III - Celestial Immortality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES

217. Cf. Comptes rendus Acad. Inscriptions, 1918, p. 278 ss.

218. Pliny, H. N., II, 8, § 28.

219. Eusebius Alex., in Patr. Graeca, LXXXVI, 1, p. 453.

220. Cat. codd. astrol. Graec, V, pars. 1, p. 196 ss.

221. See below, Lecture VI, p. 357.

222. Flinders Petrie, Athribis, London, 1908 (52 A. D.).

223. Cf. below, Lecture VI, p. 154.

224. Toutain, Revue des études anciennes, XIII, 1911, p. 166 ss.; cf. ibid., p. 379 s.

225. See below, p. 104, and Lecture VI, p. 153.

226. E. Pfeiffer, Studien zum antiken Sternglauben, 1916, p. 113 ss.

227. Pausanias, IV, 32, 4.

228. Aristophanes, Peace, 832 ss.

229. See below, Lecture IV, p. 111; cf. Introd., p. 24.

230. Pliny, H. N., II, 26, § 95.

231. Jamblich., Vit. Pyth., XVIII, 82 = Diels, Vorsokratiker, I3, p. 358, 18; cf. Plut., De genio Socr., 22, p. 590 C; Hierocles, In Aur. carm., end.

232. Lucian, Verae hist., I, 10 ss.

233. Castor, fragm. 24 and 25, Müller.

234. See Introd., p. 29, and Lecture VI, p. 162.

235. Julian, Caes., p. 307 c.

236. Plato, Rep., VII, p. 514.

237. Reproduced in my Études syriennes, 1917, p. 87; cf. below, p. 139.

238. Wiegand, in Abhandl. Akad. Berlin, 1908. Bericht, VI, p. 46: Στὰς πρόσθε τύμβον δέρκε τὴν ἄνυμφον κόρην Διογνήτοιο νηπίην Χοροῦν, ἥν θῆκεν Ἅιδης ἐν κύκλοισιν ἑβδόμοις....

239. See La théologie solaire du paganisme romain in Mém. sav. étrangers Acad. Inscr., XII, 1909, p. 449 ss.

240. Cf. Introd., p. 28.

241. See below, Lecture VI, p. 160.

242. CIL, VI, 29954; see below, Lecture VI, p. 157 ss.

243. Commodian, VIII, 10: “Sacerdotes ... numina qui dicunt aliquid morituro prodesse.”

244. See Introd., p. 24 s.; cf. below, Lecture VI, p. 167.

245. Lydus, De mensib., IV, 149 (p. 167, 25, Wünsch.).

246. Lucan, Phars., I, 45; Statius, Theb., I, 27; cf. my Études syriennes, 1917, p. 97 s.

247. Diog. Laert., VIII, 31.

248. Ovid, Metam., XV, 840 ss.; cf. 749.

249. Cassius, Dio, LXIX, 11, 4.

250. Cic., Tusc., I, 12, 28: “Totum prope caelum nonne humano generi completum est?”

251. Revue de philologie, XXXIII, 1909, p. 6 = IG, XII, 7, 123.

252. Revue de phil., ibid.; cf. Lecture V, p. 139.

253. II Cor. 12, 2.

254. Porph., Sent., 292 (p. 14, Mommert); Proclus, In Remp., I, p. 152, 17, Kroll; In Tim., III, p. 234, 25, Diehl.

255. Cf. my Mysteries of Mithras, Chicago, 1903, p. 145; below, Lecture VI, p. 169; VII, p. 187.

256. Origen, Contra Celsum, VI, 21; cf. Monum. mystères de Mithra, I, p. 118.

257. Apuleius, De dogm. Plat., I, 11.

258. Archiv für Religionsw., IX, 1906, p. 323 ss.

259. See, e.g., Plotin., III, 4, 6; cf. Lecture VIII, p. 213.