Part 7

This soul was often imagined as a bird in flight and we will see elsewhere the conclusions drawn from this naïve conception.[141] Here we wish merely to indicate how the idea of the aerial soul was combined with that of the spirit inhabiting the tomb. This shade or simulacrum of those who were no longer of this world, but who still existed, since they showed themselves to the living in their previous guise, was a body like the wind—intangible, invisible, save when it thickened like clouds or smoke. A multitude of these vaporous beings, innumerable as past generations, moved unceasingly on the earth’s surface, and, above all, roamed around the tombs, where they were retained by their attachment to their bodies. Whether, like the Greeks, men identified them with the “demons,” or, like the Romans, called them “Manes gods,” “_genii_” or “_lemures_,” or by other names, the unanimous opinion was that their power was superior to that of mankind and that they caused it to be felt by a constant intervention in the affairs of human society.

It was generally held that if the required cult were not rendered them, they would punish this neglect with wrath, but that they showed their benevolence to those who deserved it by zeal in serving them.[142] The dead were capable, like the living, of gratitude as well as of resentment. The greater had been their power in this world, the more considerable it remained in the other, and the more advantage there was in securing their protection or even their co-operation.

Servius reports the existence of the singular belief that souls had to swear to Pluto never to help those they had left behind them on earth to escape from their destiny.[143] Such was, then, the extent of their supposed power. But all the dead were not, like some of the heroes who had become the equals of the gods, capable of performing prodigious deeds. Many, gifted with less force, were concerned with lesser interests; they did no more than protect their family, the domestic hearth and the neighbouring field, and render small daily services. “Farewell, Donata, thou who wast pious and just,” says an epitaph, “guard all thy kin.”[144]

The idea that the ancestors become the tutelary spirits of their descendants who were faithful to their duty to them, goes back to the remotest antiquity and probably lies at the foundation of the cult of the Lares.[145] But the field of action of these genii was multiple, since they were a multitude, and their functions underwent a further development when they were considered to be the equivalents of the demons of the Greeks. “The souls of the dead,” Maximus of Tyre[146] tells us, “mingle with all kinds of men, with every destiny, thought and pursuit of man; they support the good, succour the oppressed and punish the criminal.” Plotinus, recalling the universal custom of paying cult to those who have gone, adds: “Many souls which belonged to men do not cease to do good to men when they have left the body. They come to their aid especially in granting them revelations.”[147]

The wish is therefore entertained to see in dreams those who have left an empty place in the family dwelling or the marriage couch. A woman whom a murder has separated from her young husband prays the most holy Manes to be indulgent to him and to allow her to see him again during the hours of the night.[148] But it was not only in dreams that men hoped to descry again those who were lost to sight. “If tears are of any avail,” says another epitaph, “show thyself by apparitions (_visis_).”[149] Is it a question here also of nocturnal apparitions? Perhaps; but the belief that the spirits of the dead returned to the earth and made themselves visible to people who were wide awake met with very little incredulity among the ancients. It was not only the common man who accepted it; most thinkers upheld this opinion. Lucian[150] shows us a meeting of philosophers in which no one doubts “that there are demons and phantoms and that the souls of the dead do wander on earth and show themselves to whom they please.” A single fact will suffice to prove how general was this conviction. The sober historian Dio Cassius[151] relates that in his time, more precisely in the year 220 A. D., a demon (who was evidently a flesh and blood impostor) appeared in the Danubian countries in the form of Alexander the Great. He was followed by four hundred Bacchantes carrying the thyrsus and the nebris. This troop went through all Thracia without doing any harm to the inhabitants, who hastened to give them shelter and food, and not a single official dared oppose their passage. Arrived near Chalcedon, the pseudo-Alexander made a strange sacrifice one night, burying a wooden horse, and thereupon immediately disappeared.

Like modern spiritualists, the ancients saw in these apparitions an irrefutable proof of the after life. “Thou who doubtest the existence of the Manes,” we read on the tomb of two young girls, “invoke us after making a vow and thou wilt understand.”[152] Revelations were indeed to be expected of the wisdom of the disincarnate souls. In spite, therefore, of the laws forbidding magic, necromancy never ceased to be practised. By a nocturnal sacrifice, analogous to that offered on tombs (p. 52) and by the virtue of their incantations, the wizards obliged the dead to appear before them and answer their questions. The poets and romancers liked to introduce in their works descriptions of the atrocious ceremonies which were intended to give momentary life even to a corpse and cause it to pronounce oracles.

