alter, but by the mere logic of their system that the last Greek
philosophers are led to admit what their predecessors rejected.
Sometimes, more or less unconsciously, they were under a religious
influence. The Platonist Celsus believed in the eternal pains of hell
but invoked only the authority of “mystagogues and theologians” in
support of this article of faith.[214] The opposition between the
obscure retreats of the Manes and the bright dwellings of Olympus is
old, and naturally became prominent as the belief spread, first that
heroes, and afterwards that all virtuous spirits, rose to the eternal
spaces.[215] But the religion which formulated the strictly consequent
doctrine of an absolute antithesis between the luminous kingdom where
the divinities and the beneficent genii were seated, and the dark domain
of the Spirit of Evil and his perverse demons, was Persian Mazdeism. The
resplendent heights where the gods had their thrones were to be after
death the abode of those who had served piously. On the other hand,
those who had contributed to increase evil on the earth, were to be
flung into the murky abysses in which Ahriman reigned. Iranian dualism
imposed this eschatological conception on a section of Alexandrian
Judaism; it was admitted by many Pythagoreans, then by the gnostic sects
and later by Manicheism. But above all it was widely propagated under
the Roman Empire by the mysteries of Mithras. We find then put forth the
doctrine that the demons are divided into two armies, incessantly at war
with each other, one good and one evil. The good army is subject to
celestial powers and comes down to earth to give succour and support to
the faithful. The evil army obeys an anti-god (ἀντίθεος) and issues from
the bowels of the earth in order to scatter misery, sin and death among
men.[216] The souls of the dead become like one or the other of these
two opposing classes of demons. When they are virtuous and pure they
rise to the luminous ether where dwell the divine spirits. If, on the
contrary, they are vicious and defiled they go down into the underground
depths where the Prince of Darkness commands; like the maleficent demons
who people this hell they suffer and cause to suffer.
It was at this compromise that paganism stopped when it reached the term
of its evolution. Oriental dualism imposed on it its final formula. It
no longer admitted, like the ancients, that all the dead must go down
from the grave into immense hollows dug in the bowels of the earth, and
it no longer made the Elysian Fields and Tartarus two contiguous domains
of the kingdom of Pluto. Nor did it transport them both, side by side,
as the pagan theologians of the beginning of our era would have done, to
the atmosphere and the starry spheres. It separated them radically,
cutting the abode of the souls into two halves, of which it placed one
in the luminous sky and the other in subterranean darkness. This was
also the conception which, after some hesitation, became generally
accepted by the Church, and which for long centuries was to remain the
common faith of all Christendom.
III
CELESTIAL IMMORTALITY
The astral religion which became predominant in the Roman Empire may be
considered as an intermediary, a connecting link, between the old
anthropomorphic paganism and the Christian faith. Instead of moral—or,
if you prefer, immoral—beings, stronger than man but subject to all the
passions of man, it taught the adoration of the heavenly powers who act
on nature, and so led mankind to the worship of the Power who is beyond
the heavens. This influence of the astral cults of the East can be
clearly perceived in the evolution of the ideas as to future life, and
this above all constitutes the historical importance of the subject
which I venture to treat in this lecture.
