CHAPTER X.THE OTHER WORLD.

Athenê andother goddesses.

Persephone is one of the most characteristic of the maiden-goddesses of whom we spoke above. The most literal and material interpretation of her myth would show her to be an embodiment of the grain, which sinks into the ground when it is sown and springs up again to live above the earth for half the year. But in a wider sense I have no doubt that Persephone is meant to typify the spring of which the grain might well be a sort of symbol, or to typify vegetation generally. And this is one of the natural characters belonging to the maiden-goddess. She is very frequently a goddess of spring in some aspect or other—of spring as the season of beauty and love. Such is the Freyja of the Norse mythology; such, to some extent, are Aphroditê (Venus) and Artemis (Diana).[74]

There is, however, one divinity among the Greeks who seems to have a somewhat different character, and whois so much more important a maiden-goddess than any of these that she at once springs into our thoughts when we are speaking of divinities of this class. I mean, of course, Athenê (Minerva). But in the first place, the wide worship of Athenê is partly accidental and due to her being the patroness of Athens; in the second place, Athenê has taken so many ethical characteristics, she is so advanced a conception of a divine being, that she is not at all a good representative of a religion in its early state. It would be rather confusing than otherwise to have to trace the character of Athenê step by step out of the natural phenomenon from which she sprang. I will only say here that I believe her to have been originally born from the sea or from a river. She may once have actually been a goddess of water. Afterwards she became, I think, the goddess of the rivers of heaven or the clouds. And as the clouds hold the storm and the lightning, Athenê is sometimes a storm-goddess, sometimes a goddess of the lightning.[75]Or again, she may be the heaven which bears the storm-cloud, the thundering heaven. We remember that Zeus and Athenê each have the privilege of wearing the Ægis—the dreadful fringed Ægis, which is, I think, the lightning-bearing cloud.

Artemis (Diana) is the moon-goddess, at least she is so in her character as sister of Apollo. But there were really many different Artemises in Greece. And very often she is a river-goddess. In the same way, there were many different Aphroditês. The more sensuous the character in which Aphroditê (Venus) appears, the more does she show her Asiatic birth; and this was why the Greeks, when regarding her especially as the goddess of love, called her Cypris, or Cytheræa, after Cyprus and Cythera, which had been inancient days stations for the Phœnician traders, and where they had first made acquaintance with the Greeks. Aphroditê was the favourite goddess of these mariners, as, indeed, a moon-goddess well might be; and it was they who gave her her most corrupt and licentious aspect. For she has not always this character even among the Phœnicians; but oftentimes appears as a huntress, more like Artemis, or armed as a goddess of battle, like Athenê. Doubtless, however, goddesses closely allied to Aphroditê or Artemis, divinities of productive nature and divinities of the moon, belonged to the other branches of the Indo-European family. Theideaof these divinities was a common property; the exact being in whom these ideas found expression varied with each race.

Scandinavianreligion.

If we travel from India and from Hellas to the cold North, the same characteristic features reappear. In the Teutonic religions,as we know them,[76]Odin has taken the place of the old Aryan sky-god, Dyâus. The last did, indeed, linger on in the Zio or Tyr of these systems; but he had sunk from the position of a chief divinity. The change, however, is not great. The god chosen to fill his place resembles him as nearly as possible in character. Odin, or Wuotan,[77]whose name in its etymological meaning is probably the god who moves violently or rushes along,[78]was originally a god of the wind rather than of the atmosphere of heaven. Yetalong with this more confined part of his character, he bears almost all the attributes of the exalted sky-god, the Dyâus or Zeus; only he adds to these some parts peculiar to a god of wind; and we can easily understand how, as these Aryan people journeyed northwards, their wind-god grew in magnitude and power.

Odin.

