Part 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

THE SUFFERINGS OF HELL AND METEMPSYCHOSIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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