Οὐκ ἐπιδὼν νύμφεια λέχη κατέβην τὸν ἄφυκτονΓόργιππος ξανθῆς Φερσεφόνης θάλαμον[1501].
Οὐκ ἐπιδὼν νύμφεια λέχη κατέβην τὸν ἄφυκτονΓόργιππος ξανθῆς Φερσεφόνης θάλαμον[1501].
Οὐκ ἐπιδὼν νύμφεια λέχη κατέβην τὸν ἄφυκτονΓόργιππος ξανθῆς Φερσεφόνης θάλαμον[1501].
Οὐκ ἐπιδὼν νύμφεια λέχη κατέβην τὸν ἄφυκτον
Γόργιππος ξανθῆς Φερσεφόνης θάλαμον[1501].
‘I, Gorgippus, lived not to look upon a bridal bed ere I went down to the chamber of bright-haired Persephone which none may escape.’ There is naturally here a note of lament, as befits any epitaph, and more especially that of one who dies young and unmarried; but none the less there is an anticipation—justified, we may think, if we will, by some ceremony of bridal ablution performed for the dead man by his friends—that his death is a wedding with the goddess of the under-world; and indeed the phraseΦερσεφόνης θάλαμος, ‘the bridal chamber of Persephone,’ recurs with some frequency in this class of epitaphs[1502].
Considered collectively, such epitaphs would suggest a distinctly offensive conception of Persephone; but in each taken separately, as it was composed, it will be allowed, I think, that if there is supreme audacity, there is equal sublimity. It is just these qualities which give pungency to a blasphemous parody of such epitaphs, in which the wit of Ausonius exposes the worst possible aspect of a religious conception which to the pure-minded was wholly pure. My apology for quoting lines which I will not translate must be the fact that a caricature is often no less instructive than a true portrait. The mock epitaph concludes as follows:
Sed neque functorum socius miscebere vulgoNec metues Stygios flebilis umbra lacus:Verum aut Persephonae Cinyreius ibis Adonis,Aut Jovis Elysii tu catamitus eris[1503].
Sed neque functorum socius miscebere vulgoNec metues Stygios flebilis umbra lacus:Verum aut Persephonae Cinyreius ibis Adonis,Aut Jovis Elysii tu catamitus eris[1503].
Sed neque functorum socius miscebere vulgoNec metues Stygios flebilis umbra lacus:Verum aut Persephonae Cinyreius ibis Adonis,Aut Jovis Elysii tu catamitus eris[1503].
Sed neque functorum socius miscebere vulgo
Nec metues Stygios flebilis umbra lacus:
Verum aut Persephonae Cinyreius ibis Adonis,
Aut Jovis Elysii tu catamitus eris[1503].
Ausonius in jest bears an unpleasant resemblance to Clement in earnest; both perverted to their uttermost a doctrine which commanded nothing but reverence from faithful participants in the mysteries.
Akin to these epitaphs are certain tablets which recently havebeen fully discussed by Miss Jane Harrison[1504], and have been shown to be of Orphic origin. They were buried with the dead, and for this reason were more outspoken in their references to the mystic doctrines than was permissible in epitaphs exposed to the vulgar gaze. The most complete of these tablets is one which was found near Sybaris, and, with the exception of the last sentence of all, the inscription is in hexameter verse. Miss Harrison, to whose work I am wholly indebted for this valuable evidence, translates as follows[1505]:
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,But Fate laid me low and the other Gods immortal... starflung thunderbolt.I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired.Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.A kid I have fallen into milk.’
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,But Fate laid me low and the other Gods immortal... starflung thunderbolt.I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired.Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.A kid I have fallen into milk.’
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,But Fate laid me low and the other Gods immortal... starflung thunderbolt.I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired.Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.A kid I have fallen into milk.’
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,
Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.
For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,
But Fate laid me low and the other Gods immortal
... starflung thunderbolt.
I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.
I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.
I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.
I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired.
Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.
A kid I have fallen into milk.’
