Part 14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.