Franz Cumont

“ The dead man does not stay confined in the narrow dwelling in which he rests; he goes down into vast caverns which extend beneath the crust of the soil we tread. These immense hollows are peopled by a multitude of shades who have left the tomb. Thus the tomb becomes the antechamber of the true dwelling of the spirits who have departed; its door is the gate of Hades itself. Through the tomb, the great company of the beings who have been plunged in the darkness of the infernal regions remains in communication with those who still sojourn in our upper world. ”

“ This organism was alive, penetrated throughout by the same essence as the soul which maintains our life and thought. This soul was an igneous breath of which the moral corruption was conceived quite materially. When it gave itself up to the desires of the senses, to corporeal passions, its substance thickened and was troubled, and the mud of this pollution adhered to it like a crust. When the soul left the body at the time of death, it became a spirit like the multitude of demons who peopled the atmosphere. ”

“ They are fond of quoting the answer of Theodore the Atheist to Lysimachus who was threatening him with death without burial—“What matters it whether I rot on the earth or under it?” Since the corpse was unconscious and without any sensibility, it was indeed of no consequence whether it were burnt or buried, eaten by worms or by crows. Why should it be a misfortune to die abroad? Only the living had a country; the whole earth was the dwelling of the dead. If such cares troubled men they were the victims of the invincible illusion that the body retained capacity to feel even beyond the grave. ”

“ Inversely, when death had dissolved the elements which formed the human composite, when the soul had left the carnal prison which enclosed it, the sun once more drew it to himself. As his ardent heat caused vapours and clouds to rise from the earth and the seas, so he brought back to himself the invisible essence which animated the body. He exercised on the earth both a physical and a psychical attraction. Human reason reascended to its original source and returned to its divine home. The rays of the god were the vehicles of souls when they rose aloft to the higher regions. ”

“ This austere and circumstantial system of morals would ensure happiness and wisdom on earth and salvation in the Beyond.
All the Neo-Pythagoreans agree in stating that the human soul is related to God and therefore immortal. Many, like the Stoics, look upon it as a parcel of the ether, an effluvium of burning and luminous fluid which fills the celestial spaces and shines in the divine stars. Others, who are nearer to Plato, believe it to be immaterial and define it as a number in movement. Always, generation is regarded as a fall and a danger for the soul. ”

“ In a celebrated passage Pliny the Naturalist, after categorically declaring that neither the soul nor the body has any more sensation after death than before the day of birth, ends with a vehement apostrophe: “Unhappy one, what folly is thine who in death renewest life! Where will creatures ever find rest if souls in heaven, if shades in the infernal regions, still have feeling? Through this complacent credulity we lose death, the greatest boon which belongs to our nature, and the sufferings of our last hour are doubled by the fear of what will follow after. ”

“ The fiery breath of our intelligence is gathered, as are the matter and the humours of our organism, into the inexhaustible reservoir which produced them, as one day the earth and the heavens will be gathered thither also. All must be engulfed in one whole, must lose itself in one forgetfulness. When man has reached the term of his fate, he faints into the one power which forms and leads the universe, just as the tired stars will be extinguished in it, when their days shall be accomplished. ”

“ We here see how the perplexity in which men struggled, when they thought of psychic survival, gave earthly immortality a greater value in the eyes of the ancients. It was for many of them the essential point because it alone was certain. Not to fall into the abyss of forgetfulness seemed a sufficient reward for virtue. “Death is to be feared by those for whom everything is extinguished with their life, not by those whose renown cannot perish.” ”

“ Every day the stars disappear beneath the horizon to reappear in the east on the morrow; every month a new moon succeeds the moon whose light has waned; every year the sun is reborn to new strength after his fires have died away; every winter vegetation withers to bloom again in the spring. The gods of nature—Attis, Osiris, Adonis—also rose again after they had been slain ”

“ But that which makes the grandeur of this theory, which won countless adepts throughout the centuries and the world, is that it transformed this naïve idea, which had no moral bearing, into a doctrine of retribution and liberation. To come back to the earth, to imprison itself in a body which soiled and tortured it, became a punishment inflicted on the guilty soul. The soul could not attain to supreme felicity until it had purified itself by long suffering and had gradually, through a cycle of rebirths, freed itself from carnal passions. ”

“ The “cycle of generation” was no longer conceived as a flux of life circulating throughout the variety of the animate beings peopling the earth, but as the descent and the ascent of a psychic essence, passing alternately from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven.
It is to these doctrines that Virgil alludes when in the Aeneid he shows us, gathered in a remote place of the Elysian Fields, the shades whom after a thousand years a god calls to come in a great troop to the river Lethe, there to drink the forgetfulness of the past, whereby “they begin again to wish to return to the body.” ”

“ He promises eternal felicity to the just, and asks himself what will be the lot of souls between the time of their death and the end of the world. Will they be at rest or will they be tortured? And the angel who inspires him answers that when the vital breath has left the body to go again to adore the glory of the Most High, the soul which has violated the divine law will not enter the celestial dwellings but will “wander amidst torments, for ever suffering and saddened on seven paths.” ”

“ The dead subsisted, then, as nebulous, impalpable beings, perceived by the senses only exceptionally. Here the belief that their remains had not quite lost all feeling mingled with the equally primitive and universal belief that the soul is a breath, exhaled with the last sigh. The vaporous shade, sometimes a dangerous but sometimes a succouring power, wandered by night in the atmosphere and haunted the places which the living man had been used to frequent. Except for some sceptical reasoners, all antiquity admitted the reality of these phantoms. ”

