was more uncertain. In the Greek cities, as in Rome, moral reproof and
posthumous penalties were anciently attached to suicide. The old
pontifical law refused ritualistic burial to persons who had hanged
themselves; and instead of funeral sacrifices it prescribed for these
dead merely the hanging up of small images (_oscilla_) consecrated to
their Manes,[345]—probably a magical, “sympathetic” rite, which was
intended to purify their wandering souls by air, as other souls were
purified by water and fire. The horrible appearance of men who died by
strangulation had given rise to the belief that the breath of life had
vainly sought to issue from their tightly closed throats.[346] A rich
inhabitant of Sarsina in Umbria granted land for a graveyard to his
fellow citizens, but excluded from the benefit of his gift those who had
hired themselves as gladiators, had died by the rope by their own hand,
or had followed an infamous calling.[347] This association shows how
loathsome this kind of death was. Funeral colleges founded under the
Empire introduced into their rules a clause stipulating that if anybody
had for any motive whatsoever put himself to death, he should lose his
right to burial.[348] This provision seems to have been inspired less by
the fear that fraud would be practised on this society of mutual
insurance against supreme abandonment, than by the conviction that
funeral honours cannot deflect the curse which weighs on the suicide and
renders his company undesirable for other dead.
But there was against popular opinion and religion, which attached an
idea of infamy to self-murder, a philosophical reaction which, among the
Stoics, led to an entirely contrary moral judgment. The powerful sect of
the Porch caused the doctrine to prevail that suicide was in certain
cases commendable. It saw in this end the supreme guarantee of the wise
man’s freedom, and praised those who by voluntary death had withdrawn
from an intolerable life. Cato of Utica, who killed himself lest he
should survive liberty, was held to be the wise man’s ideal, and as
worthy of apotheosis as Hercules. He himself, who is shown to us by the
historians as reading and rereading Plato’s _Phaedo_ before he pierced
himself with his sword,[349] certainly hoped for the immortality of
heroic souls. Here, as on other points, the Neo-Pythagoreans, and the
Neo-Platonists after them, brought the minds of men back to the old
religious beliefs. Plotinus, yielding to the opinion which still
prevailed in his time, still authorises suicide in certain cases, but we
know that his exhortations dissuaded his pupil Porphyry from putting an
end to his days, when he was seized with a disgust for life. This latter
philosopher afterwards resolutely opposed the Stoic doctrine. Although
the soul, said the Pythagoreans and Platonists, is enclosed in the body
as in a prison, in order to suffer chastisement, it is forbidden by God
to escape therefrom by its own act. If it do so escape, it incurs from
the masters of its fate infinitely harder penalties. It must await the
hour willed by these masters, and then it can rejoice in the deliverance
which it obtains at the term of old age. If it itself break the link
which joins it to the body, far from ridding itself of servitude, it
remains chained to the corpse, for necessarily it is subject to passion
at the moment of death and thus contracts impure desires. The only
liberation worthy of the wise man is that of the soul which still dwells
in the body but succeeds in freeing itself from all fleshly leanings and
in thus rising, by the force of reason, from earth to heaven.[350]
The prohibition of voluntary death anticipating the hour fixed by
Providence for each man, was strengthened and enforced everywhere by the
Christian Church.
With yet more cause did those who had been condemned to capital
punishment seem to deserve posthumous torment and the pains reserved for
the impious. These maleficent spirits, transformed to demons, continued
to work harm to the human race. The odium which attached to the word
_biothanati_ ended by concentrating itself on these two classes—those
who had committed suicide and those who had been executed. The horror
which both inspired was marked by the withholding of honourable burial.
