"Sheol shall not praise thee, Jehovah,
The dead shall not celebrate thee;
They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth;
The living, the living, shall praise thee, as I do this day."
No people have held up this _destructive_ side of death, this negative
theory of a future, with sharper outline than the Greeks and Hebrews.
What a contrast to the teaching of modern religions is that line, "They
that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth!" Other people
have found themselves unable to rest at this point; they have endowed
their place with a personality, but, still strongly impressed with its
horrors, this personality is grim and fearful. Even with the Greeks,
Hades is a person, not a place; with the Teutons, Hel has gone through
the same transformation: and a thousand other images of horror to be met
with in different creeds, devouring dragons, dogs who, like Cerberus,
threaten those who are journeying to the underground kingdom, can be
shown by their names to have sprung from merely negative images of
death, the unseen, the coverer, the concealer, the cave of night.
In contrast therefore with all these myths stand those which, after
death, send the soul upon a journey to some paradise, believed generally
to lie in the west. If these first are myths of hell, the second series
may be fairly described as myths of heaven. Nor can it be certainly
proved that the more cheerful view of the other world is of a later
growth in time than the first which seems so primitive. We see
indications of it in the interments of old stone-age grave mounds. While
among historical people the older Hebrews are the exponents of the
gloomier Sheol, the most hopeful picture of the soul's future finds
expression in the ritual service of the Egyptians. There we have a
complete history of the dead man's journey across the Nile and through
the twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, until at last it
reaches the home of the sun. And, to come nearer home, among all those
peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the Indo-European family of
nations, we shall find the evidences of a double belief, the belief in
death as of a dim underground place or as a devouring monster, and the
contrasting faith in death as a journey undertaken to reach a new
country where everything is better and happier than upon earth.
This is the myth of an earthly paradise, not, like our heaven,
disconnected altogether from the world, but a distant land lying
somewhere in the west, and forming part of the imaginary geography of
those times: so the belief is, more than others, a realistic one,
mingling with the daily experience of men and influencing deeply their
daily life. The necessary portal of death is even sometimes lost sight
of altogether, as when in the Middle Ages we find men undertaking more
than one expedition in search of the earthly paradise, and when we find
the current belief that in certain weathers was visible from the west
coast of Ireland that happy island to which St. Brandon and his
disciples had been carried when they left this world. For this reason,
though the notion of the western paradise is essentially the same for
all the human race, its local colouring constantly varies, changing with
the geographical position of each people: if they change their homes and
advance, as they will probably do, towards the land of promise, it moves
away before them, as the rainbow moves from us. The Egyptians had their
myth of the soul's journey, drawing all its distinctive features from
the special character of their land, chiefly from the commanding
influence which a great neighbouring desert exercised upon their
imagination. But for our ancestors, the parents of the Indo-European
races, the place of the desert was supplied by the sea.
The most probable conjecture has fixed the cradle of our race in that
corner of land which lies westward the steep range of the Beloot Tagh
mountains, an off-shoot of the Himalayas, and northward from the high
barren land of Cabul. This country, the ancient Bactriana, is the most
habitable district to be found anywhere in Central Asia. There the hills
stretch out in gentle slopes towards the west, and enclose fertile
valleys, whose innumerable streams, fed by the mountains east and south,
all go to swell the waters of the Oxus, now called the Jihon. Farther
north lies another fruitful country, watered by the Jaxartes, separated
from the first by a range of hills much inferior to those which divide
both lands from Yarkand and Cashgar on the east, and from Cabul on the
south. Both the great rivers empty themselves into the Sea of Aral,
between which and the Caspian, sharply cutting off the fertile country
from that sea, stretches the Khiva desert, a barren land affording a
scanty nourishment to the herds of wandering Turkic tribes. There is
good reason to believe, however, that this desert did not always exist,
but that in times not extraordinarily remote the Caspian Sea, joined to
the Sea of Aral, extended over a much larger area than it at present
covers: it is known even now to be sinking steadily within its banks.
With such a contraction of the great sea the desert would grow by a
double process, by the laying bare its sandy bed and by the withdrawal
of a neighbouring supply of moisture from the dry land. So it may well
have been that the fruitful territory wherein in remotest ages were
settled our Aryan ancestors, stretched so far west as to border upon a
large inland Asiatic sea. It has even been conjectured that the turning
of so much fertile land into desert was the proximate cause of those
migrations which sent the greater part of the Aryan races westward--to
people, at last, all the countries of Europe. The root which is common
to the European languages for the names of the sea, means, in the Indian
and Iranian languages, a desert: how can we account for this fact better
than by supposing that after the European nations had left their early
home, their brethren, who remained behind and who long afterwards
separated into the people of India and Persia, came to know as a desert
the district which their fathers had once known as the sea?
