§ 3
So far experience takes us, from which primitive logic arrived at very much the same conclusions all over the world. But, we may proceed to ask, where does this liberated psyche go? What becomes of it? Here begins “the undiscovered country” and it might appear that at its entrance there was a complete parting of the ways.
Primitive people are accustomed to attribute unlimited powers to the disembodied “soul”—powers all the more formidable because they are not seen. Indeed, they refer in part all invisible forces to the action of “souls”, and strain anxiously by means of the richest offerings within their power to secure for themselves the goodwill of these powerful spirits. Homer, on the contrary, knows nothing of any influence exerted by the psyche upon the visible world, and, consequently, hardly anything of a cult of the psyche. How, indeed, could the souls (as I may venture to call them without further risk of misunderstanding) have any such influence? They are all without exception collected in the realm of Aïdes, far from the living, separated from them by Okeanos and Acheron, guarded by the relentless god himself, the inexorable doorkeeper. Only a fabled hero like Odysseus may for once, perhaps, reach the entrance of that gloomy kingdom alive: the souls themselves, once they have crossed the river, never come back—so the soul of Patroklos assures his friend. How do they get there? The implication seems to be that on leaving the body the soul passes away, unwilling and complaining of its fate, but, nevertheless, unresisting, to Hades; and after the destruction of the body by fire, disappears for ever into the depths of Erebos. It was only a [9] later poet who, in giving the final touches to the Odyssey, introduced Hermes, the “Guide of the Dead”. Whether this is an invention of the poet’s, or, as appears more likely, it is borrowed from the ancient folk-belief of some remote corner of Greece, in the completely rounded circle of Homeric belief at any rate it is an innovation and an important one. Doubt has arisen, it appears, whether indeed all the souls must of necessity pass away into the Unseen; and they are provided with a divine guide who by his mysteriously compelling summons (Od. xxiv, 1) and the power of his magic wand constrains them to follow him.[10]
Down in the murky underworld they now float unconscious, or, at most, with a twilight half-consciousness, wailing in a shrill diminutive voice, helpless, indifferent. Of course, flesh, bones, and sinews,[11] the midriff, the seat of all the faculties of mind and will—these are all gone for ever. They were attached to the once-visible partner of the psyche, and that has been destroyed. To speak of an “immortal life” of these souls, as scholars both ancient and modern have done, is incorrect. They can hardly be said to live even, any more than the image does that is reflected in the mirror; and that they prolong to eternity their shadowy image-existence—where in Homer do we ever find this said? The psyche may survive its visible companion, but it is helpless without it. Is it possible to believe that a realistically imaginative, materially minded people like the Greeks would have regarded as immortal a creature incapable (once the funeral is over) of requiring or receiving further nourishment—either in religious cult or otherwise?
The daylight world of Homer is thus freed from spectres of the night (for even in dreams the psyche is seen no more after the body is burnt); from those intangible and ghostly essences at whose unearthly activity the superstitious of every age tremble. The living are no longer troubled by the dead. The world is governed by the gods alone; not pale and ghostly phantoms, but palpable and fully materialized figures, working powerfully everywhere, and dwelling on the clear mountain tops: “and brightness gleams around them.” No daimonic powers can compare with the gods or can avail against them; and night does not set free the departed souls of the dead. The reader starts involuntarily and begins to suspect the influence of another age, when in a part of Book XX of the Odyssey, added by a later hand, he reads how shortly before the destruction of the suitors the clairvoyant soothsayer beholds in hall and forecourt the soul-phantoms (eidôla) [10] floating in multitudes and hurrying down to the darkness under the earth: “the sun was darkened in the heaven and a thick mist came over all.” The later poet has been very successful in suggesting the terror awakened by a foreboding of tragedy; but such terror in the face of the doings of the spirit world is entirely un-Homeric.