§ 4
Wherever a cultus of this kind, making its aim and object the evocation of ecstatic raptures, has taken root—whether in whole races of men or in religious communities—there we find in close alliance with it, whether as cause or effect or both, a peculiarly vital belief in the life and power of the soul of man after its separation from the body. Our comparative glance over the analogous phenomena of other lands has shown us that the exalted worship offered to “Dionysos” among the Thracians was only a single variety of a method, familiar to more than half the human race, of getting into touch with the divine by a religious “enthousiasmos”. We therefore expect to find among the Thracians a specially strong and well-developed belief in the life of the “soul”. And in fact we find Herodotos telling us of a Thracian tribe, the Getai, whose belief “made men immortal”.[62] They had only one god, Zalmoxis by name.[63] To this god, who dwelt in a cavernous mountain, all the dead of their race, they believed, would one day be gathered and have immortal life.[64] The same belief was held by other Thracian tribes, too.[65] This creed seems to have had in view the “transplantation”[66] of the dead to a blessed life in the hereafter. But, it would seem, this transplantation was not perhaps for ever. We hear of the belief that the dead would “return”[67] from the other world; and that this idea existed among the Getai is implied (though the narrator does not clearly understand this) by the absurd pragmatizing fable which Herodotos got from the Greek settlers on the Hellespont and the Pontos.[68] In this story (as often in later accounts too) Zalmoxis is actually a slave and pupil of Pythagoras of Samos. Whoever invented this fairy-tale was led to it by observing the close relationship between the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul and the Thracian belief. In the same way later observers of the same fact reversed the positions and made Pythagoras the pupil of the Thracian.[69] In any case the fact cannot to be doubted that in Thrace people thought they had found again the special doctrine of Pythagoras as to the transmigration of souls. The belief in the “return” of the soul must be interpreted as meaning that the souls of the dead return to life in new bodies and resume their life on earth, to this extent being [264] “immortal”. Only so interpreted could it have been held for a moment without coming into conflict with obvious appearances. An allusion in Euripides seems to regard as Thracian such a belief in a recurrent incarnation of the soul.[70]
We should be justified in expecting to find an inner connexion between this Thracian belief in immortality, which seems to have made such an impression on our Greek informants, and the religion and “enthousiastic” worship of the same people. Nor are traces lacking of a close association of the Thracian worship of Dionysos and Thracian cult of the Souls.[71] But if we ask why the religion of the Thracian Dionysos was attended by a belief in the independent, indestructible life of the soul, a life not confined to the period of its sojourn in the body which at present envelopes it, the answer must be sought not in the nature of the god to whom the cult was offered (that nature being, in fact, insufficiently known to us) but in the nature of the cult itself. The object of that cult—we might almost say its special task—was to exalt its worshippers to a state of “ekstasis” in which their “souls” should be forcibly delivered from the normal circle of their human and circumscribed being, and raised as pure spirits to communion with the god and his company of spirits. The true “Bakchai”[72]—those who were really cast into a state of religious madness—found in the rapture of these orgies a new province of experience open before them: they experience things of which they could give no account in the fully conscious light of ordinary day. There can be no doubt that the experiences and visions that their “ekstasis” gave them were regarded by them as the plainest and most literally real of facts.[73] The belief in the existence and life of a second self distinct from the body and separable from it was already encouraged by the “experiences” of the separate existence and independent behaviour of that self in dreams and fainting fits.[74] How much more strongly and vividly must this belief have been confirmed for those who in the intoxication of those delirious dances had “experienced” for themselves how the soul, freed from the body, could participate in the joys and terrors of the divine existence; not indeed the whole man, body and soul together, but the soul by itself and in separation from the body—the spiritual being invisibly living within the man. The sense of its own divinity, its eternity, which had been blindingly revealed to it in “ekstasis”, might be developed by the soul into a lasting persuasion that it was indeed of a divine nature, and called to a divine life which it would enjoy for ever as soon as it was freed from the body, [265] just as it had then enjoyed it for a moment. No mere intellectual arguments could give such powerful support to a spiritualism of this kind as the personal experience itself which, even in this life supplied a foretaste of what the individual was one day to enjoy as his own for ever.
In some such way as this, the persuasion of an independent, continued existence of the soul after the death of its body was developed into a belief in the divinity and immortality of the soul. In all such cases it was almost inevitable that the naive distinction between “body” and “soul”, natural to simple-minded peoples and individuals, should harden into an opposition between the two. The descent from the heights where the ecstatic and emancipated soul enjoyed its thrilling delights was too sudden; the body could not but seem a burden and a hindrance, almost an enemy of the heaven-born soul. Disparagement of the ordinary existence of every day, a turning aside from this life—these are the natural results of such an advanced spiritualism, even though it may have no speculative basis, when it influences so profoundly the religious temperament of a people as yet untroubled by the subtleties of a scientific culture. A trace of such a depreciation of the earthly life of mankind in comparison with the joys of a free spirit-existence is to be found in what Herodotos and other narrators tell of certain Thracian tribes[75] who receive the new-born among their kinsfolk with mourning, and bury their dead with joyful acclamation, for the latter are now beyond the reach of all pain, and are living “in perfect happiness”.[76] The cheerfulness with which the Thracians faced death in battle[77] was explained by the persuasion which they held that death was only an entrance into a higher life for the soul. They were even credited with a real desire for death, for to them “dying seemed so fair”.[78]