32 Meditations, lib. iii. cap. 3.
33 Ibid. lib. iv. cap. 21.
34 Plutarch, Plac. Phil. iv. 7.
35 Tusc. Quast. lib. i. cap. 32.
in his works; but his preponderant authority, upon the whole, is that the soul and the body perish together.36 At one time he says, "The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity." "As an infant in the womb is preparing to dwell in this world, so ought we to consider our present life as a preparation for the life to come."37 At another time he says, with stunning bluntness, "There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing."
Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil. 38
Besides the mystics, like Plotinus, who affirmed the strict eternity of the soul, and the Stoics, like Poseidonius, who believed that the soul, having had a beginning, must have an end, although it might endure for a long period after leaving the body, there were among the Greeks and Romans two other classes of believers in a future life, namely, the ignorant body of the people, who credited, more or less fully, the common fables concerning Hades; and an educated body of select minds, who, while casting off the popular superstitions, yet clung tenaciously to the great fact of immortality in some form or other, without attempting to define the precise mode of it.
There was among the illiterate populace, both Greek and Roman, even from the age of Eumolpus to that of Augustus, a good deal of firm faith in a future life, according to the gross scheme and particulars preserved to us still in the classic mythology. A thousand current allusions and statements in the general literature of those times prove the actual existence of a common and literal belief in Hades with all its accompaniments. This was far from being, in the average apprehension, a mere myth. Plato says, "Many, of their own accord, have wished to descend into Hades, induced by the hope of there seeing and being with those they have loved."39 He also says, "When a man is about to die, the stories of future punishment which he had formerly ridiculed trouble him with fears of their truth."40 And that frightful accounts of hell really swayed and terrified the people, even so late as the time of the Roman republic, appears from the earnest and elaborate arguments employed by various writers to refute them.
The same thing is shown by the religious ritual enacted at funerals and festivals, the forms of public and private worship observed till after the conversion of Constantine. The cake of rice and honey borne in the dead hand for Cerberus, the periodical offerings to the ghosts of the departed, as at the festivals called Feralia and Parentalia,41 the pictures of the scenery of the under world, hung in the temples, of which there was a famous one by Polygnotus,42 all imply a literal crediting of the vulgar doctrine. Altars were set up on the spots where Tiberius and Caius Gracchus were murdered, and services were there performed in honor of their manes. Festus, an old Roman lexicographer who lived in the second or third century, tells us there was in the Comitium a stone covered pit which was supposed to be the
36 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften. Commentarius quo Stoicorum Sententia; de Animorum post mortem Statu satis illustrantur.
37 Epist. 102.
38 Troades, 1. 397.
39 Phado, 34.
40 Republic, lib. i. cap. 5.
41 Ovid, Fasti, lib. ii. II. 530-580.
42 Pausanias, lib. x. cap. 28.
mouth of Orcus, and was opened three days in the year for souls to rise out into the upper world.43 Apuleius describes, in his treatise on "the god of Socrates," the Roman conceptions of the departed spirits of men. They called all disembodied human souls "lemures." Those of good men were "lares," those of bad men "larva." And when it was uncertain whether the specified soul was a lar or a larva, it was named "manes." The lares were mild household gods to their posterity. The larva were wandering, frightful shapes, harmless to the pious, but destructive to the reprobate.44
The belief in necromancy is well known to have prevailed extensively among the Greeks and Romans. Aristophanes represents the coward, Pisander, going to a necromancer and asking to "see his own soul, which had long departed, leaving him a man with breath alone."45 In Latin literature no popular terror is more frequently alluded to or exemplified than the dread of seeing ghosts. Every one will recall the story of the phantom that appeared in the tent of Brutus before the battle of Philippi. It pervades the "Haunted House" of Plautus. Callimachus wrote the following couplet as an epitaph on the celebrated misanthrope:
"Timon, hat'st thou the world or Hades worse? Speak clear! Hades,O fool, because there are more of us here!" 46
Pythagoras is said once to have explained an earthquake as being caused by a synod of ghosts assembled under ground! It is one of the best of the numerous jokes attributed to the great Samian; a good nut for the spirit rappers to crack. There is an epigram by Diogenes Laertius, on one Lycon, who died of the gout:
"He who before could not so much as walk alone, The whole long road to Hades travell'd in one night!"
Philostratus declares that the shade of Apollonius appeared to a skeptical disciple of his and said, "The soul is immortal."47 It is unquestionable that the superstitious fables about the under world and ghosts had a powerful hold, for a very long period, upon the Greek and Roman imagination, and were widely accepted as facts.
At the same time, there were many persons of more advanced culture to whom such coarse and fanciful representations had become incredible, but who still held loyally to the simple idea of the survival of the soul. They cherished a strong expectation of another life, although they rejected the revolting form and drapery in which the doctrine was usually set forth. Xenophon puts the following speech into the mouth of the expiring Cyrus: "I was never able, my children, to persuade myself that the soul, as long as it was in a mortal body, lived, but when it was removed from this, that it died; neither could I believe that the soul ceased to think when separated from the unthinking and senseless body; but it seemed to me most probable that when pure and free from any union with the body, then it became most
43 De Significatione Verborum, verbum "Manalis."
44 Lessing, Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet.
45 Ayes, I. 1485.
46 Epigram IV.
47 Vita Apollonii, lib. viii. cap. 31.
wise."48 Every one has read of the young man whose faith and curiosity were so excited by Plato's writings that he committed suicide to test the fact of futurity. Callimachus tells the story neatly:
"Cleombrotus, the Ambracian, having said, 'Farewell, O sun!' leap'd from a lofty wall into the world Of ghosts. No deadly ill had chanced to him at all; But he had read in Plato's book upon the soul." 49
The falling of Cato on his sword at Utica, after carefully perusing the Phado, is equally familiar.
In the case of Cicero, too, notwithstanding his fluctuations of feeling and the obvious contradictions of sentiment in some of his letters and his more deliberate essays, it is, upon the whole, plain enough that, while he always regarded the vulgar notions as puerile falsehoods, the hope of a glorious life to come was powerful in him. This may be stated as the result of a patient investigation and balancing of all that he says on the subject, and of the circumstances under which he says it. To cite and criticize the passages here would occupy too much space to too little profit.
At the siege of Jerusalem, Titus made a speech to his soldiers, in the course of it saying to them, "Those souls which are severed from their fleshly bodies by the sword in battle, are received by the pure ether and joined to that company which are placed among the stars."50 The beautiful story of Cupid and Psyche, that loveliest of all the myths concerning the immortality of the soul, was a creation by no means foreign to the prevalent ideas and feelings of the time when it was written. The "Dissertations" of Maximus Tyrius abound with sentences like the following. "This very thing which the multitude call death is the birth of a new life, and the beginning of immortality."51 "When Pherecydes lay sick, conscious of spiritual energy, he cared not for bodily disease, his soul standing erect and looking for release from its cumbersome vestment. So a man in chains, seeing the walls of his prison crumbling, waits for deliverance, that from the darkness in which he has been buried he may soar to the ethereal regions and be filled with glorious light."52
The conception of man as a member of the cosmic family of gods and genii was known to all the classic philosophers, and was cherished by the larger portion of them. Pindar affirms one origin for gods and men. Plato makes wise souls accompany the gods in their excursions about the sky. Cicero argues that heaven, and not Hades, is the destination of the soul at death, because the soul, being lighter than the earthly elements surrounding it here, would rise aloft through the natural force of gravitation.53 Plutarch says, "Demons are the spies and scouts of the gods, wandering and circuiting around on their commands." Disembodied souls
