further unhappy souls, whom an inexpiable crime had vowed to everlasting
pains, were afterwards added: Ixion turning on the wheel to which he was
fixed, Theseus and Pirithous enchained, the Danaïdes carrying water in a
leaking vessel, and others. Thus was formed a group of legendary
personalities whose crimes and punishments came to be the traditional
themes of every description and representation of Tartarus in poetry and
art until the downfall of paganism.
But these convicted souls were no longer conceived, as they were by
Homer, to be exceptional offenders on whom the gods avenged a personal
insult. They had come to be the prototypes of men who, for like faults,
would be similarly chastised, the terrible examples of the lot which
divine wrath reserved for all who provoked it. They were explained as
the incarnations of the different passions and vices, the
representatives of the various classes of sinners on each of which a
determined punishment was inflicted.
The first authors of this new conception seem to have been the Orphic
and Pythagorean theologians. Homer names only one class of criminals
whom the Erinyes torture beneath the ground, the perjurers. But here
again the motive of the punishment is a direct provocation of the gods;
by the formula of execration which ended their oath, the perjurers had
surrendered themselves to divine vengeance, if they broke their faith;
and this is why a place apart among the sufferers of the underworld was
always kept for them.
The Orphics, who were the first to separate in the underworld the region
of Tartarus from the Elysian Fields, were also innovators as regarded
the character of these contrasting dwelling-places. Notably, there was
among their books a Descent into Hades (Κατάβασις εἰς Ἅιδου), which
described its joys and pains. If the blessed were admitted to the
flowery meadows where they enjoyed the delight of a perpetual feast, the
profane, those who had not been purified by the rites of the sect, were
plunged in darkness and mire, which was either intended to recall the
moral uncleanness of all who had not taken part in the cathartic
ceremonies, or else implied that these shades were figured like the
penitents who, seated in the mud of the road, proclaimed their sins to
passers-by.[429]
Orphism conceived the suffering undergone beyond the tomb as an
expiation. The soul which had not been able on earth to keep itself from
the pollution of matter and to escape from the passions, thus found
again the qualities which it had lost. After a fixed term, it returned
to another life wherein it had another chance to render itself worthy of
the lot of the Blessed—we shall speak presently of this transmigration.
Moreover, the intercession of the living in favour of the dead, the
sacrifices offered up on their behalf, could, according to the Orphics,
deliver them from their pains.
But the Orphics taught also that side by side with those who thus
purified themselves in infernal regions before returning to earth, there
were others, more guilty, who were vowed to eternal punishment. The old
Homeric belief was thus taken up and developed. The evil souls, whose
ways nothing could mend, were immured for ever in the underground
prison, where they became the companions of the great criminals whom
mythology plunged in Tartarus. This capital distinction between the two
classes of the inhabitants of hell, those condemned for a time and those
condemned in perpetuity, was transmitted down to Virgil and appears
distinctly in the Aeneid.
Infernal justice is a court of appeal from earthly justice. Like the
City,[430] Hades has its tribunal, but the judges who sit there are
infallible; it has its laws which are unremittingly applied to whoever
has broken those of his country; it has its executioners, responsible
for carrying out its sentences—the Furies, and later the demons.
Similarly, the pains of Hades are always conceived as an imitation of
those which were every day inflicted on criminals. The guilty were bound
in unbreakable chains, as in the prisons; the Erinyes struck them with
their whips, as they were flogged at the order of the magistrates;
fierce monsters bit them, as their bodies were thrown to the beasts or
devoured by them in an infamous charnel-place. The old custom of
retaliation continued to be followed in the other world, where the dead
were treated as in life they had treated their victims.[431] Elsewhere
we can recognise an imitation of the torments inflicted on the accused,
who were subjected to torture to make them confess their fault.