Beliefs which are spread among many peoples of the world relate the
immortality of the soul to the heavenly bodies. It was for long naïvely
imagined that a new sun was created every evening, or at least every
winter, and a new moon born each month, and traces of this primitive
idea survived in the religion of antiquity and persist even in our
modern speech. But when it was realised that the same celestial
luminaries reappeared and resumed their ardour after their fires had
died and they had ceased to shine, that the stars which were lit at
sunset were those which had been extinguished at dawn, their lot was
related to that of man, destined like them to be reborn, after death, to
a new life. Various savage tribes thus associate the heavenly bodies,
and especially the moon, with the resurrection of the dead. The wan
circle which sheds its vague light in the darkness of night causes
phantoms to appear to haunt vigils and dreams, and is therefore the
power which presides over life beyond the tomb. Among the Greeks of the
most ancient period Hecate was at one and the same time the goddess of
the moon, the summoner of ghosts and the queen of the infernal realm. In
the East astrological ideas mingled with this mythology. It was taught
that the moon’s cold and damp rays corrupted the flesh of the dead and
thus detached from it the soul which finally abandoned the corpse. The
Syrians, at the critical times in which the moonbeams exercised a more
active influence on this separation, offered sacrifices on tombs, and
the threefold commemoration of the dead on the third, the seventh and
the fortieth day in a part of the Eastern Church had its earliest origin
in these offerings of the sidereal cults.[217]
There was also a very widely held belief, which has survived in European
folk-lore, that each man has his star in the sky. This star is dazzling
if his lot be brilliant, pale if his state of life be humble. It is lit
at his birth and falls when he dies. The fall of a shooting star
therefore denotes a person’s death. This popular idea existed in
antiquity. Pliny the Naturalist reports it, although he denies its
truth,[218] and it was again combated in the fifth century by Eusebius
of Alexandria. “Were there then only two stars in the time of Adam and
Eve,” asks the bishop, “and only eight after the Flood when Noah and
seven other persons alone were saved in the Ark?”[219] The formulas of
epitaphs and the very usages of language show how current was the belief
that each man was, as we still say, born under a good or an evil star.
_Astrosus_ was the Latin equivalent of our _unlucky_. This doctrine of a
rudimentary astrology was incorporated in the general system of learned
genethlialogy. Although this latter attributed a predominant influence
to the planets and the signs of the zodiac, it also taught, in
accordance with popular opinion, that each of the most brilliant stars
(λαμπροὶ ἀστέρες) ensures riches, power and glory to the newly born
child, if it be in a favourable position at his birth.[220]
But side by side with this general conception of a relation between the
life of the stars and that of men, a much more precise idea is met with
from the first. The soul was, as we shall see,[221] often conceived by
the ancients as a bird preparing for flight. Where would it alight when
it had passed through the air except on the heavenly bodies which were
still imagined as quite near the earth? The paintings on an Egyptian
tomb of a late period, found at Athribis, show us the soul of the dead
man fluttering with those others like him in the midst of the
constellations.[222]
The belief was widely spread that the spirits of the dead went to
inhabit the moon. In the East this faith retained a very crude form
which certainly went back to a most primitive paganism. We find it in
India as well as in Manicheism, which arose in Mesopotamia in the third
century, but which admitted many ancient traditions into its doctrine.
“All who leave the earth,” says an Upanishad, “go to the moon, which is
swollen by their breath during the first half of the month.” The
Manicheans similarly affirmed that when the moon was in the crescent its
circumference was swelled by souls, conceived as luminous, which it drew
up from the earth, and that when it was waning it transferred these
souls to the sun. Using an idea much earlier than his time,[223] Mani
also stated that the boat of the moon, which plied in the sky, received
a load of souls which every month it transferred to the sun’s larger
vessel. The association established in Syro-Punic religions between the
moon and the idea of immortality is marked by the abundance in Africa of
funeral monuments bearing the symbol of the crescent, either alone or
associated with the circle of the sun and the star of Venus.[224] These
astral symbols are identical with those already used by the Babylonians.
But it is not only among the Semitic peoples that we find the crescent
on tombs, either alone or accompanied by other figures: it is of
frequent occurrence, notably in Celtic countries. Possibly the Druids
placed in the moon the other world where men pursued an existence
uninterrupted by death.
As for the sun, the idea most commonly accepted was that the dead
accompanied him on his course and went down with him in the west to an
underground world. There, during the night, this enfeebled heavenly body
recovered his strength, and there the dead too were revived. The power
of this faith in ancient Egypt is known: the souls embarked on the boat
of Ra, and with him, after they had accomplished the circle of the
heavens, went down through a crevice of the earth or beyond the ocean.
This was the first origin of the rôle of “psychopomp” which we shall
find attributed to the solar god.
Finally many peoples believed that souls, after plying through air and
space, inhabited the sky in the form of brilliant stars. The multitude
of the stars scintillating in the firmament was that of the innumerable
spirits who had left the world. They pressed in a dense crowd,
especially in the long luminous track of the Milky Way, which was, _par
excellence_, the dwelling of the dead. Other traditions saw in this band
across the sky the highroad which the dead travelled to gain the summit
of the world.[225] A vestige of this ingenuous conception is retained in
the very name, “Milky Way.”