48 Cyropadia, lib. viii. cap. 7.
49 Epigram XXIV.
50 Josephus, De Bell. lib. vi. cap. 1.
51 Diss. XXV.
52 Diss. XLI.
53 Tusc. Quest. lib i. cap. 17.
and demons were the same. The prevalence of such ideas as these produced in the Greek and Roman imagination a profound sense of invisible beings, a sense which was further intensified by the popular personifications of all natural forces, as in fountains and trees, full of lapsing naiads and rustling dryads. An illustrative fact is furnished by an effect of the tradition that Thetis, snatching the body of Achilles from the funeral pile, conveyed him to Leuke, an island in the Black Sea. The mariners sailing by often fancied they saw his mighty shade flitting along the shore in the dusk of evening.54 But a passage in Hesiod yields a more adequate illustration: "When the mortal remains of those who flourished during the golden age were hidden beneath the earth, their souls became beneficent demons, still hovering over the world they once inhabited, and still watching, clothed in thin air and gliding rapidly through every region of the earth, as guardians over the affairs of men."55
But there were always some who denied the common doctrine of a future life and scoffed at its physical features. Through the absurd extravagances of poets and augurs, and through the growth of critical thought, this unbelief went on increasing from the days of Anaxagoras, when it was death to call the sun a ball of fire, to the days of Catiline, when Julius Casar could be chosen Pontifex Maximus, almost before the Senate had ceased to reverberate his voice openly asserting that death was the utter end of man. Plutarch dilates upon the wide skepticism of the Greeks as to the infernal world, at the close of his essay on the maxim, "Live concealed." The portentous growth of irreverent unbelief, the immense change of feeling from awe to ribaldry, is made obvious by a glance from the known gravity of Hesiod's "Descent of Theseus and Pirithous into Hades," to Lucian's "Kataplous," which represents the cobbler Mycillus leaping from the banks of the Styx, swimming after Charon's boat, climbing into it upon the shoulders of the tyrant Megapenthes and tormenting him the whole way. Pliny, in his Natural History, affirms that death is an everlasting sleep.56 The whole great sect of the Epicureans united in supporting that belief by the combined force of ridicule and argument. Their views are the most fully and ably defended by the consummate Lucretius, in his masterly poem on the "Nature of Things." Horace,57 Juvenal,58 Persius,59 concur in scouting at the tales which once, when recited on the stage, had made vast audiences perceptibly tremble.60 And Cicero asks, "What old woman is so insane as to fear these things?"61
There were two classes of persons who sought differently to free mankind from the terrors which had invested the whole prospect of death and another world. The first were the materialists, who endeavored to prove that death was to man the absolute end of every thing. Secondly, there were the later Platonists, who maintained that this world is the only Hades, that heaven is our home, that all death is ascent to better life. "To remain on high with the gods is life; to descend into this world is death, a descent into Orcus," they said. The following couplet, of an unknown date, is translated from the Greek Anthology:
"Diogenes, whose tub stood by the road, Now, being dead, has the stars for his abode."
54 Muller, Greek Literature, ch. vi.
55 Works and Days, lib. i. II. 120-125.
56 Lib. ii. cap. 7.
57 Lib. i. epist. 16.
58 Sat. II.
59 Sat. II.
60 Tusc. Quest. lib. i. cap. 16.
61 Ibid. cap. 21.
Macrobius writes, in his commentary on the "Dream of Scipio," "Here, on earth, is the cavern of Dis, the infernal region. The river of oblivion is the wandering of the mind forgetting the majesty of its former life and thinking a residence in the body the only life. Phlegethon is the fires of wrath and desire. Acheron is retributive sadness. Cocytus is wailing tears. Styx is the whirlpool of hatreds. The vulture eternally tearing the liver is the torment of an evil conscience."62
To the ancient Greek in general, death was a sad doom. When he lost a friend, he sighed a melancholy farewell after him to the faded shore of ghosts. Summoned himself, he departed with a lingering look at the sun, and a tearful adieu to the bright day and the green earth. To the Roman, death was a grim reality. To meet it himself he girded up his loins with artificial firmness. But at its ravages among his friends he wailed in anguished abandonment. To his dying vision there was indeed a future; but shapes of distrust and shadow stood upon its disconsolate borders; and, when the prospect had no horror, he still shrank from its poppied gloom.
62 Lib. i. cap. 9, 10.
ISLAM has been a mighty power in the earth since the middle of the seventh century. A more energetic and trenchant faith than it was for eight hundred years has not appeared among men. Finally expelled from its startling encampments in Spain and the Archipelago, it still rules with tenacious hold over Turkey, a part of Tartary, Palestine, Persia, Arabia, and large portions of Africa. At this moment, as to adherence and influence, it is subordinate only to the two foremost religious systems in the world, Buddhism and Christianity. The dogmatic structure of Islam as a theology and its practical power as an experimental religion offer a problem of the gravest interest. But we must hasten on to give an exposition of merely those elements in it which are connected with its doctrine of a future life.
It is a matter of entire notoriety that there is but the least amount of originality in the tenets of the Mohammedan faith. The blending together of those tenets was distinctive, the unifying soul breathed into them was a new creation, and the great aim to which the whole was subordinated was peculiar; but the component doctrines themselves, with slight exception, existed before as avowed principles in the various systems of belief and practice that prevailed around. Mohammed adopted many of the notions and customs of the pagan Arabs, the central dogma of the Jews as to the unity of God, most of the traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures, innumerable fanciful conceits of the Rabbins,1 whole doctrines of the Magians with their details, some views of the Gnostics, and extensive portions of a corrupted Christianity, grouping them together with many modifications of his own, and such additions as his genius afforded and his exigencies required. The motley strangely results in a compact and systematic working faith.
The Islamites are divided into two great sects, the Sunnees and the Sheeahs. The Arabs, Tartars, and Turks are Sunnees, are dominant in numbers and authority, are strict literalists, and are commonly considered the orthodox believers. The Persians are Sheeahs, are inferior in point of numbers, are somewhat freer in certain interpretations, placing a mass of tradition, like the Jewish Mischna, on a level with the Koran,2 and are usually regarded as heretical. To apply our own ecclesiastical phraseology to them, the latter are the Moslem Protestants, the former the Moslem Catholics. Yet in relation to almost every thing which should seem at all fundamental or vital they agree in their teachings. Their differences in general are upon trivial opinions, or especially upon ritual particulars. For instance, the Sheeahs send all the Sunnees to hell because in their ablutions they wash from the elbow to the finger tips; the Sunnees return the compliment to their rival sectarists because they wash from the finger tips to the elbow. Within these two grand denominations of Sheeah and
1 Rabbi Abraham Geiger, Prize Essay upon the question, proposed by the University of Bonn, "Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthum aufgenommen?"
2 Merrick, Translation of the Sheeah Traditions of Mohammed in the Hyat ul Kuloob, note x.
Sunnee are found a multitude of petty sects, separated from each other on various questions of speculative faith and ceremonial practice. Some take the Koran alone, and that in its plain literal sense, as their authority. Others read the Koran in the explanatory light of a vast collection of parables, proverbs, legends, purporting to be from Mohammed. There is no less than a score of mystic allegorizing sects3 who reduce almost every thing in the Koran to symbol, or spiritual signification, and some of whom as the Sufis are the most rapt and imaginative of all the enthusiastic devotees in the world.
