Part 16

Among all the forms of punishment that by fire predominates. The idea that the Erinyes burnt the damned with their torches is ancient, and the Pyriphlegethon is an igneous river surrounding Tartarus. Certain authors went beyond this. Lucian in his “True Histories” describes the island of the impious as an immense brazier whence rise sulphurous and pitchy flames. Thus was born into the world in the Greco-Roman period a doctrine which was to survive its fall and last to modern times. The ancients certainly connected this infernal fire with the treatment inflicted on those condemned to be burnt alive; but this exceptional punishment could not inspire an eschatological conception which included all the dead. The opinion has been advanced that the choice of fire was due to the belief that this element purifies.[436] Fire would have been at first the means of destroying, in the Beyond as in this world, the uncleanliness of souls, before it became the instrument of their eternal torture. But a scientific theory seems here to have influenced religious faith. The physicians admitted the existence of an incandescent mass in the interior of the earth, which produced volcanic eruptions and hot springs. As Tartarus was situated in the uttermost depths of the underworld, it was conceived as a vast brazier in which the sulphur and bitumen vomited by the volcanoes were boiling for the punishment of sinners.[437]

But this adaptation of the pains of Tartarus to contemporary physics could not save them from philosophical criticism. While the pagan priests, to the terror of credulous minds, imagined more and more inhuman punishments for the guilty souls, the reaction of reason against these cruel inventions necessarily gathered strength. We have seen elsewhere how the polemics of philosophers forcibly attacked these life-poisoning beliefs and succeeded in a great measure in destroying them.[438] Even those who did not deny the future life rejected these fables of hell. There was an attempt to save the principle of posthumous retribution by replacing the doctrine of chastisement in Hades by that of the metempsychosis. We now will try, while considering this theory of transmigration in its various aspects, to show how such substitution was effected.

* * * * *

The mind of savages does not, like our science, distinguish between three kingdoms of nature. It supposes the same energy to animate all the beings who surround us, all of whom are taken to be like ourselves. The primitives often attribute human or even divine intelligence to beasts; and the belief is found throughout the two hemispheres that the spirits of the dead can incarnate themselves in animals and even lodge in plants. Men refrain from the slaughter or gathering of certain species, from eating their flesh or fruit, for fear of hurting a chief or relative who has gone to inhabit them. This animistic basis is common to a number of different peoples and is at the foundation of the system of metempsychosis.

But that which makes the grandeur of this theory, which won countless adepts throughout the centuries and the world, is that it transformed this naïve idea, which had no moral bearing, into a doctrine of retribution and liberation. To come back to the earth, to imprison itself in a body which soiled and tortured it, became a punishment inflicted on the guilty soul. The soul could not attain to supreme felicity until it had purified itself by long suffering and had gradually, through a cycle of rebirths, freed itself from carnal passions.

It is infinitely probable that this doctrine of reincarnation in the bodies of animals was in Greece a foreign importation. Herodotus thought that it came from Egypt,[439] but it does not seem to have existed in that country in ancient times in the form of a regular succession of transmigrations. On the other hand, Greek metempsychosis shows a resemblance, striking even in details, to one of the fundamental conceptions of the religious thought of India, that of _samsâra_, which was accepted as a dogma there long before the birth of Buddhism. The most probable opinion is that this idea made its way across the Persian Empire and thus reached the Orphics and Pythagoreans. It is, however, not unlikely that, like Babylonian astrology, Hindu eschatology was propagated as far as Egypt at a comparatively recent date, that is, about the sixth century B. C., and that the information given by the father of history may be at least partly correct, Egypt having served as an intermediary between India and Greece.

We have not, however, to discuss here this problem of the origins of metempsychosis, nor to follow the development of the doctrine in ancient Greek philosophy. In the period with which we are concerned, it had already long been traditional in the Pythagorean and Platonic schools, it was not only a philosophical theory but also a tenet admitted by several religions. We can leave unanswered the questions of whether, as the ancients affirm, the Druids believed in it, being in this particular disciples of Pythagoras, and of whether the Etruscans were persuaded to it by the teaching of the philosopher of Croton. It is, however, certain that transmigration was in the East an article of widely held belief. We find it accepted by the mysteries of Mithras and by Manicheism, and it survives to our own day in Syria among the sects of the Druses,[440] the Yezidis and the Nosaïris.[441]

What was its form in the Roman period, and how was it brought into harmony with traditional or acquired ideas as to the future life?

