confused, certain essential features, which we will here merely
indicate, can be recognised in it. We will return to them one after the
other, and speak of them in greater detail, in later lectures. When the
souls, or rather the shades, descend to the depths of the earth, they
reach first a provisional abode where they await a decision as to their
lot, an intermediate region through which all of them pass but in which
some are kept for a considerable time.[181] They then cross the Styx,
and a road which is also common to all of them leads them to the court
which determines their lot.[182] This judging of the dead is foreign to
Homeric poetry: the idea of it was perhaps borrowed by Greece from
Egypt, but from ancient Orphism onwards it was an essential element of
infernal eschatology. Infallible judges, from whom no fault is hid,
divide into two companies the multitude of the souls appearing before
them. The guilty are constrained to take the road to the left which
leads to dark Tartarus, crossing its surrounding river of fire, the
Pyriphlegethon. There those who have committed inexpiable crimes are
condemned to eternal chastisement.[183] But the road to the right leads
the pious souls to the Elysian Fields where, among flowered meadows and
wrapped in soft light, they obtain the reward of their virtues, whether,
having attained to perfection, they are able to dwell for ever with the
heroes, or whether, being less pure, they are obliged to return later to
the earth in order to reincarnate themselves in new bodies after they
have drunk the water of Lethe and lost the memory of their previous
existence.
* * * * *
The philosophical criticism of the Greeks had early attacked these
traditional beliefs, but such negative attitude became more definite
among the thinkers of the surpassingly rationalistic period which came
after Aristotle.[184] The Peripatetics, who admitted at most the
survival of reason, rejected in consequence all the myths dealing with
the descent of the shades into the kingdom of Pluto. The Epicureans were
even more radical, for, as we have seen (p. 7), they condemned the soul
to dissolution at the moment of death, thus destroying the very
foundation of the belief in Hades. Their campaign against stories in
which they saw only the lugubrious inventions of priests and poets, was
one of the capital points of their polemics against popular religion,
and they flattered themselves that by destroying faith in the pains of
Tartarus they freed mankind from vain terrors which obsessed its minds
and poisoned its joys. The Stoics, we know (p. 13), taught that the soul
is a burning breath of the same nature as the ether and as the stars
which shine in the sky. As to whether this ardent fluid was lost after
death in the universal fire, or kept its individuality until the final
conflagration of the world, the doctrine of the Porch varied. But one
thing was certain: the fiery nature of the soul must prevent it from
going down into the underground and impel it to rise to higher spheres.
If it were weighed down by its contact with the body and laden with
matter, it might float for some time in the dense air surrounding the
earth but could never descend into its depths.[185] The impossibility of
admitting literally the truth of the stories as to the infernal realm
was thus proved.
The same psychological doctrine as to the soul’s kinship with the fire
of the heavenly bodies was admitted in the Alexandrian age by the sect
which paid one and the same veneration to Pythagoras and to Plato and
was thus more attached than any other to belief in immortality. It gave
in, to some extent, to contemporary rationalism and was brought to
modify its ideas as to life beyond the grave. Ancient Pythagorism, the
heir of Orphism, made much of the sufferings reserved for sinners in the
infernal abysses. A book attributed to Periktione still shows the
daughter who has despised her parents as condemned to suffer, beneath
the earth and in the company of the impious, the eternal evil inflicted
by “Dike and the gods of down below.”[186] But in the first century
before our era the pseudo-Timaeus of Locri declares that such tales are
fictions—salutary, it is true—imagined by Homer in order to divert from
evil those to whom truth alone was not a sufficient guide.[187] The only
penalty which can overtake the sinning soul is, according to these
Neo-Pythagoreans, metempsychosis, which forces it to reincarnate itself
in a fleshly prison.[188]
This doctrine of transmigration claims to transport hell to earth and to
explain, as moral allegories, all the fables which the poets had
invented.[189] The _Inferi_ are nothing else than the dwellings of our
globe, which is the lowest of the nine circles of the world. The true
Hades is the wicked man’s life in which he is tortured by his vices. The
rivers of hell—Cocytus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon and Styx—are anger,
remorse, sadness and hate, which cause man to suffer. The Furies are the
passions, scourging him with whips and burning him with torches; and
similarly an ingenious interpretation is given to each of the pains
suffered by Tantalus, Sisyphus, the Danaïdes and the others.[190]
This exegesis led finally to an absolute denial of the existence of
hell, but such radical scepticism was in too flagrant contradiction to
the old beliefs to be willingly accepted by the minds which remained
attached to them. Hence arose attempts to bring these beliefs into
harmony with the psychology generally admitted.