A cardinal point in the Mohammedan faith is the asserted existence of angels, celestial and infernal. Eblis is Satan. He was an angel of lofty rank; but when God created Adam and bade all the angels worship him, Eblis refused, saying, "I was created of fire, he of clay: I am more excellent and will not bow to him."4 Upon this God condemned Eblis and expelled him from Paradise. He then became the unappeasable foe and seducing destroyer of men. He is the father of those swarms of jins, or evil spirits, who crowd all hearts and space with temptations and pave the ten thousand paths to hell with lures for men.
The next consideration preliminary to a clear exhibition of our special subject, is the doctrine of predestination, the unflinching fatalism which pervades and crowns this religion. The breath of this appalling faith is saturated with fatality, and its very name of Islam means "Submission." In heaven the prophet saw a prodigious wax tablet, called the "Preserved Table," on which were written the decrees of all events between the morning of creation and the day of judgment. The burning core of Mohammed's preaching was the proclamation of the one true God whose volition bears the irresistible destiny of the universe; and inseparably associated with this was an intense hatred of idolatry, fanned by the wings of God's wrath and producing a fanatic sense of a divine commission to avenge him on his insulters and vindicate for him his rightful worship from every nation. There is an apparent conflict between the Mohammedan representations of God's absolute predestination of all things, and the abundant exhortations to all men to accept the true faith and bring forth good works, and thus make sure of an acceptable account in the day of judgment. The former make God's irreversible will all in all. The latter seem to place alternative conditions before men, and to imply in them a power of choice. But this is a contradiction inseparable from the discussion of God's infinite sovereignty and man's individual freedom. The inconsistency is as gross in Augustine and Calvinism as it is in the Arabian lawgiver and the creed of the Sunnees. The Koran, instead of solving the difficulty, boldly cuts it, and does that in exactly the same way as the thorough Calvinist. God has respectively elected and reprobated all the destined inhabitants of heaven and hell, unalterably, independently of their choice or action. At the same time, reception of the true faith, and a life conformed to it, are virtually necessary for salvation, because it is decreed that all the elect shall profess and obey the true faith. Their obedient reception of it proves them to be elected. On the other hand, it is foreordained that none of the reprobate shall become disciples and followers of the Prophet. Their rejection of
3 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. i. ch. xv.
4 Sale's Translation of the Koran, ch. vii.
him, their wicked misbelief, is the evidence of their original reprobation. As the Koran itself expresses it, salvation is for "all who are willing to be warned; but they shall not be warned unless God please:"5 "all who shall be willing to walk uprightly; but they shall not be willing unless God willeth."6
But such fine drawn distinctions are easily lost from sight or spurned in the eager affray of affairs and the imminent straits of the soul. While in dogma and theory the profession of an orthodox belief, together with scrupulous prayer, fasting, alms, and the pilgrimage to Mecca, or the absence of these things, simply denotes the foregone determinations of God in regard to the given individuals, in practice and feeling the contrasted beliefs and courses of conduct are held to obtain heaven and hell. And we find, accordingly, that Mohammed spoke as if God's primeval ordination had fixed all things forever, whenever he wished to awaken in his followers reckless valor and implicit submission. "Whole armies cannot slay him who is fated to die in his bed." On the contrary, when he sought to win converts, to move his hearers by threatenings and persuasions, he spoke as if every thing pertaining to human weal and woe, present and future, rested on conditions within the choice of men. Say, "'There is but one God, and Mohammed is his prophet,' and heaven shall be your portion; but cling to your delusive errors, and you shall be companions of the infernal fire." Practically speaking, the essence of propagandist Islam was a sentiment like this. All men who do not follow Mohammed are accursed misbelievers. We are God's chosen avengers, the commissioned instruments for reducing his foes to submission. Engaged in that work, the hilts of all our scimitars are in his hand. He snatches his servant martyr from the battle field to heaven. Thus the weapons of the unbelievers send their slain to paradise, while the weapons of the believers send their slain to hell. Up, then, with the crescent banner, and, dripping with idolatrous gore, let it gleam over mountain and plain till our sickles have reaped the earth! "The sword is the key of heaven and the key of hell. A drop of blood shed in the cause of Allah, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting and prayer. Whoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven. In the day of judgment his wounds shall be resplendent as vermilion and odoriferous as musk."7 An infuriated zeal against idolaters and unbelievers inflamed the Moslem heart, a fierce martial enthusiasm filled the Moslem soul, and tangible visions of paradise and hell floated, illuminate, throughtheMoslem imagination. And so from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus, from Sierra Leone to the Pyrenees, the polity of Mohammed overran the nations, with the Koran in its left hand, the exterminating blade in its right, one thunder shout still breaking from its awful lips: "Profess Islam, and live, with the clear prospect of eternal bliss beyond life; reject it, and die, with the full certainty of eternal anguish beyond death." When the crusading Christians and the Saracenic hosts met in battle, the conflict was the very frenzy of fanaticism. "There the question of salvation or damnation lay on the ground between the marshalled armies, to be fought for and carried by the stronger." Christ and Allah encountered, and the endless fate of their opposed
5 Koran, ch. lxxiv.
6 Ibid. ch. lxxxi.
7 Gibbon, Decline and Fall of Rome, ch. 1.
followers hung on the swift turning issue. "Never have the appalling ideas of the invisible world so much and so distinctly mingled with the fury of mortal strife as in this instance. To the eyes of Turk and Arab the smoke of the infernal pit appeared to break up from the ground in the rear of the infidel lines. As the squadrons of the faithful moved on to the charge, that pit yawned to receive the miscreant host; and in chasing the foe the prophet's champions believed they were driving their antagonists down the very slopes of perdition. When at length steel clashed upon steel and the yell of death shook the air, the strife was not so much between arm and arm as between spirit and spirit, and each deadly thrust was felt to pierce the life at once of the body and of the soul."8
That terrible superstition prevails almost universally among the Mussulmans, designated the "Beating in the Sepulchre," or the examination and torture of the body in the grave. As soon as a corpse is interred, two black and livid angels, called the Examiners, whose names are Munkeer and Nakeer, appear, and order the dead person to sit up and answer certain questions as to his faith. If he give satisfactory replies, they suffer him to rest in peace, refreshed by airs from paradise; but if he prove to have been an unbeliever or heretic, they beat him on the temples with iron maces till he roars aloud with pain and terror. They then press the earth on the body, which remains gnawed and stung by dragons and scorpions until the last day. Some sects give a figurative explanation of these circumstances. The utter denial of the whole representation is a schismatic peculiarity of the sect of Motozallites. But all true believers, both Sunnee and Sheeah, devoutly accept it literally. The commentators declare that it is implied in the following verse of the Koran itself: "How, therefore, will it be with them when they die and the angels shall strike their faces and their backs?" 9
The intermediate state of souls from the time of death until the resurrection has been the subject of extensive speculation and argument with the Islamites. The souls of the prophets, it is thought, are admitted directly to heaven. The souls of martyrs, according to a tradition received from Mohammed, rest in heaven in the crops of green birds who eat of the fruits and drink of the rivers there. As to the location of the souls of the common crowd of the faithful, the conclusions are various. Some maintain that they and the souls of the impious alike sleep in the dust until the end, when Israfil's blasts will stir them into life to be judged. But the general and orthodox impression is that they tarry in one of the heavens, enjoying a preparatory blessedness. The souls of the wicked, it is commonly held, after being refused a place in the tomb and also being repulsed from heaven, are carried down to the lower abyss, and thrown into a dungeon under a green rock, or into the jaw of Eblis, there to be treated with foretastes of their final doom until summoned to the judgment.10
A very prominent doctrine in the Moslem creed is that of the resurrection of the body. This is a central feature in the orthodox faith. It is expounded in all the emphatic details of its gross literality by their authoritative doctors, and is dwelt upon with unwearied reiteration by the Koran. True, some minor heretical sects give it a spiritual interpretation; but the great
