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The Destiny of the Soul
William Rounseville Alger
PART FIFTH.
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES.
THE power of the old religions was for centuries concentrated in the Mysteries. These were recondite institutions, sometimes wielded by the state, sometimes by a priesthood, sometimes by a ramifying private society. None could be admitted into them save with the permission of the hierarchs, by rites of initiation, and under solemn seals of secrecy. These mysterious institutions, charged with strange attractions, shrouded in awful wonder, were numerous, and, agreeing in some of their fundamental features, were spread nearly all over the world. The writings of the ancients abound with references to them, mostly eulogistic. The mighty part played by these veiled bodies in the life of the periods when they flourished, the pregnant hints and alluring obscurities amid which they stand in relation to the learning of modern times, have repeatedly obtained wide attention, elicited opposite opinions, provoked fierce debates, and led different inquirers to various conclusions as to their true origin, character, scope, meaning, and results.
One of the principal points in discussion by scholars concerning the Mysteries has been whether they inculcated an esoteric doctrine of philosophy, opposed to the popular religion. Some writers have maintained that in their symbols and rites was contained a pure system of monotheistic ethics and religion. Our own opinion is that in some of these institutions, at one period, higher theological views and scientific speculations were unfolded, but in others never. Still, it is extremely difficult to prove any thing on this part of the general subject: there is much that is plausible to be said on both sides of the question. Another query to be noticed in passing is in regard to the degree of exclusiveness and concealment really attached to the form of initiation. Lobeck, in his celebrated work, "Aglaophamus," borne away by a theory, assumes the extravagant position that the Eleusinian Mysteries were almost freely open to all.1 His error seems to lie in not distinguishing sufficiently between the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries, and in not separating the noisy shows of the public festal days from the initiatory and explanatory rites of personal admission within the mystic pale.
1 Lib. i. sects. 4, 5.
The notorious facts that strict inquiry was made into the character and fitness of the applicant before his admission, and that many were openly rejected, that instant death was inflicted on all who intruded unprepared within the sacred circuits, and that death was the penalty of divulging what happened during the celebrations, all are inconsistent with the notion of Lobeck, and prove that the Mysteries were hedged about with dread. Aschylus narrowly escaped being torn in pieces upon the stage by the people on suspicion that in his play he had given a hint of something in the Mysteries. He delivered himself by appealing to the Areopagus, and proving that he had never been initiated. Andocides also, a Greek orator who lived about four hundred years before Christ, was somewhat similarly accused, and only escaped by a strenuous defence of himself in an oration, still extant, entitled "Concerning the Mysteries."
A third preliminary matter is as to the moral character of the services performed by these companies. Some held that their characteristics were divinely pure, intellectual, exalting; others that in abandoned pleasures they were fouler than the Stygian pit. The Church Fathers, Clement, Irenaus, Tertullian, and the rest, influenced by a mixture of prejudice, hatred, and horror, against every thing connected with paganism, declared, in round terms, that the Mysteries were unmitigated sinks of iniquity and shame, lust, murder, and all promiscuous deviltry. Without pausing to except or qualify, or to be thoroughly informed and just, they included the ancient stern generations and their own degraded contemporaries, the vile rites of the Corinthian Aphrodite and the solemn service of Demeter, the furious revels of the Bacchanalians and the harmonious mental worship of Apollo, all in one indiscriminate charge of insane beastliness and idolatry. Their view of the Mysteries has been most circulated among the moderns by Leland's learned but bigoted work on the "Use and Necessity of a Divine Revelation." He would have us regard each one as a vortex of atheistic sensuality and crime. There should be discrimination. The facts are undoubtedly these, as we might abundantly demonstrate were it in the province of the present essay. The original Mysteries, the authoritative institutions co ordinated with the state or administered by the poets and philosophers, were pure: their purpose was to purify the lives and characters of their disciples. Their means were a complicated apparatus of sensible and symbolic revelations and instructions admirably calculated to impress the most salutary moral and religious lessons. In the first place, is it credible that the state would fling its auspices over societies whose function was to organize lawlessness and debauchery, to make a business of vice and filth? Among the laws of Solon is a regulation decreeing that the Senate shall convene in the Eleusinian temple, the day after the festival, to inquire whether every thing had been done with reverence and propriety. Secondly, if such was the character of these secrets, why was inquisition always made into the moral habits of the candidate, that he might be refused admittance if they were bad? This inquiry was severe, and the decision unrelenting. Alcibiades was rejected, as we learn from Plutarch's life of him, on account of his dissoluteness and insubordination in the city. Nero dared not attend the Eleusinian Mysteries, "because to the murder of his mother he had joined the slaughter of his paternal aunt."2 All accepted candidates were scrupulously purified in thought and body, and clad in white robes, for nine days previous to their reception. Thirdly, it is intrinsically absurd to suppose that an institution of gross immorality and cruelty could have flourished in the most polite and refined Greek nation, as the Eleusinian Mysteries did for over eighteen hundred years, ranking among its members a vast majority of both sexes, of all classes, of all ages, and constantly celebrating its rites before immense audiences of them all. Finally, a host of men like Plato, Sophocles, Cimon, Lycurgus, Cicero, were members of these bodies, partook in their transactions, and have left on record eulogies of them and of their influence. The concurrent testimony of antiquity is that in the Great Mysteries the desires were chastened, the heart purified, the mind calmed, the soul inspired, all the virtues of morality and hopes of religion taught and enforced with sublime solemnities. There is no just ground for suspecting this to be false.
But there remains something more and different to be said also. While the authorized Mysteries were what we have asserted, there did afterwards arise spurious Mysteries, in names, forms, and pretensions partially resembling the genuine ones, under the control of the most unprincipled persons, and in which unquestionably the excesses of unbelief, drunkenness, and prostitution held riot. These depraved societies were foreign grafts from the sensual pantheism ever nourished in the voluptuous climes of the remote East. They established themselves late in Greece, but were developed at Rome in such unbridled enormities as compelled the Senate to suppress them. Livy gives a detailed and vivid account of the whole affair in his history.3 But the gladiators, scoundrels, rakes, bawds, who swarmed in these stews of rotting Rome, are hardly to be confounded with the noble men and matrons of the earlier time who openly joined in the pure Mysteries with the approving example of the holiest bards, the gravest statesmen, and the profoundest sages, men like Pindar, Pericles, and Pythagoras. Ample facilities are afforded in the numerous works to which we shall refer for unmasking the different organizations that travelled over the earth in the guise of the Mysteries, and of seeing what deceptive arts were practised in some, what superhuman terrors paraded in others, what horrible cruelties perpetrated in others, what leading objects sought in each.
The Mysteries have many bearings on several distinct subjects; but in those aspects we have not space here to examine them. We purpose to consider them solely in their relation to the doctrine of a future life. We are convinced that the very heart of their secret, the essence of their meaning in their origin and their end, was no other than the doctrine of an immortality succeeding a death. Gessner published a book at Gottingen, so long ago as the year 1755, maintaining this very assertion. His work, which is quite scarce now, bears the title "Dogma de perenni Animoruin Natura per Sacra pracipue Eleusinia Propagata."
2 Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. xxxiv.