A first theory, to which we will have to return when speaking of the
nature of the surviving souls,[191] seems to have been invented in
Alexandria and to have been inspired by Egyptian religion.[192] The
authors who first allude to it, one Greek and one Roman, are
contemporaries who wrote about the year 200 B. C., the critic
Aristarchus and the poet Ennius, but the transmission of the doctrine
can be traced through literary traditions down to the end of antiquity.
It divides the human composite not into two but into three parts—the
body, the soul and the shade. The body is destroyed beneath the earth;
the soul, which is a particle of the divine ether, rises after death
towards its place of origin; but a form (εἴδωλον) of subtle matter
detaches itself from the corpse, and it is this semblance (_simulacrum_)
or shade (_umbra_) which goes down to the infernal regions. The
existence of these regions could thus be maintained, but they were no
longer held to receive the celestial principle which gave intelligence.
Others allowed that it was impossible that the earth should contain
subterranean caverns large enough to hold Tartarus, the Elysian Fields
and the infinite multitude of the dead. But they explained that the word
subterranean (ὑπόγειος) had been misunderstood, that it denoted not the
bowels of the earth but the lower half of the terrestrial globe, the
southern hemisphere, which was unknown to the ancients, or even the
whole celestial hemisphere, curved below this globe which hung
motionless in the centre of the universe.[193] This hemisphere is always
invisible,—so the ancients might say,—which is exactly the sense of the
word Hades (= ἀειδής). The Axiochos, an apocryphal work attributed to
Plato, was first to reveal this doctrine, claiming that it had been
communicated to Socrates by the Mage Gobryes. It was in reality borrowed
by the Greeks of the Alexandrian age from the astral theology of the
Semitic peoples. According to this theology the world is divided into
two halves by the line of the horizon; the upper hemisphere is the
domain of the living and the higher gods, the lower that of the dead and
the infernal gods. Descent to it and ascent from it are by way of two
gates, situated west and east, where the sun appears and disappears. The
marshes of the Acheron, the river Styx, and Charon and his boat are
constellations which the souls cross when they have passed through the
“gate of Hades.”
The ancient Greeks had placed the Islands of the Blessed, whither the
heroes were borne by the favour of the gods, somewhere far away in the
ocean. These islands were now supposed to lie in the Antipodes, in the
unknown half of the earth. All the poets’ stories of the fragrant and
melodious gardens of this abode of delights were applied to these
marvellous countries which no sailor had ever reached.[194] On the other
hand, Tartarus was placed at the bottom of the celestial abysses, near
the lowest point of the lower hemisphere, that is, diametrically
opposite to Olympus, the dwelling of the gods, who were throned on the
summit of the starry vault. It was into this sombre gulf that the wicked
were flung; there yawned the bottomless pit in which the demons of the
dusky world inflicted eternal torture on the guilty.
This theory claimed to bring the ancient Hellenic beliefs into agreement
with the cosmography of astronomers, but this cosmography itself
undermined the foundations of the system, in so far as it refuted the
hypothesis of a physical opposition between the two halves of the
universe. It was observed that a single sky revolved about our earth;
that the same atmosphere, composed of the same elements, enveloped it
entirely; that every part of it was, in turn, equally in the light and
in the shade. Therefore physical phenomena must be identical over the
whole surface of our globe; the climate of the Antipodes must be like
that of our lands; if the Antipodes were peopled, it was by races like
those of men and the beasts. Their inhabitants therefore were not the
dead but living beings. The marvels of the Fortunate Isles did not exist
and there was no reason for regarding the lower rather than the upper
part of the heavens as the vast reservoir of souls.
