ARTICLE II.
Tartarus.
When legislators, priests and philosophers had invented the doctrine of Metempsychosis, the mystagogues and the poets took hold of it, and endeavored to spread it among the people, in consecrating it, the ones in their chants, and the others in the celebration of their mysteries. They clothed it with the charms of poetry, and presented it with magical illusions. All united to deceive the people, under the specious pretext of bettering and governing them with a surer hand. The widest field was opened to fictions; and the genius of the poets, as well as the cunning of the priests, were inexhaustible in portraying the bliss of the righteous hereafter, and the horror of the horrible prisons wherein crime was to be punished.
Each one portrayed them according to his own fancy, and added new scenes and views to the descriptions of those unknown lands; of that world of new creation, which the imagination of poets peopled with shadows, chimeras and phantoms, for the purpose of frightening the people: for rulers wrongly thought that their minds could not rise up to the abstract notions of metaphysics and morals. The Elysium and the Tartarus were more pleasing and more vividly striking to the imagination of the people: therefore darkness and light were successively presented to the gaze of those initiated to the mysteries. To the darkest night, and to frightful spectres, succeeded a bright day, whose light shone around the statue of the Deity: one could not help feeling a mysterious terror, when entering that sanctuary, where all was disposed to represent the Tartarus and the Elysium. It was in this sanctuary that the one initiated, being finally introduced, saw the picture of charming meadows, lighted by a pure sky: there he heard harmonious voices, and the majestic chants of sacred choirs. It was then that, entirely free, and rid of all evils, he joined the multitude of those initiated; and that, a crown of flowers on his head, he celebrated the holy orgies.
Thus the ancients represented here below, in their initiations, what was, they said, to happen hereafter to the souls, when they would be disengaged from their bodies; and would be liberated from the obscure prison, wherein fate had chained them by uniting them to terrestrial matter. In the mysteries of Isis, of which we hold the details from Apuleo, the candidate passed through the dark region of the empire of the dead; thence into a vast enclosure, which represented the elements; and then he was admitted into the bright region, where the brightest sun succeeded to the darkness of the night, namely, in the three worlds, the terrestrial, the elementary, and the celestial. He who had been initiated said: "I have approached the boundaries of death in treading the thresh hold of Proserpine; therefrom I have returned through the elements. Then I saw a bright light, and I found myself in the presence of the gods." This was the autopsy.
What mystagogy exhibited in the sanctuaries, poets, and even philosophers, in their fictions, publicly taught to the people: hence the descriptions of the Elysium and of the Tartarus found in Homer, Virgil and Plato, and all those given us by many systems of theology. We never had a description of the earth and of its inhabitants, a description as complete as that transmitted to us, by the ancients, about those countries of new creation, known under the names of Hell, Tartarus, and Elysium. Those men, whose geographical knowledge was so limited, have given us the minutest details of the abode of the souls beyond the grave; of the government of each one of the two empires, which form the domain of the shadows; of their habits; of their diet; of their pains and pleasures; and even of the costume of the inhabitants of these two regions. The same poetical imagination which had invented that new world, arbitrarily traced out its plan and distribution.
Socrates, in the Phædo of Plato, a work intended to prove the immortality of our soul, and the necessity of practicing virtue, speaks of the place where the souls go after death. He imagines a sort of ethereal land, superior to the one we inhabit, and situated in a sunnier region. There is nothing on our earth that can compare to the beauties of this wonderful abode. There colors are brighter, the vegetation richer; the trees, flowers and fruits are infinitely superior to those of our earth. There precious stones are so bright that those of our earth are but their shadow. This ethereal land is strewed with pearls of the purest crystal; everywhere gold and silver are dazzling. There beasts are more beautiful, and more perfectly organized than ours. There the air is the sea, and ether is the air. There seasons are so harmoniously combined, that the fortunate inhabitants are not subject to infirmities and to diseases. There the temples are inhabited by the gods themselves, who familiarly converse with men. The inmates of this delightful mansion are the only ones who see the sun, the moon, and the stars, as they truly are.