3 Lib. xxxix. cap. viii xvi.
The consenting testimony of more than forty of the most authoritative ancient writers comes down to us in their surviving works to the effect that those who were admitted into the Mysteries were thereby purified, led to holy lives, joined in communion with the gods, andassured of a better fate than otherwise could be expected in the future state. Two or three specimens from these witnesses will suffice. Aristophanes, in the second act of the Frogs, describes an elysium of the initiates after death, where he says they bound "in sportive dances on rose enamelled meadows; for the light is cheerful only to those who have been initiated."4 Pausanias describes the uninitiated as being compelled in Hades to carry water in buckets bored full of holes.5 Isocrates says, in his Panegyric, "Demeter, the goddess of the Eleusinian Mysteries, fortifies those who have been initiated against the fear of death, and teaches them to have sweet hopes concerning eternity." The old Orphic verses cited by Thomas Taylor in his Treatise on the Mysteries run thus: "The soul that uninitiated dies Plunged in the blackest mire in Hades lies." 6
The same statement is likewise found in Plato, who, in another place, also explicitly declares that a doctrine of future retribution was taught in the Mysteries and believed by the serious.7 Cicero says, "Initiation makes us both live more honorably and die with better hopes." 8 In seasons of imminent danger as in a shipwreck it was customary for a man to ask his companion, Hast thou been initiated? The implication is that initiation removed fear of death by promising a happy life to follow.9 A fragment preserved from a very ancient author is plain on this subject. "The soul is affected in death just as it is in the initiation into the great Mysteries: thing answers to thing. At first it passes through darkness, horrors, and toils. Then are disclosed a wondrous light, pure places, flowery meads, replete with mystic sounds, dances, and sacred doctrines, and holy visions. Then, perfectly enlightened, they are free: crowned, they walk about worshipping the gods and conversing with good men."10 The principal part of the hymn to Ceres, attributed to Homer, is occupied with a narrative of her labors to endow the young Demophoon, mortal child of Metaneira, with immortality. Now, Ceres was the goddess of the Mysteries; and the last part of this very hymn recounts how Persephone was snatched from the light of life into Hades and restored again. Thus we see that the implications of the indirect evidence, the leanings and guidings of all the incidental clews now left us to the real aim and purport of the Mysteries, combine to assure us that their chief teaching was a doctrine of a future life in which there should be rewards and punishments. All this we shall more fully establish, both by direct proofs and by collateral supports.
It is a well known fact, intimately connected with the different religions of Greece and Asia Minor, that during the time of harvest in the autumn, and again at the season of sowing in the spring, the shepherds, the vintagers, and the people in general, were accustomed to observe certain sacred festivals, the autumnal sad, the vernal joyous. These undoubtedly grew out of the deep sympathy between man and nature over the decay and disappearance, the revival and return, of vegetation.
4 Scene iii.
5 Lib. x. cap. xxxi.
6 Phadon, sect. xxxviii.
7 Leg., lib. ix. cap. x.
8 De Leg., lib. ii. cap. xiv.
9 St. John, Hellenes, ch. xi.
10 Sentences of Stobaus, Sermo CXIX.
When the hot season had withered the verdure of thefields, plaintive songs were sung, their wild melancholy notes and snatches borne abroad by the breeze and their echoes dying at last in the distance. In every instance, these mournful strains were the annual lamentation of the people over the death of some mythical boy of extraordinary beauty and promise, who, in the flower of youth, was suddenly drowned, or torn in pieces by wild beasts, "Some Hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April bloom."
Among the Argives it was Linus. With the Arcadians it was Scephrus. In Phrygia it was Lityerses. On the shore of the Black Sea it was Bormus. In the country of the Bithynians it was Hylas. At Pelusium it was Maneros. And in Syria it was Adonis. The untimely death of these beautiful boys, carried off in their morning of life, was yearly bewailed, their names re echoing over the plains, the fountains, and among the hills. It is obvious that these cannot have been real persons whose death excited a sympathy so general, so recurrent. "The real object of lamentation," says Muller, "was the tender beauty of spring destroyed by the raging heat, and other similar phenomena, which the imagination of those early times invested with a personal form."11 All this was woven into the Mysteries, whose great legend and drama were that every autumn Persephone was carried down to the dark realm of the King of Shadows, but that she was to return each spring to her mother's arms. Thus were described the withdrawal and reappearance of vegetable life in the alternations of the seasons. But these changes of nature typified the changes in the human lot; else Persephone would have been merely a symbol of the buried grain and would not have become the Queen of the Dead.12 Her return to the world of light, by natural analogy, denoted a new birth to men. Accordingly, "all the testimony of antiquity concurs in saying that these Mysteries inspired the most animating hopes with regard to the condition of the soul after death."13 That the fate of man should by imagination and sentiment have been so connected with the phenomena of nature in myths and symbols embodied in pathetic religious ceremonies was a spontaneous product. For how "Her fresh benignant look Nature changes at that lorn season when, With tresses drooping o'er her sable stole, She yearly mourns the mortal doom of man, Her noblest work! So Israel's virgins erst With annual moan upon the mountains wept Their fairest gone!"
And soon again the birds begin to warble, the leaves and blossoms put forth, and all is new life once more. In every age the gentle heart and meditative mind have been impressed by the mournful correspondence and the animating prophecy.
11 History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. iii. sects. 2 3.
12 For the connection of the Eleusinian goddesses with agriculture, the seasons, the under world, death, resurrection, etc., see "Demeter and Persephone," von Dr. Ludwig Preller, kap. i. sects. 9 11.
13 Muller, Hist. Gr. Lit., ch. xvi. sect. 2.
But not only was the changing recurrence of dreary winter and gladsome summer joined by affecting analogies with the human doom of death and hope of another life. The phenomena of the skies, the impressive succession of day and night, also were early seized upon and made to blend their shadows and lights, by means of imaginative suggestions, into an image of the decease and resurrection of man. Among the Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, so called, there is a hymn to Adonis, in which that personage is identified with the sun alternately sinking to Tartarus and soaring to heaven. It was customary with the ancients to speak of the setting of a constellation as its death, its reascension in the horizon being its return to life.14 The black abysm under the earth was the realm of the dead. The bright expanse above the earth was the realm of the living. While the daily sun rises royally through the latter, all things rejoice in the warmth and splendor of his smile. When he sinks nightly, shorn of his ambrosial beams, into the former, sky and earth wrap themselves in mourning for their departed monarch, the dead god of light muffled in his bier and borne along the darkening heavens to his burial. How naturally the phenomena of human fate would be symbolically interwoven with all this! Especially alike are the exuberant joy and activity of full life and of day, the melancholy stillness and sad repose of midnight and of death.
The sun insists on gladness; but at night, When he is gone, poor Nature loves to weep."
Through her yearly and her diurnal round alike, therefore, does mother Nature sympathize with man, and picture forth his fate, in type of autumnal decay, and wintry darkness, and night buried seed, in sign of vernal bud, and summer light, and day bursting fruit.
These facts and phenomena of nature and man, together with explanatory theories to which they gave rise, were, by the peculiar imaginative processes so powerfully operative among the earliest nations, personified in mythic beings and set forth as literal history. Their doctrine was inculcated as truth once historically exemplified by some traditional personage. It was dramatically impersonated and enacted in the process of initiation into the Mysteries. A striking instance of this kind of theatrical representation is afforded by the celebration, every eight years, of the mythus of Apollo's fight with the Pythian dragon, his flight and expiatory service to Admetus, the subterranean king of the dead. In mimic order, a boy slew a monster at Delphi, ran along the road to Tempe, represented on the way the bondage of the god in Hades, and returned, purified, bringing a branch of laurel from the sacred valley.15 The doctrine of a future life connected with the legend of some hero who had died, descended into the under world, and again risen to life, this doctrine, dramatically represented in the personal experience of the initiate, was the heart of every one of the secret religious societies of antiquity.
"Here rests the secret, here the keys, Of the old death bolted Mysteries."
14 Leitch's Eng. trans. of K. O. Muller's Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, Appendix, pp. 339-342.
15 Muller, Introduction to Mythology, pp. 97 and 241. Also his Dorian, lib. ii. cap. vii. sect. 8.
Perhaps this great system of esoteric rites and instructions grew up naturally, little by little. Perhaps it was constructed at once, either as poetry, by a company of poets, or as a theology, by a society of priests, or as a fair method of moral and religious teaching, by a company of philosophers. Or perhaps it was gradually formed by a mixture of all these means and motives. Many have regarded it as the bedimmed relic of a brilliant primeval revelation. This question of the origination, the first causes and purposes, of the Mysteries is now sunk in hopeless obscurity, even were it of any importance to be known. One thing we know, namely, that at an early age these societies formed organizations of formidable extent and power, and were vitally connected with the prevailing religions of the principal nations of the earth.