Thus, these ancient Aryans stood with their backs toward the mountains
and their faces toward the sea. All their prospect, all their future,
seemed to be that way; when their migrations began they were undertaken
in that direction--towards the west. Most important of all in the
formation of a creed, their sun-god, or sun-hero,[9] was seen by many of
them quenching his beams in the waters; the home of the sun is always
likewise the home of souls. What more natural, nay, what so necessary,
as that the Aryan paradise should lie westward beyond the sea? It has
been said just now that the Indian word for desert corresponds
etymologically with the European word for sea: that word must have been,
in the old Aryan, something like _mara_, from which we get the Persian
_meru_, desert, the Latin _mare_, the Teutonic (German and English)
_meer_. But from identically the same root we likewise get the Sanksrit
and the Zend (old Persian) _mara_, death, the Latin _mors_, the old
Norse _mordh_, the German _mord_, our _murder_, all signifying
originally the same thing.[10] What, then, does this imply? The word
which the old Aryans used for sea they used likewise for death. How
would this be possible, unless this, their first sea, were likewise the
sea of death, the necessary stage upon the road to paradise?
It might have been expected that such a connection of ideas would have
endowed the sea with an entirely terrible character, precluding any
attempt to explore its solitudes, or the lands which lay beyond. It has
been already said that as a matter of experience we find that the
_earthly_ paradise often comes to be realized so vividly that men lose
the fear which should attach to any attempt at finding it. They were not
religious, heavenward-looking men who, in Mr. Morris's poem, set out in
quest of the happy land; and no doubt the bard has been guided by a true
instinct, and that of all those mediæval mariners who were lost in their
search after St. Brandon's isle, none knew that they had found what they
were seeking--Death. The Greeks eagerly cherished delusions of the same
kind; and long before they had summoned up courage sufficient to
navigate the Mediterranean they had invented the myths of their western
islands of the blest, to which yellow-haired Rhadamanthus was taken when
expelled from Crete by his brother Minos, or of those gardens kept by
the daughters of the west,[11] where decay and death could not enter. It
is likely enough that for the Aryans _their_ western sea did long retain
its more fearful meaning, _a death_; but that they at last gained
courage to look upon it only as _the road_[12] to the land of which they
had long been dreaming.
How much more weighty a position the sea takes in men's thoughts than is
warranted by their real familiarity with it! Into the mass of sedentary
lives--the vast majority--it enters but seldom as an experience,
provided a man live only a few miles inland. And yet of all countries
which possess a sea-board, how full is the literature of reference to
this one phenomenon of physical nature! The sun and the moon, and all
the heavenly bodies, the familiar sights and sounds of land, are the
property of all; and yet allusions to these are not more common in
literature than allusions to the sea: one might fancy that man was
amphibious, with a power of actually living _upon_, and not only _by_,
the water. Charles Lamb acutely penetrates the cause of a certain
disappointment we all feel at the sight of the sea for the first time.
We go with the expectation of seeing all the sea at once, the
commensurate antagonist of the earth. All that we have gathered from
narratives of wandering seamen, what we have gained from true voyages,
and what we cherish as credulously from romances and poetry, come
crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation.
Thus we are imbued with thoughts of the sea before we have had any sight
of it ourselves, merely by the sea's great influence acting through the
total experience of humanity. "We think of the great deep and of those
who go down unto it: of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents
it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its
bosom, without disturbance or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells
and the mariner--
"For many a day and many a dreadful night,
Incessant labouring round the stormy cape;
of fatal rocks and the 'still-vexed Bermoothes;' of great whirlpools and
the water-spout; of sunken ships and sumless treasures swallowed up in
the unrestoring depths." We must not narrow the influence of the sea in
mythology within the compass of man's mere experience of it. Few among
the Aryans lived by the Caspian shore; but the Sea of Death appears in
one form or another in the religious belief of all the Aryan people. The
tradition of the sea, its real wonders, and greater fancied terrors,
must have passed from one to another, from the few who lived within
sight and sound of the waters to others quite beyond its horizon, to
whom it was not visible even as a faint silvery line.
It is natural that, in early myths, no accurate distinction should have
been drawn between the sea and rivers with which the Aryans were
familiar. The Caspian was imagined a broad river bounding the habitable
earth, the origin of the Oceanus of the Greeks; and the sea of death is,
in its earliest form, a river of death. All after-forms of mythical
geography, moreover, such as we find among Indians, Greeks, or Norsemen,
are but graftings upon this central idea. As the Aryans changed their
homes, the new experiences gradually blotted out the old. The Greek
transferred his thoughts about the Caspian to the Mediterranean, and
when his geography extended, the Oceanus was pushed farther and farther
away, until the later Euhemerist geographers came to confound it with
the Atlantic. Thus it is but by accident that we give to ocean the
meaning which it now bears. The first ocean was the mythical river which
flowed round the earth, and the real physical forerunner of the myth was
not the Atlantic or any of our oceans, but the Caspian Sea as it
stretched before the eyes of the ancient Aryan folk.
The Norseman, especially the Icelander,[13] lived so close to the ocean,
that the older myth was forgotten beside the aspect of nature so
familiar to him. In the middle of his earth stood a high mountain, on
which was a strong city, Asgaard, the house of the Æsir or gods. Below
Asgaard lay the green and fruitful earth, man's home. Then outside
flowed or lay the great mid-earth ocean, just like the Greek ocean in
character, despite all differences of climate and country. At other
times the mid-earth sea is personified as a devouring monster,
Jörmungandr ("great monster"), the name of the mid-gaard serpent who
lies at the bottom of the encircling sea, shaking the earth when he
moves.[14] Beyond, lies the ice-bound land of giants--Jötunheim, giant's
home--dark like the Cimmerian land, and peopled with beings as weird and
terrible as the Cyclops or the Gorgons.