To this Socrates adds, that men, who, here below, distinguish themselves for their piety and exactitude in discharging their social duties, will be admitted in this abode of happiness when death destroys their mortal form. There all those whom philosophy has led to wisdom will dwell. Socrates concludes thus:
Then it is for us a strong inducement to study wisdom, and to practice virtue, while we are on earth. These expectations are high enough for us to risk the chances of this opinion, and not to break its charms.
This is a plain avowal of the motive of the fiction: such is the secret of nearly all legislators, and the deceitfulness of the most renowned philosophers.
The second part of the land of the dead, called Tartarus, the leaders of the people also minutely described. According to their description, this abode of the wicked presents the horrid view of precipices, caverns, and abysses, more frightful than those we see on earth. Those caverns communicate to each other in the profundities of the earth, through the medium of sinuosities vast and dark, and of subterraneous canals, in which waters flow; the ones cold, and the others warm: also in several of those canals flow torrents of fire, and in others the filthiest mire. The vastest of those caverns is in the center; and into it four main rivers ebb, to spring out again. The first is the Acheron, which forms beneath the earth a shoreless marsh, wherein the souls assemble. The second is the Pyriphlegeton, which rolls torrents of burning sulphur. The third is the Cocyte; and the fourth is the Styx.
In this horrible abode divine justice tortures the criminals. At the gate of the Tartarus the frightful Tisiphon, whose gown is reeking with blood, watches day and night. The gate is also defended by a strong tower, backed by three walls, which are surrounded by the burning waves of the Phlegeton river, that rolls huge stones on fire. There are incessantly heard the rattle of chains dragged by wretched victims; their groans; and the strokes of lashes that tear their flesh. There is seen an hydra with a hundred heads, whose mouths are ever gaping for new victims to be devoured. There a vulture is constantly feeding on the ever re-growing entrails of a criminal. Other victims carry a heavy rock to the summit of a mountain, where they must set it; but, vain are their efforts, it rolls down to the bottom of the valley. Other criminals, tied to a wheel, relentlessly revolving, are not permitted the slightest rest in their torture. Others, placed near refreshing waters, and near trees loaded with fruit, are ever devoured with unquenchable thirst and hunger. If they stoop to drink the water flies from their mouth, and a stinking mire sticks to their lips. If they lower a limb to cull a fruit, the limb slips from their hand.
Farther, fifty female victims are forced to fill up with water a cask, whose bottom is riddled. Indeed, there is no sort of torment that was not invented by legislators, mystagogues, poets, and philosophers, to frighten the people, under the false assumption of making them better; but the truth is that it was rather to keep them down in subjection. Those terrifying pictures were painted on the walls of the temple of Delphos. Those fables were repeated to infants by nurses and mothers. Thus their souls grew weak and pusillanimous, for strong and durable are the first impressions, and more especially, when the general opinion, the example of the credulity of others, the authority of philosophers, of poets, of learned Hierophants, and the sight of pompous rites, and ceremonies in the overpowering sacredness of sanctuaries; when the monuments of arts, music, statues, and pictures, in short, when all tends to insinuate in the soul, through the senses stricken with hope and terror, a great error presented as a sacred truth revealed by the gods themselves for man's bliss.
Such was the general teaching and belief of the Pagans in regard to future punishment, before the coming of Jesus Christ, and the preaching of his Gospel.
As to the Jewish nation, not the slightest vestiges of any kind of belief regarding future punishment, can be traced out, neither in the Old Testament, nor in Josephus, nor in the writings of other historians, at least before the captivity of Babylon, which took place in the year 598 before the Christian era. Afterwards the Jews divided into four sects, the Essenes, the Sadducees, the Samaritans, who denied the existence of any future punishment, and the Pharisees, who, according to the testimony of Josephus, adopted the belief of Metempsychosis, or transmigration of the souls.