Chapter 12
First, we have the ancient worship of the Sun, implicit, if not explicit, in a great part of the oldest Greek rituals, and then idealized by Plato in the _Republic_, where the Sun is the author of all light and life in the material world, as the Idea of Good is in the ideal world. This worship came gradually into contact with the traditional and definite Sun-worship of Persia. The final combination took place curiously late. It was the Roman conquests of Cilicia, Cappadocia, Commagene, and Armenia that gave the decisive moment.[139:2] To men who had wearied of the myths of the poets, who could draw no more inspiration from their Apollo and Hyperion, but still had the habits and the craving left by their old Gods, a fresh breath of reality came with the entrance of Ἥλιος ἀνίκητος Μίθρας, 'Mithras, the Unconquered Sun'. But long before the triumph of Mithraism as the military religion of the Roman frontier, Greek literature is permeated with a kind of intense language about the Sun, which seems derived from Plato.[139:3] In later times, in the fourth century A. D. for instance, it has absorbed some more full-blooded and less critical element as well.
Secondly, all the seven planets. These had a curious history. The planets were of course divine and living bodies, so much Plato gave us. Then come arguments and questions scattered through the Stoic and eclectic literature. Is it the planet itself that is divine, or is the planet under the guidance of a divine spirit? The latter seems to win the day. Anthropomorphism has stolen back upon us: we can use the old language and speak simply of the planet Mercury as Ἑρμοῦ ἀστήρ. It is the star of Hermes, and Hermes is the spirit who guides it.[140:1] Even Plato in his old age had much to say about the souls of the seven planets. Further, each planet has its sphere. The Earth is in the centre, then comes the sphere of the Moon, then that of the Sun, and so on through a range of seven spheres. If all things are full of gods, as the wise ancients have said, what about those parts of the sphere in which the shining planet for the moment is not? Are they without god? Obviously not. The whole sphere is filled with innumerable spirits everywhere. It is all Hermes, all Aphrodite. (We are more familiar with the Latin names, Mercury and Venus.) But one part only is visible. The voice of one school, as usual, is raised in opposition. One veteran had seen clearly from the beginning whither all this sort of thing was sure to lead. 'Epicurus approves none of these things.'[140:2] It was no good his having destroyed the old traditional superstition, if people by deifying the stars were to fill the sky with seven times seven as many objects of worship as had been there before. He allows no _Schwärmerei_ about the stars. They are _not_ divine animate beings, or guided by Gods. Why cannot the astrologers leave God in peace? When their orbits are irregular it is _not_ because they are looking for food. They are just conglomerations of ordinary atoms of air or fire--it does not matter which. They are not even very large--only about as large as they look, or perhaps smaller, since most fires tend to look bigger at a distance. They are not at all certainly everlasting. It is quite likely that the sun comes to an end every day, and a new one rises in the morning. All kinds of explanations are possible, and none certain. Μόνον ὁ μῦθος ἀπέστω. In any case, as you value your life and your reason, do not begin making myths about them!
On other lines came what might have been the effective protest of real Science, when Aristarchus of Samos (250 B. C.) argued that the earth was not really the centre of the universe, but revolved round the Sun. But his hypothesis did not account for the phenomena as completely as the current theory with its 'Epicycles'; his fellow astronomers were against him; Cleanthes the Stoic denounced him for 'disturbing the Hearth of the Universe', and his heresy made little headway.[141:1]
The planets in their seven spheres surrounding the earth continued to be objects of adoration. They had their special gods or guiding spirits assigned them. Their ordered movements through space, it was held, produce a vast and eternal harmony. It is beautiful beyond all earthly music, this Music of the Spheres, beyond all human dreams of what music might be. The only pity is that--except for a few individuals in trances--nobody has ever heard it. Circumstances seem always to be unfavourable. It may be that we are too far off, though, considering the vastness of the orchestra, this seems improbable. More likely we are merely deaf to it because it never stops and we have been in the middle of it since we first drew breath.[142:1]
The planets also become Elements in the Kosmos, _Stoicheia_. It is significant that in Hellenistic theology the word Stoicheion, Element, gets to mean a Daemon--as Megathos, Greatness, means an Angel.[142:2] But behold a mystery! The word _Stoicheia_, 'elementa', had long been used for the Greek A B C, and in particular for the seven vowels α ε η ι ο υ ω. That is no chance, no mere coincidence. The vowels are the mystic signs of the Planets; they have control over the planets. Hence strange prayers and magic formulae innumerable.