Penal law enacted a determined punishment for every kind of offence; the
law which ruled in Hades had similarly to inflict particular pains for
each kind of fault. This logical deduction led to a new development of
penalties beyond the grave. As gradually the moralists and criminalists
detailed and classified the breaches of divine and human law, so the
authors of apocalypses multiplied the categories of those who suffered
in the nether world. They imagined the most fearful tortures, in order
to frighten sinners and drive them to seek in some religious
purification a means of escape from so terrible a lot. In a myth which
Plutarch has introduced into his book on the belated vengeance of the
gods,[432] he shows us hypocrites, who have hidden their wretchedness
under the appearance of virtue, obliged to reverse their entrails so
that the inner side of them may be seen, haters who devour each other,
and misers plunged into and plucked out from lakes of burning gold, icy
lead and jagged iron.
The text which describes these sufferings of the other world in greatest
detail is the fragment of the apocryphal apocalypse of Peter, which was
found in Egypt some thirty years ago and dates at least from the second
century of our era. The vision of hell here opposed to that of heaven is
like a first sketch for the tragic picture of the dwelling of the damned
which Dante was to draw in his Inferno. The fragment enumerates a long
series of criminals who are punished by black-robed angels and receive
the treatment appropriate to the nature of their faults. Blasphemers are
hanged by the tongue; the mouths of false witnesses are filled with
fire; the rich who have been merciless to the poor roll, clothed in
rags, on sharp and burning pebbles. Other tortures are like the sports
of macabre fancy: thus adulterers are hanged by the feet, their heads
plunged in burning mud; murderers are flung into a cave filled with
serpents that bite them, the shades of their victims watching their
anguish.
A learned philologist[433] has undertaken to prove that this repulsive
picture of the dwelling of the damned had its origin in the Orphic
books. If, however, he refers to ancient, genuine Orphism, he is
certainly mistaken. The light fantasy of the ancient Greeks never laid
heavy stress on the horrors of Tartarus; their luminous genius took no
pleasure in describing these dark atrocities.[434] There is no evidence
that they ever formulated, point by point, a penal code which applied in
the kingdom of Pluto. The Romans, whose legal mind might have led them
to do so, were kept from such aberrations by their lack of imagination.
Their infernal mythology remained rudimentary: even Virgil, who is the
interpreter of the Hellenic tradition, never alluded except in passing
to the infinitely diverse forms of crimes and their punishments.[435]
The Etruscans peopled the infernal regions with awful monsters: they
gave Charon and the Erinyes a wild semblance which recalls the devils of
the Middle Ages, but we never find them drawing up an inventory of the
breaches of the moral law in order that a punishment might be applied to
each of these.
Everything points to the conclusion that this infernal theology
developed in the East. The Egyptians described at length in the “Book of
the Dead” the pains of those who despised the precepts of Osiris, and
illustrated these sufferings with pictures. The only pagan writing in
which we find a classification of sinners and of their torments,
analogous to that contained in the revelation of the apocryphal gospel
of Peter, is the Mazdean “Book of Arta Viraf,” which, although of late
date, has antecedents which certainly go back very far. The Persian
religion, which more than any other brings the Spirit of Evil and his
hordes of demons into relief, was certainly not unconnected with the
development of infernal eschatology, even in the West, as is indicated
by the fact that these demons succeeded the Furies as executors of the
divine sentences. It was under the influence of these exotic religions
that the descriptions were propagated of refined tortures, terrifying to
the adepts of the conventicles in which they were revealed. The
mysteries which spread under the Roman Empire accentuated the contrast
between the delights of heaven and the sufferings of hell. These
esoteric sects gave birth to the literature which was to be perpetuated
through the Middle Ages, and inspire numbers of visionaries, poets and
artists. Certain authors of treatises on demonology in antiquity must
have revelled in inventing unheard-of atrocities, as later the
hagiographers took pleasure in describing the inconceivable torments
inflicted on martyrs.