8 Taylor, Hist. of Fanaticism, sect. vii.
9 Ch. xlvii.
10 Sale, Preliminary Discourse, sect. iv.
body of believers accept it unhesitatingly in its most physical shape. The intrinsic unnaturalness and improbability of the dogma were evidently felt by Mohammed and his expositors; and all the more they strove to bolster it up and enforce its reception by vehement affirmations and elaborate illustrations. In the second chapter of the Koran it is related that, in order to remove the skepticism of Abraham as to the resurrection, God wrought the miracle of restoring four birds which had been cut in pieces and scattered. In chapter seventh, God says, "We bring rain upon a withered country and cause the fruits to spring forth. Thus will we bring the dead from their graves." The prophet frequently rebukes those who reject this belief. "What aileth them, that they believe not the resurrection?"11 "Is not He who created man able to quicken the dead?"12 "The scoffers say, 'Shall we be raised to life, and our forefathers too, after we have become dust and bones? This is nothing but sorcery.'"13 First, Israfil will blow the blast of consternation. After an interval, he will blow the blast of examination, at which all creatures will die and the material universe will melt in horror. Thirdly, he will blow the blast of resurrection. Upon that instant, the assembled souls of mankind will issue from his trumpet, like a swarm of bees, and fill the atmosphere, seeking to be reunited to their former bodies, which will then be restored, even to their very hairs.
The day of judgment immediately follows. This is the dreadful day for which all other days were made; and it will come with blackness and consternation to unbelievers and evil doers, but with peace and delight to the faithful. The total race of man will be gathered in one place. Mohammed will first advance in front, to the right hand, as intercessor for the professors of Islam. The preceding prophets will appear with their followers. Gabriel will hold suspended a balance so stupendous that one scale will cover paradise, the other hell. "Hath the news of the overwhelming day of judgment reached thee?"14 "Whoever hath wrought either good or evil of the weight of an ant shall in that day behold the same."15 An infallible scrutiny shall search and weigh every man's deeds, and exact justice shall be done, and no foreign help can avail any one. "One soul shall not be able to obtain any thing in behalf of another soul."16 "Every man of them on that day shall have business enough of his own to employ his thoughts."17 In all the Mohammedan representations of this great trial and of the principles which determine its decisions, no reference is made to the doctrine of predestination, but all turns on strict equity. Reckoning a reception or rejection of the true faith as a crowning merit or demerit, the only question is, Do his good works outweigh, by so much as a hair, his evil works? If so, he goes to the right; if not, he must take the left. The solitary trace of fatalism or rather favoritism is this: that no idolater, once in hell, can ever possibly be released, while no Islamite, however wicked, can be damned eternally. The punishment of unbelievers is everlasting, that of believers limited. The opposite of this opinion is a great heresy with the generality of the Moslems. Some say the judgment will require but the twinkling of an eye; others that it will occupy fifty thousand years, during which time the sun will be drawn from its sheath and burn insufferably, and the wicked will stand looking up, their feet shod with shoes of fire, and their skulls boiling like pots. At last,
11 Ch. lxxxiv.
12 Ch. lxxv.
13 Ch. xxxvii., lvi.
14 Koran, ch. lxxxviii.
15 Ibid. ch. xcix.
16 Ibid. ch. lxxxii.
17 Ibid. ch. lxxx.
when sentence has been passed on them, all souls are forced to try the passage of al Sirat, a bridge thinner than a hair, sharper than a razor, and hotter than flame, spanning in one frail arch the immeasurable distance, directly over hell, from earth to paradise. Some affect a metaphorical solution of this air severing causeway, and take it merely as a symbol of the true Sirat, or bridge of this world, namely, the true faith and obedience; but every orthodox Mussulman firmly holds it as a physical fact to be surmounted in the last day.18 Mohammed leading the way, the faithful and righteous will traverse it with ease and as quickly as a flash of lightning. The thin edge broadens beneath their steps, the surrounding support of convoying angels' wings hides the fire lake below from their sight, and they are swiftly enveloped in paradise. But as the infidel with his evil deeds essays to cross, thorns entangle his steps, the lurid glare beneath blinds him, and he soon topples over and whirls into the blazing abyss. In Dr. Frothingham's fine translation from Ruckert,
"When the wicked o'er it goes, stands the bridge all sparkling; And his mind bewilder'd grows, and his eye swims darkling. Wakening, giddying, then comes in, with a deadly fright, Memory of all his sin, rushing on his sight. But when forward steps the just, he is safe e'en here: Round him gathers holy trust, and drives back his fear. Each good deed's a mist, that wide, golden borders gets; And for him the bridge, each side, shines with parapets."
Between hell and paradise is an impassable wall, al Araf, separating the tormented from the happy, and covered with those souls whose good works exactly counterpoise their evil works, and who are, consequently, fitted for neither place. The prophet and his expounders have much to say of this narrow intermediate abode.19 Its lukewarm denizens are contemptuously spoken of. It is said that Araf seems hell to the blessed but paradise to the damned; for does not every thing depend on the point of view?
The Mohammedan descriptions of the doom of the wicked, the torments of hell, are constantly repeated and are copious and vivid. Reference to chapter and verse would be superfluous, since almost every page of the Koran abounds in such tints and tones as the following. "The unbelievers shall be companions of hell fire forever." "Those who disbelieve we will surely cast to be broiled in hell fire: so often as their skins shall be well burned we will give them other skins in exchange, that they may taste the sharper torment." "I will fill hell entirely full of genii and men." "They shall be dragged on their faces into hell, and it shall be said unto them, 'Taste ye that torment of hell fire which ye rejected as a falsehood.'" "The unbelievers shall be driven into hell by troops." "They shall be taken by the forelocks and the feet and flung into hell, where they shall drink scalding water." "Their only entertainment shall be boiling water, and they shall be fuel for hell." "The smoke of hell shall cast forth sparks as big as towers, resembling yellow camels in color." "They who believe not shall
18 W. C. Taylor, Mohammedanism and its Sects.
19 Koran, ch. viii. Sale, Preliminary Discourse, p. 125.
have garments of fire fitted on them, and they shall be beaten with maces of red hot iron." "The true believers, lying on couches, shall look down upon the infidels in hell and laugh them to scorn."
There is a tradition that a door shall be shown the damned opening into paradise, but when they approach it, it shall be suddenly shut, and the believers within will laugh. Pitiless and horrible as these expressions from the Koran are, they are merciful compared with the pictures in the later traditions, of women suspended by their hair, their brains boiling, suspended by their tongues, molten copper poured down their throats, bound hands and feet and devoured piecemeal by scorpions, hung up by their heels in flaming furnaces and their flesh cut off on all sides with scissors of fire. 20 Their popular teachings divide hell into seven stories, sunk one under another. The first and mildest is for the wicked among the true believers. The second is assigned to the Jews. The third is the special apartment of the Christians. They fourth is allotted to the Sabians, the fifth to the Magians, and the sixth to the most abandoned idolaters; but the seventh the deepest and worst belongs to the hypocrites of all religions. The first hell shall finally be emptied and destroyed, on the release of the wretched believers there; but all the other hells will retain their victims eternally.