Even in pagan times, sacred or civil law in many places denied funeral
honours to children who died young, and to suicides—in order, says a
text,[351] that those who had not feared death might fear something
after death—and, above all, to criminals, whose corpses were not
deposited in a tomb but were thrown without any ceremony into a common
ditch (πολυάνδριον). In Rome persons executed in prison were dragged
with a hook through the streets to the Tiber, where they were flung into
the water. There was in the fact that they were deprived of funeral
rites a second reason, besides their guilt, for their suffering in the
Beyond.[352] Families and friends of the condemned endeavoured therefore
to spare them this fearful penalty, and could obtain from the
magistrates the surrender of their bodies to them. But the authorities
often refused this supreme consolation to Christians who wished to pay
this last duty to their martyred brothers. By scattering abroad the
ashes of martyrs the pagans hoped to prevent their graves from becoming
the sites of cults.
The denial of a religious funeral was also from the earliest time
onwards ordered by Church discipline and sanctioned by the Councils in
the case of suicides, and was similarly extended, in virtue of the law
in force, to malefactors. In the Middle Ages the corpses of criminals
were still to be seen carried to a shameful charnel-place in Byzantium.
For instance, the chronologist Theophanes[353] relates indignantly that
in 764 the iconoclastic Emperor Constantine Copronymus caused the arrest
of a hermit of Bithynia, who supported the cult of the images. The
emperor’s guards tied a cord round the monk’s foot and dragged him from
the praetorium to the cemetery, where, after cutting him to pieces, they
flung his remains into the ditch of the _biothanati_. Curiously this
word, _biothanati_, was derisively applied to the Christians themselves,
either because they adored a crucified Saviour, or in mockery of the
martyrs, who believed that through death by execution they earned a
glorious immortality. The poet Commodianus returns this insult by
applying the term to the pagans, whose way of life condemned them to
everlasting flames.[354] The opprobrious word remained in use until the
Middle Ages, when it denoted all whose crimes deserved capital
punishment, so that the final meaning of _biothanatus_ was gallows-bird,
gallows-food.[355]
If the meaning of the word _biothanati_ was thus restricted in the Latin
world, the old ideas which it called forth have had a singular vitality
in folk-lore, especially among the Greeks. The Greeks believe even today
that such as perish by a sudden and violent death became
_vrykolakes_.[356] Their bodies can again be reanimated, can leave the
grave, and can travel through space with extreme rapidity as vampires
and become so maleficent that mere contact with them causes loss of
life. Suicides and victims of unavenged murders are particularly
fearful. It was the custom as late as the eighteenth century to open the
grave of a dead man suspected of being a _vrykolakas_, and if his body
had escaped corruption, thus proving his supposed character, it was cut
into pieces or burnt in order to prevent it from doing further harm. So
lively did the belief remain that the _biothanatus_ could not detach
himself from his body, and that his existence, which had been too soon
interrupted, was prolonged in the tomb.
VI
THE JOURNEY TO THE BEYOND
As soon as belief took shape in an underground kingdom where gathered
the shades which were separated from the body and from the grave, the
idea also arose of a perilous journey which the soul must make in order
to win to this distant abode. Such an idea is common to many peoples of
the world. In California, the Mojave Indians are said to believe that
the departed have to find their way through a complicated maze in search
of the happy hunting grounds, which only the good souls can reach, while
the wicked wander painfully and endlessly. We know what minutely
detailed rules are contained in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, rules to
which the deceased had to conform in order that they might travel safely
to the Fields of the Blessed. The Orphic tablets, discovered in tombs in
Italy,[357] have preserved fragments of another guide to the Beyond. For
instance, the tablet of Petelia, which goes back to the second or
perhaps the third century B. C., begins thus: “Thou shalt find to the
left of the house of Hades a well-spring, and by the side thereof
standing a white cypress. To this well-spring approach not near. But
thou shalt find another by the lake of Memory, cold water flowing forth,
and there are Guardians before it. Say ‘I am a child of Earth and of
Starry Heaven. But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know
yourselves. And so I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me
quickly the cold water flowing from the lake of Memory.’ And of
themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy well-spring; and
thereafter among the other heroes thou shalt have lordship....”[358]
These instructions, which accompanied the member of the sect to his
grave,—he bore them about his neck like an amulet,—were supposed to
enable him to keep from straying in his posthumous wanderings and help
him to accomplish exactly all the acts necessary for his salvation. They
were a sort of liturgy of the other side of the grave which would ensure
eternal happiness to the faithful. “Courage (εὐψύχει); be valiant
(θάρρει); no man is immortal on earth,” such is the exhortation
frequently expressed in epitaphs. It probably reproduces a ritualistic
formula intended to sustain the shade which had to blaze its path in the
Beyond.
