THE OTHER WORLD.
[Sidenote: The death of the sun-god.]
If the sun-god was so natural a type of a man-like divinity, a god
suffering some of the pains of humanity, a sort of type of man’s own
ideal life here, it was natural that men should question this oracle
concerning their future life and their hopes beyond the grave. We have
seen that the Egyptians did so; seen how they watched the course of the
day-star, and, beholding him sink behind the sandy desert, pictured a
home of happiness beyond that waste, a place to be reached by the soul
after many trials and long wandering in the dim Amenti-land which lay
between. The Aryans dwelt, we believe, upon the slopes of the
Hindoo-Koosh or in the level plain beneath; and, if the conjecture be
reasonable that a great part of the land now a sandy desert was then
filled by an inland sea,[90] many of them must have dwelt upon its
borders and seen the sun plunge in its wave each evening. Then or
afterwards they saw this, and interpreted what they saw in the very
thought of Milton:--
‘Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor.
So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.’
And thus a belief grew up among them that after death their souls would
have to cross this ocean to some happy paradise which lay beyond in the
‘home of the sun.’
[Sidenote: Life in the tomb. The _double_.]
But there is another idea, more simple and material than this, and
therefore more natural to human nature in all its phases. This is the
notion that the dead man abides in his tomb, that he comes to life in it
after a certain fashion, and lives a new life there not greatly
different from his life on earth, only calmer and more stately--
‘Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains.’
First of all, perhaps, the survivors are content to think of the dead
man as simply living in his underground house. To prevent him coming out
thence, the stone-age men, we noticed, scattered shards, flints, and
pebbles, before the mouth of the house. To that tomb they brought their
offerings of meat and drink. The notion of the soul is not yet separated
from that of the body. But that does not show that all the ideas of
those who confounded the two were purely materialistic. In common
parlance we often confound spiritual and material things quite as much;
and yet in our thoughts we have the power of separating them. We talk of
a good-hearted man, and yet we can distinguish between the purely
imaginary or spiritual entity here meant by ‘heart,’ and the mere
physical organ. I do not say that early man could have distinguished
between the idea of the dead body and the surviving soul. Probably he
could not. I only say that we are not to judge of his belief merely by
his rites and ceremonies.
So far as these ceremonies go, man began, we judge, by thinking first of
securing for the dead an everlasting habitation. And so he covered his
grave with an immense pile of earth.[91] The pile grew greater and
greater, and at last, as we saw, it took the shape of the pyramid. Then
came the entrance-chamber or _porch_ to the tomb, in which the survivors
offered sacrifices to the dead to keep him alive by the smell of the
burnt offering.
The Egyptians had very little power of abstracting the idea of the
immaterial soul from the material dead body. At any rate, they did not
(for a long time) conceive the soul as a purely immaterial being. They
thought of the immortal part of man as a sort of _double_ of the mortal
part. This double they called his _ka_. The _ka_ could not exist without
some material form, and therefore they took infinite pains to provide it
with a body of some kind. They mummified the dead body so as to make it
last as long as possible. But besides that, they made numerous images of
the dead; sometimes (if his state could afford it) large statues of
wood[92] or stone. And in addition to these they made a vast number of
smaller images, generally of pottery--those little mummy figures in blue
or green pottery,[93] of which we find such endless quantities buried in
the tombs. There was usually a secret chamber or passage practised in
the tomb to contain these mummied figures, and it was so arranged that
the scent of the sacrifice might come along it.[94]
All these ideas belong, we see, to the most _stationary_ notion of the
dead. If they were followed out logically, the soul would be considered
as tied for ever to the mummy, which lies below in a dark chamber, or to
the little images in their small passage within the wall of the tomb.
But the Egyptians did not carry out this idea logically. For we find
prayers upon the walls of their earliest tombs, that Osiris should give
to the dead, sheep, oxen, and farm-labourers, and ‘sport,’ or corn, and
wine, and dancers, and jesters--all the pleasures, in fact, which he had
had in life. Therefore the dead must really have been thought to have
the power of life and motion as he had enjoyed it upon earth,
inconsistent as such an idea is with the constant enchainment of the
_ka_ to some material belonging, to the mummy or to the image of
pottery.
[Sidenote: The journey of the dead.]
Wherefore it came about that the Egyptians began to have a sort of
notion of _two_ souls--one the half-material _ka_, which remained in the
tomb; the other of an immaterial nature, which moved about.