Gradually the myths of the river of death and the sea of death from
being one became two. The second was confined to those nations who lived
upon the sea-shore, and lost in great part its early shape; but neither
Indians, Greeks, nor Norsemen forgot the myth of the mortal river. The
Indian retained it singly; for when his turn for wandering came, he
passed over the eastern mountains and reached a land where no sea was
any longer to be seen or heard of. In the mythical language of the
Vedas, the mortal river is called Vaitera_n_i; it lies "across the
dreadful path to the house of Yama,"[15] the god of Hell.
From the belief in the river of death no doubt arose also the practice
of committing the dead to the care of the sacred Ganges; for just as the
Hindus kindle a funeral fire in the boat which bears the dead down this
visible stream of death, so used the Norsemen to place their hero's body
in his ship, and then having lighted it send it drifting out seawards
with the tide. In conjunction with that thought of the other world which
placed the final resting-place in a dark kingdom underground, the river
is seen in Greek mythology transferred to Hades; but it is multiplied
into four, which have all grown out of one, inasmuch as they were
feigned to flow out of the upper-earth river Oceanus:--
"Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate;
Sad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage."
These pictures are not quite in character with the Hellenic thought
about the future state. But it is certain that the more gloomy images of
death are preserved in connection with the rivers of Hades, with Hades
itself, and all that it contains. So it is with the northern Styx,
Gjöll,[16] as it is called in the Eddas. This, too, is an underground
stream lying, like the Indian, on the road to the gates of death.
Thus a separation arises between the sea and the river myths. If we wish
for something more cheerful than the pictures of Styx and Gjöll and
Vaitera_n_i, we must look, for the tales of an earthly paradise which
sprang up when men had lost their first terror of the sea, but had not
lost the beliefs to which their earliest thoughts about that sea gave
birth.
Such beliefs are those which lie enshrined in the Odyssey. This poem is
full of images of death, but they are not self-conscious ones, only
mythical expressions first applied to the passage of the soul from life,
and then made literal and physical by their transference to the
unexplored western sea. What the Caspian may have been to the ancient
Aryan, such was the Mediterranean to the Greek. The Ægean was his
home-like water; there he might pass from island to island without
losing sight of land; and he soon learnt to trust himself to its care,
and to know its currents and its winds. Long before he had navigated
beyond Cape Malea, all the coasts of the Ægean had become parts of his
familiar world: outside this was the region of the unknown. The Iliad
tells us what the early Greeks thought about the first. Myths may have
mingled with the legend of the fall of Troy, but the story in Homer is
essentially realistic, rationalistic even. The very powers of the
immortals and their doings seem petty and limited. The Odyssey, on the
other hand, is the product of the Greek imagination working in fields
unturned by experience, free from any guiding impulse of knowledge; and
here step in those monstrous shapes and strange adventures which differ
altogether from the probable events of the Iliad. We feel at once that
we are in a new world, a world not so much of supernatural beings as of
magic; lands of glamour and illusion, most like the giant-land of the
Norsemen; for we are getting towards the twilight regions of the earth
and the borders of Hades.
Some writers have attempted to explain the Odyssey as nothing more than
a myth of the sun's course through heaven. But surely there is too much
solidity about the story, too thorough an atmosphere of belief around
it, to suit a tale relating such airy unrealities as those. The Greeks
who first sung the ballads must have been thinking of a real journey
upon this solid earth. But it is easy to see how many images and notions
which had first been applied only to the sun-god would creep into such a
history as that of Odysseus. Undoubtedly the sun-myth had first pointed
out the home of the dead as lying in the west; and nothing is more
natural than that a people whose thoughts and hopes carried them in the
track of the wandering sun should, when they came to construct an epos
of travel, make the imaginary journey lie the same way. They would
interweave in the story such truths--or such sailors' yarns--as
Phoenician mariners or adventurous Greeks brought home from the distant
waters, with many images which had been first made of the sun's heavenly
voyage, and others which had been first applied to death. Their
geography would, indeed, be mythical; for they could have no accurate
notions of the lands which they spoke of; but it would not be without a
kernel of reality. Justin and Augustine may look upon the garden of the
Hesperides or the garden of Alcinoüs as a reminiscence of Paradise;
Strabo may assign them an exact position on the coast of Libya; and both
may be right. The myth of the two gardens--the Hebrew and the Greek
paradises--sprang up in obedience to an identical faculty of belief, and
therefore the two stories are in origin the same. But each myth
supported itself upon so much of reality as it could lay hold of: and it
is likely enough that the famous golden apples which Hercules was sent
to fetch owed their origin to the first oranges brought by Phoenician
merchantmen to Greece.
Besides some such slender thread of reality, the adventures of Odysseus
are built upon what men's imagination told them might lie in the western
seas. Now in reality there was only one thing which at the bottom of
their hearts they believed actually did lie there--namely, death; and
beyond that, the home of the departed. Therefore their stories of
adventure in the Mediterranean do all, upon a minute inspection, resolve
themselves into a variety of mythical ways of describing death; and upon
this as a dark background the varied colours of the tale are painted.
