§ 3
The souls of the departed show their power and the fact that they are still alive more particularly in the effect that they have on this life and on the living. For the purposes of the Cult of Souls they are regarded as confined to the region of the inhabited earth; they continue in the grave or near it, for a time or permanently, and can therefore be reached by the offerings or the prayers of their living relatives. There can be no doubt that at this time men still believed, as they had done since the earliest times, in a kindly relationship between the family and its departed members, an exchange in which offerings were made at the grave by the living and blessings vouchsafed by the Unseen. It is true, however, that we only have imperfect records of such calm and comfortable family belief in the survival of the departed and of the part they continue to play in the daily life of their descendants.
But there is a more sinister variety of intercourse with the souls or spirits of the dead. They sometimes appear unsought to the living; they can be compelled by the force of magic to use their powers in the service of the living. Both these possibilities apply more particularly to those unquiet souls whom fate or their own hands have deprived of life violently and before their time; to those who have not been consigned to the peace of the grave by ceremonious burial.[84] The enlightened of the time do indeed refuse to believe in ghosts and haunting spirits of the dead that wander without rest about the place of their tragic fate, and make their presence disagreeably felt by the living.[85] But the populace, even in such enlightened days, gave the fullest credence to stories in which the existence of a spirit-world seemed to reveal its sinister reality, trespassing at times upon the world of the living. Regular folk-tales of spectral apparitions, vagrant ghosts of unfortunate souls, vampire-like spirits of the grave,[86] are preserved to us in some numbers—chiefly such as appealed to a perverted philosophy, the insaniens sapientia of an outworn age, as seeming to confirm its fancies of an invisible world between heaven and earth. In Lucian’s Lover of Lies the grey-beard [534] philosophers entertain each other in portentous seriousness with such communications from the spirit world.[87] Plutarch himself is quite seriously convinced of the reality of some ghostly appearances.[88] Philosophy, which at this time was going back to Plato, found in its system of demonology a means of making such old wives’ tales intelligible and credible to itself.
Finally, the time arrives when the violent and arbitrary interference with the unseen world—sorcery and spirit-raising—becomes a part of orthodox philosophy. The popular imagination of the Greeks did not have to wait for instruction from their barbarian neighbours, who had reduced the irrational to a system, before they could believe in the summoning of spirits from the deep. Magic in this sense was of extreme antiquity in Greece.[89] But in the fusion and intermixture of Greeks with barbarians which marked the Hellenistic age similar and cognate superstitions from all the corners of the earth met together and acquired strength from their union. It was foreign sources rather than Greek which chiefly contributed to swell the turbid and noxious stream of sorceries and spirit-raisings, the practical application of an irrational theory of the nature and being of the soul in separation from the body. The lofty heaven of the old Greek gods was beginning to grow dim before the troubled vision of this later age; more and more their place was taken by a mob of idols and an obscure rabble of lesser devils. In this chaotic medley of Greek and barbarian demonology the companies of unquiet souls and ghosts of the dead easily found a place. The ghost was no longer an alien when the Gods themselves had become ghostly. When both Gods and spirits have to answer to the spells of the sorcerer the souls of the dead are seldom left in peace.[90] We possess some relics of the art of spirit-raising in the Græco-Egyptian magic books; and we can now see with our eyes specimens which illustrate the practical outcome of this delusion in the magic charms and exorcisms that were scratched on tablets of lead or gold and placed in the graves—as the natural abode of the spirits which were to be compelled—where they have been found in considerable quantities in modern times. Among the sinister influences that are thus conjured to do the work of vengeance, punishment, or destruction upon the conjurer’s enemy, the unquiet souls of the dead are also regularly mentioned. To them is attributed the power and the will to intervene with malevolence and obstruction in the life of men, no less than to the other spiritual [535] powers of heaven and hell in company with whom they are summoned.[91]