In Egypt the legend of initiation was this.16 Typhon, a wicked, destroying personage, once formed a conspiracy against his brother, the good king Osiris. Having prepared a costly chest, inlaid with gold, he offered to give it to any one whose body would fit it. Osiris unsuspiciously lay down in it. Typhon instantly fastened the cover and threw the fatal chest into the river. This was called the loss or burial of Osiris, and was annually celebrated with all sorts of melancholy rites. But the winds and waves drove the funereal vessel ashore, where Isis, the inconsolable wife of Osiris, wandering in search of her husband's remains, at last found it, and restored the corpse to life. This part of the drama was called the discovery or resurrection of Osiris, and was also enacted yearly, but with every manifestation of excessive joy. "In the losing of Osiris, and then in the finding him again," Augustine writes, "first their lamentation, then their extravagant delight, are a mere play and fiction; yet the fond people, though they neither lose nor find any thing, weep and rejoice truly."17 Plutarch speaks of the death, regeneration, and resurrection of Osiris represented in the great religious festivals of Egypt. He explains the rites in commemoration of Typhon's murder of Osiris as symbols referring to four things, the subsidence of the Nile into his channel, the cessation of the delicious Etesian winds before the hot blasts of the South, the encroachment of the lengthening night on the shortening day, the disappearance of the bloom of summer before the barrenness of winter.18 But the real interest and power of the whole subject probably lay in the direct relation of all these phenomena, traditions, and ceremonies to the doctrine of death and a future life for man.
In the Mithraic Mysteries of Persia, the legend, ritual, and doctrine were virtually the same as the foregoing. They are credulously said to have been established by Zoroaster himself, who fitted up a vast grotto in the mountains of Bokhara, where thousands thronged to be initiated by him.19 This Mithraic cave was an emblem of the universe, its roof painted with the constellations of the zodiac, its depths full of the black and fiery terrors of grisly hell, its summit illuminated with the blue and starry splendors of heaven, its passages lined with dangers and instructions, now quaking with infernal shrieks, now breathing celestial music.
16 Wilkinson, Egyptian Antiquities, series i. vol. i. ch. 3.
17 De Civitate Dei, lib. vi. cap. 10.
18 De Is. et Osir.
19 Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum. Tertullian, Prescript. ad Her., cap. xl., where he refers the mimic death and resurrection in the Mithraic Mysteries to the teaching of Satan.
In the Persian Mysteries, the initiate, in dramatic show, died, was laid in a coffin, andafterwards rose unto a new life, all of which was a type of the natural fate of man.20 The descent of the soul from heaven and its return thither were denoted by a torch borne alternately reversed and upright, and by the descriptions of the passage of spirits, in the round of the metempsychosis, through the planetary gates of the zodiac. The sun and moon and the morning and evening star were depicted in brilliant gold or blackly muffled, according to their journeying in the upper or in the lower hemisphere.21
The hero of the Syrian Mysteries was Adonis or Thammuz, the beautiful favorite of Aphrodite, untimely slain by a wild boar. His death was sadly, his resurrection joyously, celebrated every year at Byblus with great pomp and universal interest. The festival lasted two days. On the first, all things were clad in mourning, sorrow was depicted in every face, and wails and weeping resounded. Coffins were exposed at every door and borne in numerous processions. Frail stalks of young corn and flowers were thrown into the river to perish, as types of the premature death of blooming Adonis, cut off like a plant in the bud of his age.22 The second day the whole aspect of things was changed, and the greatest exultation prevailed, because it was said Adonis had returned from the dead.23 Venus, having found him dead, deposited his body on a bed of lettuce and mourned bitterly over him. From his blood sprang the adonium, from her tears the anemone.24 The Jews were captivated by the religious rites connected with this touching myth, and even enacted them in the gates of their holy temple. Ezekiel says, "Behold, at the gate of the Lord's house which was towards the north [the direction of night and winter] there sat women weeping for Tammuz." It was said that Aphrodite prevailed on Persephone to let Adonis dwell one half the year with her on earth, and only the rest among the shades, a plain reference to vegetable life in summer and winter.25 Lucian, in his little treatise on the Syrian Goddess, says that "the river Adonis, rising out of Mount Libanus, at certain seasons flows red in its channel: some say it is miraculously stained by the blood of the fresh wounded youth; others say that the spring rains, washing in a red ore from the soil of the country, discolor the stream." Dupuis remarks that this redness was probably an artifice of the priests.26 Milton's beautiful allusion to this fable is familiar to most persons. Next came he "Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a summer's day, While smooth Adonis from his native rock Ran purple to the sea with Thammuz' blood."
20 Julius Firmicus, De Errore Prof. Relig.
21 Mithraica, Memoire Academique sur le Culte Solaire de Mithra, par Joseph de Hammer, pp: 66-68, 125-127. Tertullian, Prescript. ad Her., cap. xl. Porphyry, De Abstinentia, lib. iv. sect. 16. Hyde. Hist. Vet. Pers. Relig., p. 254.
22 Hist. du Culte d'Adonis, Mem. Acad. des Inscript., vol. iv. p. 136.
23 Theocritus, Idyl XV.
24 Bion, Epitaph Adon., l. 66.
25 See references in Anthon's Class. Dict., art. Adonis.
26 Dupuis, Orig. de Cultes, vol. iv. p. 121, ed. 1822.
There is no end to the discussions concerning the secret purport of this fascinating story. But, after all is said, it seems to us that there are in it essentially two significations, one relating to the phenomena of the sun and the earth, the other to the mutual changes of nature and the fate of humanity. Aphrodite bewailing Adonis is surviving Nature mourning for departed Man.
In India the story was told of Mahadeva searching for his lost consort Sita, and, after discovering her lifeless form, bearing it around the world with dismal lamentations. Sometimes it was the death of Camadeva, the Hindu Cupid, that was mourned with solemn dirges.27 He, like Osiris, was slain, enclosed in a chest, and committed to the waves. He was afterwards recovered and resuscitated. Each initiate passed through the emblematic ceremonies corresponding to the points of this pretended history. The Phrygians associated the same great doctrine with the persons of Atys and Cybele. Atys was a lovely shepherd youth passionately loved by the mother of the gods.28 He suddenly died; and she, in frantic grief, wandered over the earth in search of him, teaching the people where she went the arts of agriculture. He was at length restored to her. Annually the whole drama was performed by the assembled nation with sobs of woe succeeded by ecstasies of joy.29 Similar to this, in the essential features, was the Eleusinian myth. Aidoneus snatched the maiden Kore down to his gloomy empire. Her mother, Demeter, set off in search of her, scattering the blessings of agriculture, and finally discovered her, and obtained the promise of her society for half of every year. These adventures were dramatized and explained in the mysteries which she, according to tradition, instituted at Eleusis.
The form of the legend was somewhat differently incorporated with the Bacchic Mysteries. It was elaborately wrought up by the Orphic poets. The distinctive name they gave to Bacchus or Dionysus was Zagreus. He was the son of Zeus, and was chosen by him to sit on the throne of heaven. Zeus gave him Apollo and the Curetes as guards; but the brutal Titans, instigated by jealous Hera, disguised themselves and fell on the unfortunate youth while his attention was fixed on a splendid mirror, and, after a fearful conflict, overcame him and tore him into seven pieces. Pallas, however, saved his palpitating heart, and Zeus swallowed it. Zagreus was then begotten again.30 He was destined to restore the golden age. His devotees looked to him for the liberation of their souls through the purifying rites of his Mysteries. The initiation shadowed out an esoteric doctrine of death and a future life, in the mock murder and new birth of the aspirant, who impersonated Zagreus.31
The Northmen constructed the same drama of death around the young Balder, their god of gentleness and beauty. This legend, as Dr. Oliver has shown, constituted the secret of the Gothic Mysteries.32 Obscure and dread prophecies having crept among the gods that the death of the beloved Balder was at hand, portending universal ruin, a consultation was held to devise means for averting the calamity.