Among all the forms of punishment that by fire predominates. The idea
that the Erinyes burnt the damned with their torches is ancient, and the
Pyriphlegethon is an igneous river surrounding Tartarus. Certain authors
went beyond this. Lucian in his “True Histories” describes the island of
the impious as an immense brazier whence rise sulphurous and pitchy
flames. Thus was born into the world in the Greco-Roman period a
doctrine which was to survive its fall and last to modern times. The
ancients certainly connected this infernal fire with the treatment
inflicted on those condemned to be burnt alive; but this exceptional
punishment could not inspire an eschatological conception which included
all the dead. The opinion has been advanced that the choice of fire was
due to the belief that this element purifies.[436] Fire would have been
at first the means of destroying, in the Beyond as in this world, the
uncleanliness of souls, before it became the instrument of their eternal
torture. But a scientific theory seems here to have influenced religious
faith. The physicians admitted the existence of an incandescent mass in
the interior of the earth, which produced volcanic eruptions and hot
springs. As Tartarus was situated in the uttermost depths of the
underworld, it was conceived as a vast brazier in which the sulphur and
bitumen vomited by the volcanoes were boiling for the punishment of
sinners.[437]
But this adaptation of the pains of Tartarus to contemporary physics
could not save them from philosophical criticism. While the pagan
priests, to the terror of credulous minds, imagined more and more
inhuman punishments for the guilty souls, the reaction of reason against
these cruel inventions necessarily gathered strength. We have seen
elsewhere how the polemics of philosophers forcibly attacked these
life-poisoning beliefs and succeeded in a great measure in destroying
them.[438] Even those who did not deny the future life rejected these
fables of hell. There was an attempt to save the principle of posthumous
retribution by replacing the doctrine of chastisement in Hades by that
of the metempsychosis. We now will try, while considering this theory of
transmigration in its various aspects, to show how such substitution was
effected.
* * * * *
The mind of savages does not, like our science, distinguish between
three kingdoms of nature. It supposes the same energy to animate all the
beings who surround us, all of whom are taken to be like ourselves. The
primitives often attribute human or even divine intelligence to beasts;
and the belief is found throughout the two hemispheres that the spirits
of the dead can incarnate themselves in animals and even lodge in
plants. Men refrain from the slaughter or gathering of certain species,
from eating their flesh or fruit, for fear of hurting a chief or
relative who has gone to inhabit them. This animistic basis is common to
a number of different peoples and is at the foundation of the system of
metempsychosis.
But that which makes the grandeur of this theory, which won countless
adepts throughout the centuries and the world, is that it transformed
this naïve idea, which had no moral bearing, into a doctrine of
retribution and liberation. To come back to the earth, to imprison
itself in a body which soiled and tortured it, became a punishment
inflicted on the guilty soul. The soul could not attain to supreme
felicity until it had purified itself by long suffering and had
gradually, through a cycle of rebirths, freed itself from carnal
passions.
It is infinitely probable that this doctrine of reincarnation in the
bodies of animals was in Greece a foreign importation. Herodotus thought
that it came from Egypt,[439] but it does not seem to have existed in
that country in ancient times in the form of a regular succession of
transmigrations. On the other hand, Greek metempsychosis shows a
resemblance, striking even in details, to one of the fundamental
conceptions of the religious thought of India, that of _samsâra_, which
was accepted as a dogma there long before the birth of Buddhism. The
most probable opinion is that this idea made its way across the Persian
Empire and thus reached the Orphics and Pythagoreans. It is, however,
not unlikely that, like Babylonian astrology, Hindu eschatology was
propagated as far as Egypt at a comparatively recent date, that is,
about the sixth century B. C., and that the information given by the
father of history may be at least partly correct, Egypt having served as
an intermediary between India and Greece.