The dead in these scenes often appear as restive and even hostile beings who were forced to such actions by the power of witchcraft. The dominant feeling among all peoples is indeed that the dead are unhappy and therefore malevolent. They were believed to be excessively sensitive: great care must be taken to do nothing to offend them. If their rights were overlooked, if they were forgotten, they showed their wrath by sending illnesses and scourges to the guilty. This unpleasant and sometimes cruel, even ferocious character of the Manes is very marked in Rome, perhaps in consequence of the influence of the Etruscans or the beliefs concerning after life. A legend had it that the ceremonies of the _Parentalia_ having on one occasion been omitted, the plaintive ghosts scattered about the town and the fields and caused many deaths.[153] What we know of the rites performed at the _Lemuria_ and at funerals shows that they tended to protect the house against the spirits haunting it and to rid it of them. “The dead are welcome neither to the gods nor to men,” says an old Latin inscription.[154] To the family _Lares_ who protected a household, the _larvae_ were opposed, the wandering phantoms who spread terror and evil. “Spare thy mother, thy father and thy sister,” we read on a tomb, “in order that after me they may celebrate the traditional rites for thee.”[155] This hostile character attributed to inhabitants of the tombs explains the custom of placing in them leaden tablets on which curses were written calling down the most frightful ills on enemies. A large number of these _tabellae defixionum_ in Greek and Latin have been found and they prove the frequency of this practice, which has perhaps an Oriental origin.[156] But the _devotio_ to the Manes gods is an old Roman ceremony, which proceeds from the idea that they endeavour to tear the living from the earth and draw them to themselves.

* * * * *

There is one class of the dead which is peculiarly noxious, those namely who have not been buried. The ideas connected with them are so characteristic of the oldest conception of immortality that these ἄταφοι _insepulti_ deserve to detain us for a few moments.

From the most ancient times the beliefs reigned among all the peoples of antiquity that the souls of those who are deprived of burial find no rest in the other life. If they have no “eternal house” they are like homeless vagabonds. But the fact that the dead had been buried did not suffice; their burial must also have been performed according to the traditional rites. Perhaps the liturgical formulas were supposed to have power to keep the shade in the tomb, as other incantations could summon it thence. Above all, however, it was believed, as we have already stated, that when the dead had not obtained the offerings to which they had the right, they suffered and that their unquiet spirits fluttered near the corpse and wandered upon the surface of the earth and the waters, taking vengeance on men for the ills men had inflicted on them.

The denial of interment was thought to be the source of infinite torment for the dead as for the living, and to throw earth on abandoned corpses was a pious duty. The pontiffs, who believed the sight of a corpse made them unclean, might not for all that leave it unburied if they happened to find one on their way. To bury the dead has remained a work of mercy in the Church, and in Rome a confraternity still exists which brings in from far away the dead found lying in the desert Campagna. The pain represented by lack of burial was the worst chastisement called down by imprecations on enemies on whom vengeance was desired. Among believers it gave rise to an anxiety comparable with that which the refusal of the last sacrament now causes to Roman Catholics. In the Greek cities, as in Rome, the law often condemned to it those who had committed suicide or had been executed, hoping thus to divert desperate and outrageous men from their fatal design by the apprehension of a wretched lot in the Beyond.[157] Sometimes the law merely laid down that the guilty must not be interred in the soil of their country, an almost equally terrible penalty, since it cut them off from the family cult, by which their descendants could give satisfaction to their Manes. When, therefore, through some accident, a traveller or soldier died abroad or was shipwrecked at sea, his body was, when possible, brought back to his country, or, if this could not be done, a cenotaph was raised to him, and his soul was summoned aloud to come and inhabit the dwelling prepared for it. When cremation became general in Rome, the old pontifical law invented another subterfuge which allowed the ancient rites to be accomplished: a finger was cut from the body before it was carried to the pyre, and earth was thrown three times on this “resected bone” (_os resectum_).

Against these ancient beliefs, which were the source of so much anguish and so many superstitions, the philosophers fought energetically. First the Cynics and then the Epicureans and the Stoics endeavoured to show their absurdity. They are fond of quoting the answer of Theodore the Atheist to Lysimachus who was threatening him with death without burial—“What matters it whether I rot on the earth or under it?” Since the corpse was unconscious and without any sensibility, it was indeed of no consequence whether it were burnt or buried, eaten by worms or by crows. Why should it be a misfortune to die abroad? Only the living had a country; the whole earth was the dwelling of the dead. If such cares troubled men they were the victims of the invincible illusion that the body retained capacity to feel even beyond the grave.

