THE MYTHS OF THE SEA AND THE RIVER OF DEATH.
At the present time, when theologians and those who have most aptitude for such discussions are arguing “in thoughts more elevate” of the soul’s future life, and its rewards and punishments therein, the pre-historic student is tempted to let his thoughts wander backwards over a different aspect of the same subject, in an effort to link again the chain of belief concerning heaven and hell, which joins this present with a long-forgotten past. The difficulty which we feel in uniting ourselves in thought with past ages, arises surely more often from the imperfection of our sympathies than from the deficiency of our positive knowledge. So many questions which were once new have long been settled, so many experiments have been tried, such experiences have been lived through since then; it is so impossible that the earlier conditions of life and society should return; and we cannot bring ourselves to make the effort of imagination necessary to place us in harmony with bygone times. But there are some few questions which seem as far from settlement now as they ever were; one of these is the question concerning the destiny of man after death, the character of his journey into that undiscovered country, and the sort of life he will lead when there.
“A riddle which one shrinks
To challenge from the scornful sphinx.”
Some would dissuade us from the continuance of these (so they say) unfruitful speculations; but it is very certain that man must change his nature before they will lose their fascination for him; and until he does so, he cannot read without sympathy the guesses which past generations of men have made towards the solution of the same problems. For them, indeed, these solutions have lost their interest, as ours will soon do for us. Whatever lot that new condition may hold in store, eternal pleasure or eternal pain, they have tried it now; whatever scene the dark curtain hides, they have passed behind it. This is very certain: as that we soon must. But so long as we remain here upon this upper earth, we must be something above or below humanity if we refuse ever to let our thoughts wander toward the changes and chances of another life.
Not, indeed, that questions of this sort have ever had for the majority of men in one age, or for the collective mass of human kind, an all-absorbing interest. If we choose to look closely into the matter, and to test men’s opinion as it is displayed in their actions (the only real opinion), we shall at first perhaps be struck by the slight belief which they possess in a future state. For it is slight compared to their “notional assent,” that which they think they believe concerning it. With the majority, faith upon this point is at best but shadowy, of an otiose character suitable for soothing the lots of others, and sometimes, alas! called into requisition to relieve us from the stings of conscience on account of the pain which our own misconduct or neglect has introduced therein. And as it is with us, so, save under exceptional conditions, it has always been with men in the full vigour and enjoyment of life. There have been times when one aspect of the future—its terror—has been realized with an intensity, and has exercised an influence upon life and conduct, such as is unknown in our days. But these times have not been ordinary ones, and we are apt, I think, even to over-estimate the force of faith during the Middle Ages. That term, “dark ages,” overrides our fancy; “we can never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping.”[5] But, then, neither have the most light-hearted and sceptical of people been able to shut their eyes utterly to the warnings of death. We are wont to think of the Greeks as of just such a light-hearted, and in a fashion sceptical, temperament, and to contrast the spirit of Hellas with the spirit of mediæval Europe. Scarcely any thought of death, or of judgment after death, disturbs the serenity of Greek art, such as it has come down to us. Thanatos is not to be found;[6] even the tombs are adorned with representations of war and of the chase, or with figures of the dancing Hours. And yet Greek art was not without its darker side. It had, like mediæval poetry, its Dante—Polygnotus, namely—who adorned the pilgrims’ house at Delphi with frescoes representing the judgment and the tortures of the damned,—a Greek Campo Santo. He would have given us a different impression of the Greek mind in presence of the fact of mortality, and shown us how easily we are led to exaggerate the divergence in thought between different nations and different times.
So we find as far back as we can test the belief of men, certain theories touching the fate of the soul after death, which represent, in the germ at least, the prevalent opinions of our own day; and out of some of which these opinions have sprung. First among these, probably in point of time, stands the purely sceptical theory which takes its rise from the earliest efforts of language to give expression to the unseen. Casting about for a name for the essential part of man, the life or soul of him, language finds at first that it has no suitable word, and then supplies its want by using the breath—the ψυχη, spiritus—in this sense. Like the vital spark itself, the breath is seen to depart when the man dies. Whither has it gone? The purely negative, the purely sceptical answer would be, “It has disappeared.” The answer actually given in most religious creeds is, “It has gone to the unseen place,” or the concealed place; as the Greeks said, to Hades (Ἀ-ίδης); or, as our Northern ancestors said, to Hel.[7] Thus, out of pure negation we have the beginning of a myth: the spirit becomes something definite, and the place it has gone to is partly realized. The unseen place is underground, gained by a dark valley which stretches there from the upper earth. Enough of the old belief remains to keep this home of the dead itself dark and shadowy and lifeless. “The senseless dead, the simulacra of mortals,” as Homer says. And we remember how even a hero like Achilles “would rather be on earth and serve for hire to a man of mean estate, than rule a king among the dead.”