27 Asiatic Researches, vol. iii. p. 187.
28 See article Atys in Smith's Class. Dict. with references.
29 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, lib. ii. 11. 605-655.
30 Muller, Hist. Greek Lit., ch. xvi.
31 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, lib. iii. cap. 5, sect. 13.
32 History of Initiation, Lect. X.
At the suggestion of Balder's mother, Freya, the Scandinavian Venus, an oath that they would not be instrumental in causing his death wasexacted from all things in nature except the mistletoe, which, on account of its frailty and insignificance, was scornfully neglected. Asa Loke, the evil principle of the Norse faith, taking advantage of this fatal exception, had a spear made of mistletoe, and with it armed Hodur, a strong but blind god. Freya, rejoicing in fancied security, to convince Balder of his charmed exemption from wounds, persuaded him to be the mark for the weapons of the gods. But, alas! when Hodur tilted at him, the devoted victim was transpierced and fell lifeless to the ground. Darkness settled over the world, and bitter was the grief of men and gods over the innocent and lovely Balder. A deputation imploring his release was sent to the queen of the dead. Hela so far relented as to promise his liberation to the upper world on condition that every thing on earth wept for him. Straightway there was a universal mourning. Men, beasts, trees, metals, stones, wept. But an old withered giantess Asa Loke in disguise shed no tears; and so Hela kept her beauteous and lamented prey. But he is to rise again to eternal life and joy when the twilight of the gods has passed.33 This entire fable has been explained by the commentators, in all its details, as a poetic embodiment of the natural phenomena of the seasons. But it is not improbable that, in addition, it bore a profound doctrinal reference to the fate of man which was interpreted to the initiates.
A great deal has been written concerning the ceremonies and meaning of the celebrated Celtic Mysteries established so long at Samothrace, and under the administration of the Druids throughout ancient Gaul and Britain. The aspirant was led through a series of scenic representations, "without the aid of words," mystically shadowing forth in symbolic forms the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. He assumed successively the shapes of a rabbit, a hen, a grain of wheat, a horse, a tree, and so on through a wide range of metamorphoses enacted by the aid of secret dramatic machinery.
He died, was buried, was born anew, rising from his dark confinement to life again. The hierophant enclosed him in a little boat and set him adrift, pointing him to a distant rock, which he calls "the harbor of life." Across the black and stormy waters he strives to gain the beaconing refuge.
In these scenes and rites a recondite doctrine of the physical and moral relations and destiny of man was shrouded, to be unveiled by degrees to their docile disciples by the Druidic mystagogues.34
It may appear strange that there should be in connection with so many of the old religions of the earth these arcana only to be approached by secret initiation at the hands of hierophants. But it will seem natural when we remember that those religions were in the exclusive keeping of priesthoods, which, organized with wondrous cunning and perpetuated through ages, absorbed the science, art, and philosophy of the world, and, concealing their wisdom in the mystic signs of an esoteric language, wielded the mighty enginery of superstition over the people at will. The scenes and instructions through which the priests led the unenlightened candidate were the hiding of their power. Thus, wherever was a priesthood we should expect to find mysteries and initiations.
33 Pigott, Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, pp. 288-300.
34 Davies, Mythology and Rites of the British Druids, pp. 207-257; 390-392; 420, 555, 572. The accuracy of many of Davies's translations has been called in question. His statements, even on the matters affirmed above, must be received with some reservation of faith.
Historic fact justifies thesupposition; learning unveils the obscure places of antiquity, and shows us the templed or cavernous rites of the religious world, from Hindostan to Gaul, from Egypt to Norway, from Athens to Mexico. And this brings us to the Mysteries of Vitzliputzli, established in South America. Dr. Oliver, in the twelfth lecture of his History of Initiation, gathering his materials from various sources, gives a terrific account of the dramatic ritual here employed. The walls, floor, images, were smeared and caked with human blood. Fresh slaughters of victims were perpetrated at frequent intervals. The candidate descended to the grim caverns excavated under the foundations of the temple. This course was denominated "the path of the dead." Phantoms flitted before him, shrieks appalled him, pitfalls and sacrificial knives threatened him. At last, after many frightful adventures, the aspirant arrived at a narrow stone fissure terminating the range of caverns, through which he was thrust, and was received in the open air, as a person born again, and welcomed with frantic shouts by the multitudes who had been waiting for him without during the process of his initiation.
Even among the savage tribes of North America striking traces have been found of an initiation into a secret society by a mystic death and resurrection. Captain Jonathan Carver, who spent the winter of 1776 with the Naudowessie Indians, was an eye witness of the admission of a young brave into a body which they entitled Wakou Kitchewah, or Friendly Society of the Spirit. "This singular initiation," he says, "took place within a railed enclosure in the centre of the camp at the time of the new moon." First came the chiefs, clad in trailing furs. Then came the members of the society, dressed and painted in the gayest manner. When all were seated, one of the principal chiefs arose, and, leading the young man forward, informed the meeting of his desire to be admitted into their circle. No objection being offered, the various preliminary arrangements were made; after which the director began to speak to the kneeling candidate, telling him that he was about to receive a communication of the spirit. This spirit would instantly strike him dead; but he was told not to be terrified, because he should immediately be restored to life again, and this experience was a necessary introduction to the advantages of the community he was on the point of entering. Then violent agitation distorted the face and convulsed the frame of the old chief. He threw something looking like a small bean at the young man. It entered his mouth, and he fell lifeless as suddenly as if he had been shot. Several assistants received him, rubbed his limbs, beat his back, stripped him of his garments and put a new dress on him, and finally presented him to the society in full consciousness as a member.36
All the Mysteries were funereal. This is the most striking single phenomenon connected with them. They invariably began in darkness with groans and tears, but as invariably ended in festive triumph with shouts and smiles. In them all were a symbolic death, a mournful entombment, and a glad resurrection. We know this from the abundant direct testimony of unimpeachable ancient writers, and also from their indirect descriptions of the ceremonies and allusions to them.
36 Travels in the Interior of North America, ch. vii.
For example, Apuleius says, "The delivery of the Mysteries is celebrated as a thing resembling a voluntary death: the initiate, being, after a manner, bornagain, is restored to a new life." 36 Indeed, all who describe the course of initiation agree in declaring that the aspirant was buried for a time within some narrow space, a typical coffin or grave. This testimony is confirmed by the evidence of the ruins of the chief temples and sacred places of the pagan world. These abound with spacious caverns, labyrinthine passages, and curious recesses; and in connection with them is always found some excavation evidently fitted to enclose a human form. Such hollow beds, covered with flat stones easily removed, are still to be seen amidst the Druidic remains of Britain and Gaul, as well as in nearly every spot where tradition has located the celebration of the Mysteries, in Greece, India, Persia, Egypt.37
It becomes a most interesting question whence these symbols and rites had their origin, and what they were really meant to shadow forth. Bryant, Davies, Faber, Oliver, and several other well known mythologists, have labored, with no slight learning and ingenuity, to show that all these ceremonies sprang from traditions of the Deluge and of Noah's adventures at that time. The mystic death, burial, and resurrection of the initiate, they say, are a representation of the entrance of the patriarch into the ark, his dark and lonesome sojourn in it, and his final departure out of it. The melancholy wailings with which the Mysteries invariably began, typified the mourning of the patriarchal family over their confinement within the gloomy and sepulchral ark; the triumphant rejoicings with which the initiations always ended, referred to the glad exit of the patriarchal family from their floating prison into the blooming world. The advocates of this theory have laboriously collected all the materials that favor it, and skilfully striven by their means to elucidate the whole subject of ancient paganism, especially of the Mysteries. But, after reading all that they have written, and considering it in the light of impartial researches, one is constrained to say that they have by no means made out their case. It is somewhat doubtful if there be any ground whatever for believing that traditions concerning Noah's deluge and the ark, and his doings in connection with them, in any way entered into the public doctrines and forms, or into the secret initiations, of the heathen religions. At all events, there can be no doubt that the Arkite theorists have exaggerated the importance and extent of these views beyond all tolerable bounds, and even to absurdity. But our business with them now is only so far as they relate to the Mysteries. Our own conviction is that the real meaning of the rites in the Mysteries was based upon the affecting phenomena of human life and death and the hope of another life. We hold the Arkite theory to be arbitrary in general, unsupported by proofs, and inconsistent in detail, unable to meet the points presented.