The very frequency with which these commonplaces of the school are repeated shows how tenacious were the prejudices which they attempted to eradicate. Here, as in other connections, the renewal of Pythagorism supervened at the end of the Republic to favour the persistence of the old beliefs. A doctrine, to which Plato alludes,[158] taught that souls which had not been appeased by funeral rites, had to wander for a hundred years, the normal term of a human life. Confined in the air near the earth, they remained subject to the power of magicians. Especially if the wizards had been able to obtain possession of some portion of the corpse, whence the soul could not entirely detach itself, they gained influence over it and could constrain its obedience. When this century of suffering had elapsed, these souls were admitted to a place of purification, where they sojourned ten times longer, and when these thousand years had passed they returned to reincarnate themselves in new bodies. We will see in another lecture[159] that the Pythagoreans enunciated analogous theories as to the lot of children swept off before their time and of men who died a violent death.

Virgil describing the descent of Aeneas into the infernal regions recalls these Pythagorean speculations when he shows us the miserable crowd of the unburied shades fluttering for a hundred years on the bank of the Styx before they obtained from Charon their passage to its other shore.[160]

Favoured by these new tendencies of philosophy, the unreasoning apprehension inspired by omission of burial subsisted under the Empire, not only among the ignorant many, but also in the most enlightened classes. This fear explains why everyone took extreme care to have a tomb built for himself and to ensure, if he could, that funeral ceremonies were celebrated in it, why many epitaphs threaten with judicial penalties and divine punishments the sacrilegious offenders who should violate the grave, and why such a number of popular colleges were founded, of which the principal object was to secure decent obsequies to their members. The rules of the _cultores_ of Diana and Antinoüs at Lanuvium stipulate that when a slave dies and his master maliciously refuses to deliver his body for burial, a “_funus imaginarium_” be made for him, that is, that the ceremony be celebrated over a figure representing the dead man and wearing his mask.[161] From this “imaginary” burial effects were expected as beneficent as those results are maleficent which a wizard anticipated when he fettered and pierced a waxen doll to work a charm.

From the stories of the gravest writers we perceive what lot was believed to threaten the unfortunate who were burnt or interred without the rites being observed. After Caligula’s murder his corpse was hastily shovelled into the ground in a garden on the Esquiline (_horti Lamiani_), but then the keepers of this park were terrified by apparitions until the imperial victim’s sisters caused his body to be exhumed, and buried it in accordance with the sacred rules.[162] Pliny the Younger in one of his letters seriously relates a story which seems to have been often repeated, for we find it, little changed, in Lucian.[163] There was in Athens a haunted house which remained empty, no one daring to live in it because several of its tenants had died of fright. In the silence of the night a noise was heard as of clanking iron; then a horrible spectre moved forward in the shape of an emaciated old man, bearded and hairy, rattling the chains which were about his feet and legs. A philosopher dared to take this house, and he settled himself there one evening, resolved to keep himself awake by working. The ghost appeared to him, came towards him with its usual clatter, signed to him to follow and disappeared in the courtyard. When daylight came, a hole was dug in the place where the phantom had vanished, and a skeleton in fetters was found. The bones were taken up and burned according to the rites, and thereafter nothing troubled the quiet of the house. Lucian, in his version of this ghost story, specifies the philosopher as a Pythagorean and shows him repelling the apparition by the virtue of his spells. The Pythagoreans were indeed often necromancers, convinced defenders of spiritualism, in which, as we have said (p. 62), they sought an immediate proof of the immortality of the soul, and by their doctrines they contributed to keeping alive the superstitious fear attached to omission of burial.