The doctrine which placed the subterranean kingdom of Pluto and
Proserpina on the other side of the earth and in the other celestial
hemisphere, made a poor resistance to this criticism of the Alexandrian
geographers. If it did not entirely disappear, if its transmission can
be followed down to the end of antiquity and even to the Middle Ages, it
never was so widespread nor so active as another doctrine claiming to
reconcile the beliefs of the past with accepted science.
* * * * *
This bold doctrine transported the whole subterranean world above the
earth’s surface. We shall see, in the next lecture, on celestial
immortality (p. 96), that the Pythagoreans conceived the idea of placing
the Elysian Fields in the moon, and that the Fortunate Isles were
similarly explained by them as being the sun and the moon bathed by the
fluid of the ether. The _Inferi_ were thus the lower space, that is, the
space extending between the sphere of the moon, which was the limit of
the world of the gods, and our globe, which was the centre of the cosmic
system. In the _Inferi_ the souls which had to suffer the chastisement
of their faults were kept prisoners; they could not win to the stars but
wandered plaintively on the earth’s surface and especially about their
own tombs, and then rose through the atmosphere in which, little by
little, they were purified by the elements. Allegorical interpretations
found a place for the infernal rivers in this new topography of the
Beyond: Acheron was explained as being the air, the Pyriphlegethon as
the zone of hail and fire, and the meanderings of the Styx became the
circles of the universe. We shall have occasion to return to the passage
of the soul through this aerial purgatory and its ascension to the
Elysian Fields of the sky.[195]
This cosmological interpretation of the tales referring to Hades had a
more powerful influence than the moral allegory which did too much
violence to tradition in claiming to make our earthly life the
mythological hell. The doctrine that the _Inferi_ were in the atmosphere
was adopted by Stoicism at least from the time of Posidonius and was
therefore widely believed from the end of the Roman Republic onwards.
Even the mysteries, which first kept alive the belief in a subterranean
kingdom of the infernal gods, did not escape the influence of these new
ideas and were brought to adapt their esoteric teaching to them.[196]
The transformation of ancestral beliefs by this theology cannot today be
better apprehended than from the sixth book of the Aeneid. Virgil, when
he relates the descent of Aeneas into the abode of the shades, is
inspired by the _Nekyia_ of the Odyssey and other poetic tales. He
remains apparently faithful to mythological and literary tradition,
retaining the conventional decoration, the unvarying geography of the
infernal kingdom; but he does not admit the literal truth of these
beliefs of an earlier time; he is aware of the figurative sense given by
the philosophers to the old fables of Hades. At the risk of seeming to
contradict himself, he recalls this learned eschatology—the
purification, the ascension and the transmigration of souls—in
connection with what might have been no more than the story of a
marvellous journey to the country of the dead. The unity of the
conception and the composition is the less seriously compromised because
it was believed that the ancient poets themselves had wished to indicate
these truths in their verses under the veil of allegory. The descent to
the nether world has therefore a much loftier bearing in Virgil than a
mere embellishment. It is the expression of a conviction or at least a
hope, not only a brilliant fiction based on an old poetic theme.
* * * * *
However, the symbolical interpretations of the pagan theologians who
respected tradition and the purely negative criticism of the sceptics
led finally to a common result, to the destruction, namely, of the
ancient beliefs, even when it was claimed that they were being saved.