But this notion of two souls arose because the Egyptians were _more_
precise and logical than most peoples have been in their speculations as
to the future state. Among other races we see a constant confusion
between the idea of resting in the tomb, and the idea of journeying to
another land generally in the wake of the sun. And the food and drink
placed on the tomb, instead of being the simple nourishment of the
dead, were designed merely as a temporary provision for him _on his way_
to the land of souls.
The expectation of a journey after death to reach the home of shades is
all but universal; and the opinion that the home of the departed lies in
the west is of an almost equally wide extension. The Egyptian religion,
with its wonderful Book of the Dead, gives as much weight to this side
of belief as to the other notion of resting in the tomb. To lengthen out
the soul’s journey, which was fancied to last thousands of years, and
give incident where all must have been really imaginary, the actual
journey of the mummy to its resting-place was lengthened after life to
portray the more ghostly wanderings of the spirit. As a rule, the cities
of the living in Egypt lay upon the eastern bank of the Nile; the tombs,
the cities of the dead, on the left or western bank, generally just
within the borders of the desert. Wherefore, as the body was carried
across the Nile to be buried in the desert, so the soul was believed to
begin his journey in the dim twilight region of Apap, king of the
desert, to cross a river more than once, to advance _towards the sun_,
light gradually breaking upon him the while, until at last he enters the
‘Palace of the Two Truths,’ the judgment-hall of Osiris (the sun). Last
of all, he walks into the sun itself, or is absorbed into the essence of
the deity.
In these two notions we have, I think, the germ of almost all the most
ancient belief touching the soul’s future. A confusion between the two
notions would imagine the soul making a journey through the earth to an
underground land of shades. So far as we know, this was the prevailing
feeling among the Hebrews. Old Hebrew writers (with whom the hopes of
immortality were not strong) speak of going down into the grave,[95] a
place thought of as a misty, dull, unfeeling, almost unreal abode.
[Sidenote: Journey to the sky.]
Finally, a third element--if not universal, common certainly to the
Aryan races--will be the conception of the soul separating from the body
altogether and mounting upwards to some home in the sky. All these
elements are found to exist and coexist in early creeds, and the force
of the component parts determines the colour of man’s doctrine about the
other world.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The other world of the Aryans.]
Among all the Aryan peoples the Greeks seem to have turned their
thoughts farthest away from the contemplation of the grave; and though
the voice of wonder and imagination could not quite be silent upon so
important a question, Hades and the kingdom of Hades filled a
disproportionately small space in their creed. They shrank from images
of Death, and adorned their tombs or cinerary urns with wreaths of
flowers and figures of the dancing Hours: it is doubtful if the god
Thanatos (Death) has ever been pictured by Greek art.[96] And from what
they have left on record concerning Hades and the realms of death, it is
evident that they regarded it _chiefly_ from its merely negative side,
in that aspect which corresponds most exactly to the notion of a dark
subterraneous kingdom, and not to that of a journey to some other
distant land. The etymology of their mythical King of Souls corresponds,
too, with the same notions. Hades means nothing else than A-eidês, the
unseen. And when it was said that the dead had gone to Hades, all that
was literally meant was that it had gone to the unseen place. But later
on, the place became personified into the grim deity whom we know in
Greek mythology, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, he to whose share
fell, in the partition of the world, the land of perpetual night. The
underworld pictured by Homer is just of that voiceless, sightless
character which accords with the name of Hades. Even the great heroes
lose almost their identity, and all the joy and interest they had in
life. To ‘wander mid shadows a shadow, and wail by impassable streams,’
is henceforward their occupation.
Not that the Greek had _no_ idea of another world of the more heavenly
sort; ideas obtained as a joint inheritance with their brother nations;
only their thoughts and their poetry do not often centre round such
pictures. Their Elysian fields are a western sun’s home, just after the
pattern of the Egyptian; and so are their Islands of the Blest, where,
according to one tradition, the just Rhadamanthus had been transported
when he fled from the power of his brother Minôs.[97] Only, observe,
there is this difference between these Paradises and the Egyptian house
of Osiris--the latter was reached across the sandy desert, the former
are separated by the ocean from the abode of men. These are the
_Heavens_ of the Greek mythology; while the realm of Hades--or later on
the realm Hades--might by contrast be called their Hell. Let us look a
little nearer at this heaven-picture.
[Sidenote: The River of Death.]
The Caspian Sea--or by whatever name we call the great mediterranean sea
which lay before them--would be naturally, almost inevitably, considered
by the Aryans from their home in Bactria to bound the habitable world.
