Part 5

Towards the end of the Republic the mysteries of Isis and Serapis, which had come from Alexandria and had already spread through the south of Italy, established themselves in Rome and maintained themselves there in spite of opposition from the senate. Under the Empire, the Egyptian religion displayed all the pomp of its liturgy in magnificent temples and had a number of votaries in every province. The cult of Osiris, of which that of Serapis was a form, was originally a cult of the fields, like that of Attis, and the great feast which its adherents celebrated in autumn recalls the Phrygian spring feasts. The death of Osiris, whose body had been torn to pieces by Seth, was mourned; and when Isis had found the scattered fragments of the corpse, joined them together and reanimated it, noisy rejoicing followed the lamentation. Like the initiates of Cybele and Attis, those of Isis and Serapis were associated with the passion and resurrection of their god. And, in the same way, the oldest conception of immortality in these mysteries was that the departed went down into the infernal regions, where a man became another Serapis, a woman another Isis, which is to say that they were assimilated to the gods who had granted them salvation.[92] This is why on numerous funeral reliefs the dead man, who has become a hero and is shown lying on a couch, bears on his head the bushel (_modius_) which is the attribute of Serapis. In consequence, however, of the identification of this god with Dionysos, the joys beyond the grave are also represented as a feast in the Elysian Fields at which the great master of banquets presides.[93]

All these mysteries conceive immortality as a descent of the dead into Hades. For them, the kingdom of the dead lies in the bosom of the earth. Those who have been initiated will there enjoy a felicity made up of purely material pleasures, or they will be identified with the powers who reign over the nether world and will have part in their divine life. It will be noticed how closely this last conception approached to that of ancient Stoicism, according to which the various parts of the human organism, dissociated by death, were to regain their integrity in the divine elements of the universe.

Quite another doctrine was propagated by the Syrian cults and the Persian mysteries of Mithras, which spread in the West in the first century of our era. These religions taught that the soul of the just man does not go below the ground but rises to the sky, there to enjoy divine bliss in the midst of the stars in the eternal light. Only the wicked were condemned to roam the earth’s surface, or were dragged by the demons into the dusky depths in which the spirit of evil reigned. Opinions differed as to the region of heaven in which the souls of the elect dwelt. The “Chaldeans,” who looked upon the sun as the master and the intelligence of the universe, made him the author of human reason, which returned to him after it had left the body, while for the priests of Mithras the spirit rose, by way of the planetary spheres, to the summit of the heavens. We will have to examine later the different forms of astral immortality.[94] But you will already have noticed how nearly this immortality, as formulated by the Iranian and Semitic sects, approximated to the doctrine taught by Pythagorism and adopted by Neo-Stoicism.

This meeting of the two doctrines was not an effect of chance. The idea that souls are related to the celestial fires, whence they descend at birth and whither they reascend at death, had probably been borrowed by the ancient Pythagoreans from the astral religions of the East. Recent research seems to have established the fact of its Chaldeo-Persian origin. But the Greek philosophers, according to their wont, defined and developed this idea in an original way. In the Hellenistic period, when they adopted astrology, they were subject for the second time to the ascendancy of the scientific religion of the “Chaldeans”; and, in their turn, they reacted on the Oriental cults when these spread in the Graeco-Roman world. We have sure evidence that the mysteries of Mithras were, in particular, strongly affected by the influence of the Pythagorean sect, which was itself organised like a kind of mystery. In a more general way, philosophy introduced into the mysteries ethical ideas and, instead of the purely ritualistic or rather magical means of salvation, some moral requirements became necessary to earn immortality.

There is here a mass of actions and reactions of which the details escape us; but we can form some idea of such a syncretism from the remains of the theological writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, from the writings, that is, which are supposed to contain the revelations of the Egyptian god Thot. This professedly Egyptian wisdom includes a number of ideas and definitions which are characteristic of Posidonius and Neo-Pythagorism. The Greek and the Egyptian elements are so closely associated in it that it is very difficult to separate the one from the other. We find another example of the same mixture in the “Chaldaic Oracles,” which were probably composed about the year 200 of our era and which became one of the sacred books of Neo-Platonism. Unlike the Hermetic writings, this collection of verses does indeed seem to have belonged to a sect practising an actual cult: its greater part is taken up with mythology, and the fantastic mysticism of the East is more prominent here than in the Hermetic lore, but the mind of the compiler of these revelations was also penetrated by the ideas which the Greek masters had widely circulated.