If the visions of hell which filled the fancies of the faithful were material and glowing, equally so were their conceptions of paradise. On this world of the blessed were lavished all the charms so fascinating to the Oriental luxuriousness of sensual languor, and which the poetic Oriental imagination knew so well how to depict. As soon as the righteous have passed Sirat, they obtain the first taste of their approaching felicity by a refreshing draught from "Mohammed's Pond." This is a square lake, a month's journey in circuit, its water whiter than milk or silver and more fragrant than to be comparable to any thing known by mortals. As many cups are set around it as there are stars in the firmament; and whoever drinks from it will never thirst more. Then comes paradise, an ecstatic dream of pleasure, filled with sparkling streams, honeyed fountains, shady groves, precious stones, all flowers and fruits, blooming youths, circulating goblets, black eyed houris, incense, brilliant birds, delightsome music, unbroken peace.21 A Sheeah tradition makes the prophet promise to Ali twelve palaces in paradise, built of gold and silver bricks laid in a cement of musk and amber. The pebbles around them are diamonds and rubies, the earth saffron, its hillocks camphor. Rivers of honey, wine, milk, and water flow through the court of each palace, their banks adorned with various resplendent trees, interspersed with bowers consisting each of one hollow transparent pearl. In each of these bowers is an emerald throne, with a houri upon it arrayed in seventy green robes and seventy yellow robes of so fine a texture, and she herself so transparent, that the marrow of her ankle, notwithstanding robes, flesh, and bone, is as distinctly visible as a flame in a glass vessel. Each houri has seventy locks of hair, every one under the care of a maid, who perfumes it with a censer which God has made to smoke with incense without the presence of fire; and no mortal has ever breathed such fragrance as is there exhaled. 22
20 Hyat ul Kuloob, ch. x. p. 206.
21 Koran, ch. lv. ch. lvi.
22 Hyat ul Kuloob, ch. xvi. p. 286.
Such a doctrine of the future life as that here set forth, it is plain, was strikingly adapted to win and work fervidly on the minds of the imaginative, voluptuous, indolent, passionate races of the Orient. It possesses a nucleus of just and natural moral conviction and sentiment, around which is grouped a composite of a score of superstitions afloat before the rise of Islam, set off with the arbitrary drapery of a poetic fancy, colored by the peculiar idiosyncrasies of Mohammed, emphasized to suit his special ends, and all inflamed with a vindictive and propagandist animus. Any word further in explanation of the origin, or in refutation of the soundness, of this system of belief once so imminently aggressive and still so widely established would seem to be superfluous.
SURVEYING the thought of mankind upon the subject of a future life, as thus far examined, one can hardly fail to be struck by the multitudinous variety of opinions and pictures it presents. Whence and how arose this heterogeneous mass of notions?
In consequence of the endowments with which God has created man, the doctrine of a future life arises as a normal fact in the development of his experience. But the forms and accompaniments of the doctrine, the immense diversity of dress and colors it appears in, are subject to all the laws and accidents that mould and clothe the products within any other department of thought and literature. We must refer the ethnic conceptions of a future state to the same sources to which other portions of poetry and philosophy are referred, namely, to the action of sentiment, fancy, and reason, first; then to the further action, reaction, and interaction of the pictures, dogmas, and reasonings of authoritative poets, priests, and philosophers on one side, and of the feeling, faith, and thought of credulous multitudes and docile pupils on the other. In the light of these great centres of intellectual activity, parents of intellectual products, there is nothing pertaining to the subject before us, however curious, which may not be intelligibly explained, seen naturally to spring out of certain conditions of man's mind and experience as related with the life of society and the phenomena of the world.
So far as the views of the future life set forth in the religions of the ancient nations constitute systematically developed and arranged schemes of doctrine and symbol, the origin of them therefore needs no further explanation than is furnished by a contemplation of the regulated exercise of the speculative and imaginative faculties. But so far as those representations contain unique, grotesque, isolated particulars, their production is accounted for by this general law: In the early stages of human culture, when the natural sensibilities are intensely preponderant in power, and the critical judgment is in abeyance, whatever strongly moves the soul causes a poetical secretion on the part of the imagination.1 Thus the rainbow is personified; a waterfall is supposed to be haunted by spiritual beings; a volcano with fiery crater is seen as a Cyclops with one flaming eye in the centre of his forehead. This law holds not only in relation to impressive objects or appearances in nature, but also in relation to occurrences, traditions, usages. In this way innumerable myths arise, explanatory or amplifying thoughts secreted by the stimulated imagination and then narrated as events. Sometimes these tales are given and received in good faith for truth, as Grote abundantly proves in his volume on Legendary Greece; sometimes they are clearly the gleeful play of the fancy, as when it is said that the hated infant Herakles having been put to Hera's breast as she lay asleep in heaven, she, upon waking, thrust him away, and the lacteal fluid, streaming athwart the firmament, originated the Milky Way! To apply this law to our special subject:
1 Chambers's Papers for the People, vol. i.: The Myth, p. 1.
What would be likely to work more powerfully on the minds of a crude, sensitive people, in an early stage of the world, with no elaborate discipline of religious thought, than the facts and phenomena of death? Plainly, around this centre there must be deposited a vast quantity of ideas and fantasies. The task is to discriminate them, trace their individual origin, and classify them.
One of the most interesting and difficult questions connected with the subject before us is this: What, in any given time and place, were the limits of the popular belief? How much of the current representations in relation to another life were held as strict verity? What portions were regarded as fable or symbolism? It is obvious enough that among the civilized nations of antiquity the distinctions of literal statement, allegory, historic report, embellished legend, satire, poetic creation, philosophical hypothesis, religious myth, were more or less generally known. For example, when Aschylus makes one of his characters say, "Yonder comes a herald: so Dust, Clay's thirsty sister, tells me," the personification, unquestionably, was as purposed and conscious as it is when a poet in the nineteenth century says, "Thirst dived from the brazen glare of the sky and clutched me by the throat." So, too, when Homer describes the bag of Aolus, the winds, in possession of the sailors on board Ulysses' ship, the half humorous allegory cannot be mistaken for religious faith. It is equally obvious that these distinctions were not always carefully observed, but were often confounded. Therefore, in respect to the faith of primitive times, it is impossible to draw any broad, fixed lines and say conclusively that all on this side was consciously considered as fanciful play or emblem, all on that side as earnest fact. Each particular in each case must be examined by itself and be decided on its own merits by the light and weight of the moral probabilities. For example, if there was any historic basis for the myth of Herakles dragging Cerberus out of Hades, it was that this hero forcibly entered the Mysteries and dragged out to light the enactor of the part of the three headed dog. The aged North man, committing martial suicide rather than die in his peaceful bed, undoubtedly accepted the ensanguined picture of Valhalla as a truth. Virgil, dismissing Aneas from the Tartarean realm through "the ivory gate by which false dreams and fictitious visions are wont to issue," plainly wrought as a poet on imaginative materials.