The Etruscans also had _libri Acheruntici_, books of Acheron which were
attributed to the sage Tages and which treated of the fate of the dead.
These made known, in particular, what were the rites by which souls
could be transformed into gods (_di animales_). Their very title betrays
a Greek teaching, and there are reasons for believing that the teaching
of the Pythagoreans was not without influence on their composition.[359]
It is hardly doubtful that they were concerned with the path which the
Manes of human beings must follow in order to go down into the infernal
regions. The Etruscan _stelae_ and cinerary urns often show this journey
to Hades: sometimes the dead are placed, like heroes, in a war chariot;
sometimes in a cart protected by a canopy and exactly copied from the
peasants’ carts; and often nothing would indicate that these travellers
are but shades, were not the significance of the scene defined by the
presence of some deity of the nether world, like Charon. The great
sarcophagus of Vulci in the Boston Museum bears a fine representation of
this type, where the character of the travellers is shown by a winged
Fury standing behind their carriage.
Thus the idea that the dead have to tramp a long road descending into
the depths of the earth before they reach their last abode, was accepted
in Italy as in Greece from a very ancient period. How did men imagine
this road? Their conception of it is connected with a whole group of
Pythagorean doctrines which go back to a remote age.
The old poetry of Hesiod already speaks of two roads of life, a short
and easy road which is that of vice, and the path of virtue, which is at
first steep and rugged but becomes less hard as soon as the top of the
slope is reached. Everyone knows the use which the sophist Prodicus
makes of this ancient comparison in the famous myth of Hercules at the
crossroads.[360] In it, two women appear to the youthful hero, and one
seeks to draw him to the path of deceitful pleasures while the other
succeeds in conducting him to the path of austere labours which leads to
true happiness. This same conception, which is transmitted through the
whole of antiquity, inspired the Pythagoreans with the symbol of the
letter Y, formed of a vertical spike topped by two divergent branches.
The spike is the road common to all men until they have reached the age
of reason and responsibility. Subsequently they must choose between the
right and the left branches. The former, say these moralists, is steep
and rough and at first requires strenuous effort, but when those who
climb it have gained its summit they obtain a well-deserved rest. The
other road is at first level and pleasant, but it leads to harsh rocks
and ends in a precipice over which the wretched man who has followed it
is hurled. This symbol was popular in antiquity as well as in the Middle
Ages, a fact of which a curious proof, additional to those in the texts,
has lately been found. This is a relief, accompanied by an inscription,
dating from the first century of our era, which has been discovered at
Philadelphia in Lydia.[361] It decorated, as the epitaph shows, the tomb
of a Pythagorean, and it is divided into compartments by mouldings in
the form of the letter Y. Below, to the right, a child is seen, in the
care of a woman who is designated as Virtue (Ἀρετή); above, a ploughman,
driving his plough, stands for the hard and persevering labour of the
good man, who, still higher, lies on a couch before a table like the
guest at a “funeral banquet” because he has obtained the reward of his
toil. On the left side there is also, below, a woman with a child, but
she stands for wantonness (Ἀσωτεία); above her a figure is indolently
lying on a bed; and still further above, the same figure is seen falling
into a gulf, head downwards, in chastisement of his vices.
These naïve scenes decorated, as we have said, a burial place. Many
other tombs are not so elaborate, but express the same symbolism by
opposing the hard labour of man, represented on the lower part of the
stele, to the rest which this same man enjoys on the upper part of the
stone, that is, in heaven.[362] The symbol of the Y was early applied to
the future life by the Pythagoreans, who transferred the roads
representing the courses of the moral and the immoral life to Hades.