* * * * *
These ideas as to the lot of the soul after death, which were spread
among a number of different peoples, may also have existed in primitive
Greece but we have no proof that they were current there. As the
Hellenes granted to the stars only a restricted and secondary place in
their anthropomorphic religion, so in early times they had no belief, or
scarcely any, in the ascent of souls to the starry sky. This doctrine
was entirely strange even to the earliest Ionian thinkers. Recent
research has made it more and more probable that these conceptions were
introduced into Greece from the East, where astrolatry was
predominant.[226] Pausanias[227] claimed to know that the Chaldeans and
the Magi of India were the first to assert that the human soul is
immortal, and that they convinced the Hellenes, and in particular Plato,
of this doctrine. Such an affirmation, in this form, is certainly false,
but it contains an element of truth. The tenet of astral immortality is
ancient in the East: it probably took form in Babylon about the sixth
century, when Persian Mazdeism, which believed that the righteous were
lifted up to the luminous dwelling of the gods, came into contact with
the sidereal religion of the Chaldeans. It was propagated in Greece
especially by the Pythagoreans, for whom the soul had a celestial
origin, being, as we have seen (p. 24), a fiery principle, a particle of
the ether which lights the divine fires of heaven. This spark, which
descended at birth in the body, which it heated and animated, reascended
after death to the upper regions, whence it had come forth. Aristophanes
in his _Peace_[228] greets the apparition of a new star, that of the
Pythagorean poet, Ion of Chios, who had recently died, asking ironically
if it be not true that “when someone dies he becomes like the stars in
the air.” This is the most ancient precisely dated mention of stellar
immortality (421 B. C.), and it cannot be doubted that the doctrine was
that of Ion himself. Plato received it from the Pythagoreans and makes
very clear allusions to it.
The fundamental idea on which it rests, the idea that the psychic
essence is the same as the fire of the heavenly bodies, is at the root
of all oriental astrology, which claims to explain by astral influence
the formation of character. This idea of a relationship (συγγένεια)
between the soul and the stars does not in Greece belong to the old
basic popular beliefs. It was introduced thither by the philosophers,
who, as we shall see, drew from it very important theological
conclusions. According to them, it was owing to this identity of nature
that the soul was capable of knowing the gods and of aspiring to join
them.[229] This doctrine took on new power when astrology succeeded in
imposing itself on the Alexandrian world, and it is significant that we
find it clearly formulated by an adept of this pseudo-science, the
famous Hipparchus, in the second century before our era. “Hipparchus,”
says Pliny,[230] “will never receive all the praise he deserves, since
no one has better established the relation between man and the stars, or
shown more clearly that our souls are particles of the heavenly fire.”
Pythagorism and Stoicism, and after them the Syrian and Persian
mysteries, were to popularise this conception throughout the ancient
world. In certain regions, as in Gaul, it undoubtedly found pre-existing
native beliefs with which it combined, and in religion and among
theologians it assumed multiple forms. We shall try to distinguish its
chief aspects, dealing successively with lunar, solar and stellar
immortality.
* * * * *
The Pythagoreans, perhaps transforming a belief of the Greek people as
to Selene’s rôle, but more probably inspired by Oriental speculations,
held that souls, when they had been purified by air, went to dwell in
the moon. To the question, “What are the Isles of the Blessed?” the
orthodox doctrine of the sect answered, “The sun and the moon.”[231] For
them the heavenly bodies were moving islands washed by a luminous fluid,
which their swift motion caused to sound about them. These thinkers, who
debated all the scientific hypotheses, accepted the plurality of worlds.
The heavenly bodies were other earths surrounded by air and rolling in
the boundless ether. The moon in particular was designated as the
“ethereal” or “Olympic earth,” and in the moon lay the Elysian Fields,
the meadows of Hades, in which the shades of the heroes rested.