It should be recollected that most of the early peoples had no rigid formularies of faith like the Christian creeds. The writings preserved to us are often rather fragments of individual speculations and hopes than rehearsals of public dogmas. Plato is far from revealing the contemporaneous belief of Greece in the sense in which Thomas Aquinas reveals the contemporaneous belief of Christendom. In Egypt, Persia, Rome, among every cultured people, there were different classes of minds, the philosophers, the priests, the poets, the warriors, the common multitude, whose modes of thinking were in contrast, whose methods of interpreting their ancestral traditions and the phenomena of human destiny were widely apart, whose respective beliefs had far different boundaries. The openly skeptical Euripides and Lucian are to be borne in mind as well as the apparently credulous Hesiod and Homer. Of course the Fables of Asop were not literally credited. Neither, as a general thing, were the Metamorphoses of Ovid. With the ancients, while there was a general national cast of faith, there were likewise varieties of individual and sectarian belief and unbelief, skepticism and credulity, solemn reason and recreative fancy.
The people of Lystra, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, actually thought Barnabas and Paul were Zeus and Hermes, and brought oxen and garlands to offer them the sacrifices appropriate to those deities. Peisistratus obtained rule over Athens by dressing a stately woman, by the name of Phye, as Athene, and passing off her commands as those of the tutelary goddess. Herodotus ridicules the people for unsuspiciously accepting her.2 The incredibleness of a doctrine is no obstacle to a popular belief in it. Whosoever thinks of the earnest reception of the dogma of transubstantiation the conversion of a wheaten wafer into the infinite God by nearly three quarters of Christendom at this moment, must permit the paradox to pass unchallenged. Doubtless the closing eye of many an expiring Greek reflected the pitiless old oarsman plying his frost cold boat across the Stygian ferry, and his failing ear caught the rush of the Phlegethonian surge. It is equally certain that, at the same time, many another laughed at these things as childish fictions, fitted only to scare "the baby of a girl."
Stricken memory, yearning emotion, kindled fancy, a sensitive and timorous observation of natural phenomena, rustling leaves, wavering shadows, apparent effects of unknown causes, each is a superstitious mother of beliefs. The Sonora Indians say that departed souls dwell among the caves and rocks of the cliffs, and that the echoes often heard there are their voices. Ruskin suggests that the cause of the Greeks surrounding the lower world residence of Persephone with poplar groves was that "the frailness, fragility, and inconstancy of the leafage of the poplar tree resembled the fancied ghost people." We can very easily imagine how, in the breeze at the entrance to some subterranean descent,
"A ghostly rank Of poplars, like a halted train of shades,Trembled."
The operations of fierce passions, hate, fright, and rage, in a brain boiling with blood and fire, make pictures which the savage afterwards holds in remembrance as facts. He does not by reflection consciously distinguish the internal acts and sights of the mind from objective verities. Barbarians as travellers and psychologists have repeatedly observed usually pay great attention to the vagaries of madmen, the doings and utterances of the insane. These persons are regarded as possessed by higher beings. Their words are oracles: the horrible shapes, the grotesque scenes, which their disordered and inflamed faculties conjure up, are eagerly caught at, and such accounts of them as they are able to make out are treasured up as revelations. This fact is of no slight importance as an element in the hinting basis of the beliefs of uncultivated tribes. Many a vision of delirium, many a raving medley of insanity, has been accepted as truth.3 Another phenomenon, closely allied to the former, has wrought in a similar manner and still more widely. It has been a common superstition with barbarous nations in every part of the world, from Timbuctoo to Siberia, to suppose that dreams are real
2 Lib. i. cap. 60.
3 De Boismont, Rational History of Hallucinations, ch. 15: Of Hallucinations considered in a Psychological, Historical, and Religious Point of View.
adventures which the soul passes through, flying abroad while the body lies, a dormant shell, wrapped in slumber. The power of this influence in nourishing a copious credulity may easily be imagined.
The origin of many notions touching a future state, found in literature, is to be traced to those rambling thoughts and poetic reveries with which even the most philosophical minds, in certain moods, indulge themselves. For example, Sir Isaac Newton "doubts whether there be not superior intelligencies who, subject to the Supreme, oversee and control the revolutions of the heavenly bodies." And Goethe, filled with sorrow by the death of Wieland, musing on the fate of his departed friend, solemnly surmised that he had become the soul of a world in some far realm of space. The same mental exercises which supply the barbarian superstitions reappear in disciplined minds, on a higher plane and in more refined forms. Culture and science do not deliver us from all illusion and secure us sober views conformed to fact. Still, what we think amid the solid realities of waking life, fancy in her sleep disjointedly reverberates from hollow fields of dream. The metaphysician or theologian, instead of resting contented with mere snatches and glimpses, sets himself deliberately to reason out a complete theory. In these elaborate efforts many an opinion and metaphor, plausible or absurd, sweet or direful, is born and takes its place. There is in the human mind a natural passion for congruity and completeness, a passion extremely fertile in complementary products. For example, the early Jewish notion of literally sitting down at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, in the resurrection, was gradually developed by accretion of assisting particulars into all the details of a consummate banquet, at which Leviathan was to be the fish, Behemoth the roast, and so on.4 In the construction of doctrines or of discourses, one thought suggests, one premise or conclusion necessitates, another. This genetic application is sometimes plainly to be seen even in parts of incoherent schemes. For instance, the conception that man has returned into this life from anterior experiences of it is met by the opposing fact that he does not remember any preceding career. The explanatory idea is at once hit upon of a fountain of oblivion a river Lethe from which the disembodied soul drinks ere it reappears. Once establish in the popular imagination the conception of the Olympian synod of gods, and a thousand dramatic tales of action and adventure, appropriate to the characters of the divine personages, will inevitably follow.
The interest, cunning, and authority of priesthoods are another source of prevailing opinions concerning a life to come. Many nations, early and late, have been quite under the spiritual direction of priests, and have believed almost every thing they said. Numerous motives conspire to make the priest concoct fictions and exert his power to gain credence for them. He must have an alluringly colored elysium to reward his obedient disciples. When his teachings are rejected and his authority mocked, his class isolation and incensed pride find a natural satisfaction in threatening the reprobate aliens that a rain of fire will one day wash them down the smoking gulfs of sulphur. The Maronites, a sect of Catholic Christians in Syria, purchase of their priests a few yards of land in heaven, to secure a residence there when
4 Corrodi, Gesch. des Chiliasmns, th. i. abschn. 15: Gastmahl des Leviathan.
they die.5 The Siamese Buddhists accumulate silver and bury it in secret, to supply the needs of the soul during its wandering in the separate state. "This foolish opinion robs the state of immense sums. The lords and rich men erect pyramids over these treasures, and for their greater security place them in charge of the talapoins!"6 When, for some reason or other, either as a matter of neatness and convenience, or as a preventive of mutual clawing, or for some to us unimaginable end, the authoritative Skald wished to induce the Northmen to keep their nails close cut, he devised the awful myth of the ship Nagelfra, and made his raw minded people swallow it as truth. The same process was followed unquestionably in a thousand other cases, in different particulars of thought and aim, in different parts of the world.