The region beyond its borders would be a twilight-land like the land of
Apap (the desert-king) of the Egyptians; and still farther away would
lie the bright region of the sun’s proper home. And these ideas would be
both literal--cosmological conceptions, as we should call them--and
figurative, or at least mythical, referring to the future state of the
soul. The beautiful expression of the Hebrew for that twilight western
region, ‘the valley of the shadow of death,’ might be used for the
Apap-land in its figurative significance, and not the less justly
because there creeps in here the other notion of death as of a
_descending_ to the land of shades, for the two ideas of the western
heaven and the subterraneous hell were never utterly separated, but,
among the Aryans at any rate, constantly acted and reacted upon one
another. So with the Greeks we have as a cosmological conception--or let
us say, more simply, a part of their world-theory--the encircling river
Oceanus, with the dim Cimmerian land beyond; and we have the Eylsian
fields and the islands of the blest for the most happy dead. And then by
a natural transfer of ideas the bounding river becomes the river of
death--Styx and Lethê--and is placed below the earth in the region of
death. Even the Elysian fields at last suffer the same change: they too
pass below the earth.
The Indian religion, too, has its river of death. ‘On the fearful road
to Yama’s door,’ says a hymn, ‘is the terrible stream Vaitara_n_î, in
order to cross which I sacrifice a black cow.’[98]
This river of death must be somehow crossed. The Greeks, we know, had
their grim ferryman.
‘Portitor has horrendus aquas et flumina servat
Terribili squalore Charon: cui plurima mento
Canities inculta jacet; stant lumina flamma,’ etc.
The Indians crossed their river of death by a bridge, which was guarded
by two dogs, not less terrible to evildoers than Charon and Cerberus.
‘A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by
men, a path I know of.
‘On it the wise, who had known Brahma, ascend to the dwellings of
Svarga, when they have received their dismissal.’[99] So sings a poet.
Swarga is the Bright Land (_svar_, to shine), _i.e._ the Home of the
Sun. The names of the two guardian dogs, too, are interesting. They are
the sons of that Saramâ whom we have already seen sent by Indra to
recover his lost cattle, whose name signifies the breeze of morning.
Saramâ’s two sons, the dogs of Yama, being so closely connected with the
god of the under-world--as Saramâ is with Indra the sun-god--might be
guessed as the winds of evening or, more vaguely, the evening, as Saramâ
is the morning. They are so; and by their name of Sârameyas, are even
more closely related to Hermes than Saramâ was.[100] We now know why to
Hermes was allotted the office of Psychopomp, or leader of the shades to
the realm of Hades--or at least we partly know; for we see that he is
the same with the two dogs of Yama in the Indian myth. But they are also
connected by name with another much more infernal being, Cerberus. Their
individual names were _Cerbura_[101] the spotted, and Syama the black.
Thus the identity of nature is confirmed by the identity of name.
Death and Sleep are twin-brothers, and we need not be surprised to find
the Sârameyas, or rather _a_ god Sârameyas, addressed as a sort of god
of sleep, a divine hound, the protector of the sleeping household, as we
do find in a very beautiful poem of the Rig-Vedas.[102]
‘Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house; oh, thou who
takest all shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend.
Bay at the robber, Sârameyas, bay at the thief; why bayest
thou at the singer of Indra? why art thou angry with me?
sleep, Sârameyas.
The mother sleeps, the father sleeps, the dog sleeps, the
clan-father[103] sleeps, the whole clan sleeps; sleep thou, Sârameyas.
Those who sleep by the cattle, those who sleep by the wain,
the women who lie on the couches, the sweet-scented ones,
all these we bring to slumber.’
How these verses breathe of the fragrant air of early pastoral life! In
their names, again, of ‘black’ and ‘spotted’ it is very probable that
the dogs typified two appearances of night--black or starry.
[Sidenote: The heavenward journey.]
And yet we must remember that Hermes is not a god of night, or sleep,
but strictly and properly of the wind, and that his name, as that of
Sârameyas, bears this meaning in its construction. The god who bore away
the souls to the other world, however connected with the night, ‘the
proper time for dying,’ must have been originally the wind. And in this
we see an exquisite appropriateness. The soul is, in its original and
literal meaning, the breath[104]--‘the spirit does but mean the breath.’
What more natural, therefore, than that the spirit should be carried
away by the wind-god? This was peculiarly an Aryan idea. Yet let it not
be laid to the Aryans’ charge, as though their theories of the soul and
future life were less spiritual than those of other nations: quite the
contrary was the case. So far as they abandoned the notion of the
existence of the _body_ in another state and transferred the future to
the soul, their ideas became higher, and their pictures of the other
world more amplified. But how, it may be asked, did the Aryans pass to
their more spiritual conception of the soul? The more external causes of
this progress it is worth while briefly to trace.