Even the way of reckoning time changed under the influence of the Planets. Instead of the old division of the month into three periods of nine days, we find gradually establishing itself the week of seven days with each day named after its planet, Sun, Moon, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, Kronos. The history of the Planet week is given by Dio Cassius, xxxvii. 18, in his account of the Jewish campaign of Pompeius. But it was not the Jewish week. The Jews scorned such idolatrous and polytheistic proceedings. It was the old week of Babylon, the original home of astronomy and planet-worship.[143:1]
For here again a great foreign religion came like water in the desert to minds reluctantly and superficially enlightened, but secretly longing for the old terrors and raptures from which they had been set free. Even in the old days Aeschylus had called the planets 'bright potentates, shining in the fire of heaven', and Euripides had spoken of the 'shaft hurled from a star'.[143:2] But we are told that the first teaching of astrology in Hellenic lands was in the time of Alexander, when Bêrôssos the Chaldaean set up a school in Cos and, according to Seneca, _Belum interpretatus est_. This must mean that he translated into Greek the '_Eye of Bel_', a treatise in seventy tablets found in the library of Assur-bani-pal (686-626 B. C.) but composed for Sargon I in the third millennium B. C. Even the philosopher Theophrastus is reported by Proclus[143:3] as saying that 'the most extraordinary thing of his age was the lore of the Chaldaeans, who foretold not only events of public interest but even the lives and deaths of individuals'. One wonders slightly whether Theophrastus spoke with as much implicit faith as Proclus suggests. But the chief account is given by Diodorus, ii. 30 (perhaps from Hecataeus).
'Other nations despise the philosophy of Greece. It is so recent and so constantly changing. They have traditions which come from vast antiquity and never change. Notably the Chaldaeans have collected observations of the Stars through long ages, and teach how every event in the heavens has its meaning, as part of the eternal scheme of divine forethought. Especially the seven Wanderers, or Planets, are called by them Hermêneis, Interpreters: and among them the Interpreter in chief is Saturn. Their work is to interpret beforehand τὴν τῶν θεῶν ἔννοιαν, the thought that is in the mind of the Gods. By their risings and settings, and by the colours they assume, the Chaldaeans predict great winds and storms and waves of excessive heat, comets, and earthquakes, and in general all changes fraught with weal or woe not only to nations and regions of the world, but to kings and to ordinary men and women. Beneath the Seven are thirty Gods of Counsel, half below and half above the Earth; every ten days a Messenger or Angel star passes from above below and another from below above. Above these gods are twelve Masters, who are the twelve signs of the Zodiac; and the planets pass through all the Houses of these twelve in turn. The Chaldaeans have made prophecies for various kings, such as Alexander who conquered Darius, and Antigonus and Seleucus Nikator, and have always been right. And private persons who have consulted them consider their wisdom as marvellous and above human power.'