The same thought is expressed by the Hebrew poet,[8]
“Sheol shall not praise thee, Jehovah,
The dead shall not celebrate thee;
They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth;
The living, the living, shall praise thee, as I do this day.”
No people have held up this destructive side of death, this negative theory of a future, with sharper outline than the Greeks and Hebrews. What a contrast to the teaching of modern religions is that line, “They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth!” Other people have found themselves unable to rest at this point; they have endowed their place with a personality, but, still strongly impressed with its horrors, this personality is grim and fearful. Even with the Greeks, Hades is a person, not a place; with the Teutons, Hel has gone through the same transformation: and a thousand other images of horror to be met with in different creeds, devouring dragons, dogs who, like Cerberus, threaten those who are journeying to the underground kingdom, can be shown by their names to have sprung from merely negative images of death, the unseen, the coverer, the concealer, the cave of night.
In contrast therefore with all these myths stand those which, after death, send the soul upon a journey to some paradise, believed generally to lie in the west. If these first are myths of hell, the second series may be fairly described as myths of heaven. Nor can it be certainly proved that the more cheerful view of the other world is of a later growth in time than the first which seems so primitive. We see indications of it in the interments of old stone-age grave mounds. While among historical people the older Hebrews are the exponents of the gloomier Sheol, the most hopeful picture of the soul’s future finds expression in the ritual service of the Egyptians. There we have a complete history of the dead man’s journey across the Nile and through the twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, until at last it reaches the home of the sun. And, to come nearer home, among all those peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the Indo-European family of nations, we shall find the evidences of a double belief, the belief in death as of a dim underground place or as a devouring monster, and the contrasting faith in death as a journey undertaken to reach a new country where everything is better and happier than upon earth.
This is the myth of an earthly paradise, not, like our heaven, disconnected altogether from the world, but a distant land lying somewhere in the west, and forming part of the imaginary geography of those times: so the belief is, more than others, a realistic one, mingling with the daily experience of men and influencing deeply their daily life. The necessary portal of death is even sometimes lost sight of altogether, as when in the Middle Ages we find men undertaking more than one expedition in search of the earthly paradise, and when we find the current belief that in certain weathers was visible from the west coast of Ireland that happy island to which St. Brandon and his disciples had been carried when they left this world. For this reason, though the notion of the western paradise is essentially the same for all the human race, its local colouring constantly varies, changing with the geographical position of each people: if they change their homes and advance, as they will probably do, towards the land of promise, it moves away before them, as the rainbow moves from us. The Egyptians had their myth of the soul’s journey, drawing all its distinctive features from the special character of their land, chiefly from the commanding influence which a great neighbouring desert exercised upon their imagination. But for our ancestors, the parents of the Indo-European races, the place of the desert was supplied by the sea.
The most probable conjecture has fixed the cradle of our race in that corner of land which lies westward the steep range of the Beloot Tagh mountains, an off-shoot of the Himalayas, and northward from the high barren land of Cabul. This country, the ancient Bactriana, is the most habitable district to be found anywhere in Central Asia. There the hills stretch out in gentle slopes towards the west, and enclose fertile valleys, whose innumerable streams, fed by the mountains east and south, all go to swell the waters of the Oxus, now called the Jihon. Farther north lies another fruitful country, watered by the Jaxartes, separated from the first by a range of hills much inferior to those which divide both lands from Yarkand and Cashgar on the east, and from Cabul on the south. Both the great rivers empty themselves into the Sea of Aral, between which and the Caspian, sharply cutting off the fertile country from that sea, stretches the Khiva desert, a barren land affording a scanty nourishment to the herds of wandering Turkic tribes. There is good reason to believe, however, that this desert did not always exist, but that in times not extraordinarily remote the Caspian Sea, joined to the Sea of Aral, extended over a much larger area than it at present covers: it is known even now to be sinking steadily within its banks. With such a contraction of the great sea the desert would grow by a double process, by the laying bare its sandy bed and by the withdrawal of a neighbouring supply of moisture from the dry land. So it may well have been that the fruitful territory wherein in remotest ages were settled our Aryan ancestors, stretched so far west as to border upon a large inland Asiatic sea. It has even been conjectured that the turning of so much fertile land into desert was the proximate cause of those migrations which sent the greater part of the Aryan races westward—to people, at last, all the countries of Europe. The root which is common to the European languages for the names of the sea, means, in the Indian and Iranian languages, a desert: how can we account for this fact better than by supposing that after the European nations had left their early home, their brethren, who remained behind and who long afterwards separated into the people of India and Persia, came to know as a desert the district which their fathers had once known as the sea?