The sun, it has been said, acted powerfully upon men’s minds in pointing
the hopes of futurity. And in sketching the sun-myth which lay concealed
in the story of the life of Heracles, we noticed one feature which
suggests thoughts about a not yet mentioned element in the funeral rites
of the Aryans. The fiery setting of the sun would itself suggest a fiery
funeral, and pre-eminently so to a race who seem to have been addicted
more than any other to this form of interment. Balder, the Northern
sun-god, likewise receives such a funeral, and this more even than the
death of Heracles exemplifies the double significance of the sun’s
westering course. For he sails away upon a burning ship. When,
therefore, this fire-burial was thoroughly established in custom as the
most heroic sort of end, it is not likely that men would longer rely
upon their belief that the body continued in an after-life. The thought
of the dead man living in his grave or travelling thence to regions
below must, or should, by the consistent be definitely abandoned. In
place of it, a theory of the vital faculty residing in the breath,
which almost amounts to a soul distinct from the body, is accepted. Or,
if the doubting brethren still require some visible representation of
this vital power, the smoke[105] of the funeral pyre may typify the
ascending soul. Nay, it would appear as though inanimate things likewise
had some such essence, which by the fire could be separated from their
material form. For what would formerly have been placed with the dead in
the grave is now placed upon the pyre. In the funeral of Patroclus
(_Il._ xxiii.) we have a complete picture of these reformed rites, which
seems to be applicable to all the Aryan folk; nor surely could we wish
for anything more striking and impressive. The fat oxen and sheep are
slain before the pyre, and with the fat from their bodies and with honey
the corpse is liberally anointed. Then twelve captives are sacrificed to
the manes of the hero; they and his twelve favourite dogs are burnt with
him upon the pile. We soon see the reason for the anointing of the
corpse with fat, and taking so much pains that it should be thoroughly
consumed. It was necessary for the peace of the shade that his body
should be thoroughly burned; for the funeral ceremony was looked upon as
the inevitable portal to Hades; without it the ghost still lingered upon
earth unable to cross the Stygian stream. So afterwards, when the pile
will not burn, Achilles prays to the North and the West Winds and pours
libations to them that they may come and consummate the funeral rite.
All night as the flame springs up Achilles stands beside it, calling
upon the name of his friend and watering the ground with libations from
a golden cup. Toward morning the flame sinks down; and then the two
winds, according to the beautiful language of mythology, return homeward
across the Thracian sea.
All the Aryan nationalities practised cremation in some form or other,
or had practised it; most only gave it up upon the introduction of
Christianity. The time is too remote, therefore, to say when this form
of interment was in truth a novelty; and the fact that the bronze age in
Europe is, as distinguished from that of stone, a corpse-burning age, is
one of the reasons which urge us to the conclusion that the bronze-using
invaders were of the Aryan family.[106] The Indians, owing to their
excessive reverence for Agni the fire-god, adhered to the practice most
faithfully; though the very same reason (namely, their regard for the
purity of fire) made the reformed Iranian religion utterly repudiate
it--a fact which might seem strange did we not know how Zoroastrianism
was sometimes governed by a spirit of opposition to the older
faith.[107] Among the Norsemen about the time of the introduction of
Christianity into Scandinavia, Burn? or Bury? became a test-question,
and a constant cause of dispute between the rival creeds.
[Sidenote: Other world of the Norsemen.]
In the Northern religion, too, therefore, we have the same leading ideas
which we have signalized in the Indian or Grecian systems. Especially
does that notion of the breath of the body, or the smoke of the funeral
pyre representing the soul of the hero and carried upward under care of
the wind, come prominently forward. This might be expected because, it
will be remembered, the wind in the Northern mythology is not, as with
the Indians, a servant of Yama only, or as with the Greeks a lesser
divinity, but is the first of all the gods. To Odin is assigned the task
of collecting the souls of heroes who had fallen in battle; and there
are few myths more poetical than that which pictures him riding to
battle-fields to execute his mission. He is accompanied by his
Valkyriur, ‘the choosers,’ a sort of Amazonian houris, half human,
half-godlike, who ride through the air in the form of swans; wherefore
they--who are originally, perhaps, the clouds--are often called in the
Eddas, Odin’s swan-maidens. It has been said that this myth lived on in
after-ages in the form of the _Phantom Army_ and _Herne the Hunter_: and
the essential part of it, the myth of the soul carried away by the wind,
lived on more obscurely in a hundred other tales, some of which we may
glance at in our next chapter upon _Mythology_. But while this idea of
the mounting soul is often clearly expressed--as, for instance, where in
Beowulf,[108] in the last scene, the hero is burnt by the seashore, it
is said of him that he _wand to wolcum_, ‘curled to the clouds,’
imaging well the curling smoke of the pyre--there still lingered on
other ideas of the death-home, a subterraneous land (Helheim, Hel’s
home) ruled over by the goddess Hel,[109] and an infernal Styx-like
stream, with the bridge of Indian mythology transferred to the lower
world. And so much were the three distinct ideas interwoven, that in the
myth of Balder each one may be traced. For here the sun-god, who is the
very origin and prototype of the two more exalted elements of the creed
of the heavenward journey,[110] has himself to stoop downward to the
gates of Hel. If this legend sanctified for the heathens the practice of
fire-burial, they had certainly so much excuse for their obstinate
adherence to the older custom, as one of the most beautiful myths ever
told might plead for them. We may look upon the story of the death and
burning of Balder in two aspects--first as an image of the setting sun,
next as an expression of men’s thoughts concerning death, and the course
of the soul to its future home. If in this latter respect the story
seems to mix up two different myths concerning the other world, we need
not be surprised at that.
