Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

by Erwin Rohde

§ 2

A peculiar position is taken up by Pindar. Two contrasted views of the nature, origin, and destiny of the soul seem to be combined in his mind with equal claim to authority.

In the Victory Odes allusions predominate which imply an agreement with the popular view expressed in the sayings of poets and the presuppositions of the cult of souls and the worship of Heroes. After its separation from the body, the soul disappears into the underworld.[22] The piety and affectionate memory of relatives and descendants remains as a link between the dead and the living;[23] whether the soul itself is still conscious of any connexion with the world of the living seems uncertain.[24] Its power is over and done with—it is certainly no condition of blessed happiness into which it has entered. Only the glorious name, the fame that is honoured in song, rewards the great deeds of the virtuous after death.[25]

An exalted state of being, after their departure from this earth, is attributed to the Heroes alone. The belief in the existence, importance, and power of these illuminated spirits holds complete sway;[26] it emerges in lively reality from the words and narrations of the poet throughout all his work. Moreover, the ancient conception—in reality rendered untenable by the belief in Heroes—that only with the undivided union of body and soul is complete life imaginable, is discernible in many allusions and stories of Translation that imply that conception. Amphiaraos, the most illustrious of those who have been translated to everlasting life, is specially dear to the heart of the Theban poet, and is glorified more than once in the language of unaffected faith in such miracles.[27] But, further, even when death has occurred in the meantime, elevation to a higher life remains possible—even beyond the heights of the “Hero”. Semele lives for ever, though she died under the crash of the thunder-bolt.[28] The barrier between men and gods is not insuperable; we can distantly approach the immortals not only in greatness of mind, but in bodily vigour.[29] One mother gave birth to both races, though the gulf between them is indeed a deep one; man is nought—a shadow’s dream-image; for the gods the brazen heavens remain for ever as an unconquerable stronghold.[30] Only a miracle of divine interference with the lawful and normal course of nature, can raise the individual soul to the everlasting life of the gods and Heroes.

Such visions as these could be indulged in by one who still [415] kept his feet firmly fixed upon the ground of popular belief. And yet side by side with them in Pindar’s works are to be found descriptions of quite another order in which is expressed, with elaborate fullness and dogmatic exactitude, a complete doctrine of the nature, destiny, and fate of the soul; passages in which, in spite of some little poetic licence in detail, a well ordered and, in the main, consistent whole is pictured.

The Soul, the “Image of Life”, the other Self of the living and visible man, sleeps while the limbs of man are active; when the individual is asleep it shows him dream-visions of the future.[31] This psyche[32] which during the waking and conscious hours of the man is itself lying in the darkness of unconsciousness, is far from being the totality of mental powers gathered together in a single creature, or at any rate, in a single concept, such as the philosophers as well as the everyday use of the word at that period understood by the name “psyche”. Here, again, the name once more denotes the double of mankind dwelling within the living man such as it was known to primeval popular belief and to the Homeric poems. A theological meaning has, however, been added to it. This “Image” of man, we are told, “is alone descended from the gods,” and with this the reason also is discovered why the soul-image alone after the destruction of the body by death remains alive.[33]

Derived from the gods and therefore eternally exempt from destruction, everlasting and immortal, the soul is none the less condemned to finiteness; it dwells within the mortal body of man. This is the result of the “ancient guilt” of which, quite in the manner of theological poetry, Pindar also speaks.[34] After the death of the body it is to await in Hades the stern sentence that “One” shall pronounce over its earthly deeds.[35] For the condemned there is in store “affliction past beholding”[36] in deep Tartaros, “where the slow rivers of murky night spit out endless darkness,” and forgetfulness encloses the victims.[37] The just enter into the subterranean places of bliss where the sun gives them light when he has set upon earth.[38] In flowery meadows they enjoy an existence of resplendent idleness, such as only the Greek imagination, nourished amid the artistic surroundings of Greek life, could describe without falling into emptiness and futility.

But the soul has not even so found its last resting place. It must again give life to a body and not until it has completed upon earth a third faultless life can it hope for an end of its earthly course of being.[39] The conditions of each new life [416] upon earth depend upon the degree of purity that the soul has achieved in its previous lifetimes. When at last the Queen of the Underworld considers that its “ancient guilt” has been atoned for, she sends forth the souls after the ninth year[40] of their last sojourn in Hades once more to live in the upper world, this time in happiness. Here they pass through one more lifetime as kings, mighty men of valour, and Wise Men.[41] Then at last they escape from the necessity of earthly rebirth. As “Heroes” they are honoured among men;[42] and they have therefore entered into a state of higher being which the popular belief of Pindar’s time ascribed not only to the souls of the great ancestral figures of the past, but also to many who had departed hence in more recent times after a life of valour and service.[43] Now they are beyond the reach of Hades as much as of the world of men. Faith seeks them in “Islands of the Blest” far out in Okeanos; thither, to the “Citadel of Kronos” they travel on the “Way of Zeus”[44] and enjoy, in company with the great ones of the past, under the protection of Kronos[45] and his assessor Rhadamanthys, a life of bliss for ever undisturbed.

Such conceptions of the origin, fortunes, and ultimate destiny of the soul, the more they diverge from commonly held opinions, the more certainly must they be regarded as being part of the private and real persuasion of the poet himself. The poet, who on other occasions when he makes passing and casual reference to the things of the next world accommodates himself to the traditional view, gives himself up willingly to such hopes and aspirations where the circumstances of his song provided an opportunity of dealing at length with such matters—especially in hymns of mourning for the dead. He may have paid attention in such poems to the special opinions of those who were to be the first hearers of his song. Theron, the ruler of Akragas, to whom was dedicated the second Olympian Ode of Victory that deals so fully with the hope of bliss to come, was an old man whose thoughts might well be occupied with the life after death.[46] In this case, therefore, we may presume perhaps the special interest of the person whose praises are sung in these reflections that lead so far away from the commonly accepted view of the Soul.[47] But that Pindar, proud and self-willed, conscious of specific knowledge and proud of that consciousness, should have given expression to strange doctrine so foreign to popular ideas simply out of complaisance to another’s will, and in subservience to another man’s belief—that is quite unthinkable. It is rather the substance of what he believes himself [417] and has achieved by his own struggles that in a solemn hour he reveals for a moment to like-minded friends.