The descent of the soul from heaven to earth is a fall; the body is a grave in which this soul is buried, a prison in which it is captive. These old Pythagorean doctrines were unceasingly renewed and repeated down to the end of antiquity. But the Orphic idea that this degradation was the chastisement for an original sin, the consequence of a crime committed by the Titans, who were the authors of our race, and that this hereditary taint of guilt had to be atoned for by their descendants, was either entirely forgotten or else, at the least, hardly regarded. The equally ancient conception that a bitter and cruel necessity constrained souls to incarnate themselves, was, on the contrary, emphasised in consequence of the spread of astrological fatalism. Their alternate descent and ascent was conceived as governed by a cosmic law, like the progress and regress of the planets.[442] The cycle of eternal generation (κύκλος γενέσεως) which is eternal, like the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, causes mind to circulate through matter which it animates.

This transmigration could be conceived in various ways. A first theory, in which the influence of Stoic pantheism can be recognised, lays stress on the identity of individual souls with the universal soul, of which they are particles. One single divine principle awakens life in all nature. It passes from being to being, quickening their various forms, and that which is said to be death is no more than a migration. The number of the souls that people the earth is determined from the beginning; they change their dwellings but not their essence. Hardly has the human soul left one body before it enters another. This continuous travelling causes it to go through all the degrees of the animal hierarchy. It will pass, successively, into a bird, a quadruped, a fish, a reptile, and then return to man. This is why it is impious to devour the flesh of our “lower brothers” and why the sage must practise vegetarianism. Some thinkers, however, drawing logical conclusions from the admitted premises, asserted that the life of the vegetable kingdom derived from the same migration as that of the animal kingdom and that the soul of man could enclose itself in plants. It was to this teaching that Seneca alluded when he gave the name of _Apocolocyntosis_, “Transformation to a Pumpkin,” to his satire on the apotheosis of the emperor Claudius.

This eschatological doctrine had in reality nothing in common with morality. If an uninterrupted chain unites the existence of all species, if life propagates itself fatally from man to the lower beings, this necessity seems to exclude all hope of posthumous reward. In order to bring the need of a retribution in after life into agreement with the belief in the fatal circle of migrations, it was stated that the good entered the souls of peaceful and tame animals, the wicked those of wild beasts. This is why Alexander of Abonotichos predicted to a devotee that he would be in after life first a camel, then a horse, and end by being a great prophet like himself.[443] Hermes Trismegistus even claimed to know that the just became eagles among birds, lions among quadrupeds, dragons among reptiles, dolphins among fish.[444] But the lot even of these privileged souls might not seem very enviable. The moralists, therefore, relaxed the rigour of the system and exempted noble spirits from bestial degradation. All souls were no longer condemned to dwell in the bodies of animals, but only those whose low inclinations had assimilated them to brutes. They inhabited the species which best conformed to their instincts. Thus debauchees became hogs in another life; cowards and sluggards, fish; the light-minded and frivolous, birds.[445] The pagan theologians ingeniously and laboriously interpreted the story of Circe’s changing the companions of Ulysses into beasts as an allegory of metempsychosis. _Circe_ became the _circle_ of the reincarnations which were undergone by those who emptied the magic cup of pleasure, and whence the wise Ulysses escaped, thanks to Hermes, that is, to reason which instructed him.[446]

Transmigration thus became less an inevitable law of nature than a punishment of the guilty. But this punishment did not overtake only those who were reborn in animal shape. All physical defects and moral taints, which afflict man from his entry into the world, were the consequence of his crimes in an earlier life. The old Pythagoreans combined the doctrine of the metempsychosis with that of the pains reserved for the wicked in a hell beneath the earth. But we have seen how the belief in the tortures of Hades was combated until it yielded and was discredited.[447] Metempsychosis dared to do without these incredible subterranean tortures and thereby acquired a new importance. It supplied the means of maintaining the dogma of posthumous retribution without imposing a blind faith in the foolish fables of the poets: souls were held to pass immediately from one body to another without leaving the earth, rising or sinking in the scale of beings in accordance with their merits or demerits. Thus Hades becomes our corporeal life in which we expiate the faults of a previous life. The Furies are the passions which strike us with their whips and burn us with their torches.[448] The ingeniousness of the theologians found an explanation for each of the tortures described by the old mythology. Tantalus threatened by the rock is the man obsessed by the fear of heavenly wrath; Tityus, whose entrails are devoured by vultures, is the lover whose heart is gnawed by care; Sisyphus rolling his rock becomes the ambitious man who exhausts himself with vain efforts; the Danaïdes carrying water in a leaking vessel, which empties as it is filled, are the insatiable souls who give themselves up to pleasure and never have enough of enjoyment. Even the old precepts of the Pythagorean school were twisted from their ordinary meaning and became symbols of this eschatology. A popular tabu, admitted by the sect, was formulated in the sentence, “If thou leave thy dwelling, turn not round lest the Erinyes pursue thee.” The first meaning of this prohibition, which is known to the folk-lore of many places, is that to turn round as one leaves one’s house is to run the risk of being assailed by the spirits who haunt the threshold. But the doctors of Neo-Pythagorism did not thus understand the saying. For them, the dwelling was the body, the Erinyes the passions: when souls left the body they must not return thither or the passions would attach themselves to them and make them their victims.[449]