Astrology fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people. The tomb of Ozymandias, as described by Diodorus (i. 49, 5), was covered with astrological symbols, and that of Antiochus I, which has been discovered in Commagene, is of the same character. It was natural for monarchs to believe that the stars watched over them. But every one was ready to receive the germ. The Epicureans, of course, held out, and so did Panaetius, the coolest head among the Stoics. But the Stoics as a whole gave way. They formed with good reason the leading school of philosophy, and it would have been a service to mankind if they had resisted. But they were already committed to a belief in the deity of the stars and to the doctrine of Heimarmenê, or Destiny. They believed in the pervading Pronoia,[145:1] or Forethought, of the divine mind, and in the Συμπάθεια τῶν ὅλων--the Sympathy of all Creation,[145:2] whereby whatever happens to any one part, however remote or insignificant, affects all the rest. It seemed only a natural and beautiful illustration of this Sympathy that the movements of the Stars should be bound up with the sufferings of man. They also appealed to the general belief in prophecy and divination.[145:3] If a prophet can foretell that such and such an event will happen, then it is obviously fated to happen. Foreknowledge implies Predestination. This belief in prophecy was, in reality, a sort of appeal to fact and to common sense. People could produce then, as they can now, a large number of striking cases of second sight, presentiment, clairvoyance, actual prophecy and the like;[145:4] and it was more difficult then to test them.
The argument involved Stoicism with some questionable allies. Epicureans and sceptics of the Academy might well mock at the sight of a great man like Chrysippus or Posidonius resting an important part of his religion on the undetected frauds of a shady Levantine 'medium'. Still the Stoics could not but welcome the arrival of a system of prophecy and predestination which, however the incredulous might rail at it, possessed at least great antiquity and great stores of learning, which was respectable, recondite, and in a way sublime.
In all the religious systems of later antiquity, if I mistake not, the Seven Planets play some lordly or terrifying part. The great Mithras Liturgy, unearthed by Dieterich from a magical papyrus in Paris,[146:1] repeatedly confronts the worshipper with the seven vowels as names of 'the Seven Deathless Kosmokratores', or Lords of the Universe, and seems, under their influence, to go off into its 'Seven Maidens with heads of serpents, in white raiment', and its divers other Sevens. The various Hermetic and Mithraic communities, the Naassenes described by Hippolytus,[146:2] and other Gnostic bodies, authors like Macrobius and even Cicero in his _Somnium Scipionis_, are full of the influence of the seven planets and of the longing to escape beyond them. For by some simple psychological law the stars which have inexorably pronounced our fate, and decreed, or at least registered the decree, that in spite of all striving we must needs tread their prescribed path; still more perhaps, the Stars who know in the midst of our laughter how that laughter will end, become inevitably powers of evil rather than good, beings malignant as well as pitiless, making life a vain thing. And Saturn, the chief of them, becomes the most malignant. To some of the Gnostics he becomes Jaldabaoth, the Lion-headed God, the evil Jehovah.[147:1] The religion of later antiquity is overpoweringly absorbed in plans of escape from the prison of the seven planets.
In author after author, in one community after another, the subject recurs. And on the whole there is the same answer. Here on the earth we are the sport of Fate; nay, on the earth itself we are worse off still. We are beneath the Moon, and beneath the Moon there is not only Fate but something more unworthy and equally malignant, Chance--to say nothing of damp and the ills of earth and bad daemons. Above the Moon there is no chance, only Necessity: there is the will of the other six Kosmokratores, Rulers of the Universe. But above them all there is an Eighth region--they call it simply the Ogdoas--the home of the ultimate God,[147:2] whatever He is named, whose being was before the Kosmos. In this Sphere is true Being and Freedom. And more than freedom, there is the ultimate Union with God. For that spark of divine life which is man's soul is not merely, as some have said, an ἀπόρροια τῶν ἄστρων, an effluence of the stars: it comes direct from the first and ultimate God, the Alpha and Omega, who is beyond the Planets. Though the Kosmokratores cast us to and fro like their slaves or dead chattels, in soul at least we are of equal birth with them. The Mithraic votary, when their wrathful and tremendous faces break in upon his vision, answers them unterrified: ἐγώ εἰμι σύμπλανος ὑμῖν ἀστήρ, 'I am your fellow wanderer, your fellow Star.' The Orphic carried to the grave on his golden scroll the same boast: first, 'I am the child of Earth and of the starry Heaven'; then later, 'I too am become God'.[148:1] The Gnostic writings consist largely of charms to be uttered by the Soul to each of the Planets in turn, as it pursues its perilous path past all of them to its ultimate home.