Whether the souls were held captive in the other hemisphere or in the
atmosphere, or whether they were condemned to reincarnation in a body,
Hades was transformed either to the lower sky, the air or the earth, and
the early conception of a subterranean world, whither the dead who had
been laid in the grave descended, was abolished. There are abundant
texts to prove that from the end of the Roman Republic this belief had
lost its grip on many minds. Cicero[197] claims that there was not an
old woman left foolish enough to fear the deep dwellings of Orcus and
the gloomy regions peopled by the livid dead. “No one is childish
enough,” Seneca repeats,[198] “to fear Cerberus and the phantoms which
appear in the form of skeletons.” “That there are Manes,” says
Juvenal,[199] “a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman armed with a pole, and
black frogs in the gulfs of the Styx, that so many thousands of men can
cross the dark water in a single boat,” these are things in which
everyone had ceased to believe except very young children. Pliny[200]
brings forward a paradoxical argument, that, had there been infernal
regions, the zeal of the miners who had dug deep galleries in the ground
would have pierced their boundaries; and even the devout Plutarch, when
he comes to speak of the punishments reserved by mythology for the
wicked, sees in them only nurses’ tales to frighten babies.[201]
The multiplicity of this testimony and its precision allow no doubt that
not only the educated classes but a large portion of the population
rejected the fables as to the nether world. These fables were in any
case a foreign importation in the Latin world. Moralists, while they
ceased to believe in them for themselves, sometimes pretended to retain
them in order to inspire the people with salutary fear, but Tartarus had
lost much of its terror for those it should have kept from ill-doing.
Is this to say that these ideas no longer found credence anywhere? A
faith which has long dominated minds disappears hardly and leaves
persistent traces behind it in customs and feeling. Thus we find that,
more or less everywhere, the practice was perpetuated of placing in the
mouth of the corpse a piece of money which served, it was said, to pay
Charon for the crossing of the Styx.[202] Excavators have found these
coins in many Roman tombs. But they are doubtless evidence of no more
than a traditional rite which men performed without attaching a definite
meaning to it.
Moreover, the metrical epitaphs continue to speak of the Elysian Fields
and of Tartarus, of Styx and of Acheron; they complain of the cruelty of
Pluto who bears away mortals before their time, or of the Parcae or
Fates who cut the thread of their days; they mention the avenging
Furies, the sufferings of Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion. But these are no
more than ready-made formulas of poetical language, literary
reminiscences or traditional metaphors. Yet sometimes this infernal
mythology is curiously developed. Thus a long inscription on a Roman
tomb describes a young man descending from the ether in order to
announce to those near and dear to him that he has become a celestial
hero and has not to go to Pluto’s kingdom. “I shall not wend mournfully
to the floods of Tartarus; I shall not cross the waters of Acheron as a
shade, nor shall I propel the dusky boat with my oar; I shall not fear
Charon with his face of terror, nor shall old Minos pass sentence on me;
I shall not wander in the abode of gloom nor be held prisoner on the
bank of the fatal waters.”[203] This epitaph dates from the century of
Augustus, but did its author, any more than the writers of that time,
believe in the reality of the beings with which he peoples Hades? He
decorates his language with a literary ornament which Christian poetry
was later to inherit. This poetry did not hesitate to employ these pagan
commonplaces, which had passed from hand to hand until they were so worn
out that their first meaning had been effaced. The Renaissance and the
age of modern classicism were again to use and to abuse them.
The sculpture of tombs continued in the same way often to reproduce the
ancient models. Sarcophagi sometimes show us the dead man led by Hermes,
guide of souls, and coming into the presence of Pluto and
Proserpina.[204] We also see on funeral monuments Charon in his boat,
the typical sufferings of Tantalus, whose eager lips cannot reach the
flowing water, Ixion turning on his wheel, Sisyphus labouring under the
weight of his rock and, above all, the Danaïdes eternally pouring water
into a perforated vase.[205] But it is probable that these traditional
figures were repeated without any very strong faith being held as to the
real existence of the personages which they represented; indeed it was
proposed only to show them as symbols which had to be interpreted
allegorically.