Their stories of the descent to the nether world depicted the journey of
the dead in the same way, and it is still thus described in the sixth
book of the Aeneid. The dead first follow a common road; and those whose
lot is still undetermined wait in this first abode, just as on earth
children are not yet separate at the uncertain age at which they have
not yet made their decision for virtue or for vice. At the crossroads of
earthly existence the choice must be made; at the crossroad of the
infernal regions (τρίοδος) the judges of souls are seated,[363] and send
to the right those who have by their merits made themselves worthy to
enter the Elysian Fields, while they drive to the left the wicked who
are to be hurled into Tartarus. For in both worlds “right” is to the
Pythagorean, as to the soothsayers, synonymous with “good,” and “left”
synonymous with “evil.”
The original conception was necessarily transformed and explained
symbolically when the abode of virtuous souls was transported to heaven.
The stories of the ancients were no longer taken in their literal sense,
but an allegorical meaning, allowing them to be brought into harmony
with the new beliefs, was given to them. Henceforward one of the two
roads leads to the higher regions, the road, namely, of the Blessed
(ὁδὸς μακάρων) or of the gods. The other, the path of men, is that which
after long windings brings back to earth the impure souls who accomplish
the cycle of their migrations and must be reincarnated in new bodies.
A passage of Cicero’s _Tusculans_,[364] which is directly inspired by
the _Phaedo_ of Plato, is instructive as to the transformation which
ideas underwent. “There are,” it says, “two roads and two courses for
souls which issue from the body. The souls which are sullied with human
vice and have abandoned themselves to passions ... follow a crooked path
which leads them away from the dwelling of the gods; but for the souls
which have kept their innocence and purity and have, while in human
bodies, imitated the life of the gods, there is an easy return to the
beings from whose abode they descended to the earth.” In the same way
Virgil, as we have said elsewhere,[365] is apparently faithful to the
traditional topography of Hades, but does not regard it as really
situated in the underground. There were even attempts to fix precisely
the itinerary which souls had to follow in the upper spheres. Seneca
pleasantly ridicules these beliefs in his satire on the apotheosis of
Claudius, affirming that emperors went to heaven by the Appian Way. The
Milky Way, originally regarded as the path of the sun, remained,
according to an opinion which persisted until the end of antiquity, the
road by which gods and heroes rose to the zenith.[366] It was said to
cut the zodiac in the tropical signs of Cancer and Capricorn, and it was
there that those gates opened by which souls went down from heaven to
earth and rose from earth to heaven.[367] The former of these gates was
called the Gate of Men, the other the Gate of Gods.
We will return later (p. 162) to the theories which assign different
dwellings in the starry spheres to pure spirits and tell of their
passing through the celestial gates. We would merely note that the
allegory of the two roads, of which one is the road of God and heaven
and eternal life and the other that of Satan, hell and death, is found
in the most ancient Christian literature, and is justifiably likened by
Lactantius[368] to the Pythagorean Y, which is at the origin of all the
later symbolism.
* * * * *
But when the idea of a journey to the underworld had been transformed
into that of a journey to heaven, how was the power of the dead to reach
the upper spheres explained? What force or what vehicle raised them
thither? Originally they made use of all the means of locomotion. They
went on foot, in a ship, in a carriage, on horseback, and even had
recourse to aviation.