Thus, these ancient Aryans stood with their backs toward the mountains and their faces toward the sea. All their prospect, all their future, seemed to be that way; when their migrations began they were undertaken in that direction—towards the west. Most important of all in the formation of a creed, their sun-god, or sun-hero,[9] was seen by many of them quenching his beams in the waters; the home of the sun is always likewise the home of souls. What more natural, nay, what so necessary, as that the Aryan paradise should lie westward beyond the sea? It has been said just now that the Indian word for desert corresponds etymologically with the European word for sea: that word must have been, in the old Aryan, something like mara, from which we get the Persian mĕru, desert, the Latin mare, the Teutonic (German and English) meer. But from identically the same root we likewise get the Sanksrit and the Zend (old Persian) mara, death, the Latin mors, the old Norse mordh, the German mord, our murder, all signifying originally the same thing.[10] What, then, does this imply? The word which the old Aryans used for sea they used likewise for death. How would this be possible, unless this, their first sea, were likewise the sea of death, the necessary stage upon the road to paradise?
It might have been expected that such a connection of ideas would have endowed the sea with an entirely terrible character, precluding any attempt to explore its solitudes, or the lands which lay beyond. It has been already said that as a matter of experience we find that the earthly paradise often comes to be realized so vividly that men lose the fear which should attach to any attempt at finding it. They were not religious, heavenward-looking men who, in Mr. Morris’s poem, set out in quest of the happy land; and no doubt the bard has been guided by a true instinct, and that of all those mediæval mariners who were lost in their search after St. Brandon’s isle, none knew that they had found what they were seeking—Death. The Greeks eagerly cherished delusions of the same kind; and long before they had summoned up courage sufficient to navigate the Mediterranean they had invented the myths of their western islands of the blest, to which yellow-haired Rhadamanthus was taken when expelled from Crete by his brother Minos, or of those gardens kept by the daughters of the west,[11] where decay and death could not enter. It is likely enough that for the Aryans their western sea did long retain its more fearful meaning, a death; but that they at last gained courage to look upon it only as the road[12] to the land of which they had long been dreaming.
How much more weighty a position the sea takes in men’s thoughts than is warranted by their real familiarity with it! Into the mass of sedentary lives—the vast majority—it enters but seldom as an experience, provided a man live only a few miles inland. And yet of all countries which possess a sea-board, how full is the literature of reference to this one phenomenon of physical nature! The sun and the moon, and all the heavenly bodies, the familiar sights and sounds of land, are the property of all; and yet allusions to these are not more common in literature than allusions to the sea: one might fancy that man was amphibious, with a power of actually living upon, and not only by, the water. Charles Lamb acutely penetrates the cause of a certain disappointment we all feel at the sight of the sea for the first time. We go with the expectation of seeing all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the earth. All that we have gathered from narratives of wandering seamen, what we have gained from true voyages, and what we cherish as credulously from romances and poetry, come crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation. Thus we are imbued with thoughts of the sea before we have had any sight of it ourselves, merely by the sea’s great influence acting through the total experience of humanity. “We think of the great deep and of those who go down unto it: of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells and the mariner—
“For many a day and many a dreadful night,
Incessant labouring round the stormy cape;
of fatal rocks and the ‘still-vexed Bermoothes;’ of great whirlpools and the water-spout; of sunken ships and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths.” We must not narrow the influence of the sea in mythology within the compass of man’s mere experience of it. Few among the Aryans lived by the Caspian shore; but the Sea of Death appears in one form or another in the religious belief of all the Aryan people. The tradition of the sea, its real wonders, and greater fancied terrors, must have passed from one to another, from the few who lived within sight and sound of the waters to others quite beyond its horizon, to whom it was not visible even as a faint silvery line.