36 Golden Ass, Eng. trans., by Thomas Taylor, p. 280.
37 Copious instances are given in Oliver's History of Initiation, in Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry, and in Maurice's Indian Antiquities.
In the first place, a fundamental part of the ancient belief was that below the surface of the earth was a vast, sombre under world, the destination of the ghosts of men, the Greek Hades, the Roman Orcus, the Gothic Hell. A part of the service of initiation was a symbolic descent into this realm. Apuleius, describing his initiation, says, "I approached to the confinesof death and trod on the threshold of Proserpine." 38 Orpheus, to whom the introduction of the Mysteries into Greece from the East was ascribed, wrote a poem, now lost, called the "Descent into Hades." Such a descent was attributed to Hercules, Theseus, Rhampsinitus, and many others.39 It is painted in detail by Homer in the adventure of his hero Ulysses, also by Virgil much more minutely through the journey of Aneas. Warburton labors with great learning and plausibility, and, as it seems to us, with irresistible cogency, to show that these descents are no more nor less than exoteric accounts of what was dramatically enacted in the esoteric recesses of the Mysteries.40 Any person must be invincibly prejudiced who can doubt that the Greek Hades meant a capacious subterranean world of shades. Now, to assert, as Bryant and his disciples do,41 that "Hades means the interior of Noah's ark," or "the abyss of waters on which the ark floated, as a coffin bearing the relics of dead Nature," is a purely arbitrary step taken from undue attachment to a mere theory. Hades means the under world of the dead, and not the interior of Noah's ark. Indeed, in the second place, Faber admits that in the Mysteries "the ark itself was supposed to be in Hades, the vast central abyss of the earth." But such was not the location of Noah's vessel and voyage. They were on the face of the flood, above the tops of the mountains. It is beyond comparison the most reasonable supposition in itself, and the one best supported by historic facts, that the representations of a mystic burial and voyage in a ship or boat shown in the ancient religions were symbolic rites drawn from imagination and theory as applied to the impressive phenomena of nature and the lot of man. The Egyptians and some other early nations, we know, figured the starry worlds in the sky as ships sailing over a celestial sea. The earth itself was sometimes emblematized in the same way. Then, too, there was the sepulchral barge in which the Egyptian corpses were borne over the Acherusian lake to be entombed. Also the "dark blue punt" in which Charon ferried souls across the river of death. In these surely there was no reference to Noah's ark. It seems altogether likely that what Bryant and his coadjutors have constructed into the Arkite system of interpretation was really but an emblematic showing forth of a natural doctrine of human life and death and future fate. A wavering boat floating on the deep might, with striking fitness, typify the frail condition of humanity in life, as when Hercules is depicted sailing over the ocean in a golden cup; and that boat, safely riding the flood, might also represent the cheerful faith of the initiate in a future life, bearing him fearlessly through all dangers and through death to the welcoming society of Elysium, as when Danae and her babe, tossed over the tempestuous sea in a fragile chest, were securely wafted to the sheltering shore of Seriphus. No emblem of our human state and lot, with their mysteries, perils, threats, and promises, could be either more natural or more impressive than that of a vessel launched on the deep. The dying Socrates said "that he should trust his soul on the hope of a future life as upon a raft, and launch away into the unknown."
38 Golden Ass, Taylor's trans., p. 283.
39 Herodotus, lib. il. cap. cxxii.
40 Divine Legation of Moses, book ii. sect. iv.
41 Faber, Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. v.: On the Connection of the Fabulous Hades with the Mysteries.
Thus the imagination broods over and explores the shows and secrets, presageful warnings and alluringinvitations, storms and calms, island homes and unknown havens, of the dim seas of nature and of man, of time and of eternity.42
Thirdly, the defenders of the Arkite theory are driven into gross inconsistencies with themselves by the falsity of their views. The dilaceration of Zagreus into fragments, the mangling of Osiris and scattering of his limbs abroad, they say, refer to the throwing open of the ark and the going forth of the inmates to populate the earth. They usually make Osiris, Zagreus, Adonis, and the other heroes of the legends enacted in the Mysteries, representatives of the diluvian patriarch himself; but here, with no reason whatever save the exigencies of their theory, they make these mythic personages representatives of the ark, a view which is utterly unfounded and glaringly wanting in analogy. When Zagreus is torn in pieces, his heart is preserved alive by Zeus and born again into the world within a human form. After the body of Osiris had been strewn piecemeal, the fragments were fondly gathered by Isis, and he was restored to life. There is no plausible correspondence between these cases and the sending out from the ark of the patriarchal family to repeople the world. Their real purpose would seem plainly to be to symbolize the thought that, however the body of man crumbles in pieces, there is life for him still, he does not hopelessly die. They likewise say that the egg which was consecrated in the Mysteries, at the beginning of the rites, was intended as an emblem of the ark resting on the abyss of waters, and that its latent hatching was meant to suggest the opening of the ark to let the imprisoned patriarch forth. This hypothesis has no proof, and is needless. It is much more plausible to suppose that the egg was meant as a symbol of a new life about to burst upon the candidate, a symbol of his resurrection from the mystic tomb wherein he was buried during one stage of initiation; for we know that the initiation was often regarded as the commencement of a fresh life, as a new birth. Apuleius says, "I celebrated the most joyful day of my initiation as my natal day."
Faber argues, from the very close similarity of all the differently named Mysteries, that they were all Arkite, all derived from one mass of traditions reaching from Noah and embodying his history.43 The asserted fact of general resemblance among the instituted Mysteries is unquestionable; but the inference above drawn from it is unwarrantable, even if no better explanation could be offered. But there is another explanation ready, more natural in conception, more consistent in detail, and better sustained by evidence. The various Mysteries celebrated in the ancient nations were so much alike not because they were all founded on one world wide tradition about the Noachian deluge, but because they all grew out of the great common facts of human destiny in connection with natural phenomena. The Mysteries were funereal and festive, began in sorrow and ended in joy, not because they represented first Noah's sad entrance into the ark and then his glad exit from it, but because they began with showing the initiate that he must die, and ended with showing him that he should live again in a happier state.
42 Procopius, in his History of the Gothic War, mentions a curious popular British superstition concerning the ferriage of souls among the neighboring islands at midnight. See Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, kap. xxvi. zweite ausgabe.
43 Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10: Comparison of the Various Mysteries.
Even the most prejudiced advocates of the Arkite theoryare forced to admit, on the explicit testimony of the ancients, that the initiates passed from the darkness and horrors of Tartarus to the bliss and splendors of Elysium by a dramatic resurrection from burial in the black caverns of probation to admission within the illuminated hall or dome of perfection.44 That the idea of death and of another life runs through all the Mysteries as their cardinal tenet is well shown in connection with the rites of the celebrated Cave of Trophonius at Lebadea in Boeotia. Whoso sought this oracle must descend head foremost over an inclined plane, bearing a honey cake in his hand. Aristophanes speaks of this descent with a shudder of fear.45 The adventurer was suddenly bereft of his senses, and after a while returned to the upper air. What he could then remember composed the Divine revelation which had been communicated to him in his unnatural state below. Plutarch has given a full account of this experience from one Timarchus, who had himself passed through it.46 The substance of it is this. When Timarchus reached the bottom of the cave, his soul passed from his body, visited the under world of the departed, saw the sphere of generation where souls were reborn into the upper world, received some explanation of all these things: then, returning into the body, he was taken up out of the cave. Here is no allusion to any traditions of the Deluge or the ark; but the great purpose is evidently a doctrine of the destiny of man after death.
