Part 12

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

V

UNTIMELY DEATH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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