It is natural that, in early myths, no accurate distinction should have been drawn between the sea and rivers with which the Aryans were familiar. The Caspian was imagined a broad river bounding the habitable earth, the origin of the Oceanus of the Greeks; and the sea of death is, in its earliest form, a river of death. All after-forms of mythical geography, moreover, such as we find among Indians, Greeks, or Norsemen, are but graftings upon this central idea. As the Aryans changed their homes, the new experiences gradually blotted out the old. The Greek transferred his thoughts about the Caspian to the Mediterranean, and when his geography extended, the Oceanus was pushed farther and farther away, until the later Euhemerist geographers came to confound it with the Atlantic. Thus it is but by accident that we give to ocean the meaning which it now bears. The first ocean was the mythical river which flowed round the earth, and the real physical forerunner of the myth was not the Atlantic or any of our oceans, but the Caspian Sea as it stretched before the eyes of the ancient Aryan folk.
The Norseman, especially the Icelander,[13] lived so close to the ocean, that the older myth was forgotten beside the aspect of nature so familiar to him. In the middle of his earth stood a high mountain, on which was a strong city, Asgaard, the house of the Æsir or gods. Below Asgaard lay the green and fruitful earth, man’s home. Then outside flowed or lay the great mid-earth ocean, just like the Greek ocean in character, despite all differences of climate and country. At other times the mid-earth sea is personified as a devouring monster, Jörmungandr (“great monster”), the name of the mid-gaard serpent who lies at the bottom of the encircling sea, shaking the earth when he moves.[14] Beyond, lies the ice-bound land of giants—Jötunheim, giant’s home—dark like the Cimmerian land, and peopled with beings as weird and terrible as the Cyclops or the Gorgons.
Gradually the myths of the river of death and the sea of death from being one became two. The second was confined to those nations who lived upon the sea-shore, and lost in great part its early shape; but neither Indians, Greeks, nor Norsemen forgot the myth of the mortal river. The Indian retained it singly; for when his turn for wandering came, he passed over the eastern mountains and reached a land where no sea was any longer to be seen or heard of. In the mythical language of the Vedas, the mortal river is called Vaiterani; it lies “across the dreadful path to the house of Yama,”[15] the god of Hell.
From the belief in the river of death no doubt arose also the practice of committing the dead to the care of the sacred Ganges; for just as the Hindus kindle a funeral fire in the boat which bears the dead down this visible stream of death, so used the Norsemen to place their hero’s body in his ship, and then having lighted it send it drifting out seawards with the tide. In conjunction with that thought of the other world which placed the final resting-place in a dark kingdom underground, the river is seen in Greek mythology transferred to Hades; but it is multiplied into four, which have all grown out of one, inasmuch as they were feigned to flow out of the upper-earth river Oceanus:—
“Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate;
Sad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.”
These pictures are not quite in character with the Hellenic thought about the future state. But it is certain that the more gloomy images of death are preserved in connection with the rivers of Hades, with Hades itself, and all that it contains. So it is with the northern Styx, Gjöll,[16] as it is called in the Eddas. This, too, is an underground stream lying, like the Indian, on the road to the gates of death.
Thus a separation arises between the sea and the river myths. If we wish for something more cheerful than the pictures of Styx and Gjöll and Vaiterani, we must look, for the tales of an earthly paradise which sprang up when men had lost their first terror of the sea, but had not lost the beliefs to which their earliest thoughts about that sea gave birth.
Such beliefs are those which lie enshrined in the Odyssey. This poem is full of images of death, but they are not self-conscious ones, only mythical expressions first applied to the passage of the soul from life, and then made literal and physical by their transference to the unexplored western sea. What the Caspian may have been to the ancient Aryan, such was the Mediterranean to the Greek. The Ægean was his home-like water; there he might pass from island to island without losing sight of land; and he soon learnt to trust himself to its care, and to know its currents and its winds. Long before he had navigated beyond Cape Malea, all the coasts of the Ægean had become parts of his familiar world: outside this was the region of the unknown. The Iliad tells us what the early Greeks thought about the first. Myths may have mingled with the legend of the fall of Troy, but the story in Homer is essentially realistic, rationalistic even. The very powers of the immortals and their doings seem petty and limited. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is the product of the Greek imagination working in fields unturned by experience, free from any guiding impulse of knowledge; and here step in those monstrous shapes and strange adventures which differ altogether from the probable events of the Iliad. We feel at once that we are in a new world, a world not so much of supernatural beings as of magic; lands of glamour and illusion, most like the giant-land of the Norsemen; for we are getting towards the twilight regions of the earth and the borders of Hades.