It need take away no jot of our pleasure in the brilliant picture to
acknowledge this. Nay, it gather adds to it, for behind the graceful air
of the poem, sung as a poem only, we hear a deeper note telling of the
passionate, obstinate questionings of futurity which belonged not more
to Greece three thousand years ago than they now belong to us.
Any one acquainted with the genesis of myth would at once be disposed to
see in the Odyssey the combination of two different legends; for one
series of adventures comes as a tale told during the course of the
second. We first see our hero on the island of Calypso, the sea-nymph;
and when Hermes has brought from the gods the command for his release,
he is carried thence by storms to the land of the Phæaceans. There
Nausicaa finds him and brings him to her father Alcinoüs, by whom he is
hospitably entertained, and at last sent back to Ithaca, his home. This
forms one complete legend, the simplest and probably the first, because
_into_ it is woven the account of Odysseus' earlier adventures. In the
halls of Alcinoüs the wanderer tells what happened to him before he
reached the cave of Calypso, and in this narrative we follow him to the
island of the Lotus-eaters, to the island of the Cyclops, thence to the
house of Circe, and from there to the very borders of hell itself. And
we guess that we have here got hold of a later amplified legend built up
out of the earlier myth. We find just such changes as this in Norse
mythology; a story told in a few lines by the elder Edda, is expanded
into an elaborate history in the younger. Looking again more closely at
the Odyssey, we discover that many circumstances in the expanded tale
bear close resemblance to one or other of the adventures in the shorter
category. Take, for instance, the life with Calypso and with Circe. Both
Calypso and Circe are nymphs, enchantresses; each lives alone upon her
island: with each Odysseus passes a term of years, living with her as
her husband, longing all the while to return to his own wife and his own
home, and yet unable to do so: from each Hermes is the deliverer. What
if Calypso and Circe both repeat in reality the same myth; and what if
Odysseus' other great adventure, the voyage to the Phæaceans, have
likewise its counterpart in the expanded story? The question of the real
identity or difference of the two stories can only be decided when we
have seen how much significance there is in the points of their apparent
likeness.
Who is Calypso? Her name bespeaks her nature not ambiguously. It is from
=kalyptein=, to cover or conceal. She is the shrouder, or the shrouded
place, answering exactly therefore to Hel, which, as has before been
said, comes from the verb _helja_, "to hide." How, then, can Calypso be
anything else than death, as she dwells there in her cave, by the shores
of the sea? How can Odysseus' life with her, his sleep in her cave, be
anything else than an image of dying? The gods have determined that the
hero shall not remain in this mortal sleep for ever; so Hermes is sent
to command Calypso to let Odysseus go. Hermes is the god whose mission
it is to lead souls down to the realm of Hades--the psychopomp, as in
this office he is called. But sometimes he may come upon an opposite
message, to restore men to life; the staff which closes the eyes of men
may likewise open them when asleep. On such a task he comes--
"Wind-like beneath, the immortal golden sandals
Bare up his flight o'er the limitless earth and the sea;
And in his hand that magic wand he carried,
Wherewith the eyes of men he closes in slumber,
Or wakens from sleeping."
He comes like the breath of morning awakening the world, to rouse our
hero from the embrace of death; and the whole scene is beautifully
attuned to an image of returning life. Therefore the interference of
Hermes between Odysseus and Calypso is full of significance. We
accordingly meet the same episode in the Circe tale. That this last is a
later widening of the first story appears from many things; chiefly in
this, that there is more moral in the history; for the truest myth is
content to follow the actual workings of nature, without attempting to
adorn a story with extraneous incident, or to convert its simplicity
into the complexities of allegory. That turning the companions into
swine was a punishment for luxury--that points the moral; the original
Circe, we may be sure, only touched her lovers with her sleepy magic
rod. It was the same wand with the "slepy yerde"[17] of Hermes, and she
used it not wantonly but only because all whom she embraces must fall
into the unwakeful slumber. If Circe's name does not reveal her nature
so nakedly as Calypso's does, this is but consistent with the fact of
her later creation. Nevertheless, we easily recognise by it death in one
of its many types--a ravenous animal or bird, a hawk or wolf.[18]
When Odysseus is freed from the fatal embrace of Calypso, he is not at
once restored to the common earth, but from his descent into hell goes
heavenwards, or at least to the happy islands of the blessed. The land
of the Phæaceans, Scheria, can scarcely be anything else than this
Paradise, to which, according to one myth, Rhadamanthus fled from his
brother Minos when he reigned in Crete. The Phæaceans, too, have had
dealings with "yellow-haired Rhadamanthus," whom they carried back in
their swift barques to Euboea. The name of their island is merely land,
shore;[19] perhaps at first only the farther coast of the sea of death.
"Far away do we live at the end of the watery plain,
Nor before now have we ever had dealings with other mortals;
But now there comes some luckless wanderer hither.
