§ 3
And yet the poet ventures to go beyond Homer in one important point. What he hints rather than actually says of the condition of things in Hades conflicts in no single point with the conventional Homeric view; but it is an innovation to suggest that this condition of things can even for the briefest moment be interrupted. The blood drunk by the souls gives them back for a moment their consciousness; their remembrance of the upper world returns to them. Their senses must then all the while have been not dead but sleeping. There can be no doubt that the poet for whom this supposition is indispensable to his story did not thereby intend to formulate an entirely new doctrine. But in order to add to his poetic effect, he was led to include in his story some touches which, meaningless within the circle of his own beliefs, pointed elsewhere, and, indeed, backward, to older, quite differently moulded beliefs, and to the usages founded upon them. He makes Odysseus, following the advice of Kirke, dig a grave at the entrance of Hades in which to pour out a solemn drink-offering to “all the dead”, consisting first of all in a mixture of milk and honey, then wine and water, over which white meal is finely sprinkled. Next he slays a ram and a black ewe, bending their heads downwards into the grave.[71] [37] Then the bodies of the animals are burnt, and round the blood collect all the souls, who flutter about it, kept at a distance by Odysseus’ sword[72] till Teiresias has first drunk. Here the drink-offerings constitute undoubtedly a sacrificial offering devoted to the dead and poured out for their satisfaction. The poet indeed does not think of the slaughtered animals as a sacrifice; the tasting of the blood is simply intended to restore to the souls their consciousness; in the case of Teiresias, who retains his senses, the gift of prophetic clairvoyance. But this, we can see clearly, is a fiction of the poet’s: what he here describes is in every detail a sacrifice to the dead, such as we so often find described as such in accounts from later times. The scent of the blood calls up the spirits; their satiation with blood (αἱμακουρία) is the essential purpose of such offerings; and these are what the poet’s imagination dimly recalls as models. Nothing in this picture has been invented. Neither, on the other hand, it is quite clear, has he altered his sacrificial ceremony to make it fit in with novel ideas that were beginning to gain ground; ideas that ascribed a more vital existence to the souls of the dead. For here, too, just as in the case of the offerings to the dead described in the funeral of Patroklos, the poet’s manner of conceiving the life of the dead is not such as could give support to new and more vigorous cult ceremonies. His conception tends rather to contradict the ceremonies that he describes. In fact, what we have here, too, is a “fossilized” and no longer intelligible vestige of a practice that was once rooted in belief—a relic deprived of its original meaning and adapted by the poet to the special purposes of his narrative. The sacrificial ritual used to attract the souls on this occasion strikingly resembles the ritual which was used in later times to conjure up the souls of the dead at those places which were supposed to give entrance to the ghostly world below the earth. It is also not impossible that, even in the time of the poet of the “Journey to Hades”, in some remote corners of Greek lands such calling-up of the dead was still practised as a relic of former belief. But, supposing that the poet had some information of such local cults of the dead, and modelled his story on them,[73] that only makes it the more remarkable that he effaces all trace of the original meaning of his ritual, and in adherence to the strict Homeric doctrine on the point, banishes all thought that the souls may possibly continue in the neighbourhood of the living and can thence be conjured up into the light of day.[74] He knows only of one kingdom of the Dead far off in the dim West, beyond the bounds of sea [38] and ocean, where the legendary hero of romance can, indeed, reach its gateway, but where alone he can have communication with the souls of the dead. The House of Hades never allows its inhabitants to pass out.
And yet all this is hopelessly contradicted by the votive offerings that the poet, by what can only be called an oversight, makes Odysseus promise to all the dead, and particularly to Teiresias, upon his return home (Od. x, 521–6; xi, 29–33). Of what use would it be to the dead to receive the offering of a “barren cow”,[75] of “treasures” burnt upon the funeral pyre; or how could Teiresias enjoy the slaughtering of a black sheep far away in Ithaca—when they are all confined to Erebos and could not taste the offerings made to them? This is the most remarkable and important of all vestiges of an ancient worship of the dead. It proves indubitably that in pre-Homeric times the belief prevailed that even after the funeral of the body the soul is not eternally banished to the inaccessible land of shadows, but is able to approach the sacrificer and to enjoy the sacrifices offered to it, just as much as the gods can. A single obscure allusion in the Iliad[76] suggests what is here much more clearly and almost naïvely revealed—namely that even at the time when the Homeric view of the nothingness of the souls for ever parted from their bodies reigned supreme, the custom of making offerings to the dead after the funeral was over (though in exceptional circumstances only, and not as a regularly recurring performance) had not been entirely forgotten.