Some writers have attempted to explain the Odyssey as nothing more than a myth of the sun’s course through heaven. But surely there is too much solidity about the story, too thorough an atmosphere of belief around it, to suit a tale relating such airy unrealities as those. The Greeks who first sung the ballads must have been thinking of a real journey upon this solid earth. But it is easy to see how many images and notions which had first been applied only to the sun-god would creep into such a history as that of Odysseus. Undoubtedly the sun-myth had first pointed out the home of the dead as lying in the west; and nothing is more natural than that a people whose thoughts and hopes carried them in the track of the wandering sun should, when they came to construct an epos of travel, make the imaginary journey lie the same way. They would interweave in the story such truths—or such sailors’ yarns—as Phœnician mariners or adventurous Greeks brought home from the distant waters, with many images which had been first made of the sun’s heavenly voyage, and others which had been first applied to death. Their geography would, indeed, be mythical; for they could have no accurate notions of the lands which they spoke of; but it would not be without a kernel of reality. Justin and Augustine may look upon the garden of the Hesperides or the garden of Alcinoüs as a reminiscence of Paradise; Strabo may assign them an exact position on the coast of Libya; and both may be right. The myth of the two gardens—the Hebrew and the Greek paradises—sprang up in obedience to an identical faculty of belief, and therefore the two stories are in origin the same. But each myth supported itself upon so much of reality as it could lay hold of: and it is likely enough that the famous golden apples which Hercules was sent to fetch owed their origin to the first oranges brought by Phœnician merchantmen to Greece.
Besides some such slender thread of reality, the adventures of Odysseus are built upon what men’s imagination told them might lie in the western seas. Now in reality there was only one thing which at the bottom of their hearts they believed actually did lie there—namely, death; and beyond that, the home of the departed. Therefore their stories of adventure in the Mediterranean do all, upon a minute inspection, resolve themselves into a variety of mythical ways of describing death; and upon this as a dark background the varied colours of the tale are painted. It need take away no jot of our pleasure in the brilliant picture to acknowledge this. Nay, it gather adds to it, for behind the graceful air of the poem, sung as a poem only, we hear a deeper note telling of the passionate, obstinate questionings of futurity which belonged not more to Greece three thousand years ago than they now belong to us.
Any one acquainted with the genesis of myth would at once be disposed to see in the Odyssey the combination of two different legends; for one series of adventures comes as a tale told during the course of the second. We first see our hero on the island of Calypso, the sea-nymph; and when Hermes has brought from the gods the command for his release, he is carried thence by storms to the land of the Phæaceans. There Nausicaa finds him and brings him to her father Alcinoüs, by whom he is hospitably entertained, and at last sent back to Ithaca, his home. This forms one complete legend, the simplest and probably the first, because into it is woven the account of Odysseus’ earlier adventures. In the halls of Alcinoüs the wanderer tells what happened to him before he reached the cave of Calypso, and in this narrative we follow him to the island of the Lotus-eaters, to the island of the Cyclops, thence to the house of Circe, and from there to the very borders of hell itself. And we guess that we have here got hold of a later amplified legend built up out of the earlier myth. We find just such changes as this in Norse mythology; a story told in a few lines by the elder Edda, is expanded into an elaborate history in the younger. Looking again more closely at the Odyssey, we discover that many circumstances in the expanded tale bear close resemblance to one or other of the adventures in the shorter category. Take, for instance, the life with Calypso and with Circe. Both Calypso and Circe are nymphs, enchantresses; each lives alone upon her island: with each Odysseus passes a term of years, living with her as her husband, longing all the while to return to his own wife and his own home, and yet unable to do so: from each Hermes is the deliverer. What if Calypso and Circe both repeat in reality the same myth; and what if Odysseus’ other great adventure, the voyage to the Phæaceans, have likewise its counterpart in the expanded story? The question of the real identity or difference of the two stories can only be decided when we have seen how much significance there is in the points of their apparent likeness.
Who is Calypso? Her name bespeaks her nature not ambiguously. It is from καλύπτειν, to cover or conceal. She is the shrouder, or the shrouded place, answering exactly therefore to Hel, which, as has before been said, comes from the verb helja, “to hide.” How, then, can Calypso be anything else than death, as she dwells there in her cave, by the shores of the sea? How can Odysseus’ life with her, his sleep in her cave, be anything else than an image of dying? The gods have determined that the hero shall not remain in this mortal sleep for ever; so Hermes is sent to command Calypso to let Odysseus go. Hermes is the god whose mission it is to lead souls down to the realm of Hades—the psychopomp, as in this office he is called. But sometimes he may come upon an opposite message, to restore men to life; the staff which closes the eyes of men may likewise open them when asleep. On such a task he comes—
“Wind-like beneath, the immortal golden sandals
Bare up his flight o’er the limitless earth and the sea;
And in his hand that magic wand he carried,
Wherewith the eyes of men he closes in slumber,
Or wakens from sleeping.”