If we had no other evidence than funeral poetry and art of the
persistence of the beliefs of the past, the testimony would have to be
accepted very cautiously. But other more convincing proofs assure us
that popular faith clung, with characteristic tenacity, to the ancient
conception of the _Inferi_. Without believing precisely in the strange
tortures inflicted on the wicked heroes of mythology, the man in the
street was still vaguely persuaded that the souls went down from the
tomb to some deep places where they received rewards and punishments.
Suetonius[206] relates that when the death of Tiberius became known in
Rome the people “prayed Mother Earth and the Manes gods to give the dead
man no other dwelling than that of the impious.” The Oriental slaves
brought the same convictions from their countries like many other old
beliefs which had faded away in the West. The romancer Heliodorus, a
Syrian priest, shows us in his novel his heroine invoking “the demons
who on the earth and under the earth watch over and punish unrighteous
men,”[207] her prayer being that, after the iniquitous death which
threatened her, they might receive her. The same conviction appears in
the funeral inscriptions of the East. Thus an epitaph of Elaiousa in
Cilicia[208] adjures “the heavenly god, the Sun, the Moon and the
subterranean gods who receive us.” The common idea was that a dead man
can be excluded from the dwelling of the shades and condemned to wander
miserably on the earth. In the same way the thought is often expressed
in the magic papyri of Egypt that the deceased were plunged into the
dark gulfs underground and there became demons whom the wizard called
up, when he summoned them by his incantations. Even in Greece, where
rationalistic criticism had penetrated far deeper among the people,
Plutarch, while he reports that few people were still really afraid of
Cerberus, the lot of the Danaïdes and other bugbears of Hades, adds,
however, that for fear of such pains recourse was had to purifications
and initiations.[209]
This belief in the existence of Hades, maintained in the lower strata of
the population in spite of the inroads made on it and of its partial
supersession by other doctrines, was to acquire new strength from the
rebirth of Platonism, which looked upon the writings of the “divine”
master as inspired. In several passages Plato spoke with so much
precision of the dwelling of the souls in the bowels of the earth that
even the subtlety of his later interpreters found difficulty in giving
another meaning to his text, although the attempt was made by some of
them. Therefore effort was directed to defending the doctrine of the
infallible sage by refuting the objections raised against it by his
adversaries. The Stoics had held, as we have seen (p. 77), that the
soul, being a “fiery breath,” had a natural tendency to rise in the air
and could not sink into the ground. But Porphyry[210] objected that in
lowering itself from heaven towards our world it had become impregnate
with the atmospheric damp and thus had grown heavier, and that if during
its passage in the body it became laden with the clay of a sensual life,
if it wrapped itself in a material cloak, its density came to be such
that it was dragged down into the dusky abysses of the earth. “It is
true,” says Proclus,[211] “that the soul by force of its nature aspires
to rise to the place which is its natural abode, but when passions have
invaded it they weigh it down and the savage instincts which develop in
it attract it to the place to which they properly belong, that is, the
earth.” According to Proclus,[212] who claims to interpret Plato
faithfully, the soul after death is judged somewhere between the sky and
our globe; if it be declared worthy it enjoys a life of blessedness in
the celestial spheres; if, on the other hand, it deserve penalties, it
is sent to a place beneath the ground. Elsewhere, defining his
thought,[213] he affirms that the various parts of Hades and the
subterranean courts and the rivers of whose existence Homer and Plato
appraise us, should not be regarded as vain imaginations or fabulous
marvels. As the souls which go to heaven are distributed among several
and different resting-places, so we must believe that for souls still in
need of chastisement and purification underground dwellings, whither
penetrate numerous effluvia of the super-terrestrial elements, are
thrown open. It is these effluvia that are called “rivers” or
“currents.” Here too various classes of demons hold empire, some of them
avengers, some chastisers, some purifiers and some executioners. Into
this abode, the farthest from that of the gods, the sun’s rays do not
penetrate. It is filled with all the disorder of matter. Therein is the
prison, guarded by demons who ensure justice, of the guilty souls hidden
beneath the earth.