It was Odin who lashed into fury their stormy seas, and kept the impatientvikings(fjord-men) forced prisoners in their sheltered bays. He it was who rushed through their mountain forests, making the ancient pine-tops bend to him as he hurried on; and men sitting at home over their winter fires, and listening to his howl, told one another how he was hastening to some distant battle-field, there to direct the issue, and to choose from among the fallen such heroes as were worthy to accompany him to Valhalla, the Hall of Bliss.[79]Long after the worship of Christ had overturned that of the Æsir,[80]this, the most familiar and popular aspect of Odin’s nature, lived on in the thoughts of men. In the Middle Ages the wind reappears in the legend of the Phantom Army, a strange apparition of two hosts of men seen to join battle in midair. The peasant of the Jura or the Alps could tell how, when alone upon the mountain-side, he had beheld the awful vision. Sometimes all the details of the fight were visible, but as though the combatants were riding in the air; sometimes thesoundsof battle only came from the empty space above, till at the end a shower of blood gave the fearful witness a proof that he was not the dupe of his imagination only.[81]In other places, especially, for example,in the Harz mountains, the Phantom Army gave place to the Wild Huntsman. This phantom hunt has many different names in the different countries of Europe. With us it is known best under the name of Herne the Hunter or of Arthur’s Chase. In Brittany this last name is also used. In the Harz and in other places in Germany the huntsman was called Hackelbärend or Hackelberg; and the story went how he had been chief huntsman to the Duke of Brunswick, but for impiety or for some dreadful oath, like that which had brought vengeance on the famous Van der Decken, had been condemned to hunt for ever through the clouds—for ever, that is, until the Day of Judgment.[82]Allthe year through he pursues his way alone, and the peasants hear his holloa, mingled with the baying of his two dogs.[83]But for twelve nights—between Christmas and the Twelfth-night—he hunts on the earth; and if any door is left open during the night, and one of the two hounds runs in, he will bring misfortune upon that house.

Besides this wilder aspect of his character, Odin appears as the heaven-god—all-embracing—the father of gods and men, like Zeus. ‘All-father Odin’ he is called, and his seat was on Air-throne; thither every day he ascended and looked over Glad-home, the home of the gods, and over the homes of men, and far out beyond the great earth-girding sea, to the dim frost-bound giant-land on earth’s border. And whatever he saw of wrong-doing and of wickedness upon the earth, that he set to rights; and he kept watch against the coming of the giants over seas to invade the abode of man and the citadel of the gods. Only these last—the race of giants—he could not utterly subdue and exterminate; for Fate, which was stronger than all, had decreed that they should remain until the end, and only be overthrown at the Twilight of the Gods themselves. But of this myth, which was half-Christian, we have not space to speak at length here.

In this picture of Odin we surely see a fellow-portrait to that of the ‘wide-seeing’ Zeus. ‘The eye of Zeus, which sees all things and knows all,’ says one poet; or again, asanother says, ‘Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the sky, Zeus is all, and that which is over all.’

Tyr, Thor,and Balder.

Behind Odin stands Tyr—of whom we have already spoken—and Thor and Balder, who are, or originally were, two different embodiments of the sun; Thor being also a god of thunder. He is in character very closely allied to Heracles. He is the mighty champion, the strongest and most warlike of all the gods. But he is the friend of man and patron of agriculture,[84]and as such the enemy of the giant-race, which represents not only cold and darkness, but the barren, rugged, uncultivated regions of earth. Like Heracles, Thor is never idle, constantly with some work on hand, ‘faring eastward to fight Trolls (giants),’ as the Eddas often tell us. In one of these expeditions he performs three labours, which may be paralleled from the labours of Heracles. He nearly drains the sea dry by drinking from a horn; this is the sun ‘sucking up the clouds’ from the sea, as people still speak of him as doing. It corresponds to the turning the course of the Alpheus and Peneus, which Heracles performs. Then he tries to lift (as he thinks) a large cat from the ground, but in reality he has been lifting the great mid-earth serpent (notice the fact that we have the sun at war with a serpent once more) which encircles the whole earth, and he has by his strength shaken the very foundations of the world. This is the same as the feat of Heracles in bringing up Cerberus from the underworld. And lastly, he wrestles, as he thinks, with an old woman, and is worsted; but in reality he has been wrestling with Old Age or Death, from whom no one ever came off the victor. So we read in Homer that Heracles once wounded Hades himself, and ‘brought grief into the landof shades,’ and in Euripides’ beautiful play,Alcestis, we see Heracles struggling, but this time victoriously, with Thanatos, Death himself. In these labours the Norse hero, though striving manfully, fails; but the Greek is always victorious. Herein lies a difference belonging to the character of the two creeds.