He comes like the breath of morning awakening the world, to rouse our hero from the embrace of death; and the whole scene is beautifully attuned to an image of returning life. Therefore the interference of Hermes between Odysseus and Calypso is full of significance. We accordingly meet the same episode in the Circe tale. That this last is a later widening of the first story appears from many things; chiefly in this, that there is more moral in the history; for the truest myth is content to follow the actual workings of nature, without attempting to adorn a story with extraneous incident, or to convert its simplicity into the complexities of allegory. That turning the companions into swine was a punishment for luxury—that points the moral; the original Circe, we may be sure, only touched her lovers with her sleepy magic rod. It was the same wand with the “slepy yerde”[17] of Hermes, and she used it not wantonly but only because all whom she embraces must fall into the unwakeful slumber. If Circe’s name does not reveal her nature so nakedly as Calypso’s does, this is but consistent with the fact of her later creation. Nevertheless, we easily recognise by it death in one of its many types—a ravenous animal or bird, a hawk or wolf.[18]
When Odysseus is freed from the fatal embrace of Calypso, he is not at once restored to the common earth, but from his descent into hell goes heavenwards, or at least to the happy islands of the blessed. The land of the Phæaceans, Scheria, can scarcely be anything else than this Paradise, to which, according to one myth, Rhadamanthus fled from his brother Minos when he reigned in Crete. The Phæaceans, too, have had dealings with “yellow-haired Rhadamanthus,” whom they carried back in their swift barques to Eubœa. The name of their island is merely land, shore;[19] perhaps at first only the farther coast of the sea of death.
“Far away do we live at the end of the watery plain,
Nor before now have we ever had dealings with other mortals;
But now there comes some luckless wanderer hither.
Him it is right that we help; for all men, fellows and strangers,
Come from Zeus; in his sight the smallest gift is pleasing.”[20]
They live close to the gods, and in familiar converse with them. It is a place where decay and death cannot enter. In the gardens of Alcinoüs flowers and fruit do not grow old and disappear; winter does not succeed to summer; all is one continuous round of blossoming and bearing fruit; in one part of the garden the trees are all abloom; in another they are heavy with clusters. There it is, as in that wizard’s tower of Middle-Age legend it only seemed to be—
“That from one window men beheld the spring,
And from another saw the summer glow,
And from a third the fruited vines arow.”[21]
In name the Phæaceans appear as beings of the twilight—φαίαξ, strengthened from φαιός, dusky, dim. Their most wondrous possessions are their ships, which know the thoughts of men, and sail swifter than a bird or than thought. “No pilots have they, no rudders, no oarsmen, which other ships have, for they themselves know the thoughts and minds of men. The rich fields they know, and the cities among all men, and swiftly pass over the crests of the sea, shrouded in mist and gloom.”[22] Yet the Phæaceans themselves live remote from human habitation, unused to strangers. It would seem, therefore, that the ships travel alone on their dark voyages. For what purpose? It is not difficult to guess. Their part is to carry the souls of dead men over to the land of Paradise.[23] We can imagine them sailing in every human sea; calling at every port, familiar with every city, though in their shroud of darkness they are unseen by men. They know all the rich lands, for every land has its tribute to pay to the ships of death. They are the exact counterparts of the “grim ferryman which poets write of;” only that the last plies his business in the ancient underground Hades, while the Phæacean mariners are really believed to be inhabitants of the upper earth; albeit they can pass from this life to the other.