In a bird's eye survey of the broad field we have traversed, one cannot help noticing the marked influence of the present scenery and habits, history and associations, of a people in deciding the character of their anticipations of the future. The Esquimaux paradise is surrounded by great pots full of boiled walrus meat. The Turk's heaven is a gorgeously idealized pleasure garden or celestial harem. As the apparition of a man wanders into the next state, a shadow of his present state floats over into the future with him. The Hereafter is the image flung by the Now. Heaven and hell are the upward and downward echoes of the earth. Like the spectre of the Brocken on the Hartz Mountains, our ideas of another life are a reflection of our present experience thrown in colossal on the cloud curtains of futurity. Charles Lamb, pushing this elucidating observation much further, says, "The shapings of our heavens are the modifications of our constitutions." A tribe of savages has been described who hoped to go after death to their forefathers in an under ground elysium whose glory consisted in eternal drunkenness, that being their highest conception of bliss and glory. What can be more piteous than the contemplation of those barbarians whose existence here is so wretched that even their imagination and faith have lost all rebound, and who conceive of the land of souls only as poorer and harder than this, expecting to be tasked and beaten there by stronger spirits, and to have nothing to eat? The relation of master and servant, the tyranny of class, is reflected over into the other life in those aristocratic notions which break out frequently in the history of our subject. The Pharisees some of them, at least excluded the rabble from the resurrection. The Peruvians confined their heaven to the nobility. The New Zealanders said the souls of the Atuas, the nobles, were immortal, but the Cookees perished entirely. Meiners declares that the Russians, even so late as the times of Peter the Great, believed that only the Czar and the boyars could reach heaven. It was almost a universal custom among savage nations when a chieftain died to slay his wives and servants, that their ghosts might accompany his to paradise, to wait on him there as here. Even among the Greeks, as Bulwer has well remarked, "the Hades of the ancients was not for the many; and the dwellers of Elysium are chiefly confined to the oligarchy of earth."
The coarse and selfish assumption on the part of man of superiority over woman, based on his brawniness and tyranny, has sometimes appeared in the form of an assertion that
5 Churchill, Mt. Lebanon, vol. iii. ch. 7.
6 Pallegoix, Description du Royaume de Siam, ch. xx. p. 113.
women have no souls, or at least cannot attain to the highest heaven possible for man. The former statement has been vulgarly attributed to the Moslem creed, but with utter falsity. A pious and aged female disciple once asked Mohammed concerning her future condition in heaven. The prophet replied, "There will not be any old women in heaven." She wept and bewailed her fate, but was comforted upon the gracious assurance from the prophet's lips, "They will all be young again when there." The Buddhists relate that Gotama once directed queen Prajapati, his foster mother, to prove by a miracle the error of those who supposed it impossible for a woman to attain Nirwana. She immediately made as many repetitions of her own form as filled the skies of all the sakwalas, and, after performing various wonders, died and rose into Nirwana, leading after her five hundred virtuous princesses.7
How spontaneously the idiosyncrasies of men in the present are flung across the abysm into the future state is exhibited amusingly, and with a rough pathos, in an old tradition of a dialogue between Saint Patrick and Ossian. The bard contrasts the apostle's pitiful psalms with his own magnificent songs, and says that the virtuous Fingal is enjoying the rewards of his valor in the aerial existence. The saint rejoins, No matter for Fingal's worth; being a pagan, assuredly he roasts in hell. In hot wrath the honest Caledonian poet cries, "If the children of Morni and the tribes of the clan Ovi were alive, we would force brave Fingal out of hell, or the same habitation should be our own."8
Many of the most affecting facts and problems in human experience and destiny have found expression, hypothetic solution, in striking myths preserved in the popular traditions of nations. The mutual resemblances in these legends in some cases, though among far separated peoples, are very significant and impressive. They denote that, moved by similar motives and exercised on the same soliciting themes, human desire and thought naturally find vent in similar theories, stories, and emblems. The imagination of man, as Gfrorer says, runs in ruts which not itself but nature has beaten.
The instinctive shrinking from death felt by man would, sooner or later, quite naturally suggest the idea that death was not an original feature in the divine plan of the world, but a retributive additional discord. Benignant nature meant her children should live on in happy contentment here forever; but sin and Satan came in, and death was the vengeance that followed their doings. The Persians fully developed this speculation. The Hebrews either also originated it, or borrowed it from the Persians; and afterwards the Christians adopted it. Traces of the same conception appear among the remotest and rudest nations. The Caribbeans have a myth to the effect that the whole race of men were doomed to be mortal because Carus, the first man, offended the great god Tiri. The Cherokees ascribe to the Great Spirit the intention of making men immortal on earth; but, they say, the sun when he passed over told them there was not room enough, and that people had better die! They also say that the Creator attempted to make the first man and woman out of two stones, but failed, and afterwards fashioned them of clay; and therefore it is that they are perishable.9 The
7 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 314.
8 Logan, Scottish Gael, ch. xiv.
9 Squier, Serpent Symbol, p. 67, note c.
Indians of the Oronoco declare that the Great Spirit dwelt for a while, at first, among men. As he was leaving them, he turned around in his canoe and said, "Ye shall never die, but shall shed your skins." An old woman would not believe what he said; he therefore recalled his promise and vowed that they should die.
The thought of more than one death that the composite man is simplified by a series of separating deaths has repeatedly found place. The New Testament speaks of "the second death;" but that is a metaphorical phrase, descriptive, as there employed, of condemnation and suffering. It is a thought of Plato that the Deity put intellect in soul, and soul in a material envelope. Following this hint, Plutarch says, in his essay on the Face in the Moon, that the earth furnishes the body, the moon the soul, the sun the mind. The first death we die, he continues, makes us two from three; the second makes us one from two. The Feejees tell how one of their warriors, seeing the spectre of a recently deceased enemy of his, threw his war club at it and killed it. They believed the spirit itself was thus destroyed. There is something pathetic in this accumulation of dissolution upon dissolution, this pursuit of death after death. We seem to hear, in this thin succession of the ghosts of ghosts, the fainter growing echoes of the body fade away.
Many narratives reveal the fond hovering of the human mind over the problem of avoiding death altogether. The Hebrew Scriptures have made us familiar with the translation of Enoch and the ascension of Elijah without tasting death. The Hindus tell of Divadassa, who, as a reward for his exceeding virtue and piety, was permitted to ascend to heaven alive.10 They also say that the good Trisanku, having pleased a god, was elevated in his living body to heaven.11 The Buddhists of Ceylon preserve a legend of the elevation of one of the royal descendants of Maha Sammata to the superior heavens without undergoing death.12 There are Buddhist traditions, furthermore, of four other persons who were taken up to Indra's heaven in their bodies without tasting death, namely, the musician Gattila, and the kings Sadhina, Nirni, and Mandhatu.13 A beautiful myth of the translation of Cyrus is found in Firdousi's Shah Nameh:
"Ky Khosru bow'd himself before his God: In the bright water he wash'd his head and his limbs; And he spake to himself the Zend Avesta's prayers; And he turn'd to the friends of his life and exclaim'd, 'Fare ye well, fare ye well for evermore! When to morrow's sun lifts its blazing banner, And the sea is gold, and the land is purple, This world and I shall be parted forever. Ye will never see me again, save in Memory's dreams.'When the sun uplifted his head from the mountain, The king had vanish'd from the eyes of his nobles. They roam'd around in vain attempts to find him;
10 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, p. 431.
11 Vishnu Purana, p. 371.
12 Upham, Sacred Books of Ceylon, vol. i. Introduction, p. 17.
13 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 25, note.
And every one, as he came back to the place, Bade a long farewell to the king of the world. Never hath any one seen such a marvel No, though he live long in the world That a man should go alive into the presence of God."
