§ 7
The practice of cremation itself will perhaps give us one last piece of evidence that there had been a time when the idea of the prolonged sojourn of the disembodied spirit in the realm of the living and its power of influencing the survivors existed among the Greeks. Homer knows of no other kind of funeral than that of fire. On a funeral pyre are burnt the bodies of king or leader with the most solemn ritual; those of the common people fallen in war are given to the flames with less ceremony; none are buried. We may well ask whence comes this custom, and what is its meaning for Greeks of the Homeric age? This means of disposing of the bodies of the dead is not by any means the most simple and obvious; it [20] is far easier to carry out, and far less expensive, to bury them in the earth. It has been suggested that the custom of cremation as observed by Persians, Germans, Slavs, and other peoples, is inherited from a nomadic period. The wandering horde has no permanent habitation in which or near which the body of the beloved dead can be buried and perpetual sustenance offered to his soul. Unless, therefore, as is the custom with some nomadic tribes, the dead body is given up to be the prey of beasts or weather, it might seem a natural idea to reduce it to ashes and carry the remains, preserved in a light jar, along with the tribe on its further journeyings.[34] Whether such practical reasonings can have had so much influence in a connexion that is generally governed entirely by fancy, and in which practical considerations are altogether scouted—I shall leave undecided. But, in any case, if we postulate a nomadic origin for the practice of burning the dead among the Greeks, we should have to go back altogether too far into the past to explain a mode of behaviour that, by no means exclusively practised in early times by the Greeks, becomes absolutely prescriptive in a period when they have long ceased to wander. The Asiatic Greeks, and in particular the Ionians, whose popular beliefs and customs are, in general outline, at least, reproduced for us in Homer, deserted one settled habitation in order to found another. Cremation then must have been so permanently established among them that it never entered their heads to seek any other method of disposing of their dead. In Homer not only the Greeks before Troy and Elpenor, far away from home, are burnt when they die; Eëtion, too, in his own home is given a funeral pyre by Achilles (Il. vi, 418). Hektor’s body is burnt in the middle of Troy and the Trojans themselves in their own native land burn their dead (Il. vii). The box or urn that holds the cremated bones of the dead is buried in a mound; the ashes of Patroklos, Achilles, Antilochos, and Aias rest on foreign soil (Od. iii, 109 ff.; xxiv, 76 ff.). It never occurs to Agamemnon that if Menelaos dies before Ilios his brother’s grave could be anywhere else than at Troy (Il. iv, 174 ff.). There is, therefore, evidently no intention on the part of the living of taking the remains of the dead with them on their return home;[35] and this cannot be the object of cremation. It will be necessary to look for some principle more in accordance with primitive modes of thought than such merely practical considerations. Jakob Grimm[36] suggested that the burning of the corpse might have been intended as an offering of the dead man to the gods. Among [21] the Greeks this could only mean the gods of the lower world; but nothing in Greek belief or ritual suggests such a grim intention.[37] The real purpose aimed at in cremation is not so far to seek. Since the destruction of the body by fire is supposed to result in the complete separation of the spirit from the land of the living,[38] it must be assumed that this result is also intended by the survivors who employ the means in question; and consequently that the complete banishment of the psyche once and for all into the other world is the real purpose and the original occasion of the practice of cremation. Isolated expressions of opinion among the nations that have practised the custom do, as a matter of fact, indicate as its object the speedy and entire separation of soul from body.[39] The exact nature of the intention varies with the state of belief about the soul. When the Indians turned from the custom of burying their dead to that of burning them, they were actuated, it appears, by the idea that the sooner and more completely the soul was freed from the body and its limitations, the more easily would it reach the Paradise of the Just.[40] Of the purifying effects of the fire implied in this conception, the Greeks knew nothing until the idea was revived in later times.[41] The Greeks of the Homeric age, innocent of any such “Kathartic” notion, thought only of the destructive powers of that element to which they entrusted the body of their dead, and of the benefit that they were conferring upon the soul in freeing it by fire from the lifeless body, thus adding their assistance to its own efforts to get free.[42] Nothing can destroy the psyche’s visible counterpart more quickly than fire. If, then, the body is burnt and the most treasured possessions of the dead man consumed along with it, no tie remains that can detain the soul any longer in the world of the living.
Cremation, therefore, is intended to benefit the dead, whose soul no longer wanders unable to find rest; but still more the living, for they will not be troubled by ghosts that are securely confined to the depths of the earth. The Greeks of Homer, accustomed by long usage to the burning of the dead, are free from all fears of haunting “ghostly” presences. But when the practice of the fire-funeral was first adopted, that which was to be guarded against in the future by the destruction of the body with fire must have been a real cause of fear.[43] The souls that were so anxiously relegated to the other world of the Unseen must have been feared as awesome inhabitants of this world. And so, from whatever source it may have come to them,[44] the custom of cremation gives firm ground for [22] supposing that at some period of their history the belief in the power and activity of the spirits of the dead and their influence upon the living—a subject of fear rather than reverence—must have been prevalent amongst the Greeks; even though only a few scattered hints still bear witness to such beliefs in the Homeric poems.