Among the ancient Egyptians the firmament was conceived as being so
close to the mountains of the earth that it was possible to get up to it
with the aid of a ladder. The early texts of the Pyramids describe the
gods helping the king to climb the last rungs of the ladder, when he
ascended to their high dwelling. Such ideas are found elsewhere, among
the Chinese as well as in Europe. We are told that a priest-king of a
people of Thrace joined tall wooden ladders together in order that he
might go to Hera to complain of his unruly subjects.[369] Although the
stars had been relegated to an infinite distance in space, the ladder
still survived in Roman paganism as an amulet and as a symbol. Many
people continued to place in tombs a small bronze ladder, which recalled
the naïve beliefs of distant ages. This means of attaining to the upper
world has been given to the dead man in several graves of the Rhine
border. In the mysteries of Mithras a ladder of seven steps, made of
seven different metals, still symbolised the passage of the soul across
the planetary spheres.[370] Philo, and after him Origen,[371]
interpreted Jacob’s ladder as the air through which the disincarnate
souls ascended and descended; and the patriarch’s dream in the symbolism
of the Middle Ages was still considered as a pledge of the ladder of
salvation leading the elect to heaven. A naïve miniature of the
illustrated manuscripts of St. John Climacus—one of them is preserved in
the Freer collection—shows monks climbing the heavenly ladder of virtues
and welcomed at the top by Christ or by an angel, while winged demons
try to pull them down and make them fall into the jaws of a dragon
below, which represents hell.[372] On the other hand, even in antiquity
the emblem of the ladder had been adopted by magic,[373] which retained
it throughout the centuries, and to this day little ladders are sold in
Naples as charms against the _jettatura_ or evil eye.
In Egypt the souls also travelled to the dwelling of the gods in the
boat of Ra, the solar deity. This idea does not seem to have passed into
the mysteries of Isis in the West but in the East it was retained by the
Manicheans. The moon and the sun were the ships which plied through the
heavenly spaces carrying the luminous spirits.[374] For the Greeks it
was to the Islands of the Blest, situated somewhere in the distant
ocean, that ships transported the dead. This crossing of the sea,
peopled by monsters of the deep, was one of the favourite subjects of
the decorators of Roman sarcophagi. But under the Empire the Fortunate
Islands, we know,[375] were often explained as being the moon and the
sun, washed by the ether, and it was therefore to the moon that the bark
of salvation had to bear souls across the stormy waters of matter. The
Styx had become a celestial or aerial river; Charon, with the help of
the winds, caused pious souls to pass not to the subterranean world but
to the heavenly dwelling of heroes.[376] The bark which should bear the
Blessed to the abode of delight, where they would live together, is
often represented in funeral sculpture,[377] and continued to be in
Christian art, the symbol of a happy passage to the shores of Paradise.
Epitaphs sometimes cause the passer-by to wish the dead “Εὐπλοῖ,” “A
happy voyage!”[378]
The Etruscan tombs often show the dead man on horseback on the road of
the underworld, and in early Greek tombs terra cotta shoes and horses
have been discovered which were intended to make easier the long and
dangerous journey to the country whence there is no return. But in order
that a rider may win to heaven his horse must be provided with strong
wings. Primitively these wings were probably intended to indicate only
the swiftness of this mythical steed.[379] But in Roman times they
undoubtedly meant that it could fly up to the sky. The great Paris
cameo, said to represent the apotheosis of Augustus, shows a prince of
his house, Germanicus or perhaps Marcellus, thus borne away by a winged
courser.[380] There is a similar representation on a coin which
commemorates the apotheosis of an empress, probably Faustina. The same
Pegasus, who probably has nothing in common with Bellerophon’s steed,
appears again on a fragment of a relief recently discovered in England
at Corstopitum (Corbridge-on-Tyne).[381] He is carrying off a personage,
probably an emperor, who wears the _paludamentum_ or military cloak and
has his head bound with a radiate crown, on either side of whom are the
Dioscuri, the symbols of the two celestial hemispheres. The dead are
mounted on Pegasus because he was brought into relation with the Sun,
who is the creator and saviour of souls.
For the same reason, because he was the sacred animal of Apollo, the
gryphon served this purpose. Thus in the medallion which decorates the
stucco vault of a tomb on the Latin Way this winged monster carries on
his strong back a veiled figure, covered with a long garment, who can be
no other than the shade of the dead man wrapped in the shroud.[382]