Their business with Odysseus is to bring him back to the common world of Greece—to beloved Ithaca. He has passed to the cave of Hel, and emerged from it to visit the land of Paradise; now he returns, that his adventures may be sung in the homes of Greece. How could men ever tell tales of that strange country, if it really were a shore from which no traveller returned? Accordingly, this traveller is laid to sleep in the black barque of the Phæaceans, “a sweet sleep, unwakeful, nearest like to death; and as arose the one brightest star to herald the morning, the sea-troubled ship touched the shore.”[24] Thus end the adventures of the wanderer; and, as far as regards the belief concerning the sea of death, this is all his adventures can tell us. His doings with the Cyclops, with the Lotus-eaters, have their relationship with the same belief; but they scarcely bring in any new elements; they only change the method of their treatment and symbolize them in a new way. Hades is more distinctly treated of in the second series; and this is enough to show us that the mortal character of the whole journey has been lost sight of more completely than in the first myths; so we noticed before, that the significance of Calypso’s name is half forgotten when her part is assigned to Circe. The journey to Hades from Circe’s island, Ææa, tallies exactly with the journey to Scheria from the island of Calypso; only, for the island of the blest is substituted the underground home of souls; and when Odysseus addresses there his companion, Elpenor, whom he had but a little while ago left dead on Circe’s island, and asks him how he could have come under the dark west more quickly on foot than Odysseus did sailing in a black ship, we see that the meaning of the ocean journey is forgotten, and that a sort of confusion has arisen between the Hades under men’s feet, to which the souls of the dead descend, and the Hades at the end of the journey lying far away. This part, then, is not significant of the Greek belief concerning an earthly Paradise. The learned Welcker, who first showed how these Phæacean ships were the carriers of souls,[25] wishes also to connect the myth with some non-Hellenic source. He supposes it to have been gathered from the Teutons. But surely we are not obliged to go so far, unless we are prepared to consider Charon non-Hellenic also; and no one can really pretend that. For the Phæacean myth is in many ways truer than the myth of Charon and Styx. Styx is but the earth-river (or sea), Oceanus, transferred to beneath the earth; and the story of the ferryman is a compromise between the two creeds—that of the under-world and that of the western paradise beyond sea; while the myth of the Phæaceans is a simple expression of the last. The connection which we find between Greek and German in these beliefs is derivable only from their common ancestry—not from a contact in later days. Certainly these legends have their close counterparts in Norse mythology; the two series only require to be stripped of local colouring, and some unessential details, to display very clearly their common brotherhood. How curious, for instance, is it to see that Calypso corresponds literally in name with the Northern goddess of the dead, Hel! Another myth, the story of the burning of Baldur, repeats the same images of death which we trace in the legend of Odysseus.
Baldur is quite evidently the sun-god. Less of a hero, more of a god, than Odysseus, he is nevertheless mortal—as, indeed, all the Norse gods are—and falls pierced by the hand of his own brother, Hödur. Then his corpse is placed upon his ship, Hringhorn, and sent out upon this, as on a pyre, drifting into the ocean. We can imagine how to the Norsemen upon their stormy seas, the image of the sun dying red upon the western waters recalled the story of Baldur’s burning ship. The Viking imitated his god in this, and when his time came ordered his funeral fire to be lighted in like manner upon a ship and himself to be set sailing, as Baldur was. After this we are brought in the myth to the underground kingdom of Hel, and there the goddess entertains Baldur, as Calypso entertained Odysseus, making ready her best to do him honour, and seating him in the highest place in her hall. Then the gods take counsel how Baldur is to be brought back again, and one of them, Hermödr,[26] the messenger, like Hermes, is sent to beg Hel to let Baldur out of Helheim. Fate and death are more powerful in northern lands than they are in Greece. The gods cannot command that this Calypso should let her prisoner go; and alas! they do not even obtain an answer to their prayer save on conditions which they are unable to fulfil. Hel will set Baldur free, if all things, both living and dead, weep for him; but if one thing refuses to weep, then he must remain in the under-world. Thereupon the gods sent messengers over the whole earth, commanding all things, living and lifeless, to weep Baldur out of Helheim; all things freely complied with the request, both men and stones, and trees and metals; until as the messengers were returning, deeming that their mission was accomplished, they met an old witch sitting in a cave, and she refused to weep, saying, “Let Hel keep her own.”[27] This old witch is Calypso or Circe in another guise. Her name is Thokk, that is, darkness (dökkr).