The gist of the document which the dead man takes with him is then briefly this. He claims to have been pure originally and of the same race as his gods; but as a man he was mortal and exposed to death, and in this respect differed from his gods. He states however that he has performed certain ritual acts which entitle him to be re-admitted to the pure fellowship of the gods now that death is passed. And the answer comes, ‘Thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’
Now here I wish to consider one only of these ritual acts—that one of which the meaning is clearest—Δεσποίνας δ’ ὑπὸ κόλπον ἔδυν χθονίας βασιλείας, which means, if I may give my own rendering, ‘I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the under-world.’ The phrase is one which repeats the idea which we have already seen expressed in the formulary of Cybele’s rites,ὑπὸ τὸν παστὸν ὑπέδυν[1506], ‘I was privily admitted to the bridal chamber,’ and in the token of the Sabazian mysteries,ὁ διὰ κόλπου θεός[1507], ‘the god pressed to the bosom’; and Lucian’s final phrase in his account of Alexander’s mock-mysteries showsa kindred phrase,τὰ ὑπὸ κόλπου[1508], as an euphemism of the same kind[1509]. The Orphic therefore no less than others based his claim to future happiness on the fact that he had performed a ritual act, of the nature of a sacrament, which constituted a pledge that the wedlock between him and his goddess foreshadowed here should be consummated hereafter.
Even more abundant evidence is furnished by sepulchral monuments; and in support of my views I cannot do better than quote two high authorities who coincide in their verdict upon the meaning of the scenes represented. In reference to those scenes ‘in which death is conceived in the guise of a marriage’ Furtwängler writes: ‘The monuments belonging to this class are extraordinarily numerous, and exhibit very different methods of treating the idea which they carry out. A relief upon a sarcophagus from the Villa Borghese shows the God of the dead in the act of carrying down the fair Kore to be his bride in the lower world. Above the steeds of his chariot, which are already disappearing into the depths of the earth, flies Eros as guide. The bride however appears to be going only under compulsion and after some struggle; the look of the bridegroom expresses sternness rather than gentleness; and the mother who sits with face averted seems to exclude all thoughts of the daughter’s return. Only in the torches which the guide carries in his hand, in the snakes which are looking upward, and in the observant attitude of Hecate, can a suggestion of the return be found.
‘On another sarcophagus—from Nazzara—which represents the same marriage-journey, Eros is not merely the guide of the steeds, but aids the bridegroom in carrying off Kore, so that in this case the struggle with death takes purely the form of a struggle with love. At the same time the mother is driving along with her chariot, thereby signifying the renewal of life, which is yet more clearly betokened in the ploughman and the sower at her side.
‘In a yet gentler spirit we see the same journey conceived in a vase-painting from lower Italy. Here there is a look of gentleness on Hades’ face; the bride accompanies him gladly, and even takes an affectionate farewell of her mother, who appears to acquiesce in her departure. In this case too Eros is flying above the horses, and is turned towards the lovers, while in front of him there flies a dove, the bird sacred to the goddess of love. Hecate with torches guides the steeds; near at hand waits Hermes to escort the procession; and above the whole scene the stars are shining, as if to indicate the new life in the region of death.
‘In another form, exalted to a yet higher holiness, the same marriage is repeated in the sphere of Dionysus-worship. Thus on a cameo in the Vatican, Dionysus is represented driving with his bride, Ariadne, in a brightly-decked triumphal car. Holy rapture is manifested on the features of both, and on top of the chariot stands a Cupid directing it. Dionysus is arrayed in the doe-skin, and holds in his left hand athyrsus, in his right a goblet; Ariadne is carrying ears of corn and poppy-heads, and has her hair wreathed with vine-leaves. The car is drawn by Centaurs of both sexes, with torches, drinking-horns, and musical instruments. The idea which underlies this scene is the reproduction of Life out of Death; Hades has issued forth again for a new marriage-bond with Kore in the realm of light, appearing now rejuvenated in the form of Dionysus, just as his bride assumes the form of Ariadne, and because the power of death is broken behind him, his car likewise becomes a triumphal car.
‘Just as the marriage of Zeus in the realm of light became a type for men in this life, so the marriage of Hades, or of Dionysus representing him, developed into a similar prototype for the dead. Since that which is true of Death bears directly upon the actual dead, it was quite natural that gradually the process of death came to be considered in general as a wedding with the deities of death. With this conception too harmonize those wedding-scenes which are so common and conspicuous on funeral monuments, as well as the often-recurring scenes from the joyous cycle of Dionysus-myths[1510].’
Two brief comments may be made upon this passage. First, Furtwängler clearly recognises in Dionysus a mere substitute for Hades, and thus confirms my interpretation of the strange legend concerning Dionysus and Prosymnus[1511]. We noticed that the somewhat obscure observation of Heraclitus (as quoted by Clement) upon that story contained the words ‘Dionysus and Hades are one and the same’; and we now see that in art too the same identification was made, and that the marriage of a mortal with Dionysus was used to typify the future marriage of the dead with their gods. The reason for this identification seems simply to be that the cults in which the two gods figured, although differing in outward form, were felt to express one and the same idea—namely the conception of death as a form of marriage; and the tendency to identify in such cases was carried so far that the god Dionysus was even, we are told, identified with the mortal Adonis[1512], presumably because the worship of each, as I have shown above, turned upon this one cardinal doctrine.