But they were no more than theorists as to a belief which was widespread and which the invasion of Oriental magic was to revive. The curse-tablets often evoke, together with other demons, “those who are deprived of a sacred tomb” (ἄποροι τῆς ἱερᾶς ταφῆς).[164] They associate them with those who have died before their time or by a violent death.[165] Heliodorus[166] the romancer, a priest of Emesa in Syria, who probably lived in the third century, pictures for us a very characteristic scene: a child has been killed; a wizard takes its body, places it between two fires, and performs a complicated operation over it, in order to restore it to life by his incantations and to obtain a prediction of the future. “Thou forcest me to rise again and to speak,” the child complains, “taking no thought for my funeral and thus preventing me from mingling with the other dead.” For the shades of the nether world rejected one who had been left unburied.[167]

These ancient beliefs, which the East shared with the West, were, more or less modified, to survive the downfall of paganism. If the Christians of the first centuries no longer feared that they would go to join the shades who wandered on the bank of the Styx, they were still pursued by the superstitious dread that they would have no part in the resurrection of the flesh if their bodies did not rest in the grave.[168] Nay, the terrors of former ages still haunt the Greeks of today. The people remain persuaded that those who have not had a religious funeral return to wander on the earth, and that, changed to bloody vampires, they punish men, and in particular their kin, for their neglect.[169] A nomocanon of the Byzantine Church orders that if the body of a ghost be found intact, when disinterred, its maleficent power thus being proved, it be burnt and a funeral service with an offering of meats be afterwards celebrated for its soul. This is exactly what was done in antiquity in order to appease the dead who had not been buried according to the rite, _rite conditi_.

II

THE NETHER WORLD

Among most peoples the primitive idea of an after life in the grave was enlarged into the conception of a common existence of the dead in the depths of the earth. The dead man does not stay confined in the narrow dwelling in which he rests; he goes down into vast caverns which extend beneath the crust of the soil we tread. These immense hollows are peopled by a multitude of shades who have left the tomb. Thus the tomb becomes the antechamber of the true dwelling of the spirits who have departed; its door is the gate of Hades itself. Through the tomb, the great company of the beings who have been plunged in the darkness of the infernal regions remains in communication with those who still sojourn in our upper world. The libations and offerings made by the survivors on the grave descend to this gloomy _hypogeum_ and there feed and rejoice those for whom they are intended. Until the time of the Roman Empire, nay, to the end of antiquity, the common man believed in this wonder.[170] To attempt to define the means by which it was brought about would be vain. These were beliefs which went back so far and were so deeply rooted in the mind of the people that men accepted them without seeking to explain them.

In Rome, the idea that the spirits of the dead inhabit a common dwelling in the nether world existed from the time when the city had its beginnings. It kept in religion a coarsely naïve form which proves how archaic it was. According to a rite borrowed by the Romans from the Etruscans, a pit was dug in the centre of the city, when the latter’s foundations were laid, in order to make the _Inferi_ communicate with the upper world. First fruits and other gifts were thrown into the pit, as well as a clod of the earth of the settlers’ native country. Thus they restored their broken contact with the Manes of their ancestors. In all probability this hole was formed of a vertical pit ending in a chamber with an arched roof curved like the heaven—hence the name _mundus_ given to it. The key of the vault of this lower cellar was formed of a stone, the _lapis Manalis_, which could be raised in order to let the spirits pass. Three times a year, on the twenty-fourth of August, the fifth of October and the eighth of November, this ceremony took place: the door of hell was opened and the dead had free access to the atmosphere. These days were therefore sacred, _religiosi_, and all business was suspended on them.

Recently the _mundus_ of the ancient _Roma Quadrata_ was believed to have been discovered during excavations of the Palatine, but the underground space in question is probably only a silo or a cistern. Other pits used for the cult of the dead existed elsewhere in the city. It has recently been suggested that the altar of the god Consus, which was hidden in a ditch in the middle of the Circus Maximus and uncovered during the races, was one of these mouths of hell and like that shown in representations of the funeral games of the Etruscans.[171]

But on certain days the souls of the dead rose to the earth’s surface of themselves, although nothing had been done to make their coming thither easier, and they then had to be appeased by sacrifices. This was what happened from the thirteenth to the twenty-first of February, during the _Parentalia_, when the souls of ancestors were honoured, and on the ninth, the eleventh and the thirteenth of May, the dates of the _Lemuria_, on which, at midnight, according to a prescribed ceremonial, the father of the family nine times threw black beans to the _Lemures_ to keep them away from the house.

_Lemures_ and _Manes_ are used only in the plural: these words stand for the vague conceptions formed of the shades of the dead who dwelt beneath the ground. These were a nameless crowd, hardly individualised, not distinguishable from the fleeting phantoms who fluttered about the tombs. The Romans were a people of little imagination, and their infernal mythology remained rudimentary until the time when they borrowed from the Greeks the picturesque stories about the adventures of travellers to Hades and the blessings and misfortunes which there awaited them.