Balder the Beautiful—the fair, mild Balder—represents the sun more truly than Thor does: the sun in his gentle aspect, as he would naturally appear to a Norseman. His house is Breidablik, ‘Wide-glance,’ that is to say, the bright upper air, the sun’s home. He is like the son of Lêtô seen in his benignant aspect, the best beloved among gods, the brightener of their warlike life, beloved, too, by all things on earth, living and inanimate, and lamented as only the sun could be—the chief nourisher at life’s feast. For, when Balder died, everything in heaven and earth, ‘both all living things and trees and stones and all metals,’ wept to bring him back again, ‘as thou hast no doubt seen these things weep when they are brought from a cold place into a hot one.’ A modern poet has very happily expressed the character of Balder, the sun-god, the great quickener of life upon earth. Balder is supposed to leave heaven to tread the ways of men, and his coming is the signal for the new birth, as of spring-time, in the sleeping world.

‘There is some divine troubleOn earth and in air;Trees tremble, brooks bubble,Ants loosen the sod,Warm footsteps awakenWhatever is fair,Sweet dewdrops are shakenTo quicken each clod.The wild rainbows o’er himAre melted and fade,The light runs before himThrough meadow and glade.Green branches close round him,Their leaves whisper clear—He is ours, we have found him,Bright Baldur is here.’[85]

Frigg,Freyja,Frey.

The earth-mother of the Teutons was Frigg, the wife of Odin; but perhaps when Frigg’s natural character was forgotten, Hertha (Earth) became separated into another personage. ‘Odin and Frigg,’ says the Edda, ‘divide the slain;’ and this means that the sky-god received the breath, the earth-goddess the body. But on the whole Frigg plays an insignificant part in our late form of Teuton mythology. Closely related to her, as Persephone is related to Dêmêtêr, with a name formed out of hers, stands Freyja, the goddess of spring and beauty and love; for the Northern goddess of love might better accord with the innocence of spring than could the Phœnician Aphroditê. Freyja has a brother Freyr, who reduplicates her name and character, for he too is a sun-god or a god of spring.

Very beautiful is the myth which reverses the sad story of Persephone (and of Balder), and tells of the barren earth wooed by the returning spring. Freyr one day mounted the seat of Odin which was called air-throne, and whence a god might look over all the ways of earth. And looking out into giant-land far in the north, he saw a light flash forth as the aurora lights up the wintry sky.[86]And looking again, he saw that a maiden wondrously beautiful had just opened her father’s door, and that this was her beauty which shone out over the snow. Then Freyr left the air-throne and determined to send to the fair one and wooher to be his wife. Her name was Gerda.[87]Freyr sent his messenger Skirnir to carry his suit to Gerda; and Skirnir told her how great Freyr was among the gods, how noble and happy a place was Asgard, the home of the gods. For all Skirnir’s pleading Gerda would give no ear to his suit. But Freyr had given his magic sword (the sun’s rays) to Skirnir; and at last the ambassador, tired of pleading, drew that and threatened to take the life of Gerda unless she granted Freyr his wish. So she consented to meet him nine nights hence in the wood of Barri. The nine nights typify, it is thought, the nine winter months of the Northern year; and the name of the wood, Barri, means ‘the green;’ the beginnings of spring in the wood being happily imaged as the meeting of the fresh and the barren earth.

All the elements of nature were personified by the spirit of Aryan poetry, and it would be a hopeless task—wearisome and useless to the reader—to give a mere category of the nature-gods in each system. Those which had most influence upon their religious thought were they who have been mentioned, the gods of the sky and sun and mother-earth. The other elemental divinities were (as a rule) more strictly bound within the circle of their own dominions. It is curious to trace the difference between these strictly polytheistic deities—coequal in their several spheres—and those others who arose in obedience to a wider ideal of a godhead. We have seen that the Indians had a strictly elemental heaven or sky, as well as their god Dyâus, and that they called him Varuna, a word which corresponds etymologically to the Greek Ouranos, the heaven. In the later Indian mythology Varuna came tostand, not for the sky, but for the wide expanse of ocean, and so corresponds to the Greek Poseidon, the Latin Neptune, and the Norse Œgir. All these were the gods of the sea and of all waters. The wind, as we saw, combined in the person of Odin with the character of a highest god; but in the Greek the part was played by an inferior divinity, Hermes. In India there is a wind-god (called Vaja); but the character is likewise divided among a plurality of minor divinities, the Maruts. Of Agni, the god of fire, corresponding to Hephæstus and Vulcan, we have spoken; and in the North Fire is not a god at all, but an evil being called Loki. This is enough to show that the worship of Agni rose into fervour after the separation of the Aryan folk.

