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

by Erwin Rohde

§ 2

As the numbers of the underworld beings increased, and their cult grew and expanded, these divinities began to have a very different meaning for the living from what they once had for the Greeks of the Homeric age. The upper and the lower worlds are drawn closer to each other; the world of the living borders upon that world after death over which the chthonic gods hold sway. The ancient belief that the earth-caverns of their own land, on which men dwelt and worked, were the near and accessible abode of divinity, now reappeared here and there, and was no longer completely awed into silence by the poetic lustre of the all-embracing divine world of Olympos. We have spoken in a previous [chapter] of Amphiaraos at Thebes, Trophonios in the Lebadean cave, and Zeus in the cave on Mt. Ida; and again of that Zeus who was seen enthroned by those who descended into a cave in Epirus. These are all vestiges of the same belief which originally underlay all local cults of underworld deities. The realm of [162] chthonic gods, of spirits and departed souls, seemed to be close at hand. Ploutonia, i.e. direct inlets to the underworld, existed at many places,[23] as also did Psychopompeia, clefts in the rock through which the souls can pass out into the upper world. In the middle of the city of Athens, in a natural chasm on the Areiopagos, underworld beings were reputed to have their home.[24] The most striking denial of the separation between the living and the underworld, such as was demanded by Homeric theology, was at Hermione. Here, behind the temple of Chthonia lay a sacred precinct of Plouton or Klymenos with a chasm in the ground through which Herakles had once brought up Kerberos to the earth—and an “Acherusian Lake”.[25] So near did the spirit world seem here, that the people of Hermione did not give their dead the usual coin to pay the fare of Charon, the ferryman of the dead:[26] for them, in whose own country lay the river Acheron, no tract of water lay between the land of the living and the dead.

More important than these cases of contact between the dark underworld and the world of the living—for the localization of the underworld still remained for the most part matter of fancy—is the fact that the creatures of that world are again drawing closer to the senses of men. The thoughts of men turn more frequently to the other world at so many festivals and anniversaries; the gods who rule below desire and repay the veneration of mankind, both of the individual and the city. And in the train of the chthonic gods the souls of the dead, always closely bound to them, receive a cult which in many particulars goes beyond anything customary in the Homeric Age.

II
FUNERAL CEREMONIES AND WORSHIP OF THE DEAD

The first duty that the survivors owe to their dead is to bury the body in the customary manner. This age takes the matter more seriously than the Homeric people had done. Whereas in Homer denial of burial to enemies fallen in war is often mentioned, it is now regarded as a religious duty that is seldom neglected to give back the bodies of the fallen foe for burial. To deny the honour of burial to members of one’s own city is an outrage of the most extreme kind; everyone knows what terrible vengeance for such a neglect of duty was taken, by the excited populace at Athens, on the generals after Arginousai. Nothing can release a son from the duty of burying his father and offering him the regular gifts at his [163] grave.[27] And if the relations, in spite of everything, neglect their task the law at Athens requires the Demarch to see to the burial of his fellow demesman.[28] Religious requirements, however, go beyond the law. At the solemn agricultural festival of Demeter the Bouzyges at Athens invoked a curse on all who should leave a corpse unburied.[29] This matter, which the chthonic deities take under their protection, is no mere sanitary police regulation. It is not any such consideration, but solely the “unwritten laws” of religion which are obeyed by Antigone when she covers the dead body of her brother with a little dust: even such symbolical burial is enough to avert the “abomination” (ἄγος). Motives of pure piety may have played their part, but the really fundamental idea underlying all such practices was the one already met with in the Iliad:[30] that the soul of the unburied person can find no rest in the hereafter. The ghost haunts the neighbourhood, its rage afflicts the land in which it is detained against its will; and the withholding of burial “is worse for the withholder than for him to whom burial is refused”.[31] Condemned criminals, indeed, are thrown by the state, unburied, into a pit;[32] the sacrilegious and traitors to their country are denied burial in the ground of that country.[33] This is a formidable punishment, for even though the outlaw is buried in a foreign country,[34] his soul cannot be permanently tended there. Only the family of the dead in their own home can give their departed kinsman the honour due to him in the cult of the souls, and only they at the spot where his remains lie buried.[35]

What we know of the details of the funeral ceremonies, differs very little in essence from what had survived into the Homeric age as customs no longer fully explained by contemporary belief. The new features that we meet with may also, for the most part, be very primitive usage restored to currency. Some of the particular details make the solemnity of the act more apparent.