Secondly, Furtwängler points out that the marriage of Zeus and Hera represented for living men the same doctrine as the marriage of Hades and Persephone (or of Dionysus and Ariadne) represented for the dead. The truth of this is well illustrated by the close resemblance between Aristophanes’ picture of Hera’s wedding and those funeral monuments and vases which Furtwängler describes; for there too ‘golden-winged Eros held firm the reins, and drave the wedding-car of Zeus and blessed Hera[1513].’ In other words, this Olympian marriage was only one among several mystic marriages which all conveyed, though in diverse form, the same lesson, that marriage was the perfection of divine life no less than of human life, and therefore that hereafter when men, or at any rate the blessed and initiated among men, should come to dwell with their gods, no bond of communion between gods and men could be perfect short of the marriage-bond.
It was natural enough that the drama of Hera’s wedding with Zeus should most often have been chosen to be played at an ordinary wedding, because it would not obtrude thoughts of death upon a joyous event with such insistence as most of the otherreligious legends which reposed upon the same fundamental doctrine; but sometimes, we know, it was the priestesses of Demeter who officiated at wedding-ceremonies, and in those cases it cannot be doubted that it was Persephone and not Hera who was the divine prototype of the bride, and the thought that her wedding was a wedding with the god of death could not have been excluded. At funerals, on the other hand, the story of Zeus and Hera which was preferred at weddings owing to its less obvious allusion to death, would for that same reason have found less favour than those other marriage-legends in which the identity of death with marriage was more clearly enunciated; and of these, owing to the exceptional reverence in which the Eleusinian mysteries were held, the story of Persephone seems to have been among the most frequent. Yet in the picture drawn by Aristophanes at which we have just glanced, for one subtle touch which suggests the connexion of Hera’s wedding with human weddings, there is another subtle touch which suggests its relation with human death. The first is an epithet applied to Eros who drove the wedding-car—the epithetἀμφιθαλής, used of one who has both parents living[1514]. The allusion to human weddings is clear. It was no doubt imperative in old time, as it still is, in Greece, that anyone who attended upon a bride or bridegroom, as for instance the bearer of water for the bridal bath, should have both parents living; and the use of the same term in reference to Eros, the attendant upon Zeus and Hera, marks the intimate connexion between the divine marriage and the marriage of living men and women. But another epithet in the passage conveys no less clear an allusion to the marriage of those, whom men call dead, with their deities. Hera is namedεὐδαίμων, a word which, meaning ‘favoured by God,’ may seem strangely applied to one who herself was divine[1515]. But it was selected by Aristophanes for a good reason; by the wordεὐδαιμονίαwas commonly denoted that future bliss which the initiated believed to consist in wedlock with their deities. Likeθεοφιλής, ‘god-beloved,’ the termεὐδαίμων, ‘blessed,’ was, so to speak, a catch-word of the mysteries[1516]; and the application of it to Hera in Aristophanes’ ode brings the legend of Hera’s marriage into rank with those other wedding-stories whose actual plot hinged upon the identity of death and marriage. Thus though one legend might be more appropriate in its externals to one occasion, and another legend to another occasion, the ultimate and fundamental idea of them all was single and the same.
This view is boldly championed by the second authority whom I proposed to quote upon the subject of mystic marriage-scenes depicted on funeral-monuments. ‘The idea,’ says Lenormant, ‘of mystic union in death is frequently indicated in the scenes represented uponsarcophagiand painted vases. But for the most part the idea is expressed there only in an allusive manner, which depends upon the identification which this marriage-scene established between the dead person and the deity, by means of such subjects as the carrying off of Cephalus by Aurora, or Orithyia by Boreas, or the love-story of Aphrodite and Adonis[1517].’ ‘Thus,’ he explains, ‘a girl carried off (by death) from her parents was simply a bride betrothed to the infernal god, and was identified with Demeter’s maiden daughter, the victim of the passion and violence of Hades; a young man cut off by an early fate figured as the beautiful Adonis, snatched away by Persephone from the love of Aphrodite, and brought, in spite of himself, to the bed of the queen of the lower world[1518].’ The identification which Lenormant sees in these several instances is an identification, I suppose, not of personalities but of destinies. The popular religion of ancient Greece shows little trace of any pantheistic view which would have contemplated the absorption of the personality of the dead man or woman into that of any god or goddess. Indeed the very number of the personally distinct deities with whom, on such an hypothesis, the dead would have been identified, as well as that continuance of sexual difference in the future life which is postulated by the very doctrine before us, precludes all thought of personal identification. Rather it is the future destiny of the dead person which was identified with the destiny of the deity or hero whose marriage was represented on sarcophagus orcippusor commemorative vase[1519]. The lot of Kore or Ariadne or Orithyia prefigured the lot of mortalwomen hereafter; the fortunes of Adonis or Cephalus typified those of mortal men; and all the marriage-scenes alike, whatever the differences of presentation, revealed the hope and the promise of wedlock hereafter between mankind and their deities.