We postpone to the next chapter the mention of the gods of the under-world.

The Zendreligion.

The religions of which we have been giving this slight sketch have been what we may call ‘natural’ religions, that is to say, the thoughts about God and the Unseen world which without help of any specialvisionseem to spring up simultaneously in the minds of the different Aryan peoples. But one among the Aryan religions still in pre-historic times broke off abruptly from its relation with the others, and, under a teacher whom we may fairly call god-taught, in beauty and moral purity passed far beyond the rest.

This was the Zoroastrian, the faith of the Iranian (ancient Persian) branch, or, as it is perhaps better called, the Zend or Mazdean religion; a creed which holds a pre-eminence among all the religions of antiquity, excepting alone that of the Hebrews. And that there is no exaggeration in such a claim is sufficiently witnessed by the inspired writings themselves, in which the Persian kings are frequently spoken ofas if they as much as the Hebrews were worshippers of Jehovah. ‘Cyrus the servant of God,’ ‘The Lord said unto my lord (Cyrus),’ are constantly recurring expressions in Isaiah.

In some respects this Zoroastrianism seems to stand in violent opposition to the Aryan religion. Nevertheless, at the back of the religion of the Zend Avesta, which is the sacred book of the Iranian creed, we can (as was before hinted) trace the outline of an earlier natural religion essentially the same—so far as we can judge—with the religion of the Vedas. And upon the whole we should be disposed to say that Zoroastrianism appears to be not much else than a higher development of that earlier system. At any rate, we may feel sure that the older system was before the coming of the ‘gold bright’[88]reformer, essentially a polytheism with only some yearnings towards monotheism, and that Zoroaster settled it upon a firmly monotheistic basis. This very fact leaves us little to say about the Iranian system considered strictly as a religion. For when once nations have risen to the height of a monotheism there can be little essential difference in their beliefs; such difference as there is will be in the conception they have of the character of their gods, whether it be a high, a relatively high, or relatively low one; and this again is more perhaps a question of moral development than of religion. Their one god, since he made all things and rules all things, cannot partake of the exclusive nature of any natural phenomenon; he cannot be a god of wind or water, ofsun or sky. The Zoroastrian creed did afterwards introduce (then for the first time in the world’s history) a very important element of belief, namely, of the distinct origin, and almost if not quite equal powers, of the good and evil principles. But this was later than the time of Zarathustra.

The name which Zarathustra taught the people to give to the one god was unconnected with Aryan nature-names, Dyâus, or Varuna, or Indra. He simply called him the ‘Great Spirit,’ or, in the Zend, Ahura-mazda;[89]in later Persian, Hormuzd or Ormuzd. He is the all-perfect, all-wise, all-powerful, all-beautiful. He is the creator of all things. And—still nearer to the Christian belief—before the creation of the world, by means whereof the world itself was made, existed theWord. Some trace of this same doctrine of the pre-existing Word (Hanover, in the Zoroastrian religion) is to be found in the Vedas, where he is calledVach. It would be here impossible to enter into an examination of the question how far these early religions seem to shadow forth the mystical doctrine of theLogos. The evil principle opposed to Ormuzd is Angra-Mainyus (Ahrimanes), but in the true doctrine he is by no means the equal of God, no more so than is Satan. The successive corruption of pure Zoroastrianism after the time of its founder is marked by a constant exaggeration of the power of the evil principle (suggested, perhaps, by intercourse with devil-worshipping nations of a lower type) until Ahrimanes becomes the rival of Ormuzd, coequal and co-eternal with him.

Such is the simple creed of the Persians, accompanied of course by rites and ceremonies, part invented by the reformer, part inherited from the common Aryan parentage.It is well known that the Persians built no temples, but worshipped Ormuzd chiefly upon the mountain-tops; that they paid great respect to all the elements—that is to air, water, and fire, the latter most of all—a belief which they shared with their Indian brethren, but stopped far short of worshipping any. That they held very strongly the separate idea of the soul, so that when once a body had lost its life, they considered it to be a thing wholly corrupt and evil; a doctrine which carried in the germ that of the inherent evil of matter, as the philosophical reader will discern.

