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

by Erwin Rohde

§ 5

The worship of a Hero is everywhere connected with the site of his grave. That is the general rule proved in innumerable cases. That is why in the case of a more than ordinarily revered Hero, his grave as the centre of his worship is set up in some prominent and honourable place—the market-place of the city, the Prytaneion,[30] or, like the grave of Pelops in the Altis at Olympia, in the very middle of the holy precinct, in the thick of the festival crowd.[31] Or else the Hero who guarded the city and the land might have his grave in the wall of the city gate or upon the farthest border of its territory.[32] Where his grave is, there the Hero is fast bound; that is his [122] dwelling-place.[33] This idea prevails everywhere, though it may not be given such blunt expression as at Tronis, in the country of the Phocians, where the blood of the offering made to the Hero was poured down through an opening immediately into his grave mound.[34] It is implied, as a rule, in these cases that the grave contains the bones of the Hero. The bones—all that is left of his mortality—chain the Hero to his grave. Hence, when it was thought desirable to attach a Hero and his protective power to a city his bones (or what were taken for such) on the command of an oracle were brought from a foreign land and laid to rest in his native country. We possess many accounts of such transference of relics.[35] Most of them occurred in the distant past, but we also read how in the full light of history in the year 476 enlightened Athens brought over the bones of Theseus from Skyros;[36] and not until they were buried in the Theseion was Theseus properly attached to Athens.

Since the possession of the corporeal remains[37] of the Hero secured the possession of the Hero himself, the cities often protected themselves against strangers, who might remove the treasured bones, by keeping the position of the grave a secret.[38] A grave is always necessary to fix the Hero at a definite place, or, at least, an “empty tomb”, which sometimes had to do duty for a grave.[39] In such cases the Hero was perhaps thought of as bound by a spell to that place.[40] As a rule, it is the remains of his former body that hold him fast. But these remains are a part of the Hero himself; though dead (and mummified, as we are told in one case),[41] he works and acts just the same; his psyche, his invisible counterpart and double, hovers in the neighbourhood of the body and the grave.

These are all very primitive conceptions such as have, as a rule, only been preserved among peoples who have remained at a very undeveloped stage of culture.[42] When we find them in force among Greeks of post-Homeric times, we cannot really believe that they arose then for the first time, in complete contrast with the clear-sighted freedom of the men of the Homeric age. They have only re-emerged from the repressive influence of the Homeric rationalism. It would be natural to think that the same ideas that have been described as underlying the belief in Heroes were already in the minds of those prehistoric Greeks who in Mycenae and elsewhere took such care (even it seems going so far as to embalm them)[43] to preserve the bodies of their princes from destruction, and who put ornaments and utensils in their graves for future use [123] or enjoyment. It has been explained above how, in the times of which Homer’s poems give us a picture, the alteration in sentiment as well as the spread of the custom of completely destroying the bodies of the dead with fire must have weakened the belief in the confinement of the soul to this world and to the remains of the body. This belief never entirely perished. It was preserved alive, perhaps for a long time only by a few, in those places where there remained a cult attached to a grave. Such a cult would not, indeed, extend to those whose death had occurred within more recent times, but it did not allow the old-established worship of the great dead of the past to die out entirely. Over the royal graves on the citadel at Mycenae stood a sacrificial hearth,[44] which bears witness to the continuance of the ancient worship of the kings buried there. The Catalogue of Ships in Homer mentions the “grave of Aipytos”, an old Arcadian local monarch, as a landmark of the district;[45] may not the sanctity of that grave have been preserved? In many places, at any rate, graves were pointed out and honoured that belonged to Heroes who owed their existence solely to poetic fancy or were even mere personifications—abstractions of the names of places and countries whose ancestors they purported to be. In such cases the Hero-worship had become purely symbolic, and often perhaps a mere formality. But from such a fictitious ancestor-worship the cult of the graves of Heroes cannot possibly have arisen; such fictions are themselves only intelligible as copies of another and more vivid worship, of a cult of real ancestors. If no such cult had existed in actual fact before men’s eyes, it would be impossible to understand how men came to imitate ancestor-worship in the shape of such purely imaginary creatures. A copy implies the existence of a model; a symbol requires the contemporary or earlier existence of the reality symbolized. We should certainly know more of the worship of ancestors among the ancient royal families if in nearly all the Greek states monarchy had not been abolished at an early period and all traces of it suppressed. Sparta alone provides us with a solitary example of what may once have been the prevailing custom in all the seats of royal authority. When a Spartan king died his funeral was celebrated with extreme pomp. His body (which, even when he had died abroad, was embalmed and brought home to Sparta) was laid beside the other dead of his family, and honour was paid to him, in Xenophon’s words, not as a man, but as a Hero.[46] In this case, which undoubtedly represents a traditional usage handed down from remote [124] antiquity, we have the rudiments of Hero-worship as applied to the dead of a royal family. The members of noble families who, like the Eupatridai of Athens, sometimes traced their descent from a king,[47] must also have retained from ancient times the practice of ancestor-worship. As of all unofficial cults, we hear little of the cults of the old clans based on blood-relationship and connexion by marriage (γένη, πάτραι). But just as out of their combination first the village communities and then the fully organized Greek Polis grew up, so, too, the religious cults which were paid to the ancestors of these unions of kinsfolk set a pattern for the manifold social groups out of which the developed state was built up.[48]