Him it is right that we help; for all men, fellows and strangers,
Come from Zeus; in his sight the smallest gift is pleasing."[20]
They live close to the gods, and in familiar converse with them. It is a
place where decay and death cannot enter. In the gardens of Alcinoüs
flowers and fruit do not grow old and disappear; winter does not succeed
to summer; all is one continuous round of blossoming and bearing fruit;
in one part of the garden the trees are all abloom; in another they are
heavy with clusters. There it _is_, as in that wizard's tower of
Middle-Age legend it only _seemed_ to be--
"That from one window men beheld the spring,
And from another saw the summer glow,
And from a third the fruited vines arow."[21]
In name the Phæaceans appear as beings of the twilight--=phaiax=,
strengthened from =phaios=, dusky, dim. Their most wondrous possessions
are their ships, which know the thoughts of men, and sail swifter than a
bird or than thought. "No pilots have they, no rudders, no oarsmen,
which other ships have, for they themselves know the thoughts and minds
of men. The rich fields they know, and the cities among all men, and
swiftly pass over the crests of the sea, shrouded in mist and
gloom."[22] Yet the Phæaceans themselves live remote from human
habitation, unused to strangers. It would seem, therefore, that the
ships travel alone on their dark voyages. For what purpose? It is not
difficult to guess. Their part is to carry the souls of dead men over to
the land of Paradise.[23] We can imagine them sailing in every human
sea; calling at every port, familiar with every city, though in their
shroud of darkness they are unseen by men. They know all the rich lands,
for every land has its tribute to pay to the ships of death. They are
the exact counterparts of the "grim ferryman which poets write of;" only
that the last plies his business in the ancient underground Hades, while
the Phæacean mariners are really believed to be inhabitants of the upper
earth; albeit they can pass from this life to the other.
Their business with Odysseus is to bring him back to the common world of
Greece--to beloved Ithaca. He has passed to the cave of Hel, and emerged
from it to visit the land of Paradise; now he returns, that his
adventures may be sung in the homes of Greece. How could men ever tell
tales of that strange country, if it really were a shore from which no
traveller returned? Accordingly, this traveller is laid to sleep in the
black barque of the Phæaceans, "a sweet sleep, unwakeful, nearest like
to death; and as arose the one brightest star to herald the morning, the
sea-troubled ship touched the shore."[24] Thus end the adventures of the
wanderer; and, as far as regards the belief concerning the sea of death,
this is all his adventures can tell us. His doings with the Cyclops,
with the Lotus-eaters, have their relationship with the same belief; but
they scarcely bring in any new elements; they only change the method of
their treatment and symbolize them in a new way. Hades is more
distinctly treated of in the second series; and this is enough to show
us that the mortal character of the whole journey has been lost sight of
more completely than in the first myths; so we noticed before, that the
significance of Calypso's name is half forgotten when her part is
assigned to Circe. The journey to Hades from Circe's island, Ææa,
tallies exactly with the journey to Scheria from the island of Calypso;
only, for the island of the blest is substituted the underground home of
souls; and when Odysseus addresses there his companion, Elpenor, whom he
had but a little while ago left dead on Circe's island, and asks him how
he could have come under the dark west more quickly on foot than
Odysseus did sailing in a black ship, we see that the meaning of the
ocean journey is forgotten, and that a sort of confusion has arisen
between the Hades under men's feet, to which the souls of the dead
descend, and the Hades at the end of the journey lying far away. This
part, then, is not significant of the Greek belief concerning an earthly
Paradise. The learned Welcker, who first showed how these Phæacean ships
were the carriers of souls,[25] wishes also to connect the myth with
some non-Hellenic source. He supposes it to have been gathered from the
Teutons. But surely we are not obliged to go so far, unless we are
prepared to consider Charon non-Hellenic also; and no one can really
pretend that. For the Phæacean myth is in many ways truer than the myth
of Charon and Styx. Styx is but the earth-river (or sea), Oceanus,
transferred to beneath the earth; and the story of the ferryman is a
compromise between the two creeds--that of the _under_-world and that of
the western paradise beyond sea; while the myth of the Phæaceans is a
simple expression of the last. The connection which we find between
Greek and German in these beliefs is derivable only from their common
ancestry--not from a contact in later days. Certainly these legends have
their close counterparts in Norse mythology; the two series only require
to be stripped of local colouring, and some unessential details, to
display very clearly their common brotherhood. How curious, for
instance, is it to see that Calypso corresponds literally in name with
the Northern goddess of the dead, Hel! Another myth, the story of the
burning of Baldur, repeats the same images of death which we trace in
the legend of Odysseus.
Baldur is quite evidently the sun-god. Less of a hero, more of a god,
than Odysseus, he is nevertheless mortal--as, indeed, all the Norse gods
are--and falls pierced by the hand of his own brother, Hödur. Then his
corpse is placed upon his ship, Hringhorn, and sent out upon this, as on
a pyre, drifting into the ocean. We can imagine how to the Norsemen upon
their stormy seas, the image of the sun dying red upon the western
waters recalled the story of Baldur's burning ship. The Viking imitated
his god in this, and when his time came ordered his funeral fire to be
lighted in like manner upon a ship and himself to be set sailing, as
Baldur was. After this we are brought in the myth to the underground
kingdom of Hel, and there the goddess entertains Baldur, as Calypso
entertained Odysseus, making ready her best to do him honour, and
seating him in the highest place in her hall. Then the gods take
counsel how Baldur is to be brought back again, and one of them,
Hermödr,[26] the messenger, like Hermes, is sent to beg Hel to let
Baldur out of Helheim. Fate and death are more powerful in northern
lands than they are in Greece. The gods cannot command that this Calypso
should let her prisoner go; and alas! they do not even obtain an answer
to their prayer save on conditions which they are unable to fulfil. Hel
will set Baldur free, if all things, both living and dead, weep for him;
but if one thing refuses to weep, then he must remain in the
under-world. Thereupon the gods sent messengers over the whole earth,
commanding all things, living and lifeless, to weep Baldur out of
Helheim; all things freely complied with the request, both men and
stones, and trees and metals; until as the messengers were returning,
deeming that their mission was accomplished, they met an old witch
sitting in a cave, and she refused to weep, saying, "Let Hel keep her
own."[27] This old witch is Calypso or Circe in another guise. Her name
is Thokk, that is, darkness (dökkr).
