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 wellspring, and by the side thereof standing a white cypress. To this wellspring 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’ cart. And often nothing would indicate that these travelers 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 labors 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 moldings 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 labor 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 labor 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 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 Saint 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 favorite 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.

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 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 color. 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 color 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 color 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 vapor, 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 colored 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 neighborhood 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.

FOOTNOTES

357. See above, Lecture II, p. 74.

358. Transl. Harrison, Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion, 1903, p. 660.

359. Thulin, Etruskische Disciplin, III, 1909, p. 58 ss.

360. Xenoph., Memorab., II, 1, 21; cf. Hesiod, Op. et dies, 287 ss.

361. Brinkmann, Rheinisches Museum, LXVI, 1911, p. 622 ss.

362. See below, Lecture VIII, p. 205.

363. See Lecture II, p. 76.

364. Cic., Tusc., I, 30, 72.

365. See above, Lecture III, p. 82.

366. See above, Lecture III, p. 94.

367. Cf. Comptes rendus Acad. Inscr., 1920, p. 277.

368. Lactantius, Inst., VI, 3 s.

369. Polyaen., VII, 22.

370. See Lecture III, p. 107; Monum. mystères de Mithra, I, p. 118 s.; II, p. 525.

371. Philo, De somniis, I, 22; Origen, Contra Celsum, VI, 21.

372. Charles R. Morey, East Christian paintings in the Freer collection, New York, 1914, p. 17 ss.

373. Ladder among other magical emblems on terra cotta discs found at Taranto; cf. Revue archéologique, V, 1917, p. 102.

374. See above, Lecture III, p. 93.

375. Ibid., p. 96.

376. Cf. Revue de philologie, XLIV, 1920, p. 75.

377. Cf. Joseph Keil, Jahresh. Instituts Wien, XVII, 1914, pp. 138, 142, n. 13; Bormann, Bericht des Vereins Carnuntum, 1908–1911, p. 330, where Itala felix applies not to the ship but to the dead woman.

378. For instance, Dessau, Inscr. sel., 8031.

379. Cf. my Études syriennes, 1917, p. 99, n. 1. So on the beautiful chariot of Monteleone in the Metropolitan Museum of New York (sixth century B. C.).

380. Cf. my Études syriennes, p. 91 s.

381. Ibid., p. 92, fig. 41.

382. Ibid., p. 94, fig. 42; cf. below, p. 165.

383. Cf. ibid., p. 95 s.

384. II Reg., 2, 11.

385. Kornemann, Klio, VII, p. 278; cf. Études syriennes, p. 98, n. 3.

386. Eunap., Hist., fr. 26 (F. H. G. IV, 25; cf. Études syriennes, p. 104).

387. See above, Lecture III, p. 102.

388. Weichert, Der Seelenvogel in der alten Literatur und Kunst, Leipzig, 1902; see above, Lecture III, p. 93.

389. Études syriennes, p. 38 ss.

390. Phaedr., p. 246 C.

391. Anth. Pal., VII, 62 = Diog. Laert., III, 44; cf. Études syriennes, p. 88: Αἰετέ τίπτε βέβηκας ὑπὲρ τάφον; ἢ τίνος, εἰπέ, ἀστεροέντα θεῶν οἶκον ἀποσκοπέεις;— Ψυχῆς εἰμὶ Πλάτωνος ἀποπταμένης εἰς Ὄλυμπον εἰκών· σῶμα δὲ γῆ γηγενὲς Ἀτθὶς ἔχει.

392. Cf. Études syriennes, p. 57 ss.

393. Études syriennes, 1917, p. 87, fig. 39.

394. See Introd., p. 28.

395. See Lecture III, p. 100.

396. Études syriennes, p. 106 s.; cf. Lecture III, p. 101.

397. See Lecture I, p. 59.

398. Diog. Laert., VIII, 1, 27.

399. Jul., Or., V, p. 172 C.

400. Cic., Tusc., I, 42 ss.; Sextus Empir., Adv. Math., IX, 71, 4; cf. above, Introd., p. 29.

401. Winds and souls, see below, Lecture VII, p. 185.

402. See below, Lecture VII, p. 186; cf. Lecture II, p. 81.

403. See Introd., p. 29; cf. Lecture VII, p. 185.

404. See below, Lecture VII, p. 185.

405. See above, Lecture III, p. 93, and p. 96 s.

406. Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie2, 1910.

407. Plato, Phaedo, p. 107 D, 108 B.

408. Kaibel, Epigr. Graeca, 650 = Inscr. Sic. Ital., 2461.

409. Haussoullier, Revue de philologie, XXIII, 1909, p. 6; cf. Lecture III, p. 105.

410. See above, Lecture IV, p. 112.

411. Cf. Rohde, Psyche, II4, p. 376 s.

412. See above, Lecture I, p. 45 ss., 59 ss.

413. Cf. Cic., Tusc., I, 16, 37.

414. See below, Lecture VIII, p. 199 ss.

415. Lucretius, I, 124: “Simulacra modis pallentia miris.”

416. See, for instance, above, p. 156.

417. Cf. Proclus, In Rempubl., I, p. 290, 10 ss., Kroll.

418. On this katoptromanteia, cf. Revue archéologique, V, 1917, p. 105 ss.; Ganschinietz in Realencycl., s. v.

419. See above, Lecture V, p. 130.

420. See above, Lecture II, p. 79.

421. Cf. Revue de philologie, XLIV, 1920, p. 237 ss.

422. See Lecture III, p. 103.

423. Cf. Lecture III, p. 107.

424. Plato, Phaedr., 247 B; cf. Phaedo, p. 113 D.

425. Timaeus, p. 41 D E.

426. See above, Lecture III, p. 106 s., and Introd., p. 41; cf. p. 24.