Balder dies, as the sun dies each day, and as the summer dies into
winter. He falls, struck by a dart from the hand of his blind brother
Hödr (the darkness), and the shadow of death appears for the first time
in the homes of Asgard. At first the gods knew not what to make of it,
‘they were struck dumb with horror,’ says the Edda;[111] but seeing
that he is really dead, they prepare his funeral pyre. They took his
ship _Hringhorni_ (Ringhorn, the disk of the sun), and on it set a pile
of wood, with Balder’s horse and his armour, and all that he valued
most, to which each god added some worthy gift. And when Nanna, the wife
of Balder, saw the preparations, her heart broke with grief, and she too
was laid upon the pile. Then they set fire to the ship, which sailed out
burning into the sea.
But Balder himself had to go to Helheim, the dark abode beneath the
earth, where reigns Hel,[112] the goddess of the dead. Then Odin sends
his messenger, Hermödr, to the goddess, to pray her to let Balder return
once more to earth. For nine days and nine nights Hermödr rode through
dark glens, so dark that he could not discern anything until he came to
the river Gjöll (‘the sounding’--notice that here the Greek Cocytus
reappears), over which he rode by Gjöll’s bridge, which was pleasant
with bright gold. A maiden sat there keeping the bridge; she inquired of
him his name and lineage--for, said she, ‘Yestereve five bands of dead
men rid over the bridge, yet they did not shake it so much as thou hast
done. But thou hast not death’s hue upon thee; why, then, ridest thou
here on the way to Hel?’
‘I ride to Hel,’ answered Hermödr, ‘to seek Balder. Hast thou perchance
seen him pass this way?’
‘Balder,’ answered she, ‘hath ridden over Gjöll’s bridge. But yonder,
northward, lies the road to Hel.’
Hermödr then rode into the palace, where he found his brother Balder
filling the highest place in the hall, and in his company he passed the
night. The next morning he besought Hel, that she would let Balder ride
home with him, assuring her how great the grief was among the gods.
Hel answered, ‘It shall now be proved whether Balder be so much loved as
thou sayest. If, therefore, all things both living and lifeless weep for
him, then shall he return. But if one thing speak against him or refuse
to weep, he shall be kept in Helheim.’
And when Hermödr had delivered this answer, the gods sent off messengers
throughout the whole world, to tell everything to weep, in order that
Balder might be delivered out of Helheim. All things freely complied
with this request, both man and every other living thing, and earths,
and stones, and trees, and metals, just as thou hast no doubt seen these
things weep when they are brought from a cold place into a hot one. As
the messengers were returning, and deemed that their mission had been
successful, they found an old hag, named Thokk,[113] sitting in a
cavern, and her they begged to weep Balder out of Helheim. But she
said:--
‘Thokk will wail Nought quick or dead
With dry eyes For carl’s son care I.
Balder’s bale-fire. Let Hel hold her own.’
So Balder remained in Helheim.
Such was the sad conclusion of the myth of which the memory is kept up
even in these days. For in Norway and Sweden--nay, in some parts of
Scotland, the _bale-fires_ celebrating the bale or death of the sun-god
are lighted on the day when the sun passes the highest point in the
ecliptic. Balder will not, said tradition, remain for ever in Helheim. A
day will come, the twilight of the gods, when the gods themselves will
be destroyed in a final victorious contest with the evil powers. And
then, when a new earth has arisen from the deluge which destroys the
old, Balder, the god of Peace, will come from Death’s home to rule over
this regenerate world. A sublime myth--if indeed it can be called a
_myth_.