Before the eyes and upon the heart of all mankind in every age has passed in common vision the revolution of the seasons, with its beautiful and sombre changes, phenomena having a power of suggestion irresistible to stir some of the most profound sentiments of the human breast. The day rolls overhead full of light and life and activity; then the night settles upon the scene with silent gloom and repose. So man runs his busy round of toil and pleasure through the day of existence; then, fading, following the sinking sun, he goes down in death's night to the pallid populations of shade. Again: the fruitful bloom of summer is succeeded by the bleak nakedness of winter. So the streams of enterprise and joy that flowed full and free along their banks in maturity, overhung by blossoming trees, are shrivelled and frozen in the channels of age, and above their sepulchral beds the leafless branches creak in answer to the shrieks of the funereal blast. The flush of childish gayety, the bloom of youthful promise, when a new comer is growing up sporting about the hearth of home, are like the approach of the maiden and starry Spring, "Who comes sublime, as when, from Pluto free, Came, through the flash of Zeus, Persephone." And then draw hastily on the long, lamenting autumnal days, when "Above man's grave the sad winds wail and rain drops fall, And Nature sheds her leaves in yearly funeral."
44 Faber, Mysteries of the Cabiri, ch. 10, pp. 331-356. Dion Chrysostom describes this scene: Oration XII.
45 The Clouds, 1. 507.
46 Essay on the Demon of Socrates. See also Pansanias, lib. ix. cap. xxxix.
The flowers are gone, the birds are gone, the gentle breezes are gone; and man too must go, go mingle with the pale people of dreams. But not wholly and forever shall he die. The sun soars into new day from the embrace of night; summer restored hastens on the heels of retreating winter; vegetation but retires and surely returns, and the familiar song of the birds shall sweeten the renewing woods afresh for a million springs. Apollo weeping over the beauteous and darling boy, his slain and drooped Hyacinthus, is the sun shorn of his fierce beams and mourning over the annual wintry desolation: it is also Nature bewailing the remediless loss of man, her favorite companion. It was these general analogies and suggestions, striking the imagination, affecting the heart, enlisting the reason, wrought out, personified, and dramatized by poets, taken up with a mass of other associated matter by priestly societies and organized in a scheme of legendary doctrine and an imposing ritual, that constituted the basis and the central meaning of the old Mysteries; and not a vapid tradition about Noah and his ark.
The aim of these institutions as they were wielded was threefold; and in each particular they exerted tremendous power. The first object was to stretch over the wicked the restraining influence of a doctrine of future punishment, to fill them with a fearful looking for judgment in the invisible world. And a considerable proportion of this kind of fear among the ancients is to be traced to the secret influence of the Mysteries, the revelations and terrors there applied. The second desire was to encourage the good and obedient with inspiring hopes of a happy fate and glorious rewards beyond the grave. Plutarch writes to his wife, (near the close of his letter of consolation to her,) "Some say the soul will be entirely insensible after death; but you are too well acquainted with the doctrines delivered in the Mysteries of Bacchus, and with the symbols of our fraternity, to harbor such an error." The third purpose was, by the wonders and splendors, the secret awe, the mysterious authority and venerable sanctions, thrown around the society and its ceremonies, to establish its doctrines in the reverential acceptance of the people, and thus to increase the power of the priesthood and the state. To compass these ends, the hidden science, the public force, the vague superstition, the treasured wealth, and all the varied resources available by the ancient world, were marshalled and brought to bear in the Mysteries. By chemical and mechanical secrets then in their exclusive possession, the mystagogues worked miracles before the astonished novices.47 They had the powers of electricity, gunpowder, hydrostatic pressure, at their command.48 Their rites were carried out on the most magnificent scale. The temple at Eleusis could hold thirty thousand persons.
47 Anthon's Class. Dict., art. "Elicius."
48 Salverte, Des Sciences Occultes, ou Essai sur la Magie. See also editor's introduction to Thomson's Eng. trans. of Salverte's work.
Imagine what effect might be produced, under such imposing and prepared circumstances, on an ignorant multitude, by a set of men holding all the scientific secrets and mechanical inventions till then discovered, illumination flashing after darkness successively before their smitten eyes, the floors seeming to heave and the walls to crack, thunders bellowing through the mighty dome; now yawning revealed beneath them the ghostly chimera of Tartarus, with all the shrieking and horrid scenery gathered there; nowthe mild beauties of Elysium dawning on their ravished vision, amid strains of celestial music, through fading clouds of glory, while nymphs, heroes, and gods walked apparent. Clement of Alexandria tells us that one feature of the initiation was a display of the grisly secrets of Hades.49 Apuleius, in his account of his own initiation, says, "At midnight I saw the sun shining with a resplendent light; and I manifestly drew near to the lower and to the upper gods and adored them in immediate presence." 50 Lobeck says that, on the lifting of the veil exposing the adytum to the gaze of the initiates, apparitions of the gods appeared to them.51 Christie, in his little work on the Greek Mysteries, says that the doctrines of the Eleusinian shows were explained by means of transparent scenes, many of which were faithfully copied upon the painted Greek vases; and these vase accordingly, were deposited in tombs to evidence the faith of the deceased in a future life. The foregoing conceptions may be illustrated by the dramatic representations, scenic shadows behind transparent curtains, in Java, alluded to by Sir Stamford Raffles.52
It is remarkable how far the Mysteries spread over the earth, and what popularity they attained. They penetrated into almost every nation under the sun. They admitted, in some degree, nearly the whole people. Herodotus informs us that there were collected in Egypt, at one celebration, seven hundred thousand men and women, besides children.53 The greatest warriors and kings Philip, Alexander, Sulla, Antony esteemed it an honor to be welcomed within the mystic pale. "Men," says Cicero, "came from the most distant shores to be initiated at Eleusis." Sophocles declares, as quoted by Warburton, "True life is to be found only among the initiates: all other places are full of evil." At the rise of the Christian religion, all the life and power left in the national religion of Greece and Rome were in the Mysteries. Accordingly, here was the most formidable foe of the new faith. Standing in its old entrenchments, with all its popular prestige around it, it fought with desperate determination for every inch it was successively forced to yield. The brilliant effort of Julian to roll back the tide of Christianity and restore the pagan religion to more than its pristine splendor an effort beneath which the scales of the world's fortunes poised, tremulous, for a while was chiefly an endeavor to revive and enlarge the Mysteries. Such was the attachment of the people to these old rites even in the middle of the fourth century of the Christian era, that a murderous riot broke out at Alexandria, in which Bishop George and others were slain, on occasion of the profanation by Christians of a secret adytum in which the Mysteries of Mithra were celebrated.54
49 Stromata, lib. iii., cited by a writer on the Mysteries in Blackwood, Feb. 1853, pp. 201-203.
50 Taylor's trans. of Golden Ass, p. 283. In a note to p. 275 of this work, the translator describes (with a citation of his authorities) "the breathing resemblances of the gods used in the Mysteries, statues fabricated by the telesta, so as to be illuminated and to appear animated."
51 Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 7.