The tenet of astral immortality, which philosophy shared with the cults emanating from Syria and Persia, imposed itself on the ancient world. It is curious to notice how it was introduced into the theology of the very mysteries to which it was at first foreign: Attis ended by becoming a solar god, and thenceforward it was in the heights of heaven that Cybele was united to the souls she had prevented from wandering in darkness and had saved from hell. The priests of the Alexandrian divinities were similarly to explain that the dead had not their dwelling in the interior of our globe, but that the “subterranean” (ὑπόγειος) kingdom of Serapis was situated beneath the earth, that is, in the lower hemisphere of heaven, bounded by the line of the horizon.[95]

According as the Oriental religions were more largely propagated, faith in a new eschatology spread gradually among the people; and although memories and survivals of the old belief in the life of the dead in the grave and the shade’s descent into the infernal depths may have lingered, the doctrine which predominated henceforward was that of celestial immortality.

The distance separating the age of Augustus from that of the Flavians on this point can be measured by reading Plutarch’s moral works (about 120 A. D.). A constant preoccupation with religious matters, and in particular a learned curiosity as to the cults of the East, shows itself in this Greek of Chaeronea, living in a country which, in its pride in its own past, had more than any other resisted the invasion of exoticism. Further, the eclectic philosopher likes to insert in his dissertations myths in which, after the fashion of Plato, he expounds the lot of souls in the Beyond and their struggle to rise heavenwards. An attempt has been made to prove—wrongly, I think—that he is here inspired by Posidonius. These apocalyptic visions, which claim to reveal truths previously ignored, are not taken from that well-known writer; they have a religious imprint which betrays sacerdotal influence, and the philosophic ideas they contain are those which were part of the common wisdom of the Pythagoreans and the mysteries.

There doubtless still were in the second century Stoics, like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, for whom the future life was a mere hypothesis, or at most a hope (p. 14), as well as sceptics, like Lucian of Samosata, whose irony mocked all beliefs. But gradually their number diminished and the echo of their voices grew feebler. Faith in survival deepened as present life came to seem a burden harder and harder to bear. The pessimistic idea that birth is a chastisement and that the true life is not that passed on earth, imposed itself in proportion to the growth of public and private ills and to the aggravation of the empire’s social and moral decline. In the period of violence and devastation which occurred in the third century, there was so much undeserved suffering, there were so many unjust failures and unpunished crimes, that men took refuge in the expectation of a better life in which all the iniquity of this world would be retrieved. No earthly hope then brightened life. The tyranny of a corrupt bureaucracy stifled every attempt at political progress. Science seemed exhausted and no longer discovered unknown truths; art was struck with sterility of invention and reproduced heavily the creations of the past. An increasing impoverishment and a general insecurity constantly discouraged the spirit of enterprise. The idea spread that humanity was smitten by incurable decay, that society was on the road to dissolution and the end of the world was impending. All these causes of discouragement and pessimism must be remembered in order to understand the dominance of the old idea, then so often repeated, that a bitter necessity constrains the spirit of man to enclose itself in matter, and that death is a liberation which delivers it from its carnal prison. In the heavy atmosphere of a period of oppression and powerlessness, the despondent souls of men aspired with ineffable ardour to the radiant spaces of heaven.

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The mental evolution of Roman society was complete when Neo-Platonism took upon itself the office of directing minds. The powerful mysticism of Plotinus (205–262 A. D.) opened up the path which Greek philosophy was to follow until the world of antiquity reached its end. We shall not undertake to notice in this place the discrepancies of the latest teachers who theorised about the destiny of souls. In the course of these lectures we shall have occasion to quote some of the opinions of Porphyry, the chief disciple of Plotinus, and of his successor Jamblichus, who was, like himself, a Syrian. We will here do no more than indicate broadly what distinguished the theories of this school from those which had hitherto been dominant.

The system generally accepted, by the mysteries as by philosophy, was a pantheism according to which divine energy was immanent in the universe and had its home in the celestial spheres. The souls, conceived as material, could in consequence rise to the stars but did not leave the world. The Neo-Pythagoreans themselves had not had a very firmly established doctrine on this point: while some of them stated that reason was incorporeal, others, as we have seen (p. 24), admitted with the Stoics that it was an igneous substance. It is true that even in paganism the appearance can be discerned of the belief in a Most High (Ὕψιστος) or an unknown god Ἄγνωστος, whom some people supposed to dwell above the starry heavens, beyond the limits of the world, and towards whom pious spirits could rise. The revivers of Platonic idealism asserted the transcendence of God and the spirituality of the soul more strongly and clearly. A whole chapter of the _Enneades_ of Plotinus is taken up with refuting those who held the soul to be material.[96] As a principle of life and movement, it is stated to be immortal by its very essence, so that if it kept its purity perfect, it would find after its passage here below eternal felicity in the intelligible world.