It remains to say something of their religious books. TheZend Avestawas supposed to comprise the teaching of Zoroaster, and was believed to have been written by him. Only one complete book has been preserved—it is called theVendidâd. TheZendlanguage in which theAvestais written is the oldest known form of Persian, older than that in use at the time of Darius the Great; but this is no proof that it dates back to the days of Zarathustra. Part of it is in prose and part in verse, and as in every literature we find that the fragments of verse are they which survive the longest, it has been conjectured that the songs of theZend Avesta(Gâthâs they are called) may even have been written by the great reformer himself.

The deathof thesun-god.

Ifthe sun-god was so natural a type of a man-like divinity, a god suffering some of the pains of humanity, a sort of type of man’s own ideal life here, it was natural that men should question this oracle concerning their future life and their hopes beyond the grave. We have seen that the Egyptians did so; seen how they watched the course of the day-star, and, beholding him sink behind the sandy desert, pictured a home of happiness beyond that waste, a place to be reached by the soul after many trials and long wandering in the dim Amenti-land which lay between. The Aryans dwelt, we believe, upon the slopes of the Hindoo-Koosh or in the level plain beneath; and, if the conjecture be reasonable that a great part of the land now a sandy desert was then filled by an inland sea,[90]many of them must have dwelt upon its borders and seen the sun plunge in its wave each evening. Then or afterwards they saw this, and interpreted what they saw in the very thought of Milton:—

‘Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor.So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed,And yet anon repairs his drooping head,And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled oreFlames in the forehead of the morning sky.’

And thus a belief grew up among them that after death their souls would have to cross this ocean to some happy paradise which lay beyond in the ‘home of the sun.’

Lifein the tomb.Thedouble.

But there is another idea, more simple and material than this, and therefore more natural to human nature in all its phases. This is the notion that the dead man abides in his tomb, that he comes to life in it after a certain fashion, and lives a new life there not greatly different from his life on earth, only calmer and more stately—

‘Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains.’

First of all, perhaps, the survivors are content to think of the dead man as simply living in his underground house. To prevent him coming out thence, the stone-age men, we noticed, scattered shards, flints, and pebbles, before the mouth of the house. To that tomb they brought their offerings of meat and drink. The notion of the soul is not yet separated from that of the body. But that does not show that all the ideas of those who confounded the two were purely materialistic. In common parlance we often confound spiritual and material things quite as much; and yet in our thoughts we have the power of separating them. We talk of a good-hearted man, and yet we can distinguish between the purely imaginary or spiritual entity here meant by ‘heart,’ and the mere physical organ. I do not say that early man could have distinguished between the idea of the dead body and the surviving soul. Probably he could not. I only say that we are not to judge of his belief merely by his rites and ceremonies.

So far as these ceremonies go, man began, we judge, by thinking first of securing for the dead an everlasting habitation. And so he covered his grave with an immense pile of earth.[91]The pile grew greater and greater, and at last, as we saw, it took the shape of the pyramid. Then came the entrance-chamber orporchto the tomb, in which the survivors offered sacrifices to the dead to keep him alive by the smell of the burnt offering.

The Egyptians had very little power of abstracting the idea of the immaterial soul from the material dead body. At any rate, they did not (for a long time) conceive the soul as a purely immaterial being. They thought of the immortal part of man as a sort ofdoubleof the mortal part. This double they called hiska. Thekacould not exist without some material form, and therefore they took infinite pains to provide it with a body of some kind. They mummified the dead body so as to make it last as long as possible. But besides that, they made numerous images of the dead; sometimes (if his state could afford it) large statues of wood[92]or stone. And in addition to these they made a vast number of smaller images, generally of pottery—those little mummy figures in blue or green pottery,[93]of which we find such endless quantities buried in the tombs.There was usually a secret chamber or passage practised in the tomb to contain these mummied figures, and it was so arranged that the scent of the sacrifice might come along it.[94]

All these ideas belong, we see, to the moststationarynotion of the dead. If they were followed out logically, the soul would be considered as tied for ever to the mummy, which lies below in a dark chamber, or to the little images in their small passage within the wall of the tomb. But the Egyptians did not carry out this idea logically. For we find prayers upon the walls of their earliest tombs, that Osiris should give to the dead, sheep, oxen, and farm-labourers, and ‘sport,’ or corn, and wine, and dancers, and jesters—all the pleasures, in fact, which he had had in life. Therefore the dead must really have been thought to have the power of life and motion as he had enjoyed it upon earth, inconsistent as such an idea is with the constant enchainment of thekato some material belonging, to the mummy or to the image of pottery.