We have not, however, to discuss here this problem of the origins of
metempsychosis, nor to follow the development of the doctrine in ancient
Greek philosophy. In the period with which we are concerned, it had
already long been traditional in the Pythagorean and Platonic schools,
it was not only a philosophical theory but also a tenet admitted by
several religions. We can leave unanswered the questions of whether, as
the ancients affirm, the Druids believed in it, being in this particular
disciples of Pythagoras, and of whether the Etruscans were persuaded to
it by the teaching of the philosopher of Croton. It is, however, certain
that transmigration was in the East an article of widely held belief. We
find it accepted by the mysteries of Mithras and by Manicheism, and it
survives to our own day in Syria among the sects of the Druses,[440] the
Yezidis and the Nosaïris.[441]
What was its form in the Roman period, and how was it brought into
harmony with traditional or acquired ideas as to the future life?
The descent of the soul from heaven to earth is a fall; the body is a
grave in which this soul is buried, a prison in which it is captive.
These old Pythagorean doctrines were unceasingly renewed and repeated
down to the end of antiquity. But the Orphic idea that this degradation
was the chastisement for an original sin, the consequence of a crime
committed by the Titans, who were the authors of our race, and that this
hereditary taint of guilt had to be atoned for by their descendants, was
either entirely forgotten or else, at the least, hardly regarded. The
equally ancient conception that a bitter and cruel necessity constrained
souls to incarnate themselves, was, on the contrary, emphasised in
consequence of the spread of astrological fatalism. Their alternate
descent and ascent was conceived as governed by a cosmic law, like the
progress and regress of the planets.[442] The cycle of eternal
generation (κύκλος γενέσεως) which is eternal, like the revolutions of
the heavenly bodies, causes mind to circulate through matter which it
animates.
This transmigration could be conceived in various ways. A first theory,
in which the influence of Stoic pantheism can be recognised, lays stress
on the identity of individual souls with the universal soul, of which
they are particles. One single divine principle awakens life in all
nature. It passes from being to being, quickening their various forms,
and that which is said to be death is no more than a migration. The
number of the souls that people the earth is determined from the
beginning; they change their dwellings but not their essence. Hardly has
the human soul left one body before it enters another. This continuous
travelling causes it to go through all the degrees of the animal
hierarchy. It will pass, successively, into a bird, a quadruped, a fish,
a reptile, and then return to man. This is why it is impious to devour
the flesh of our “lower brothers” and why the sage must practise
vegetarianism. Some thinkers, however, drawing logical conclusions from
the admitted premises, asserted that the life of the vegetable kingdom
derived from the same migration as that of the animal kingdom and that
the soul of man could enclose itself in plants. It was to this teaching
that Seneca alluded when he gave the name of _Apocolocyntosis_,
“Transformation to a Pumpkin,” to his satire on the apotheosis of the
emperor Claudius.
This eschatological doctrine had in reality nothing in common with
morality. If an uninterrupted chain unites the existence of all species,
if life propagates itself fatally from man to the lower beings, this
necessity seems to exclude all hope of posthumous reward. In order to
bring the need of a retribution in after life into agreement with the
belief in the fatal circle of migrations, it was stated that the good
entered the souls of peaceful and tame animals, the wicked those of wild
beasts. This is why Alexander of Abonotichos predicted to a devotee that
he would be in after life first a camel, then a horse, and end by being
a great prophet like himself.[443] Hermes Trismegistus even claimed to
know that the just became eagles among birds, lions among quadrupeds,
dragons among reptiles, dolphins among fish.[444] But the lot even of
these privileged souls might not seem very enviable. The moralists,
therefore, relaxed the rigour of the system and exempted noble spirits
from bestial degradation. All souls were no longer condemned to dwell in
the bodies of animals, but only those whose low inclinations had
assimilated them to brutes. They inhabited the species which best
conformed to their instincts. Thus debauchees became hogs in another
life; cowards and sluggards, fish; the light-minded and frivolous,
birds.[445] The pagan theologians ingeniously and laboriously
interpreted the story of Circe’s changing the companions of Ulysses into
beasts as an allegory of metempsychosis. _Circe_ became the _circle_ of
the reincarnations which were undergone by those who emptied the magic
cup of pleasure, and whence the wise Ulysses escaped, thanks to Hermes,
that is, to reason which instructed him.[446]
Transmigration thus became less an inevitable law of nature than a
punishment of the guilty. But this punishment did not overtake only
those who were reborn in animal shape. All physical defects and moral
taints, which afflict man from his entry into the world, were the
consequence of his crimes in an earlier life. The old Pythagoreans
combined the doctrine of the metempsychosis with that of the pains
reserved for the wicked in a hell beneath the earth. But we have seen
how the belief in the tortures of Hades was combated until it yielded
and was discredited.[447] Metempsychosis dared to do without these
incredible subterranean tortures and thereby acquired a new importance.