Pythagoras himself, promoted to the rank of an immortal spirit, rejoiced
there among the sages. Persephone, assimilated to Artemis, reigned over
this kingdom. Did not the moon, like her, transfer itself alternately
above and below the earth? The planets were this huntress’s hounds
which, ever in chase, were scouring the fields of space around her in
every direction.
The authors of Pythagorean apocalypses peopled the mountains and valleys
of the moon with fantastic animals, stronger than ours, and with strange
plants, more vigorous than those of our globe. The inhabitants of the
moon, fed on the vapours of the atmosphere, were not liable to human
needs. In his “True Histories,” Lucian[232] parodied these mad
imaginings with comic exaggeration and ludicrous obscenity.
A curious fragment of Castor of Rhodes gives an instance of an
unexpected application of these beliefs.[233] This historian, who lived
at the end of the Republic, had the idea of interpreting Roman customs
by the Pythagorean doctrines which Nigidius Figulus and his circle of
theosophists had brought back into fashion (p. 22). In particular he
explained by this method the ivory _lunulae_ (crescents) which decorated
the senators’ shoes. They recalled, he says, that noble souls inhabited
the moon after death and trod on its soil.
The eclectic Stoics of the same period, and especially Posidonius of
Apamea, gave this lunar eschatology a place in their system, and
undertook to justify it by the physical doctrines of the Porch.
According to them, souls, which are a burning breath, rose through the
air towards the fires of the sky, in virtue of their lightness.[234]
When they reached the upper zone, they found in the ether about the moon
surroundings like their own essence and remained there in equilibrium.
Conceived as material and as circular in form, they were, like the
heavenly bodies, nourished by the exhalations which arose from the soil
and the waters. These innumerable globes of a fire endowed with
intelligence formed an animated chorus about the divine luminary of
night. The Elysian Fields did not, in this theory, lie in the moon
itself, which was no longer an earth inhabited by fantastic beings, but
in the pure air _about_ the moon whither penetrated only souls no less
pure. This idea was to last until the end of paganism, although other
eschatological doctrines then met with more favour. The emperor Julian
in the beginning of his satire on the Caesars describes them as invited
to a banquet held, as was proper, on a lower level than the feast of the
gods, who met at the summit of heaven. “It seemed fitting,” he
says,[235] “that the emperors should dine in the upper air just below
the moon. The lightness of the bodies with which they had been invested
and also the revolutions of the moon sustained them.”
The zone of the moon, the lowest of the seven planetary spheres, in
which the serene ether touches our own foggy atmosphere, is the frontier
between the world of the gods and that of men, the border between
immortality and the generated, the line of demarcation between the life
of blessedness and the death which our earthly existence really is.
Aristotle had already noted the distinction between the two halves of
the universe, the one active and the other passive, the heavens formed
of unalterable ether and subject neither to progress nor to corruption,
and our sublunary world composed of four elements, our world in which
all is born, is transformed and dies. Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-Stoics
liked, in insisting on this opposition, to show the contrast between the
splendour and the darkness, the serenity and the trouble, the constancy
and the mutability, the truth and the error, the happiness and the
misery, the peace and the war, which reigned respectively in the
dwelling of the gods and in the abode of men, whither souls descending
to earth penetrated so soon as they had crossed the circle of the moon.
In imitation of Plato[236] this sublunary world is shown as a dark cave
in which the captive souls, plunged in obscurity, aspire to see again
the light from on high.
The funeral monuments of the imperial period have retained numerous
traces of these beliefs. As we have already said (p. 94), the crescent
often appears on them, either alone or together with other symbols.
Other tombstones are still more expressive. A Roman relief, preserved in
Copenhagen, is particularly characteristic: the bust of a little girl
appears on it placed on a large crescent and surrounded by seven
stars.[237] On this an inscription recently found at Didyma might serve
as a commentary: “Standing before this tomb, look at young Chorô, virgin
daughter of Diognetos. Hades has placed her in the seventh circle,”[238]
that is, in the circle of the moon, which is the lowest of the seven
planets.