Thejourney ofthe dead.

Wherefore it came about that the Egyptians began to have a sort of notion oftwosouls—one the half-materialka, which remained in the tomb; the other of an immaterial nature, which moved about.

But this notion of two souls arose because the Egyptians weremoreprecise and logical than most peoples have been in their speculations as to the future state. Among other races we see a constant confusion between the idea of resting in the tomb, and the idea of journeying to another land generally in the wake of the sun. And the food and drink placed on the tomb, instead of being thesimple nourishment of the dead, were designed merely as a temporary provision for himon his wayto the land of souls.

The expectation of a journey after death to reach the home of shades is all but universal; and the opinion that the home of the departed lies in the west is of an almost equally wide extension. The Egyptian religion, with its wonderful Book of the Dead, gives as much weight to this side of belief as to the other notion of resting in the tomb. To lengthen out the soul’s journey, which was fancied to last thousands of years, and give incident where all must have been really imaginary, the actual journey of the mummy to its resting-place was lengthened after life to portray the more ghostly wanderings of the spirit. As a rule, the cities of the living in Egypt lay upon the eastern bank of the Nile; the tombs, the cities of the dead, on the left or western bank, generally just within the borders of the desert. Wherefore, as the body was carried across the Nile to be buried in the desert, so the soul was believed to begin his journey in the dim twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, to cross a river more than once, to advancetowards the sun, light gradually breaking upon him the while, until at last he enters the ‘Palace of the Two Truths,’ the judgment-hall of Osiris (the sun). Last of all, he walks into the sun itself, or is absorbed into the essence of the deity.

In these two notions we have, I think, the germ of almost all the most ancient belief touching the soul’s future. A confusion between the two notions would imagine the soul making a journey through the earth to an underground land of shades. So far as we know, this was the prevailing feeling among the Hebrews. Old Hebrew writers (with whom the hopes of immortality were not strong) speakof going down into the grave,[95]a place thought of as a misty, dull, unfeeling, almost unreal abode.

Journey tothe sky.

Finally, a third element—if not universal, common certainly to the Aryan races—will be the conception of the soul separating from the body altogether and mounting upwards to some home in the sky. All these elements are found to exist and coexist in early creeds, and the force of the component parts determines the colour of man’s doctrine about the other world.

The other world of the Aryans.

Among all the Aryan peoples the Greeks seem to have turned their thoughts farthest away from the contemplation of the grave; and though the voice of wonder and imagination could not quite be silent upon so important a question, Hades and the kingdom of Hades filled a disproportionately small space in their creed. They shrank from images of Death, and adorned their tombs or cinerary urns with wreaths of flowers and figures of the dancing Hours: it is doubtful if the god Thanatos (Death) has ever been pictured by Greek art.[96]And from what they have left on record concerning Hades and the realms of death, it is evident that they regarded itchieflyfrom its merely negative side, in that aspect which corresponds most exactly to the notion of a dark subterraneous kingdom, and not to that of a journey to some other distant land. The etymology of their mythical King of Souls corresponds, too, with the same notions. Hades means nothing else than A-eidês, the unseen. And when it was said that the dead had gone to Hades, all that was literally meant was that it had gone to the unseen place. But later on, the place became personified into the grim deity whom we know in Greek mythology, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, he to whose share fell, in the partition of the world, the land of perpetual night. The underworld pictured by Homer is just of that voiceless, sightless character which accords with the name of Hades. Even the great heroes lose almost their identity, and all the joy and interest they had in life. To ‘wander mid shadows a shadow, and wail by impassable streams,’ is henceforward their occupation.