52 Discourse to the Lit. and Sci. Soc. of Java, 1815, pub. in Valpy's Pamphleteer, No. 15.
53 Lib. ii. cap. ix.
54 Socrates, Ecc. Inst., lib. iii. cap. 2.
And when, a little later, the Emperor Valentinian had determined to suppress all nocturnal rites, he was induced to withdraw his resolution by Pretextatus, proconsul in Greece, "a man endowed with every virtue, who represented to him that theGreeks would consider life insupportable if they were forbidden to celebrate those most sacred Mysteries which bind together the human race."55 Upon the whole, we cannot fail to see that the Mysteries must have exerted a most extensive and profound influence alike in fostering the good hopes of human nature touching a life to come, and in giving credit and diffusion to the popular fables of the poets concerning the details of the future state. Much of that belief which seems to us so absurd we can easily suppose they sincerely embraced, when we recollect what they thought they had seen under supernatural auspices in their initiations.
In the Greek and Roman faith there was gradually developed in connection chiefly with the Mysteries, as we believe an aristocratic doctrine which allotted to a select class of souls an abode in the sky as their distinguished destination after death, while the common multitude were still sentenced to the shadow region below the grave. As Virgil writes, "The descent to Avernus is easy. The gate of dark Dis is open day and night. But to rise into the upper world is most arduous. Only the few heroes whom favoring Jove loves or shining virtue exalts thither can effect it." 56 Numerous scattered, significant traces of a belief in this change of the destination of some souls from the pit of Hades to the hall of heaven are to be found in the classic authors. Virgil, celebrating the death of some person under the fictitious name of Daphnis, exclaims, "Robed in white, he admires the strange court of heaven, and sees the clouds and the stars beneath his feet. He is a god now." 57 Porphyry ascribes to Pythagoras the declaration that the souls of departed men are gathered in the zodiac.58 Plato earnestly describes a region of brightness and unfading realities above this lower world, among the stars, where the gods live, and whither, he says, the virtuous and wise may ascend, while the corrupt and ignorant must sink into the Tartarean realm.59 A similar conception of the attainableness of heaven seems to be suggested in the old popular myths, first, of Hercules coming back in triumph from his visit to Pluto's seat, and, on dying, rising to the assembly of immortals and taking his equal place among them; secondly, of Dionysus going into the under world, rescuing his mother, the hapless Semele, and soaring with her to heaven, where she henceforth resides, a peeress of the eldest goddesses. Cicero expresses the same thought when he affirms that "a life of justice and piety is the path to heaven, where patriots, exemplary souls, released from their bodies, enjoy endless happiness amidst the brilliant orbs of the galaxy." 60 The same author also speaks of certain philosophers who flourished before his time, "whose opinions encouraged the belief that souls departing from bodies would arrive at heaven as their proper dwelling place." 61 He afterwards stigmatizes the notion that the life succeeding death is subterranean as an error,62 and in his own name addresses his auditor thus: "I see you gazing upward and wishing to migrate into heaven." 63
55 Essay on Mysteries, by M. Ouvaroff, Eng. trans. by J. D. Price, p. 55.
56 Aneid, lib. vi. 11. 125-130.
57 Ecl. v. 11. 57, 58, 64.
58 De Antro Nympharum.
59 Phado sects. 136-138.
60 Soma. Scipionis.
61 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. xi.
62 Ibid. cap. xvi.
63 Ibid. cap. xxxiv.
64 Ennius, e. g., sings, "Romulus in coelo cum diis agit avum"
It was the common belief of the Romans for ages that Romulus was taken up into heaven, where he would remain forever, claiming Divine honors.64 The Emperor Julian says, in his Letter on theDuties of a Priest, "God will raise from darkness and Tartarus the souls of all of us who worship him sincerely: to the pious, instead of Tartarus he promises Olympus." "It is lawful," writes Plato, "only for the true lover of wisdom to pass into the rank of gods." 65 The privilege here confined to philosophers we believe was promised to the initiates in the Mysteries, as the special prerogative secured to them by their initiation. "To pass into the rank of the gods" is a phrase which, as here employed, means to ascend into heaven and have a seat with the immortals, instead of being banished, with the souls of common mortals, to the under world.
In early times the Greek worship was most earnestly directed to that set of deities who resided at the gloomy centre of the earth, and who were called the chthonian gods.66 The hope of immortality first sprung up and was nourished in connection with this worship. But in the progress of time and culture the supernal circle of divinities who kept state on bright Olympus acquired a greater share of attention, and at last received a degree of worship far surpassing that paid to their swarthy compeers below. The adoration of these bright beings, with a growing trust in their benignity, the fables of the poets telling how they had sometimes elevated human favorites to their presence, for instance, receiving a Ganymede to the joys of their sublime society, the encouraging thoughts of the more religious and cheerful of the philosophers, these facts, together with a natural shrinking from the dismal gloom of the life of shades around the Styx, and a native longing for admission to the serene pleasures of the unfading life led by the radiant lords of heaven, in conjunction, perhaps, with still other causes, effected an improvement of the old faith, altering and brightening it, little by little, until the hope came in many quarters to be entertained that the faithful soul would after death rise into the assemblage and splendor of the celestial gods. The Emperor Julian, at the close of his seventh Oration, represents the gods of Olympus addressing him in this strain: "Remember that your soul is immortal, and that if you follow us you will be a god and with us will behold our Father." Several learned writers have strenuously labored to prove that the ground secret of the Mysteries, the grand thing revealed in them, was the doctrine of apotheosis, shaking the established theology by unmasking the historic fact that all the gods were merely deified men. We believe the real significance of the various collective testimony, hints, and inferences by which these writers have been brought to such a conclusion is this; the genuine point of the Mysteries lay not in teaching that the gods were once men, but in the idea that men may become gods. To teach that Zeus, the universal Father, causing the creation to tremble at the motion of his brow, was formerly an obscure king of Crete, whose tomb was yet visible in that island, would have been utterly absurd. But to assert that the soul of man, the free, intelligent image of the gods, on leaving the body, would ascend to live eternally in the kingdom of its Divine prototypes, would have been a brilliant step of progress in harmony both with reason and the heart. Such was probably the fact. Observe the following citation from Plutarch: "There is no occasion against nature to send the bodies of good men to heaven; but we are to conclude that virtuous souls, by nature and the Divine justice, rise from men to heroes, from heroes to genii; and if, as in the Mysteries, they arepurified, shaking off the remains of mortality and the power of the passions, they then attain the highest happiness, and ascend from genii to gods, not by the vote of the people, but by the just and established order of nature." 67
65 Phado, sect. lxxi.
66 Muller, Mist. Greek Lit., cap. ii. sect. 5; cap. xvi. sect. 2.
The reference in the last clause is to the decrees of the Senate whereby apotheosis was conferred on various persons, placing them among the gods. This ceremony has often been made to appear unnecessarily ridiculous, through a perversion of its actual meaning. When the ancients applied the term "god" to a human soul departed from the body, it was not used as the moderns prevailingly employ that word. It expressed a great deal less with them than with us. It merely meant to affirm similarity of essence, qualities, and residence, but by no means equal dignity and power of attributes between the one and the others. It meant that the soul had gone to the heavenly habitation of the gods and was thenceforth a participant in the heavenly life.68 Heraclitus was accustomed to say, "Men are mortal gods; gods are immortal men." Macrobius says, "The soul is not only immortal, but a god." 69 And Cicero declares, "The soul of man is a Divine thing, as Euripides dares to say, a god." 70 Milton uses language precisely parallel, speaking of those who are "unmindful of the crown true Virtue gives her servants, after their mortal change, among the enthroned gods on sainted seats." Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch in the second century, says that "to become a god means to ascend into heaven." 71 The Roman Catholic ceremony of beatification and canonization of saints, offering them incense and prayers thereafter, means exactly what was meant by the ancient apotheosis, namely, that while the multitudes of the dead abide below, in the intermediate state, these favored souls have been advanced into heaven. The papal functionaries borrowed this rite, with most of its details, from their immediate pagan predecessors, who themselves probably adopted it from the East, whence the Mysteries came. It is well known that the Brahmans and Buddhists believed, centuries before the Christian era, in the contrasted fate of good men after death to enjoy the successive heavens above the clouds, and of bad men to suffer the successive hells beneath the earth. A knowledge of this attractive Oriental doctrine may have united with the advance of their own speculations to win the partial acceptance obtained among the Greeks and Romans for the faith which broke the universal doom to Hades and opened heaven to their hopeful aspirations. In a tragedy of Euripides the following passage occurs, addressed to the bereaved Admetus: "Let not the tomb of thy wife be looked on as the mound of the ordinary dead. Some wayfarer, as he treads the sloping road, shall say, 'This woman once died for her husband; but now she is a saint in heaven.'" 72
When the meaning of the cheerful promises given to the initiates of a more favored fate in the future life than awaited others namely, as we think, that their spirits on leaving the body should scale Olympus instead of plunging to Tartarus had been concealed within the Mysteries for a long time, it at length broke into public view in the national apotheosis of ancient heroes, kings, and renowned worthies, the instances of which became so numerous that Cicero cries, "Is not nearly all heaven peopled with the human race?" 73 Over the heads of the devout heathen, as they gazed up through the clear night air, twinkled the beams of innumerable stars, each chosen to designate the cerulean seat where some soul was rejoicing with the gods in heaven over the glorious issue of the toils and sufferings in which he once painfully trod this earthly scene.