* * * * *

Here, however, we touch on another form of metempsychosis. The ancients make a distinction between the doctrine of reincarnation or “reincorporation” (translating exactly the Greek word μετενσωμάτωσις), and rebirth or palingenesis (παλιγγενεσία). This latter word is not here taken in the Stoic sense of the eternal return of things, a series of cosmic cycles in which the same phenomena are exactly reproduced.[450] It is used to designate a transmigration separated by intervals, a process which is not continuous. In the first kind of metempsychosis there is, properly speaking, no rebirth, for the soul does not leave the earth, but there unceasingly accomplishes its circular journey through the living world. On the contrary, according to the second theory, it does not immediately resume possession of a body. It remains disincarnate for a long period of years—for Virgil as for Plato the number is one thousand—and thus leads a double existence of which its passages to this world take up only the lesser part. It is not even fatally constrained to redescend to the earth: if it has kept itself free from all corporeal defilement, it will soar to heaven and dwell there for ever.

But if, during his sojourn on the earth, man has given himself up to the pleasures of the senses, his soul becomes attached to his body. At first it cannot separate itself from the corpse, around which it circles, plaintively regretting the joys it has lost. It desires again to enter the flesh which was the instrument of its voluptuousness; it seeks a dwelling which will allow it to continue the sensual habits which have become its second nature. And so, when the time is accomplished, it is seized with an irresistible love for the body in which it is to enclose itself again; a fascination, like a magic charm, draws it to this object of its desires, which is to cause its misery. The fatality driving it to incarnation and suffering is not here an inevitable law of the universe but an inner necessity, a destiny which it has made for itself. The cosmic _Ananke_ has become psychic.

Thus every vicious tendency contracted by the soul during its abode in this world has for this soul consequences which their long duration makes more momentous. If virtue enables it to rise upward at each new birth and to acquire, as the ages revolve, an ever increasing perfection, perversion of character produces effects which are calamitous not only in this life but also in several other lives through the centuries. Moral laws are no less infallible than physical laws. Right or wrong, every act has to be paid for with harm or benefit in the long chain of incarnations. By his acquired disposition, man determines his future throughout a sequence of generations; the evil he suffers is to be imputed not to the creator but to himself. A bust of Plato found at Tivoli and now preserved in San Francisco[451] has graven on it the following sentence of the Master as to the lot of immortal souls: “The fault is the chooser’s; God is without fault”—Αἰτία ἑλομένω, ὁ θεὸς ἀναίτιος.

The very fact of birth was a pain for the soul, since it tore it from its celestial home and plunged it into a soiled and troubled world; consequently it was not necessary for the soul’s chastisement that it should descend into the body of animals. Indeed, certain thinkers rejected this kind of metempsychosis: a reasonable spirit could not, they held, dwell in a being deprived of reason. Transmigration occurred therefore exclusively from man to man and from beast to beast. Such was the opinion defended by Porphyry and Jamblichus, who, in order to dispose of the texts of Plato which were contrary to this theory, upheld that he spoke figuratively, and that his “asses,” his “wolves” and his “lions” signified persons who resembled these beasts in ignorance or ferocity.[452]

It is seen that this metempsychosis was getting far away from that which had its origin in the primitive beliefs. The “cycle of generation” was no longer conceived as a flux of life circulating throughout the variety of the animate beings peopling the earth, but as the descent and the ascent of a psychic essence, passing alternately from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven.

It is to these doctrines that Virgil alludes when in the Aeneid he shows us, gathered in a remote place of the Elysian Fields, the shades whom after a thousand years a god calls to come in a great troop to the river Lethe, there to drink the forgetfulness of the past, whereby “they begin again to wish to return to the body.”[453]

* * * * *

But the poet also gives us precious hints as to the lot reserved for the soul in the interval between its incarnations. For palingenesis, unlike the doctrine of perpetual reincorporation, left a place for chastisement in the infernal regions. These were however situated, as we have seen, for the Pythagoreans and Posidonius, whom Virgil interpreted, not on earth but in the air. It was there that the soul had to purify itself from the stains acquired while it was in touch with the flesh. This pollution, we know,[454] was conceived in a very material form. The texts speak of a thickening of the subtle substance of which the soul is formed, of concretions encrusting it, of indelible marks with which the vices stain it. When the soul left the corpse, of which it kept the form, it first, as we have seen, floated in the ambient air. When it was not weighed down by the matter with which it had become impregnated, the breath of the atmosphere raised it gently and, gradually warming it, bore it to the heavens, and this is why the Winds are often represented on tombstones.[455] But these Winds, fierce divinities, could also cause the soul to expiate its faults bitterly. If it had lost its purity and lightness, the whirlwinds drew it into their vortex, the storms rolled and buffeted it, thus violently tearing away the crust which had become attached to it. The souls were thus freed from defilements contracted during life just as linen hung in the air is bleached and loses all odour.