But Lenormant mentions one vase-painting[1520]in which this fundamental doctrine is taught not by parables of mythology, but more overtly and directly. The scene depicted is the marriage of a youth, whose name, Polyetes, is in pathetic contrast with his short span of years spent upon earth, with a goddess Eudaemonia (or ‘Bliss’) in the lower world. In this deity Lenormant sees ‘the infernal goddess under an euphemistic name.’ Nor could any more significant name have been used. It has already been pointed out thatεὐδαιμονίαwas a term much favoured by the initiated in the mysteries, and was openly used by them to denote that future bliss which secretly was understood to consist in divine wedlock. Hence the scene upon this vase would at once suggest to those who were familiar with the doctrines of the mysteries, that the youth, being presumably of the number of the initiated, had found in death the realisation of his happy hopes and had entered into blissful union with the goddess of the lower world.
To sum up briefly: we have seen alike in the literature of ancient Greece and in the folk-songs of modern Greece that death has commonly been conceived by the Hellenic race in the guise of a wedding; a review of marriage-customs and funeral-customs both ancient and modern has re-affirmed the constant association of death and marriage, and has shown how deep-rooted in the minds of the common people that idea must have been which produced a deliberate assimilation of funeral-rites to the ceremonies of marriage. Next we investigated the connexion of the mysteries with the popular religion, and saw reason to hold that, far from being subversive of it or alien to it, they inculcated doctrines which were wholly evolved from vaguer popular ideas always current in Greece. Finally we traced in many of those legends, on which the dramatic representations of the mysteries are known to have been based, a commonmotif, the idea that death is the entrance for men into a blissful estate of wedded union with their deities. And this religious ideal not only satisfies the condition ofagreement with, and evolution from, those popular views in which death figured somewhat vaguely as a form of wedding, but also proves to be the natural and necessary outcome of two religious sentiments with which earlier chapters have dealt; first, the ardent desire for close communion with the gods, and secondly, the belief that men’s bodies as well as their souls survived death and dissolution; for if the body by means of its disintegration rejoined the soul in the nether world, and the human entity was then complete, enjoying the same substantial existence, the same physical no less than mental powers, which it had enjoyed in the upper world, and which the immortal gods enjoyed uninterrupted by death, then, since the same rite of marriage was the consummation both of divine life and of human life, men’s yearning for close communion with their gods required for its ideal and perfect satisfaction the full union of wedlock; and the sacrament which assured men of this consummation was the highest development of the whole Greek religion, the mysteries.
Such a sacrament and such aspirations might well have offended even those Christians of early days, if such there were, who were willing to deal sympathetically with paganism; that those who were its declared enemies, and were ready to use against it the weapons of perversion and vituperation, found in this conception a vulnerable point, is readily understood. It is true indeed that in the very idea which they most vilified there was a certain curious analogy between the new religion and the old. Just as paganism allowed to each man or woman individually the hope of becoming the bridegroom or the bride of one of their many deities, so Christianity represented the Church, the whole body of the faithful collectively, as the bride of its sole deity. But the analogy is superficial only. The bond of feeling which united the Church with God was very differently conceived from that which drew together the pagans and their deities. The chastened ‘charity’ (ἀγάπη) of the Christians had little in common with the passionate love (ἔρως) with which the Greeks of old time had dared look upon their gods. Theirs was the Love that ‘held firm the reins and drave the wedding-car of Zeus and blessed Hera[1521]’; the Love that hovered above the steeds of Hades and changed forPersephone the road of death into a road to bliss; the Love whom ‘no immortal may escape nor any of mankind whose life passeth it as a day, but whoso hath him is as one mad[1522]’; and the only true consummation of such love was wedlock.
This conception necessarily implied the equality of men with their gods in the future life; and that future equality was sometimes represented as no more than a return to that which was in the beginning. ‘One is the race of men with the race of gods; for one is the mother that gave to both our breath; yet are they sundered by powers wholly diverse, in that mankind is as naught, but heaven is builded of brass that abideth ever unshaken[1523].’ So sang Pindar of the past and of the present; but the Orphic tablet which has been already quoted carries on the thought into the future:
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,But Fate laid me low....’