67 Lives, Romulus, sect. xxviii.
68 See a valuable discussion of the ancient use of the terms theos and deus in note D vol. iii. of Norton's Genuineness of the Gospels.
69 Somn. Scip., lib. ii. cap. 12.
70 Tusc. Quest., lib. i. cap. 26.
71 We omit several other authorities, as the reader would probably deem any further evidence superfluous.
72 Alcestis, ll. 1015-1025, ed. Glasg.
Herodian, a Greek historian of some of the Roman emperors, has left a detailed account of the rite of apotheosis.74 An image of the person to be deified was made in wax, looking all sick and pale, laid in state on a lofty bed of ivory covered with cloth of gold, surrounded on one side by choirs of noble lords, on the other side by their ladies stripped of their jewels and clad in mourning, visited often for several days by a physician, who still reports his patient worse, and finally announces his decease. Then the Senators and haughtiest patricians bear the couch through the via sacra to the Forum. Bands of noble boys and of proud women ranged opposite each other chant hymns and lauds over the dead in solemn melody. The bier is next borne to the Campus Martius, where it is placed upon a high wooden altar, a large, thin structure with a tower like a lighthouse. Heaps of fragrant gums, herbs, fruits, and spices are poured out and piled upon it. Then the Roman knights, mounted on horseback, prance before it in beautiful bravery, wheeling to and fro in the dizzy measures of the Pyrrhic dance. Also, in a stately manner, purple clothed charioteers, wearing masks which picture forth the features of the most famous worthies of other days to the reverential recognition of the silent hosts assembled, ride around the form of their descendant. Suddenly a torch is set to the pile, and it is wrapped in flames. From the turret, amidst the aromatic fumes, an eagle is let loose. Phoenix like symbol of the departed soul, he soars into the sky, and the seven hilled city throbs with pride, reverberating the shouts of her people. Thus into the residence of the gods "Sic itur ad astra" was borne the divinely favored mortal; "And thus we see how man's prophetic creeds Made gods of men when godlike were their deeds."
For it was only in times of degradation and by a violent perversion that the honor was allowed to the unworthy; and even in such cases it was usually nullified as soon as the people recovered their senses and their freedom. There is extant among the works of Seneca a little treatise called Apocolocuntosis, that is, pumpkinification, or the metamorphosis into a gourd, a sharp satire levelled against the apotheosis of the Emperor Claudius. The deification of mortals among the ancients has long been laughed at. When the great Macedonian monarch applied for a decree for his apotheosis while he was yet alive, the Lacedemonian Senate, with bitter sarcasm, voted, "If Alexander desires to be a god, let him be a god." The doctrine is often referred to among us in terms of mockery. But this is principally because it is not understood. It simply signifies the ascent of the soul after death into the Olympian halls instead of descending into the Acheronian gulfs.
73 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. 12.
74 Lib. iv.
And whether we consider the symbolic justice and beauty of the conception as a poetic image applied to the deathless heroes of humanity ensphered above us forever in historic fame and natural worship, or regard its comparative probability as the literal location of the residence of departed spirits, it must recommend itself to us as a decided improvement on the ideas previously prevalent, and as a sort of anticipation, in part, of that bright faith in a heavenly home for faithfuls souls, afterwards established in the world by Him of whom it was written, "No man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, who is now in heaven." Indeed, so forcible and close is the correspondence between the course of the aspirant in his initiation dramatically dying, descending into Hades, rising again to life, and ascending into heaven with the apostolic presentation of the redemptive career of Christ, our great Forerunner, that some writers Nork, for instance have suggested that the latter was but the exoteric publication to all the world of what in the former was esoterically taught to the initiates alone.
There was a striking naturalness, a profound propriety, in the obscurities of secrecy and awe with which the ancient Mysteries shrouded from a rash curiosity their instructions concerning the future life and only unfolded them by careful degrees to the prepared candidate. It is so with the reality itself in the nature of things. It is the great mystery of mysteries, darkly hinted in types, faintly gleaming in analogies, softly whispered in hopes, passionately asked in desires, patiently confirmed in arguments, suddenly blazed and thundered in revelation. Man from the very beginning of his race on earth has been thickly encompassed by mysteries, hung around by the muffling curtains of ignorance and superstition. Through one after another of these he has forced his way and gazed on their successive secrets laid bare. Once the Ocean was an alluring and terrible mystery, weltering before him with its endless wash of waves, into which the weary sun, in the west, plunged at evening, and out of which, in the east, it bounded refreshed in the morning. But the daring prows of his ships, guided by pioneering thought and skill, passed its islands and touched its ultimate shores. Once the Polar Circle was a frightful and frozen mystery, enthroned on mountains of eternal ice and wearing upon its snowy brow the flaming crown of the aurora borealis. But his hardy navigators, inspired by enterprise and philanthropy, armed with science, and supplied by art, have driven the awful phantom back, league by league, until but a small expanse of its wonders remains untracked by his steps. Once the crowded Sky was a boundless mystery, a maze of motions, a field where ghastly comets played their antics and shook down terrors on the nations. But the theories of his reason, based on the gigantic grasp of his calculus and aided by the instruments of his invention, have solved perplexity after perplexity, blended discords into harmony, and shown to his delighted vision the calm perfection of the stellar system. So, too, in the moral world he has lifted the shrouds from many a dark problem, and extended the empire of light and love far out over the ancient realm of darkness and terror. But the secret of Death, the mystery of the Future, remains yet, as of old, unfathomed and inscrutable to his inquiries. Still, as of old, he kneels before that unlifted veil and beseeches the oracles for a response to faith.
The ancient Mysteries in their principal ceremony but copied the ordination and followed the overawing spirit of Nature herself. The religious reserve and awe about the entrance into the adytum of their traditions were like those about the entrance into the invisible scenes beyond the veils of time and mortality. Their initiation was but a miniature symbol of the great initiation through which, and that upon impartial terms, every mortal, from King Solomon to the idiot pauper, must sooner or later pass to immortality. When a fit applicant, after the preliminary probation, kneels with fainting sense and pallid brow before the veil of the unutterable Unknown, and the last pulsations of his heart tap at the door of eternity, and he reverentially asks admission to partake in the secrets shrouded from profane vision, the infinite Hierophant directs the call to be answered by Death, the speechless and solemn steward of the celestial Mysteries. He comes, pushes the curtain aside, leads the awe struck initiate in, takes the blinding bandage of the body from his soul; and straightway the trembling neophyte receives light in the midst of that innumerable Fraternity of Immortals over whom the Supreme Author of the Universe presides.