That journey awaits us after death; but in the meantime? In the meantime there are initiations, sacraments, mystic ways of communion with God. To see God face to face is, to the ordinary unprepared man, sheer death. But to see Him after due purification, to be led to Him along the true Way by an initiating Priest, is the ultimate blessing of human life. It is to die and be born again. There were regular official initiations. We have one in the Mithras-Liturgy, more than one in the Corpus Hermeticum. Apuleius[148:2] tells us at some length, though in guarded language, how he was initiated to Isis and became 'her image'. After much fasting, clad in holy garments and led by the High Priest, he crossed the threshold of Death and passed through all the Elements. The Sun shone upon him at midnight, and he saw the Gods of Heaven and of Hades. In the morning he was clad in the Robe of Heaven, set up on a pedestal in front of the Goddess and worshipped by the congregation as a God. He had been made one with Osiris or Horus or whatever name it pleased that Sun-God to be called. Apuleius does not reveal it.
There were also, of course, the irregular personal initiations and visions of god vouchsafed to persons of special prophetic powers. St. Paul, we may remember, knew personally a man who had actually been snatched up into the Third Heaven, and another who was similarly rapt into Paradise, where he heard unspeakable words;[149:1] whether in the body or not, the apostle leaves undecided. He himself on the road to Damascus had seen the Christ in glory, not after the flesh. The philosopher Plotinus, so his disciple tells us, was united with God in trance four times in five years.[149:2]
We seem to have travelled far from the simplicity of early Greek religion. Yet, apart always from Plotinus, who is singularly aloof, most of the movement has been a reaction under Oriental and barbarous influences towards the most primitive pre-Hellenic cults. The union of man with God came regularly through _Ekstasis_--the soul must get clear of its body--and _Enthousiasmos_--the God must enter and dwell inside the worshipper. But the means to this union, while sometimes allegorized and spiritualized to the last degree, are sometimes of the most primitive sort. The vagaries of religious emotion are apt to reach very low as well as very high in the scale of human nature. Certainly the primitive Thracian savages, who drank themselves mad with the hot blood of their God-beast, would have been quite at home in some of these rituals, though in others they would have been put off with some substitute for the actual blood. The primitive priestesses who waited in a bridal chamber for the Divine Bridegroom, even the Cretan Kourêtes with their Zeus Kourês[150:1] and those strange hierophants of the 'Men's House' whose initiations are written on the rocks of Thera, would have found rites very like their own reblossoming on earth after the fall of Hellenism. 'Prepare thyself as a bride to receive her bridegroom,' says Markos the Gnostic,[150:2] 'that thou mayst be what I am and I what thou art.' 'I in thee, and thou in me!' is the ecstatic cry of one of the Hermes liturgies. Before that the prayer has been 'Enter into me as a babe into the womb of a woman'.[150:3]
In almost all the liturgies that I have read need is felt for a mediator between the seeker after God and his goal. Mithras himself saw a Mesîtês, a Mediator, between Ormuzd and Ahriman, but the ordinary mediator is more like an interpreter or an adept with inner knowledge which he reveals to the outsider. The circumstances out of which these systems grew have left their mark on the new gods themselves. As usual, the social structure of the worshippers is reflected in their objects of worship. When the Chaldaeans came to Cos, when the Thracians in the Piraeus set up their national worship of Bendis, when the Egyptians in the same port founded their society for the Egyptian ritual of Isis, when the Jews at Assuan in the fifth century B. C. established their own temple, in each case there would come proselytes to whom the truth must be explained and interpreted, sometimes perhaps softened. And in each case there is behind the particular priest or initiator there present some greater authority in the land he comes from. Behind any explanation that can be made in the Piraeus, there is a deeper and higher explanation known only to the great master in Jerusalem, in Egypt, in Babylon, or perhaps in some unexplored and ever-receding region of the east. This series of revelations, one behind the other, is a characteristic of all these mixed Graeco-Oriental religions.