The Neo-Platonists preserved the idea, which had previously been admitted, that this intellectual essence comes down to earth through the planetary spheres and the atmosphere, and that as it sinks in the luminous ether and the damp air, it becomes laden with particles of the elements through which it passes. It surrounds itself with a garment or, as it is sometimes called, with a vehicle (ὄχημα) which thickens as it gradually draws near us.[97] This subtle body, the seat of the passions and of feeling, is intermediary between the spiritual principle which has issued from God and the flesh in which it is to enclose itself, and for certain philosophers it survives death and accompanies the soul to the Beyond, at least if the soul, not being free from earthly admixture, cannot wholly leave the world of sense, and therefore rises only to the planetary circle or to that of the fixed stars.

When the soul has suffered even more from the taint to which its contact with matter, the source of evil, exposes it, it is doomed to reincarnate itself in a new body and again to undergo the trial of this life. When it has become incurably corrupt and burdened with evil, it goes down into the depths of Hades.

Following Plato, Plotinus and his successors have adopted the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. They have even developed it, as we shall see,[98] together with the whole pessimistic and ascetic conception of life, the conception which looks at birth as a pain and a fall, a temporary subjection to a body from which emancipation must be sought. It is only after this liberation that the soul can reach perfect wisdom; it must no longer be troubled by the senses if it is to attain to the end of existence, to union with God.

This union can be realised even during this life in moments of ecstasy, in which the soul rises above thought and gives itself up entirely to love for the ineffable Unity in which it is absorbed. Like many other mystics, Plotinus disdains the ceremonies of positive cults: they were superfluous to the sage who could of himself enter into communion with the supreme Being. But even his disciple Porphyry conceded a greater value to rites and initiations. If they were powerless to lead the partakers of mysteries to the highest degree of perfection, their effect yet was to render men worthy to live among the visible gods who people heaven.[99] But only philosophical wisdom could rise to the intelligible world and the Unknowable.

The principle of a mystical relation between man and the divinity was to lead Neo-Platonism to more and more reverence for religious traditions. For it was held that in the past the revelation of truth had been granted by Heaven not only to divine Plato and the sages of Greece, but to all the founders of barbarous cults and authors of sacred writings. They all communicated profound teaching, which they sometimes hid beneath the veil of allegory. Inspired by the symbolism of the Pythagoreans, the last representatives of Greek philosophy claimed to rediscover the whole of Platonic metaphysics and the Platonic doctrine of immortality in the myths and rites of paganism. The speeches of Julian the Apostate on the Sun-King and the Mother of the Gods are characteristic examples of this bold exegesis, destitute of all critical and even all common sense, which was adopted by the last champions of the old beliefs.

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These aberrations of Neo-Platonic thought must not hide the school’s historical importance from us, any more than the excesses of the superstitious theurgy which invaded it. When it revived Plato’s idealism, it produced a lasting change in the eschatological ideas which prevailed in paganism, and it deeply influenced even the Christian doctrines of immortality held since the fourth century. This will be better seen, we hope, in the course of these lectures.[100] It may be said that the conception of the lot of souls which reigned at the end of antiquity persisted on the whole through the Middle Ages—the immaterial spirits of the just rising through the planetary spheres to the Supreme Being enthroned above the zone of the fixed stars; the posthumous purification of those whom life has sullied in a purgatory intermediary between heaven and hell; the descent of the wicked into the depths of the earth where they suffered eternal chastisement. This threefold division of the universe and of souls was largely accepted at the time of the Empire’s decline by pagans and by Christians, and after long centuries it was again to find magnificent expression in Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Before it could be destroyed astronomy had to destroy the whole cosmography of Posidonius and Ptolemy on which it was based. When the earth ceased to be the centre of the universe, the one fixed point in the midst of the moving circles of the skies, and became a tiny planet turning round another heavenly body, which itself moved in the immensity of space, among an infinity of similar stars, the naïve conception formed by the ancients of the journey of souls in a well-enclosed world could no longer be maintained. The progress of science discredited the convenient solution bequeathed to scholasticism by antiquity, and left us in the presence of a mystery of which the pagan mysteries never had even a suspicion.