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,But Fate laid me low....’
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,But Fate laid me low....’
‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,
Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.
For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,
But Fate laid me low....’
So far with Pindar. But the dead man’s claims do not end there: ‘I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld’; already had he received a foretaste of that divine wedlock which implied equality with the gods; and so there comes the answer, ‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’
This idea commended itself even to thinkers who did not believe in bodily survival after death. Plato, in thePhaedo, where above all things is taught the perishable nature of the body and the immortality of the soul alone, yet avails himself of the belief that the pure among mankind shall attain even to godhead hereafter. To him the pure are not the initiated indeed, but the earnest strivers after wisdom. In his theory of retributive metempsychosis he surmises that those who have followed the lusts of the flesh shall hereafter enter the ranks of asses and other lustful beasts; that those who have wrought violence shall enter the ranks of wolves and hawks and kites; that those who have practised what is popularly accounted virtue, but without true understanding, shall enter the ranks of harmless and social creatures, bees, wasps, and ants, or even the ranks of men oncemore. ‘But into the ranks of gods none may enter without having followed after wisdom and so departing hence wholly pure—none save the lover of knowledge[1524].’ What precise meaning Plato attached to his phrase ‘to enter the ranks’ (εἰς γένος ἐνδύεσθαιorἀφικνεῖσθαι), to which he adheres throughout the passage, is a question which agitated the Neoplatonists[1525]somewhat needlessly. The phrase is intended either literally throughout or allegorically throughout. If it be allegorical, the meaning must be that all human souls shall enter again into human bodies, but that they shall start this new phase of existence with the qualities of lust, violence, respectability, or real virtue and purity, acquired in the previous life—merely resembling, as nearly as men may, asses, wolves, bees, or gods. Now as regards the first three classes, this allegorical interpretation, if a little forced, is feasible enough; but what of the fourth class? Shall the soul which has attained purity, the very negation of fleshliness in Plato’s view, suffer re-incarnation and struggle once more against the flesh? Surely the allegorical explanation is at once condemned. The phrase was intended literally[1526]. Plato signified the re-incarnation of the lustful, the violent, and the merely respectable, in the forms of animals of like character, and he signified—I must not say the re-incarnation, for Plato’s gods were spiritual and not carnal—but the regeneration of the pure in the form of gods. And in the same spirit Plutarch too contemplated the possibility of some men’s souls becoming first heroes, and from heroes rising to the rank of ‘daemons,’ and from ‘daemons’ coming to share, albeit but rarely, in real godhead[1527].
Thus even the highest aspirations of the most spiritually-minded of pagan thinkers owed much to the purely popular religion. The Orphic tablet links up the popular conception of death as a wedding with the Platonic conception of the deification of the soul. ‘I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the underworld’: ‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’
But if Plato, even in his conception of a purely spiritual life hereafter, owed something to the popular religion, he drew upon itfar more freely in his conception of Love. In theSymposiumone speech after another culminates in the assertion of that belief which found its highest expression in the mysteries. ‘So then I say,’ says Phaedrus, ‘that Love is the most venerable of the gods, the most worthy of honour, the most powerful to grant virtue and blessedness unto mankind both in life and after death[1528].’ And in the same tone too Eryximachus: ‘He it is that wields the mightiest power and is the source for us of all blessedness and of our power to have loving fellowship both with one another and with the gods that are stronger than we[1529].’ And finally Aristophanes: It is Love, ‘who in this present life gives us most joys by drawing like unto like, and for our hereafter displays hopes most high, if we for our part display piety towards the gods, that he will restore us to our erstwhile nature and will heal us and will make us happy and blessed[1530].’
This is not Platonic philosophy but popular religion. Phrase after phrase reveals the origin of this conception of Love. The hopes most high were the hopes held forth by the mysteries; the blessedness and the loving fellowship with gods were the fulfilment of those hopes. In such language did men ever hint at the joys to which their mystic sacraments gave access. And Plato here ventures yet further. The author of those high hopes, the founder of that blessedness, he proclaims, is none other than Love—Love that appealed not to the soul only of the initiated, but to the whole man, both soul and body—Love that meant not only the yearning after wisdom and holiness and spiritual equality with the gods, but that same passion which drew together man and woman, god and goddess—the passion of mankind for their deities, fed in this life by manifold means of communion and even by sacramental union, satisfied hereafter in the full fruition of wedded bliss.