We see that philosophy and physics had united to transform the old
belief in the ascent of souls to the moon. The intervention of theories
claiming to explain the systems of the world is still more marked in the
other doctrines of astral immortality. It was this blending which made
them strong enough to impose themselves on the minds of men. By their
agreement with contemporary science, they satisfied reason and faith at
the same time. But as all this theology really rested on a wrong
cosmography, its lot was bound up with that of a false conception of the
universe, and the two fell together.
* * * * *
The first of these doctrines appears to us the most reasonable because
it is founded on the primordial rôle of the sun in our world. It was
born in the East when the Chaldean priests deprived the moon of the
pre-eminence originally ascribed to it, and recognised the unequalled
importance of the sun in the cosmic system.[239] These astronomical
theologians deduced from this recognition a theory which includes
something like an anticipation of universal gravitation, and which was
to prove seductive both by its greatness and by its logic. It spread
through the ancient world in the second and first centuries B. C. There
are some signs that the Pythagoreans, who were much addicted to the
study of the heavenly bodies, were the first to adopt it, and with the
propagation of Oriental astrology it obtained a wide diffusion in the
West.
The sun, placed in the fourth rank or the middle of the planetary
spheres,[240] like a king surrounded by his guards, was believed
alternately to attract and repel the other celestial bodies by the force
of his heat, and to regulate their harmonious movements as the
coryphaeus directed the evolutions of a chorus. But since the stars were
looked upon as the authors of all the physical and moral phenomena of
the earth, he who determined the complicated play of their revolutions
was the arbiter of destinies, the master of all nature. Placed at the
centre of the great cosmic organism, he animated it to its utmost
limits, and was often called the “heart of the world” whither its heat
radiated.
But this well-ordered universe could not be directed by a blind force,
and therefore the sun was an “intelligent light” (φῶς νοερόν). The pagan
theologians looked upon him as the directive reason of the world (_mens
mundi et temperatio_). The Pythagoreans saw in him Apollo Musagetes, the
leader of the chorus of the Muses, who were placed in the nine circles
of the world and whose accord produced the harmony of the spheres. Thus
he became the creator of individual reason and director of the human
microcosm. The author of generation, he presided over the birth of
souls, while bodies developed under the influence of the moon. The
radiant sun constantly sent down sparkles from his flaming circle to the
beings he animated. The vital principle which nourished men’s material
envelope and caused its growth was lunar, but the sun produced reason.
Inversely, when death had dissolved the elements which formed the human
composite, when the soul had left the carnal prison which enclosed it,
the sun once more drew it to himself. As his ardent heat caused vapours
and clouds to rise from the earth and the seas, so he brought back to
himself the invisible essence which animated the body. He exercised on
the earth both a physical and a psychical attraction. Human reason
reascended to its original source and returned to its divine home. The
rays of the god were the vehicles of souls when they rose aloft to the
higher regions.[241] He was the anagogue (ἀναγωγεύς) who withdrew
spirits from matter which soiled them.
Just as he sent the planets away from him and brought them back by a
series of emissions and absorptions, so he caused his burning effluvia
to descend to the beings whom he called to life, and so he gathered them
after their death that they might rise to him once more. Thus a cycle of
migrations caused souls to circulate between the sky and the earth, as
the stars alternately drew away from and returned to the radiant focus,
heart and spirit of the Great All, which called forth and directed their
eternal revolutions. It is easy to understand how this coherent and, it
may be said, magnificent theology, founded on the discoveries of ancient
astronomy at its zenith, imposed on Roman paganism the cult of the
invincible Sun, the master of all nature, the creator and saviour of
man.
A mass of literary evidence and a number of figured monuments prove how
powerful became, under the Roman Empire, the belief that the sun was the
god of the dead. Old mythological traditions combined with Chaldean
theology and were propagated with the Eastern religions. It was imagined
that the deceased, and in particular the emperors, were borne to heaven
on the chariot of Helios, or that the eagle, the king of the birds and
the servant of the sovereign sun, carried off their souls to bear them
to his master. Elsewhere it was the griffin of Apollo or the solar
phoenix who was the bearer of the dead or the symbol of immortality. A
funeral altar of Rome even bears the characteristic inscription, “_Sol
me rapuit_,” “the Sun has seized me up.”[242]