I

AFTER LIFE IN THE TOMB

When Cicero in his _Tusculans_[101] first touches on the question of the immortality of the soul, he begins by citing in its support the fact that belief in it has existed since earliest antiquity. He states that unless the first Romans were convinced that man was not reduced to nought, when he left this life, and that all feeling was not extinguished in death, there could be no explanation of the rules of the old pontifical law as to funerals and burials, rules the violation of which was regarded as an inexpiable crime. This remark is that of a very judicious observer. There subsist in the funeral rites of all peoples, in the ceremony of mourning established by the religious law or by tradition, customs which derive from archaic conceptions of life beyond the tomb and which are still followed although their original meaning is no longer understood. Modern learning has sometimes successfully sought to elucidate them, borrowing light from the practices of savage peoples and from European folk-lore. We will not enter the domain of these researches, for since our special purpose here is to expound the ideas as to immortality held in later times, we have to consider only the beliefs which were still alive in that period. A false interpretation supplied by a philosopher may have more historical value for us than the true explanation of an institution which had lost its meaning.

But even among the ideas which were neither obliterated nor discredited, conceptions which originated at very different dates have to be distinguished.

The doctrines of paganism, like the soil of our planet, are formed of superimposed strata. When we dig into them we discover successive layers under the upper deposits of recent alluvia. Nothing was suddenly destroyed in ancient religions; their transformations were never revolutionary. Faith in the past was not entirely abolished when new ways of believing were formed. Contradictory opinions could exist side by side for a long time without any shock being caused by their disagreement; and it was only little by little and slowly that argument excluded one way of thinking to give place to the other, while there were always hardy survivals left, both in thought and in customs. Thus the beliefs as to the future life which were current under the Roman Empire present a singular mixture, coarse ideas going back to the prehistoric period mingling with theories imported into Italy at a late date.

We will today examine the oldest of all the ways of considering survival in the Beyond: life in the tomb.

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Ethnology has proved that among all peoples the belief that the dead continue to live in the tomb has reigned, and sometimes still reigns. The primitive man, disconcerted by death, cannot persuade himself that the being who moved, felt, willed, as he does, can be suddenly deprived of all his faculties. The most ancient and the crudest idea is that the corpse itself keeps some obscure sensitiveness which it cannot manifest. It is imagined to be in a state like sleep. The vital energy which animated the body is still attached to it and cannot exist without it. This belief was so powerful in Egypt that it inspired a whole section of the funeral ritual and called forth the infinite care that was taken to preserve mummies. Even in the West it survived vaguely, and traces of it might still be discovered today. Lucretius combats this invincible illusion of men who, even while they affirm that death extinguishes all feeling, keep a secret uneasiness as to the suffering which their mortal remains may undergo and are frightened by the idea that their bodies may be eaten by worms or carnivorous animals. They cannot separate themselves from this prone body, which they believe is still their self. Why, continues the poet, would it be more painful to be the prey of wild beasts than to be burnt by the flame of the pyre, to freeze lying on the icy slab of the grave or to be crushed by the weight of heaped-up earth?[102] This very fear that the earth may weigh heavily on those who are deposited in the grave shows itself among many peoples who inter their dead, and was expressed in Rome by a formula so very usual that it was recalled in epitaphs by initials only: “_S(it) t(ibi) t(erra) l(evis)_,” “May earth be light for thee.” Until the Empire Stoic philosophers could be found who upheld that the soul endures only for the time for which the body is preserved.[103]

But experience proved that the corpse decomposed rapidly in the soil, all that remained of it being a skeleton bereft of the organs of sensation. When the custom of incineration, followed in Italy from the prehistoric period, became practically general in Rome, the destruction of the body took place regularly before the eyes of those present. Thus men reached the belief that those near and dear to them, whom they sometimes saw again in their dreams or seemed to feel beside them, who were kept alive at least in memory, differed from the beings of flesh and bones whom they had known. From those material individuals subtle elements detached themselves, filled with a mysterious force which subsisted when the human organism had crumbled to dust or been reduced to ashes. It was this same principle which temporarily departed from persons who lost consciousness in a faint or a lethargy. If this light essence did not leave a dying man at the moment of his death—whether or not it could escape from his body immediately was indeed uncertain—it was set free by the funeral fire,[104] but it still inhabited the tomb in which his remains rested. The idea that it was somehow attached to his remains had taken root in men’s minds, and even literature bears witness to the persistence of this deeply implanted popular belief. Propertius,[105] when cursing a woman, desires that “her Manes may not be able to settle near her ashes.” And at Liternum in Campania, where Scipio Africanus caused himself to be buried because, as he said, he did not wish to leave even his bones to his ungrateful country, the grotto was shown where he rested and where, so men believed,[106] “a serpent kept guard over his Manes.”