Not that the Greek hadnoidea of another world of the more heavenly sort; ideas obtained as a joint inheritance with their brother nations; only their thoughts and their poetry do not often centre round such pictures. Their Elysian fields are a western sun’s home, just after the pattern of the Egyptian; and so are their Islands of the Blest, where, according to one tradition, the just Rhadamanthus had been transported when he fled from the power of his brother Minôs.[97]Only, observe, there is this difference between these Paradises and the Egyptian house of Osiris—the latter was reached across the sandy desert, the former areseparated by the ocean from the abode of men. These are theHeavensof the Greek mythology; while the realm of Hades—or later on the realm Hades—might by contrast be called their Hell. Let us look a little nearer at this heaven-picture.

The River of Death.

The Caspian Sea—or by whatever name we call the great mediterranean sea which lay before them—would be naturally, almost inevitably, considered by the Aryans from their home in Bactria to bound the habitable world. The region beyond its borders would be a twilight-land like the land of Apap (the desert-king) of the Egyptians; and still farther away would lie the bright region of the sun’s proper home. And these ideas would be both literal—cosmological conceptions, as we should call them—and figurative, or at least mythical, referring to the future state of the soul. The beautiful expression of the Hebrew for that twilight western region, ‘the valley of the shadow of death,’ might be used for the Apap-land in its figurative significance, and not the less justly because there creeps in here the other notion of death as of adescendingto the land of shades, for the two ideas of the western heaven and the subterraneous hell were never utterly separated, but, among the Aryans at any rate, constantly acted and reacted upon one another. So with the Greeks we have as a cosmological conception—or let us say, more simply, a part of their world-theory—the encircling river Oceanus, with the dim Cimmerian land beyond; and we have the Eylsian fields and the islands of the blest for the most happy dead. And then by a natural transfer of ideas the bounding river becomes the river of death—Styx and Lethê—and is placed below the earth in the region of death. Even the Elysian fields at last suffer the same change: they too pass below the earth.

The Indian religion, too, has its river of death. ‘On the fearful road to Yama’s door,’ says a hymn, ‘is the terrible stream Vaitaranî, in order to cross which I sacrifice a black cow.’[98]

This river of death must be somehow crossed. The Greeks, we know, had their grim ferryman.

‘Portitor has horrendus aquas et flumina servatTerribili squalore Charon: cui plurima mentoCanities inculta jacet; stant lumina flamma,’ etc.

The Indians crossed their river of death by a bridge, which was guarded by two dogs, not less terrible to evildoers than Charon and Cerberus.

‘A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by men, a path I know of.

‘On it the wise, who had known Brahma, ascend to the dwellings of Svarga, when they have received their dismissal.’[99]So sings a poet.

Swarga is the Bright Land (svar, to shine),i.e.the Home of the Sun. The names of the two guardian dogs, too, are interesting. They are the sons of that Saramâ whom we have already seen sent by Indra to recover his lost cattle, whose name signifies the breeze of morning. Saramâ’s two sons, the dogs of Yama, being so closely connected with the god of the under-world—as Saramâ is with Indra the sun-god—might be guessed as the winds of evening or, more vaguely, the evening, as Saramâ is the morning. They are so; and by their name of Sârameyas, are even more closely related to Hermes than Saramâ was.[100]We now know why to Hermes was allotted the office of Psychopomp, or leader of the shades to the realm of Hades—or at least we partlyknow; for we see that he is the same with the two dogs of Yama in the Indian myth. But they are also connected by name with another much more infernal being, Cerberus. Their individual names wereCerbura[101]the spotted, and Syama the black. Thus the identity of nature is confirmed by the identity of name.

Death and Sleep are twin-brothers, and we need not be surprised to find the Sârameyas, or ratheragod Sârameyas, addressed as a sort of god of sleep, a divine hound, the protector of the sleeping household, as we do find in a very beautiful poem of the Rig-Vedas.[102]

‘Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house; oh, thou who takest all shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend.Bay at the robber, Sârameyas, bay at the thief; why bayest thou at the singer of Indra? why art thou angry with me? sleep, Sârameyas.The mother sleeps, the father sleeps, the dog sleeps, the clan-father[103]sleeps, the whole clan sleeps; sleep thou, Sârameyas.Those who sleep by the cattle, those who sleep by the wain, the women who lie on the couches, the sweet-scented ones, all these we bring to slumber.’