Their passage through the air did not complete their purification. In the East the idea was old that above the firmament was found the great reservoir of the waters which fell to the ground as rain. Beyond, a burning zone must extend, where the heavenly bodies were lit, and a river of fire, identified with the Pyriphlegethon of the Greeks, was imagined. These old mythological ideas were brought into relation with Stoic physics: above the region of the winds stretched that of the clouds, in which the rain, the snow and the hail were formed, and higher still there was the burning air, in which the lightning flashed and which touched the starry spheres. The souls must blaze a path through these obstacles. After being tossed and blown about by the winds, they were drenched by rain and plunged into the gulf of the upper waters. They reached at last the fires of heaven, of which the heat scorched them. Not till they had undergone this threefold trial, in the course of which they had passed through countless years of expiation, did they at length find peace in the serenity of the luminous ether.[456]

Virgil,[457] in the passage already quoted, alludes to this doctrine when, in speaking of the souls, he says:

“... Aliae panduntur inanes Suspensae ad ventos, aliis sub gurgite vasto Infectum eluitur scelus, aut exuritur igni.”

“Some are exposed, hung lightly to the winds; as to others, the crime infecting them is washed away in a deep gulf or burnt by fire.”

In an eschatological myth, which Plutarch[458] borrows from Demetrius of Tarsus, he shows us guilty souls who seek to reach the moon and who do not arrive thither, but are hunted and buffeted as by swelling billows, and others who have reached the goal, but are rejected and plunged from on high into the abyss. Similarly, Hermes Trismegistus depicts souls flung from the height of heaven into the depths of the atmosphere and delivered to the storms and whirlwinds of warring air, water and fire. Their eternal punishment is to be tossed and carried in different directions by the cosmic waves which roll unceasingly between earth and heaven.[459]

The passage of souls through the elements is represented symbolically on a funeral monument almost contemporary with the verses of Virgil, which was discovered near Scarbantia in Pannonia.[460] Above the portraits of the deceased, there appear first in the spandrels of this _cippus_ two busts of the winds facing each other. Higher up, on the architrave, are two Tritons, and on each side of a trident two dolphins, which evidently represent the idea of the watery element. Finally, at the top of the stone, in the pediment, we see two lions. The lion, for physical and astrological reasons, was considered as the symbol of fire, the igneous principle.

We have seen[461] that for the doctrine which placed the limit of the dwelling of the gods and the elect in the zone of the moon, another was substituted according to which the souls, in order to regain the purity of their original nature, had to traverse the spheres of the planets to reach the heaven of fixed stars. The trials of purgatory had to be prolonged up to the entry into the dwelling of the blessed. The idea was, therefore, conceived of attributing each of the planets to one of the elements. The moon was the ethereal earth, Mercury the water, Venus the air, the sun the fire: and inversely, Mars was the fire, Jupiter the air, Saturn the water, and the sphere of the stars the celestial earth, in which lay the Elysian Fields. Thus the soul, in order to be saved, had to be reborn three times in virtue of a triple passage through the four elements.[462]

This last doctrine, which is connected with astrological speculations, seems to have had only a limited vogue and to have been of ephemeral duration. On the other hand, the idea of a purgatory situated in the atmosphere between our earth and the moon, a place in which souls were purified not only by fire but also by air and water, was long to survive the fall of paganism and to be propagated through the Middle Ages in the West as in the East. For Dante, purgatory still occupied a fiery zone stretched between the terrestrial and the celestial circles.

* * * * *

Was the soul which, after a long expiation, had reached the Elysian Fields and the sphere of the stars, always to descend thence, seized with a blind love for the body, and to pass again through the trials of another earthly life? No, the ancient Orphics already flattered themselves that by their cathartic rites they obtained for the soul an escape from the fatal cycle of generation and regaining of heaven for ever. The Pythagoreans inherited this doctrine, which they kept until the Roman period. In spite of the contrary opinion of certain thinkers, pagan philosophers and priests generally taught that after pilgrimages, more or less long, after a succession of deaths and rebirths, the purified spirits returned to dwell for ever in their celestial country. It was to this goal that the mysteries promised to lead their initiate; this was the end which the sages flattered themselves that they attained by their virtue.

It will be understood that such a hope, combined with the suppression of eternal damnation in Hades, led necessarily to the doctrine of the eventual salvation of all souls. We know this system especially through Origen, but he merely reproduced a theory to which the evolution of pagan ideas had led.