“ We will today examine the oldest of all the ways of considering survival in the Beyond: life in the tomb.
Ethnology has proved that among all peoples the belief that the dead continue to live in the tomb has reigned, and sometimes still reigns. The primitive man, disconcerted by death, cannot persuade himself that the being who moved, felt, willed, as he does, can be suddenly deprived of all his faculties. The most ancient and the crudest idea is that the corpse itself keeps some obscure sensitiveness which it cannot manifest. ”

“ The zone of the moon, the lowest of the seven planetary spheres, in which the serene ether touches our own foggy atmosphere, is the frontier between the world of the gods and that of men, the border between immortality and the generated, the line of demarcation between the life of blessedness and the death which our earthly existence really is. ”

“ When man perceives the harmony of the sky and the immovable order of its revolutions, he is first filled with joy and struck with admiration. Then the passion is born in him to learn about them all that it is possible for his mortal nature to know, for he is persuaded that he will thus lead the best and happiest existence and will go after his death to the places suited to virtue. ”

“ Thus this deep instinct of preservation, which impels human beings to desire survival, showed itself even in him who contributed most of all to destroy faith in immortality.
It is always with difficulty that men resign themselves to dying wholly. Even when reason admits, nay when it desires, annihilation, the subconscious self protests against it; our personality is impelled by its very essence to crave the persistence of its self. ”

“ Was the soul which, after a long expiation, had reached the Elysian Fields and the sphere of the stars, always to descend thence, seized with a blind love for the body, and to pass again through the trials of another earthly life? ”

“ And doubtless also, the faith or the hope has never more imposed itself, even on the unbelieving, that these countless multitudes, filled with moral force and generous passion, who have entered eternity, have not wholly perished, that the ardour which animated them was not extinguished when their limbs grew cold, that the spirit which impelled them to self-sacrifice was not dissipated with the atoms which formed their bodies. ”

“ Such was the inevitable necessity imposed on mankind. Immortality was a privilege of divinity. The man who was exempted from the common lot of his kind was therefore the equal of the gods; he had risen above his perishable condition to acquire the everlasting youth of the Olympians, the unlimited duration of the stars which travel the heavens, the eternity of the Supreme Being. ”

“ THE JOURNEY TO THE BEYOND As soon as belief took shape in an underground kingdom where gathered the shades which were separated from the body and from the grave, the idea also arose of a perilous journey which the soul must make in order to win to this distant abode. Such an idea is common to many peoples of the world. In California, the Mojave Indians are said to believe that the departed have to find their way through a complicated maze in search of the happy hunting grounds, which only the good souls can reach, while the wicked wander painfully and endlessly. ”

“ Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-Stoics liked, in insisting on this opposition, to show the contrast between the splendour and the darkness, the serenity and the trouble, the constancy and the mutability, the truth and the error, the happiness and the misery, the peace and the war, which reigned respectively in the dwelling of the gods and in the abode of men, whither souls descending to earth penetrated so soon as they had crossed the circle of the moon. ”

“ Enclosed in the body as in a tomb, it runs the risk of corruption, even of perishing. Earthly existence is a hard voyage on the stormy waters of matter, which are perpetually rolling and surging. Thus a fundamental pessimism looked upon life here below as a trial and a chastisement; a radical dualism placed the body in opposition to the divine essence residing in it. The constant care of the sage was to keep his soul from pollution by its contact with the flesh. ”

“ It will be noticed how closely this last conception approached to that of ancient Stoicism, according to which the various parts of the human organism, dissociated by death, were to regain their integrity in the divine elements of the universe.
Quite another doctrine was propagated by the Syrian cults and the Persian mysteries of Mithras, which spread in the West in the first century of our era. These religions taught that the soul of the just man does not go below the ground but rises to the sky, there to enjoy divine bliss in the midst of the stars in the eternal light. ”

“ UNTIMELY DEATH In the last lecture we endeavoured to show that in the ancient world immortality was at first conceived as being precarious and conditional, and that only the heroes, the exceptional men, who were in truth gods on earth, obtained apotheosis after their death. We afterwards saw that the mysteries extended the promise of eternal salvation to all the initiate, who by virtue of the rites were made equal to the gods, and finally that the philosophers contested the necessity of sacred ceremonies and affirmed that human reason by its own unaided power could win union with God. ”

“ Among all the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean basin the idea was anciently spread that the essence or the spirit which animates man escapes from the body in the shape of a bird, especially a bird of prey, for in order not to perish this soul must feed on blood, the principle of life. ”

“ Philosophic literature and the epitaphs present to us, repeatedly and in a thousand forms, the idea that we cannot strive against omnipotent necessity, that the rule of this rigid master must be borne without tears or recriminations. The wise man, who destroys within himself desire of any happenings, enjoys even during this existence divine calm in the midst of tribulations, but those whom the vicissitudes of life drive or attract, who let illusions seduce or grieve them, will at last obtain remission of their troubles when they reach the tranquil haven of death. ”

“ Thus the mystic who had become god, who had part in the divine energy, also acquired the power to conquer death. Oriental religions looked upon earthly existence as a fight from which the just man issued victorious. Immortality was a triumph won over the powers of evil, of which the most implacable was death. The souls of the elect were crowned like athletes and soldiers; their wreath was the “crown of life,” often represented on funeral monuments. [272] The Greeks sometimes, and the Etruscans frequently, had personified death as a horrible monster who frightened those whom he approached. ”

“ The late pagan philosophy asserts constantly and forcibly that the wise man’s reason is able by itself, or rather through a celestial grace, without the intervention of any liturgy, to ensure its own return to its divine source. “As,” says Porphyry, “he who is the priest of a particular god knows how to consecrate his statues, celebrate orgies, perform initiations and lustrations, so the true philosopher, who is the priest of the universal God, knows how to make His sacred images and to carry out His purifications and all the processes which will unite him to this God.” ”