The Teutonic people had many myths and stories about the carrying the
dead across the sea. We have signalized the belief in such a passage as
the origin of those countless mediæval legends of the earthly Paradise:
doubtless it is the parent of the modern superstition that ghosts will
not cross the running water. Side by side with the story of the
Phæaceans we may place the superstition which Procopius records touching
our own island. The Byzantine historian of Justinian seems to have had
but vague ideas of the position of Britain, which, by the tide of
Teutonic invasion across the Rhine, had long been cut off from
intercourse with the Empire. These Easterns were careless and ignorant
of the remote West. So Procopius speaks of Britannia as lying opposite
to Spain; and then he mentions another island, Brittia--evidently in
reality our island--which faces the northern coast of Gaul, and of this
he tells the following strange story:--There is, he declares, an island
called Brittia, which lies in the Northern Seas. It is separated into
two divisions by a wall;[28] and on one side of this wall the air is
healthy and the land fertile and pleasant, and all things most apt for
human habitation. But on the other side the air is so noxious that no
one can breathe in it for an hour: it is given up to serpents and
poisonous animals and plants. Yet not entirely; for this is the home of
the dead. Then he goes on to relate how the fishermen who inhabit the
coast opposite this part of Brittia have to perform the strange duty of
carrying the souls across the strait. Each does his office in rotation;
when the man's night has come he is awoke by a knocking at his door, but
when he opens it, sees no one. He goes down to the shore, and finds
there strange vessels, which, though empty to mortal eyes, lie deep in
the water as though weighed down by some freight. Stepping in, each
fisherman takes his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the vessels are
wafted in one night across the channel, a distance which, with oar and
sail, they could usually scarce accomplish in eight. Arrived at the
opposite side--our coast--the fishermen heard names called over and
voices answering in rota, and they felt the boats becoming light. Then,
when all the ghosts were landed, they were carried back to Gaul. We may
picture them returning to the habitable world in the first glow of
morning, or with the one bright morning star which shone on Odysseus
landing at Ithaca.
So much for the myth of the sea, or river, of death. A most important
change was wrought in belief when the custom of burning the dead was
introduced. It would seem that our Aryan ancestors were the beginners of
this rite. Whence it arose we cannot say; but if the God of Fire was a
prominent divinity, the thought of committing the dead into his charge
seems a simple and natural one. Among the Aryan people the only deep
traces of fire-worship are to be seen in the Vedic and Iranian
religions,[29] while the fire-burial survived in all: but the former may
well have held a prominent place in their older creed. Or--and this is
far from unlikely--the custom of fire-burial may have arisen out of the
sun myth, just as the belief in the soul's journey after death was
suggested by watching the sun's journey to the west. The two great
fire-funerals mentioned in Greek and Teutonic mythology are the funerals
of sun-gods. Heracles burning on Mount OEta, on the western coast of the
Ægean, may have been first thought of by Greeks who saw the sun setting
in fire over that sea; and Baldur's bale on the ship _Hringhorn_ is
evidently the Norse edition of the same story, his blazing ship the
blaze in the sky, as the sun sinks into the water. Burning the dead
never seems to have been a universal practice; rather a special honour
paid to kings and heroes. But then we must remember that immortality
itself was not, in ancient belief, granted to all men indiscriminately,
only to the greatest.
