this system especially through Origen, but he merely reproduced a theory to which the evolution of pagan ideas had led.

We have seen that metempsychosis helped the philosophers to shake, if not to ruin, the belief in infernal punishment. But this belief again had power towards the end of antiquity, when the dualist sects which were the outcome of Persian Mazdeism were propagated and when Plato became the supreme authority in philosophy. We touched on this point, in another lecture,[463] when we showed how the idea of a demons’ prison in the bosom of the earth triumphed.

Thus, when the Roman world was in its decline, men came back to the old threefold distinction of the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. The very guilty, who cannot be corrected, are hurled into Tartarus, where they suffer for ever the punishment of their incurable wickedness. Souls less corrupt are subjected to purification, either by passing through the elements or by undergoing successive reincarnations, and thus they regain their original nature before they are readmitted to their first dwelling. Finally, the most perfect souls, those of the wise who have freed themselves from the domination of the body and have not let themselves be contaminated by matter, and those of the pious faithful, to whom religious lustrations have given back their purity or whom initiations to the mysteries have made equal to the gods, at once rise again to the celestial spheres.

In the next lecture we shall speak of the rewards reserved for them in the dwelling of the blessed.

VIII

THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED

We have seen how the evolution of religious faith caused the dwelling-place of the dead to move from the tomb to the nether world and from the nether world to the heavens. When the abode of souls was changed, all the ideas attached to the future life had to be transposed. In this lecture we shall endeavour to make clear how the opinions which were held as to the felicity of the blessed were thus transformed. We shall take up again matter which we have already touched upon in another connection and try to show the successive changes undergone by three manners of conceiving happiness in after life: the repose of the dead, the repast of the dead, and the sight of God.

The most ancient and originally the simplest of these conceptions was that of the repose of the dead. We know[464] that the dead who had not been buried in accordance with the rites were believed to find no rest in the tomb. A corpse had to be committed to the earth with traditional ceremonies in order that the spirit which animated it might have quiet. If this spirit were not subsequently nourished by offerings and sacrifices, it left its burial place and roamed the earth’s surface like an animal driven by hunger. The shades inhabiting the tombs could also be evoked by necromancers and such disturbance broke in upon their rest most unpleasantly.

These archaic ideas were so deeply implanted in the popular mind that other beliefs never expelled them, but supervened and existed side by side with them without causing their disappearance.

On tombs of the imperial period formulas like the following are often read: “_Hic requiescit_,” “Here rests,” “_Quieti aeternae_,” “For eternal rest”—inscriptions which could be interpreted figuratively; but other wishes can only be taken to have a material sense, such as: “_Ossa quiescant_,” “May his bones rest,” and “_Molliter ossa cubent_,” “May the bones lie softly.” Poetry has preserved a number of similar phrases. Tibullus expresses the following wish for a loved woman: “May thy slender form rest well beneath the soft earth.”[465]