Most of the Hermetic treatises are put in the form of initiations or lessons revealed by a 'father' to a 'son', by Ptah to Hermes, by Hermes to Thoth or Asclepios, and by one of them to us. It was an ancient formula, a natural vehicle for traditional wisdom in Egypt, where the young priest became regularly the 'son' of the old priest. It is a form that we find in Greece itself as early as Euripides, whose Melanippe says of her cosmological doctrines,
'It is not my word but my Mother's word'.[152:1]
It was doubtless the language of the old Medicine-Man to his disciple. In one fine liturgy Thoth wrestles with Hermes in agony of spirit, till Hermes is forced to reveal to him the path to union with God which he himself has trodden before. At the end of the Mithras liturgy the devotee who has passed through the mystic ordeals and seen his god face to face, is told: 'After this you can show the way to others.'
But this leads us to the second great division of our subject. We turn from the phenomena of the sky to those of the soul.
* * * * *
If what I have written elsewhere is right, one of the greatest works of the Hellenic spirit, and especially of fifth-century Athens, was to insist on what seems to us such a commonplace truism, the difference between Man and God. Sophrosynê in religion was the message of the classical age. But the ages before and after had no belief in such a lesson. The old Medicine-Man was perhaps himself the first _Theos_. At any rate the primeval kings and queens were treated as divine.[152:2] Just for a few great generations, it would seem, humanity rose to a sufficient height of self-criticism and self-restraint to reject these dreams of self-abasement or megalomania. But the effort was too great for the average world; and in a later age nearly all the kings and rulers--all people in fact who can command an adequate number of flatterers--become divine beings again. Let us consider how it came about.
First there was the explicit recognition by the soberest philosophers of the divine element in man's soul.[153:1] Aristotle himself built an altar to Plato. He did nothing superstitious; he did not call Plato a god, but we can see from his beautiful elegy to Eudemus, that he naturally and easily used language of worship which would seem a little strange to us. It is the same emotion--a noble and just emotion on the whole--which led the philosophic schools to treat their founders as 'heroes', and which has peopled most of Europe and Asia with the memories and the worship of saints. But we should remember that only a rare mind will make its divine man of such material as Plato. The common way to dazzle men's eyes is a more brutal and obvious one.
To people who were at all accustomed to the conception of a God-Man it was difficult not to feel that the conception was realized in Alexander. His tremendous power, his brilliant personality, his achievements beggaring the fables of the poets, put people in the right mind for worship. Then came the fact that the kings whom he conquered were, as a matter of fact, mostly regarded by their subjects as divine beings.[154:1] It was easy, it was almost inevitable, for those who worshipped the 'God'[154:2] Darius to feel that it was no man but a greater god who had overthrown Darius. The incense which had been burned before those conquered gods was naturally offered to their conqueror. He did not refuse it. It was not good policy to do so, and self-depreciation is not apt to be one of the weaknesses of the born ruler.[154:3] But besides all this, if you are to judge a God by his fruits, what God could produce better credentials? Men had often seen Zeus defied with impunity; they had seen faithful servants of Apollo come to bad ends. But those who defied Alexander, however great they might be, always rued their defiance, and those who were faithful to him always received their reward. With his successors the worship became more official. Seleucus, Ptolemaeus, Antigonus, Demetrius, all in different degrees and different styles are deified by the acclamations of adoring subjects. Ptolemy Philadelphus seems to have been the first to claim definite divine honours during his own life. On the death of his wife in 271 he proclaimed her deity and his own as well in the worship of the Theoi Adelphoi, the 'Gods Brethren'. Of course there was flattery in all this, ordinary self-interested lying flattery, and its inevitable accompaniment, megalomania. Any reading of the personal history of the Ptolemies, the Seleucidae or the Caesars shows it. But that is not the whole explanation.