Chapter XII · Eschatologic Ideas of East and West.

Religions are often found to differ fundamentally in their conceptions of the fate of the departed spirit of man, and in the prominence and importance they assign to the posthumous life. There is, in fact, a group of religions which we might term “other-worldly,” because certain dogmas concerning the world after death are made the basis on which their aspirations and ideals of conduct are constructed; to this group belong Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and the old Egyptian creed. There are other religions, also of a highly developed type, in which eschatologic doctrine plays no forcible or constructive part either in the theology or in the ethics. Such were the Mesopotamian, primitive Judaism, and the early Hellenic.

Now it is possible that the curse of the demon was powerful both in the earlier and later periods of ancient, as it is powerful to-day in modern, Greece; the demon might be a ghost or a revenant. And it has been the ambition of a small group of scholars in this country to prove that the higher literature and art of Greece, that reveals so fair and sane an imagination of the unseen world, is only a thin veil drawn over much that was grotesque and ghastly in the popular superstition. Even Homer reveals forms of terror in Hades; and we have ugly tales of demons sucking blood, and ravaging the land like the Ποινή of Megara. It is not necessary to labour this point. Probably every ancient race has been sorely tried at one time or other by the burden of demonology; even our hardy ancient kinsmen of Iceland had their vampires and strangling ghosts, that figure occasionally in their saga. But the great peoples of our Western civilisation are those who have struggled free from this obsession into the light of progressive secular life. Such also—we have the right to believe—was the early Greek. To draw the distinction too sharply between the cultured and the uncultured strata may be a source of fallacy, especially when it is ancient Hellas that we are dealing with, where the artist was usually a man of the people and the people certainly delighted in the work of their poets, and were strangely susceptible to the healing influences of music. If Greek poetry, then, and art strove to banish the ugliest forms of the demon-world, and thereby worked with purifying and tranquillising influence on the temperament, so much the better for the Greek peasant. It is probably wrong, therefore, to regard the average Hellene as a nightmare-ridden man. But we might dare to say this of the Babylonian; and his imaginary terrors were fostered by his religious liturgical poetry, and to some extent by his art. For most of his hymns are formulae of exorcisms, incantations against demons and spectres. But such liturgy played relatively a very small part in Greek ritual; and this is one of the strongest facts that can be brought to witness against the theory of early Babylonian influence.

Yet both the Greek and the Babylonian feared the miasma of the dead. Ishtar’s threats at the portal of Hell, a tremendous outburst of infernal poetry, is a strong witness to this feeling: “Thou warder, open thy door, open thy door that I may enter in. If thou openest not thy door that I may not enter, I will crash thy door into splinters, I will burst the bolt, I will splinter the threshold and tear up the wings of the door: I will lead forth the dead that they shall eat and drink: the dead shall keep company with the living.” What lends part of its force to this great passage is the dreadful thought that the living should be haunted by the multitude of the ghosts that would pollute the living person and the light of day.

Shamash the sun-god is the natural enemy of ghosts, and is therefore appealed to in the incantation quoted just above to drive away the demon-spectres. He seems to stand here in the same relation of antipathy to the ghost-world as the “pure” Apollo stood for the Greek.

Those who equip the dead with some of the things that were of use and delight to the living must believe that the departed soul preserves a certain energy and power of enjoyment, though a gloomy poet among them may enlarge impressively on the emptiness of death. The unknown Assyrian king who describes in an inscription the sumptuous burial that he gave his father may not have been of the same mind as the poet of the Ishtar-epic concerning the laws of the Queen of Hell:

“Within the grave

The secret place

In kingly oil

I gently laid him.

The grave-stone

Marketh his resting-place.

With mighty bronze

I sealed its [entrance],

I protected it with an incantation.

Vessels of gold and silver,

Such as my father loved,

All the furniture that befitteth the grave,

The due right of his sovereignty,

I displayed before the Sun-God,

And beside the father who begat me,

I set them in the grave.

Gifts unto the princes,

Unto the spirits of the earth

And unto the gods who inhabit the grave,

What is the meaning of the act of exposing the gold and silver vessels to the sun-god Shamash before placing them on the grave? Was it done to purify them by the aspect of the pure god and thus to fit them for the use of the glorified dead? The evidence of the deification of kings has been collected above. But the ceremony in question is unique, as far as I am aware.

“On a couch he lieth

And drinketh pure water,

The man who was slain in battle.

His father and his mother [support] his head,

This is the lore that in the Epic of Gilgamesh is imparted to the hero by the ghost of his beloved Eabani, concerning the advantages of the man who gets due burial over him whose corpse is thrown out into the field, and whose soul wanders restlessly eating “the dregs of the vessel, the leavings of the feast, and that which is cast out upon the street.”

These simple differences in the oblations incline us to suppose that the primitive grave-ritual of Greece was developed independently of Babylon.

Again, in Greece this tendance of the spirits, in the case of the great ones of the community—the king, the hero, or the priest—was undoubtedly linked at an early period with apotheosis of the dead; and actual hero-cults and actual cults of ancestors became, as we have seen, a salient phenomenon of Greek religion.

There are two striking passages in the Iliad, of which the importance for our present question is often ignored: in iii. 278 there is reference to the two divinities whom, with Aristarchus, we must interpret as Hades and Persephone, who punish oath-breakers after death: in xix. 259 the same function of executing judgment in the nether world upon the souls of the perjured is ascribed to the Erinyes: the context in both passages suggests that the poet is giving voice to a common popular belief.

And in regard to posthumous happiness, early Greece may have believed more than Homer reports. For who can determine how early this eschatologic hope came into the Eleusinian mysteries?