We see at once that with the use of fire-burial many of the old beliefs
had to be given up; all those, for instance, which depended upon the
preservation of the bodily remains. Of old time men had buried treasures
with the corpse in the expectation that they would be of some kind of
use to it; the body itself was at first imagined to descend to the
under-world or to travel the western journey to the home of the sun. But
now the body is visibly consumed upon the funeral pile, where, too, are
placed, by a curious survival of old custom, the precious things which
would formerly have been buried with it in the ground. The body and
these things have been consumed, are gone; where have they gone? Have
they perished utterly, and is there nothing more left than the earliest
belief of an =A-idês=--a nowhere; is nothing true of all those myths of
the soul passing away to a home of bliss? Instead of giving up this
faith, the Aryan people have only spiritualized it, robbed it of the too
literal and earthly clothing which in earlier times it wore. The thought
which had once identified the life with the breath comes again into
force, or, if some material representation is still wished for, we have
the smoke of the funeral pyre, which rises heavenwards like an ascending
soul. In this spirit we find in long after years, in the description of
the funeral fire of Beowulf the Goth, it is said that the soul of the
hero _wand to wolcum_, "curled to the clouds," imaging the smoke which
was curling up from his pyre. There is even a curious analogy between
the words for _smoke_ and _soul_ in the Aryan languages, showing how
closely the two ideas were once allied. From a primitive root _dhu_,
which means to shake or blow, we get both the Sanskrit root _dhuma_,
smoke, and the Greek =thymos=, the immaterial part of man, his thought
or soul. =Thymos= is not a mere abstraction like our word mind, but that
which could live when the body was killed or wasted to death by
disease.[30]
Evidently, therefore, even the inanimate things, the weapons and
treasures which are burnt with the dead, survive in a land of essences
for the use of the liberated soul. To the question, Where does man's
essence go to when it rises from the funeral fire? the answer, if the
wish alone urged the thought, would be "To the gods." But with the
majority of burying people the belief in future union with the gods was
not strongly insisted upon. The islands of the blest are certainly not
to be confounded with Olympus; although the Phæaceans claim to live very
near the gods.[31] Yet with the use of burning, and among the Aryan
people, the hope gains a measure of strength. The gods of the Aryan
were, before everything, gods of the air. As the soul and the smoke
mounted upwards, "curled to the clouds," the belief of its having gone
to join the gods--chief god, Dyâus, the air--was impressed more vividly
upon his mind. And as the notion of the western journey to the home of
the sun was not abandoned, a natural compromise would be to send the
soul upwards to the path of the sun, and make its voyage a voyage in
heaven, led by the sun or by the wind. But his path still lay westward;
the home of the dead ancestors lay beyond the western boundary; there
was still an Oceanus to be crossed, and a dark Cimmerian land to be
passed through.
The heavenly path taken by the soul becomes, in the eye of mortals, a
_bridge_ spanning the celestial arch, and carrying them over the river
of death; and men would soon begin asking themselves where lay this
heavenly road. Night is necessarily associated with thoughts of
death--"Death, and his brother Sleep"--and of the other world. The
heavens wear a more awful aspect than by day. The sun has forsaken us,
and is himself buried beneath the earth; and a million dwellers in the
upper regions, who were before unseen, now appear to sight--the stars,
who in so many mythologies are associated with souls. Among the stars we
see a bright, yet misty, bow bent overhead: can this be other than the
destined bridge of souls? The ancient Indians called this road
gods'-path, because besides that it was the way for souls to God, it was
also the way from gods to men. They also called it the
cow-path--_gôpatha_, meaning possibly cloud-path--from which it is
likely we derive our name for it, "the Milky-way." The Low-German name
for the Milky-way is _kau-pat_--_i.e., kuh-pfad_, cow-path. But in their
hymns the Indians oftenest speak of it as the path of Yama, the way to
the house of Yama, the god of the dead:--
"A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by
men, a path I know of:
"On it the wise who have known Brahma ascend to the world Svarga, when
they have received their dismissal," sings a Sanskrit poet.[32]
Another (R. V. i. 38. 5) prays the Maruts, the gods of the wind, not to
let him wander on the path of Yama, or, when he does so--that is, when
his time shall come--to keep him that he fall not into the hands of
Nirrtis, the Queen of Naraka (Tartarus). In another place we find as
guardians of the bridge two dogs, the dogs of Yama, and the dead man is
committed to their care:--
"Give him, O king Yama, to the two dogs, the watchers, the four-eyed
guardians of the path, guardians of men: grant him safety and freedom
from pain."
Thus stands out in its complete development the myth of the Bridge of
Souls: a narrow path spanning the arch of heaven, passing over the
dwelling of Nirrtis, the Queen of Tartarus (perhaps not clearly
distinguishable from the river of death), and reaching at last the
country of the wise Pitris, the "fathers" of the tribe, who have gone to
heaven before, and who since their death have not ceased to keep watch
over the descendants of their race. This road is guarded by two dogs,
the dogs of Yama, both wardens of the bridge and likewise psychopomps,
or leaders of the soul up the strait road.
This was essentially an Indian myth--or perhaps an Indian and
Iranian--and took the place of the myth of the sea journey, as it was
conceived by Greeks and Germans. The Indians and Iranians had never a
sea of death, so they could not have such ferrymen as the Phæaceans, or
legends such as the voyages of Odysseus and the burning of Baldur. In
the place of them, and with their mortal _river_, they adopted this
Bridge of Souls. The guardians are manifold in their nature; for their
names show them related both to Cerberus, who guards Hades, and to
Hermes, who leads the souls of the dead below; and, so far as we can
gather from the Vedas, these dogs of Yama discharged both offices,
sometimes keeping the bridge and sometimes conducting souls along it.
"Give him," says the prayer, "O Yama, to the two dogs." No doubt their
terrors were for the wicked only, and they are thus apt images of
death:--
"Death comes to set thee free;
Oh, meet him cheerily
As thy true friend."[33]
Still, as we see from their appearance, the dreadful aspect of death
predominates. In like forms, as dogs or wolves, they return time out of
mind in Norse mythology and in Middle-Age legend.
It has been said that this myth of the Bridge of Souls was essentially
Indian and Iranian (old Persian). It is often most difficult to
ascertain what were the ancient Persian beliefs: but in this case the
myth has been handed down to us from the Persians through the Arabs, a
people possessing of right no part or lot in its construction. It is
generally acknowledged that Mohammed took from the Persians that famous
bridge so vividly described in the Korân.[34] Es-Sirât is the bridge's
name. It is finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, and
is, besides, guarded with thorns and briars along all its length.