How these verses breathe of the fragrant air of early pastoral life! In their names, again, of ‘black’ and ‘spotted’ it is very probable that the dogs typified two appearances of night—black or starry.

The heavenward journey.

And yet we must remember that Hermes is not a god of night, or sleep, but strictly and properly of the wind, and that his name, as that of Sârameyas, bears this meaning in its construction. The god who bore away the souls to the other world, however connected with the night, ‘the proper time for dying,’ must have been originally the wind. And in this we seean exquisite appropriateness. The soul is, in its original and literal meaning, the breath[104]—‘the spirit does but mean the breath.’ What more natural, therefore, than that the spirit should be carried away by the wind-god? This was peculiarly an Aryan idea. Yet let it not be laid to the Aryans’ charge, as though their theories of the soul and future life were less spiritual than those of other nations: quite the contrary was the case. So far as they abandoned the notion of the existence of thebodyin another state and transferred the future to the soul, their ideas became higher, and their pictures of the other world more amplified. But how, it may be asked, did the Aryans pass to their more spiritual conception of the soul? The more external causes of this progress it is worth while briefly to trace.

The sun, it has been said, acted powerfully upon men’s minds in pointing the hopes of futurity. And in sketching the sun-myth which lay concealed in the story of the life of Heracles, we noticed one feature which suggests thoughts about a not yet mentioned element in the funeral rites of the Aryans. The fiery setting of the sun would itself suggest a fiery funeral, and pre-eminently so to a race who seem to have been addicted more than any other to this form of interment. Balder, the Northern sun-god, likewise receives such a funeral, and this more even than the death of Heracles exemplifies the double significance of the sun’s westering course. For he sails away upon a burning ship. When, therefore, this fire-burial was thoroughly established in custom as the most heroic sort of end, it is not likely that men would longer rely upon their belief that the body continued in an after-life. The thought of the dead man living in his grave or travelling thence to regions below must, or should, by the consistent be definitely abandoned. In placeof it, a theory of the vital faculty residing in the breath, which almost amounts to a soul distinct from the body, is accepted. Or, if the doubting brethren still require some visible representation of this vital power, the smoke[105]of the funeral pyre may typify the ascending soul. Nay, it would appear as though inanimate things likewise had some such essence, which by the fire could be separated from their material form. For what would formerly have been placed with the dead in the grave is now placed upon the pyre. In the funeral of Patroclus (Il.xxiii.) we have a complete picture of these reformed rites, which seems to be applicable to all the Aryan folk; nor surely could we wish for anything more striking and impressive. The fat oxen and sheep are slain before the pyre, and with the fat from their bodies and with honey the corpse is liberally anointed. Then twelve captives are sacrificed to the manes of the hero; they and his twelve favourite dogs are burnt with him upon the pile. We soon see the reason for the anointing of the corpse with fat, and taking so much pains that it should be thoroughly consumed. It was necessary for the peace of the shade that his body should be thoroughly burned; for the funeral ceremony was looked upon as the inevitable portal to Hades; without it the ghost still lingered upon earth unable to cross the Stygian stream. So afterwards, when the pile will not burn, Achilles prays to the North and the West Winds and pours libations to them that they may come and consummate the funeral rite. All night as the flame springs up Achilles stands beside it, calling upon the name of his friend andwatering the ground with libations from a golden cup. Toward morning the flame sinks down; and then the two winds, according to the beautiful language of mythology, return homeward across the Thracian sea.

All the Aryan nationalities practised cremation in some form or other, or had practised it; most only gave it up upon the introduction of Christianity. The time is too remote, therefore, to say when this form of interment was in truth a novelty; and the fact that the bronze age in Europe is, as distinguished from that of stone, a corpse-burning age, is one of the reasons which urge us to the conclusion that the bronze-using invaders were of the Aryan family.[106]The Indians, owing to their excessive reverence for Agni the fire-god, adhered to the practice most faithfully; though the very same reason (namely, their regard for the purity of fire) made the reformed Iranian religion utterly repudiate it—a fact which might seem strange did we not know how Zoroastrianism was sometimes governed by a spirit of opposition to the older faith.[107]Among the Norsemen about the time of the introduction of Christianity intoScandinavia, Burn? or Bury? became a test-question, and a constant cause of dispute between the rival creeds.

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