The different elements out of which Pindar has composed his special view are not hard to distinguish. He is following theological doctrine in what he tells of the divine origin of the soul, its wanderings through several bodies, the judgment in Hades, the special place assigned to the just, and that of the wicked. But it is layman’s theology that he is propounding; it does not bind itself to a single unalterable formula, and betrays throughout that its exponent is a poet. Pindar, throughout the whole of his poetic activity, combines the office of singer with that of professional teacher, more especially where he has to speak of the things of an invisible divine world. But for all his didactic professionalism he remains the poet, for whom as depository and trustee of the Myth it is out of the question to abandon the traditional, whether in legend or belief. His task is to keep pure what has been handed down to him, to make it more profound, perhaps to supplement and complete it, but with all this to justify it. Thus, poetic legend and popular belief enter even into his theologian’s doctrine of the Soul; the Islands of the Blest, the elevation of man to Hero—these were things he could not give up.

From what particular direction Pindar’s theological interests may have come to him we cannot say with precision or certainty. Orphic as well as Pythagorean doctrines may have come to his notice in Sicily whither he made repeated visits after 477 B.C.[48] For both sects this country was the original nursery and breeding ground.

There, too, the poet may perhaps have (even at that date) met with certain varieties of the Orphic mystical doctrine which, like his own views, were intermingled with elements taken from conventional mythology. Examples of this type of Orphic mysticism allied with foreign elements are the verses which, inscribed upon gold tablets, were found not long ago in graves near the ancient Sybaris.[49] Three of these poems begin with phrases that are common to them all, and imply the same underlying conceptions; after that they part company and represent two different views. The soul of the dead person[50] thus addresses itself to the Queen of the lower world, and the other gods of the depths below: “I draw near to you purified and born of pure parents.”[51] It belongs then to a mortal who, like his parents before him, has been “purified” in the sacred mysteries of a religious association.[52] It claims also to be descended from the blessed race of the deities of the lower [418] world.[53] “Lightning robbed me of life,” so one of the versions goes on,[54] “and so I escaped from the Circle, the burdensome, the grievous”. In these words purely Orphic belief is expressed: the Soul has now at last escaped entirely from the “Circle of Births”,[55] and it enters as it tells us “with speedy feet into the wished-for precinct”,[56] and buries itself in the bosom of the Queen of the Underworld.[57] It is the latter, probably, who at the end greets the liberated soul with the words: “Fortunate and to be called Blessed art thou; now shalt thou be, instead of a mortal—a god.”

Much less exalted are the hopes expressed in the other two versions of the mystic document—two versions that resemble each other in most essentials. Here the soul asserts that it has done penance for unrighteous deeds; now it appears before the revered Persephoneia to implore her graciously to send it to the dwelling places of the pure and the holy.[58]

How are we to explain the discrepancy? It would indeed be possible to explain the more restrained version as that of a sect whose members were less confident of their own divine origin and of the necessary return of the soul at last to its enfranchised divine state. It is much more probable, however—since in fact the presupposition of the divine nature of the soul and its kinship with the divine is really made in both cases and with the same words—that we here have to do with the beliefs of one and the same sect, and that the varying heights of felicity aspired to correspond to different stages of the process of redemption. He who through participation in the sacred mysteries has atoned for the ancient guilt, can be admitted by the goddess into the paradise of the blest in the midst of Hades. But he must still, in subsequent rebirths upon earth first complete the cycle before he can be fully released from rebirth and become once more what he was at the beginning, entirely a god. The dead man of the first tablet has reached the final goal of his pilgrimage; the other two have only reached an intermediate resting place.[59] Another inscription, found in a grave of the same neighbourhood,[60] by its use of a mystic formula[61] appended also to the first version of the above-mentioned poems, reveals itself as an expression of faith deriving from the same sect. Among a variety of disconnected instructions and appeals to the dead,[62] strung together with no particular arrangement, it contains the following statement: “a god hast thou become instead of a mortal”. This then always remained the crowning point of the salvation promised by the sect. [419]

In the cult and beliefs of this sect which thus with divided voice speaks to us in these verses, the worship of the ancient Greek divinities of the Underworld (among whom Dionysos is not this time included) was fused with the boldest conception belonging to the Dionysiac mysteries: the confident assurance that the divine nature of the soul must in the end break through, purified and triumphant over the earthliness that obscured it. Pindar in another, but not very different, way has brought the same elements into conjunction. One would indeed like to be able to estimate the influence which his doctrine, which lay so close to his own heart, may have exercised on the hearers and readers of his poems. He was at once something more and something less than a theological teacher. Never again among the Greeks did the blessed life of the sanctified soul receive such majestic expression, clothed in such ample and resplendent diction, as that which poured so freely from the heart of this richly gifted poet. But though the poet may have touched the heart of his hearer and tempted his imagination to stray along the path laid out for him, yet it cannot have been easy (and perhaps the greatness of the poet’s triumph almost made it harder) permanently to mistake the magic gleam of poetry for the sunlight of reality. One may doubt whether the poems in which Pindar recounted his dreams of future blessedness can have found many hearers in whom they awakened not merely æsthetic satisfaction, but belief in the literal truth of the teaching, in the reality of those beautiful, dim, haloed figures.