Nevertheless, when, at the last day, the good Muslim comes to cross it,
a light will shine upon him from heaven, and he will be snatched across
like lightning or like the wind; but when the wicked man or the
unbeliever approaches, the light will be hidden, and, from the extreme
narrowness of the bridge and likewise becoming entangled in the thorns,
he will fall headlong into the abyss of fire that is beneath. This is
the fragment of our old Aryan mythology which the Mohammedan has taken
to himself to form an image of hell and of punishment after death. It is
significant that from the Persians should have been inherited the most
gloomy myth concerning the Bridge of Souls. For from the same source we
(Christians) gain our fearfullest notions of the Devil.
The bridge cannot be always the Milky-way. In at least one Sanskrit hymn
we learn--
"Upon it, they say, there are colours, white, and blue, and brown, and
gold, and red.
"And this path Brahma knows, and he who has known Brahma shall take it;
he who is pure and glorious."
Here the singer is evidently describing the rainbow. Now in the Norse
cosmology the rainbow had the same name as the Indian _patha-devayano_,
gods'-path. The Eddas call it As-bru, the bridge of the Æsir, or gods.
Its other name, Bifröst, the trembling mile, it may even have inherited
from the Milky-way, for that, when we look at it, seems to be always
trembling. Asbru or Bifröst, then, is the bridge whereby the gods
descend to earth. One end of it reaches to the famous Urdar fount, where
sit the weird sisters three--the Nornir, or fates. "Near the fountain
which is under the ash stands a very fair house, out of which come
three maidens, named Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld (Past, Present, Future).
These maidens assign the lifetime of men, and are called Norns."[35] To
their stream the gods ride every day along Bifröst to take counsel. For
in the Norse creed the gods know not the hidden things of the future,
nor have power to ward them off. Fate and death, the Twilight of the
Gods, lies ahead for them also, as these things lie ahead of mortals.
It is possible that a trace of the rainbow bridge is to be seen in the
Greek myth of the asphodel meadows, which are a part of the infernal
regions. But no other trace of the Bridge of Souls--if this be one--is
to be found throughout the range of Hellenic mythology.
The Eddas have nothing to say of the Milky-way. But we have clear
evidence that it was considered by the German people a path for the
dead. Indeed, in the scanty legends which survive, we can trace the
characteristic features of the Indian myth of the bridge guarded by
Yama's dogs, and the souls led along it by the wind-god. The wind-god of
the north is the father of gods, none less than Odin himself; and this
is why Odin is described as riding with his Valkyriur to the
battle-fields, to choose from the dead the heroes who shall go with him
to Valhöll, the hall of the chosen. It is because, as the wind-god, he
collects the breath of the departed. Odin and Freyja (Air and Earth)
divide the slain, says one legend--that is, the bodies go to earth, the
breath goes to heaven. Now, in the Middle Ages, when Odin-worship had
been overthrown, the gods of Asgaard descended to Helheim; from being
deities they were turned into fiends. Odin still pursued his office as
leader of the souls; but now he was huntsman of hell. One of the
commonest appearances of this fiend, therefore, is as a huntsman--called
the Wild Huntsman. He is heard by the peasants of the wild mountain
districts at this day. He is companioned by _two dogs_, and his chase
goes on along the Milky-way all the year through, save during the twelve
nights which follow Christmas. During that time he hunts on earth, and
the peasant will do well to keep his door well-barred at night. If he
does not, one of the hell-hounds will rush in and lie down in the ashes
of the hearth. No power will move him during the ensuing year, and for
all that time there will be trouble in the house. When the hunt comes
round again he will rise from his couch and rush forth, wildly howling,
to join his master.
A gentler legend is that which we find preserved in a charming poem of
the Swede, Torpelius, called "The Winter Street"--another of the names
for the Milky-way. With this, in the form in which it has been rendered
into English,[36] we may end our list of legends connected with the Sea
of Death or the Bridge of Souls. The story is of two lovers:--
"Her name Salami was, his Zulamyth;
And each so loved, each other loved. Thus runs the tender myth:
"That once on earth they lived, and, loving there,
Were wrenched apart by night, and sorrow, and despair;
And when death came at last, with white wings given,
Condemned to live apart, each reached a separate heaven.
* * * * *
"Yet loving still upon the azure height,
Across unmeasured ways of splendour, gleaming bright,
With worlds on worlds that spread and glowed and burned,
Each unto each, with love that knew no limit, longing turned.
"Zulamyth half consumed, until he willed
Out of his strength one night a bridge of light to build
Across the waste--and lo! from her far sun,
A bridge of light from orb to orb Salami had begun.
"A thousand years they built, still on, with faith,
Immeasurable, quenchless, so my legend saith,
Until the winter street of light--a bridge
Above heaven's highest vault swung clear, remotest ridge from
ridge.
"Fear seized the Cherubim; to God they spake--
'See what amongst thy works, Almighty, these can make!'
God smiled, and smiling, lit the spheres with joy--
'What in my world love builds,' he said, 'shall I, shall Love
itself destroy?'"
* * * * *