After the eyes and mouth have been closed by the next of kin the body is washed and anointed by women of the family, and clothed in clean garments. It is then laid out upon a bier in the interior of the house for the ceremonial lying-in-state. In Athens marjoram was strewn under the body, for superstitious reasons,[36] and also four broken-off vine branches; in the grave, also, the corpse lay on vine branches.[37] Underneath the bier were placed ointment vessels of the peculiar slim shape that the graves have restored to us again in such numbers. At the door of the room, for the benefit of those leaving the house who had incurred religious defilement by coming in contact [164] with the corpse, was placed a bowl full of pure water brought in from another house.[38] Cypress branches fixed upon the house door outside warned the scrupulous that a corpse was in the house.[39] The head of the dead person was generally decked with garlands and fillets, in a manner unknown to the Homeric age, as a sign, it appears, of respect for the higher sanctity of the departed.[40]

The lying-in-state of the dead, lasting the whole of one day, was certainly not intended originally to serve the purpose of a public “notification of death”, such as later writers attribute to it.[41] The funeral dirge was sung at the bier of the dead man, and to give opportunity for this ceremony was its real purpose. The habit of the old Attic government of the Eupatridai had increased the pomp of funeral ceremonies in every direction, and had encouraged an extravagant cult of the souls of the departed. Solon’s legislation had to restrain and limit such exaggeration in many ways, and in particular, the tendency to increase unduly the lamentation sung over the dead body required to be kept within bounds. Only the women of the immediate family of the dead might take part in it, for to them alone the cult of the departed belonged as a duty.[42] The violent expression of grief, the tearing of the cheeks, beating the breast and head, was forbidden,[43] as also was the singing of “poems”,[44] i.e. in all probability regular funeral dirges specially written for the purpose such as Homer made the women sing round Hektor’s bier. To extend the subject of the funeral dirge to apply to others beside the person then being buried had to be made absolutely illegal.[45] This prohibition must also have been applied already to the gathering at the graveside. But to sacrifice animals before the procession to the grave was a very ancient custom, and it seems as if Solon forbade this too.[46] In other states, also, legislation was necessary to put a curb on the tendency to overdo the violence of the expressions of grief for the dead[47] which were common in the antiquity of the Greeks as among many of the “uncivilized” tribes who carry them to the point of exhaustion. It was not simple piety or natural human grief (never particularly given to violent or excessive demonstration) that caused these things. It was rather the ancient belief that the soul of the dead was still invisibly present, and would be pleased at the most violent expressions of grief for its loss.[48] The dirge, carried to this extreme, belongs in fact to the cult of the departed spirit. The restraints placed upon the traditional lamentation may in their turn—in so far as they were effective—have been derived not from considerations of good [165] sense (which rarely have much influence in such matters) but from religious or superstitious reasons.[49]

The lying-in-state of the body seems invariably to have lasted for one day only.[50] In the early morning of the third day[51] after death the corpse, together with the bier on which it lay, was borne out of the house. Legislation was in some places necessary to check excessive ostentation at the funeral procession.[52] What pomp and ceremony was customary in the time of the old aristocratic rule at this part of the cult of the dead, we may gather (if it corresponded at all to reality) from the picture of a funeral procession represented on a very archaic “Dipylon vase”.[53] There the body is carried on high on a wagon drawn by two horses: men carrying swords surround it, and a whole company of women, making lamentation and beating their heads, follow the procession. At Athens the attendance in the procession was confined, in the case of women at least, to those of the immediate kinsfolk (for three generations). The men, who had their place in front of the women seem to have been admitted without such restriction.[54] The admission of hired companies of Karian women and men, singing the national dirges, seems at Athens not to have been forbidden.[55] At Keos and elsewhere, the laws ordered processions to the grave to be conducted in silence.[56] On the whole, the discipline of respectable city life reduced the “excessive and barbaric”,[57] which must once have been the rule in the display of mourning, to a discreet symbolism.

On the details of the burial procedure our information is incomplete. Occasional expressions used by Greek authors allow us to conclude—and this is confirmed by the excavation of graves in Greek countries—that besides the custom, exclusively prevailing in Homeric times, of cremation, the more ancient practice of burying the body unburnt was still kept up.[58] The body was not intended to be completely destroyed. Out of the ashes of the funeral pyre the son carefully gathers the remains of his father’s bones[59] in order to bury them, enclosed in an urn or a box. If on the other hand the body remains unburnt, it is either enclosed in a coffin made of baked clay, or wood[60]—a custom clearly betraying its foreign origin, or else—and this must have been certainly the older and more purely native Greek usage—it is let down into the earth without a coffin, and laid upon a bed of leaves;[61] at other times, if the nature of the ground allows, it may rest unburied in a rock-chamber, upon a bed of stonework.[62]

The soul, though now set free, keeps up some connexion with the body it once inhabited. It is for its use and pleasure [166] that an ample provision of household implements and vessels is laid beside the corpse (though no longer the whole of the dead man’s possessions as once was usual); and graves since opened have restored such things in large numbers to our gaze.[63] But the Greeks never seriously believed that such a phantasmal existence could be prolonged to eternity. Elaborate expedients for the perpetual preservation of the corpse (by embalmment and other means, such as were employed in the case of bodies buried in the Mycenæan shaft-graves)[64] were unknown in these later times—except as a peculiar archaism in the burial of Spartan kings.