It supplied the means of maintaining the dogma of posthumous retribution
without imposing a blind faith in the foolish fables of the poets: souls
were held to pass immediately from one body to another without leaving
the earth, rising or sinking in the scale of beings in accordance with
their merits or demerits. Thus Hades becomes our corporeal life in which
we expiate the faults of a previous life. The Furies are the passions
which strike us with their whips and burn us with their torches.[448]
The ingeniousness of the theologians found an explanation for each of
the tortures described by the old mythology. Tantalus threatened by the
rock is the man obsessed by the fear of heavenly wrath; Tityus, whose
entrails are devoured by vultures, is the lover whose heart is gnawed by
care; Sisyphus rolling his rock becomes the ambitious man who exhausts
himself with vain efforts; the Danaïdes carrying water in a leaking
vessel, which empties as it is filled, are the insatiable souls who give
themselves up to pleasure and never have enough of enjoyment. Even the
old precepts of the Pythagorean school were twisted from their ordinary
meaning and became symbols of this eschatology. A popular tabu, admitted
by the sect, was formulated in the sentence, “If thou leave thy
dwelling, turn not round lest the Erinyes pursue thee.” The first
meaning of this prohibition, which is known to the folk-lore of many
places, is that to turn round as one leaves one’s house is to run the
risk of being assailed by the spirits who haunt the threshold. But the
doctors of Neo-Pythagorism did not thus understand the saying. For them,
the dwelling was the body, the Erinyes the passions: when souls left the
body they must not return thither or the passions would attach
themselves to them and make them their victims.[449]
* * * * *
Here, however, we touch on another form of metempsychosis. The ancients
make a distinction between the doctrine of reincarnation or
“reincorporation” (translating exactly the Greek word μετενσωμάτωσις),
and rebirth or palingenesis (παλιγγενεσία). This latter word is not here
taken in the Stoic sense of the eternal return of things, a series of
cosmic cycles in which the same phenomena are exactly reproduced.[450]
It is used to designate a transmigration separated by intervals, a
process which is not continuous. In the first kind of metempsychosis
there is, properly speaking, no rebirth, for the soul does not leave the
earth, but there unceasingly accomplishes its circular journey through
the living world. On the contrary, according to the second theory, it
does not immediately resume possession of a body. It remains
disincarnate for a long period of years—for Virgil as for Plato the
number is one thousand—and thus leads a double existence of which its
passages to this world take up only the lesser part. It is not even
fatally constrained to redescend to the earth: if it has kept itself
free from all corporeal defilement, it will soar to heaven and dwell
there for ever.
But if, during his sojourn on the earth, man has given himself up to the
pleasures of the senses, his soul becomes attached to his body. At first
it cannot separate itself from the corpse, around which it circles,
plaintively regretting the joys it has lost. It desires again to enter
the flesh which was the instrument of its voluptuousness; it seeks a
dwelling which will allow it to continue the sensual habits which have
become its second nature. And so, when the time is accomplished, it is
seized with an irresistible love for the body in which it is to enclose
itself again; a fascination, like a magic charm, draws it to this object
of its desires, which is to cause its misery. The fatality driving it to
incarnation and suffering is not here an inevitable law of the universe
but an inner necessity, a destiny which it has made for itself. The
cosmic _Ananke_ has become psychic.