There is a Greek story that Empedocles, "after a sacred festival, was drawn up to heaven in a splendor of celestial effulgence."14 Philostratus relates a tradition of the Cretans, affirming that, Apollonius having entered a temple to worship, a sound was heard as of a chorus of virgins singing, "Come from the earth; come into heaven; come." And he was taken up, never having been seen afterwards. Here may be cited also the exquisite fable of Endymion. Zeus promised to grant what he should request. He begged for immortality, eternal sleep, and never fading youth. Accordingly, in all his surpassing beauty he slumbers on the summit of Latmus, where every night the enamored moon stoops to kiss his spotless forehead. One of the most remarkable fragments in the traditions of the American aborigines is that concerning the final departure of Tarenyawagon, a mythic chief of supernatural knowledge and power, who instructed and united the Iroquois. He sprang across vast chasms between the cliffs, and shot over the lakes with incredible speed, in a spotless white canoe. At last the Master of Breath summoned him. Suddenly the sky was filled with melody. While all eyes were turned up, Tarenyawagon was seen, seated in his snow white canoe, in mid air, rising with every burst of the heavenly music, till he vanished beyond the summer clouds, and all was still.15
Another mythological method of avoidingdeath is by bathing in some immortal fountain. The Greeks tell of Glaucus, who by chance discovered and plunged in a spring of this charmed virtue, but was so chagrined at being unable to point it out to others that he flung himself into the ocean. He could not die, and so became a marine deity, and was annually seen off the headlands sporting with whales. The search for the "Fountain of Youth" by the Spaniards who landed in Florida is well known. How with a vain eagerness did Ponce de Leon, the battered old warrior, seek after the magic wave beneath which he should sink to emerge free from scars and stains, as fresh and fair as when first he donned the knightly harness! Khizer, the Wandering Jew of the East, accompanied Iskander Zulkarnain (the Oriental name for Alexander the Great) in his celebrated expedition to find the fountain of life.16 Zulkarnain, coming to a place where there were three hundred and sixty fountains, despatched three hundred and sixty men, ordering each man to select one of the fountains in which to wash a dry salted fish wherewith he was furnished. The instant Khizer's fish touched the water of the fountain which he had chosen, it sprang away, alive. Khizer leaped in after it and drank. Therefore he cannot die till the last trump sounds. Meanwhile, clad in a green garb, he roams through the world, a personified spring of the year.
14 Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy, vol. i. p. 135, (1st Eng. edit.)
15 Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois, ch. ix.
16 Adventures of Hatim Tai, p. 125.
The same influences which have caused death to be interpreted as a punitive after piece in the creation, and which have invented cases wherein it was set aside, have also fabricated tales of returns from its shrouded realm. The Thracian lover's harp, "drawing iron tears down Pluto's cheek," won his mistress half way to the upper light, and would have wholly redeemed her had he not in impatience looked back. The grim king of Hades, yielding to passionate entreaties, relented so far as to let the hapless Protesilaus return to his mourning Laodameia for three hours. At the swift end of this poor period he died again; and this time she died with him. Erus, who was killed in battle, and Timarchus, whose soul was rapt from him in the cave of Trophonius, both returned, as we read in Plato and Plutarch, to relate with circumstantial detail what they saw in the other world. Alcestis, who so nobly died to save her husband's life, was brought back from the region of the dead, by the interposition of Herakles, to spend happy years with her grateful Admetus. The cunning Sisyphus, who was so notorious for his treachery, by a shrewd plot obtained leave, after his death, to visit the earth again. Safely up in the light, he vowed he would stay; but old Hermes psychopompus forcibly dragged him down.
When Columbus landed at San Salvador, the natives thought he had descended from the sun, and by signs inquired if he had not. The Hawaiians took Captain Cook for the god Lono, who was once their king but was afterwards deified, and who had prophesied, as he was dying, that he should in after times return. Te Wharewara, a New Zealand youth, relates a long account of the return of his aunt from the other world, with a minute description of her adventures and observations there.17 Schoolcraft gives a picturesque narrative of a journey made by a Wyandot brave to and from the land of souls.18
There is a group of strangely pleasing myths, closely allied to the two preceding classes, showing how the popular heart and imagination glorify their heroes, and, fondly believing them too godlike to die, fancy them only removed to some secret place, where they still live, and whence in the time of need they will come again to rescue or to bless their people. Greece dreamed that her swift footed Achilles was yet alive in the White Island. Denmark long saw king Holger lingering on the old warrior cairns of his country. Portugal trusted that her beauteous prince Sebastian had escaped from the fatal field to the East, and would one day return to claim his usurped realm.19 So, too, of Roderick the Goth, who fell in disastrous battle with the Arabs, the Visiogothic traditions and faith of the people long insisted that he would reappear. The Swiss herdsmen believe the founders of their confederacy still sleep in a cavern on the shores of Lucerne. When Switzerland is in peril, the Three Tells, slumbering there in their antique garb, will wake to save her. Sweetly and often, the ancient British lays allude to the puissant Arthur borne away to the mystic vales of Avalon, and yet to be hailed in his native kingdom, Excalibur once more gleaming in his hand. The strains of the Troubadours swell and ring as they tell of Charlemagne sleeping beneath
17 Shortland, Traditions of the New Zealanders, p. 128.
18 History, &c. of Indian Tribes, part ii. p. 235.
19 There is a fanatic sect of Sebastianists in Brazil now. See "Brazil and the Brazilians," by Kidier and Fletcher, pp. 519-521.
the Untersberg, biding his appointed time to rise, resume his unrivalled sceptre, and glorify the Frank race. And what grand and weird ballads picture great Barbarossa seated in the vaults of Kyffhauser, his beard grown through the stone table in front of him, tarrying till he may come forth, with his minstrels and knights around him, in the crisis hour of Germany's fortunes! The Indians of Pecos, in New Mexico, still anxiously expect the return of Montezuma; while in San Domingo, on the Rio Grande, a sentinel every morning ascends to the top of the highest house, at sunrise, and looks out eastward for the coming of the great chief.20 The peasants of Brittany maintain as a recent traveller testifies that Napoleon is still alive in concealment somewhere, and will one day be heard of or seen in pomp and victory. One other dead man there has been who was expected to return. the hated Nero, the popular horror of whom shows itself in the shuddering belief expressed in the Apocalypse and in the Sibylline Oracles that he was still alive and would reappear.21
Alian, in his Various History, recounts the following singular circumstances concerning the Meropes who inhabited the valley of Anostan.22 It would seem to prove that no possible conceit of speculation pertaining to our subject has been unthought of. A river of grief and a river of pleasure, he says, lapsed through the valley, their banks covered with trees. If one ate of the fruit growing on the trees beside the former stream, he burst into a flood of tears and wept till he died. But if he partook of that hanging on the shore of the latter, his bliss was so great that he forgot all desires; and, strangest of all, he returned over the track of life to youth and infancy, and then gently expired. He turned
"Into his yesterdays, and wander'd back To distant childhood, and went out to God By the gate of birth, not death."
Mohammed, during his night journey, saw, in the lower heaven, Adam, the father of mankind, a majestic old man, with all his posterity who were destined for paradise on one side, and all who were destined for hell on the other. When he looked on the right he smiled and rejoiced, but as often as he looked on the left he mourned and wept. How finely this reveals the stupendous pathos there is in the theological conception of a Federal Head of humanity!
The idea of a great terminal crisis is met with so often in reviewing the history of human efforts to grasp and solve the problem of the world's destiny, that we must consider it a normal concomitant of such theorizings. The mind reels and loses itself in trying to conceive of the everlasting continuance of the present order, or of any one fixed course of things, but finds relief in the notion of a revolution, an end, and a fresh start. The Mexican Cataclysm or universal crash, the close of the Hindu Calpa, the Persian Resurrection, the Stoic Conflagration, the Scandinavian Ragnarokur, the Christian Day of Judgment, all embody this one thought. The Drama of Humanity is played out, the curtain falls, and when it rises again