The Teutonic people had many myths and stories about the carrying the dead across the sea. We have signalized the belief in such a passage as the origin of those countless mediæval legends of the earthly Paradise: doubtless it is the parent of the modern superstition that ghosts will not cross the running water. Side by side with the story of the Phæaceans we may place the superstition which Procopius records touching our own island. The Byzantine historian of Justinian seems to have had but vague ideas of the position of Britain, which, by the tide of Teutonic invasion across the Rhine, had long been cut off from intercourse with the Empire. These Easterns were careless and ignorant of the remote West. So Procopius speaks of Britannia as lying opposite to Spain; and then he mentions another island, Brittia—evidently in reality our island—which faces the northern coast of Gaul, and of this he tells the following strange story:—There is, he declares, an island called Brittia, which lies in the Northern Seas. It is separated into two divisions by a wall;[28] and on one side of this wall the air is healthy and the land fertile and pleasant, and all things most apt for human habitation. But on the other side the air is so noxious that no one can breathe in it for an hour: it is given up to serpents and poisonous animals and plants. Yet not entirely; for this is the home of the dead. Then he goes on to relate how the fishermen who inhabit the coast opposite this part of Brittia have to perform the strange duty of carrying the souls across the strait. Each does his office in rotation; when the man’s night has come he is awoke by a knocking at his door, but when he opens it, sees no one. He goes down to the shore, and finds there strange vessels, which, though empty to mortal eyes, lie deep in the water as though weighed down by some freight. Stepping in, each fisherman takes his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the vessels are wafted in one night across the channel, a distance which, with oar and sail, they could usually scarce accomplish in eight. Arrived at the opposite side—our coast—the fishermen heard names called over and voices answering in rota, and they felt the boats becoming light. Then, when all the ghosts were landed, they were carried back to Gaul. We may picture them returning to the habitable world in the first glow of morning, or with the one bright morning star which shone on Odysseus landing at Ithaca.
So much for the myth of the sea, or river, of death. A most important change was wrought in belief when the custom of burning the dead was introduced. It would seem that our Aryan ancestors were the beginners of this rite. Whence it arose we cannot say; but if the God of Fire was a prominent divinity, the thought of committing the dead into his charge seems a simple and natural one. Among the Aryan people the only deep traces of fire-worship are to be seen in the Vedic and Iranian religions,[29] while the fire-burial survived in all: but the former may well have held a prominent place in their older creed. Or—and this is far from unlikely—the custom of fire-burial may have arisen out of the sun myth, just as the belief in the soul’s journey after death was suggested by watching the sun’s journey to the west. The two great fire-funerals mentioned in Greek and Teutonic mythology are the funerals of sun-gods. Heracles burning on Mount Œta, on the western coast of the Ægean, may have been first thought of by Greeks who saw the sun setting in fire over that sea; and Baldur’s bale on the ship Hringhorn is evidently the Norse edition of the same story, his blazing ship the blaze in the sky, as the sun sinks into the water. Burning the dead never seems to have been a universal practice; rather a special honour paid to kings and heroes. But then we must remember that immortality itself was not, in ancient belief, granted to all men indiscriminately, only to the greatest.
We see at once that with the use of fire-burial many of the old beliefs had to be given up; all those, for instance, which depended upon the preservation of the bodily remains. Of old time men had buried treasures with the corpse in the expectation that they would be of some kind of use to it; the body itself was at first imagined to descend to the under-world or to travel the western journey to the home of the sun. But now the body is visibly consumed upon the funeral pile, where, too, are placed, by a curious survival of old custom, the precious things which would formerly have been buried with it in the ground. The body and these things have been consumed, are gone; where have they gone? Have they perished utterly, and is there nothing more left than the earliest belief of an Ἀ-ίδης—a nowhere; is nothing true of all those myths of the soul passing away to a home of bliss? Instead of giving up this faith, the Aryan people have only spiritualized it, robbed it of the too literal and earthly clothing which in earlier times it wore. The thought which had once identified the life with the breath comes again into force, or, if some material representation is still wished for, we have the smoke of the funeral pyre, which rises heavenwards like an ascending soul. In this spirit we find in long after years, in the description of the funeral fire of Beowulf the Goth, it is said that the soul of the hero wand to wolcum, “curled to the clouds,” imaging the smoke which was curling up from his pyre. There is even a curious analogy between the words for smoke and soul in the Aryan languages, showing how closely the two ideas were once allied. From a primitive root dhu, which means to shake or blow, we get both the Sanskrit root dhuma, smoke, and the Greek θυμός, the immaterial part of man, his thought or soul. Θυμός is not a mere abstraction like our word mind, but that which could live when the body was killed or wasted to death by disease.[30]
Evidently, therefore, even the inanimate things, the weapons and treasures which are burnt with the dead, survive in a land of essences for the use of the liberated soul. To the question, Where does man’s essence go to when it rises from the funeral fire? the answer, if the wish alone urged the thought, would be “To the gods.” But with the majority of burying people the belief in future union with the gods was not strongly insisted upon. The islands of the blest are certainly not to be confounded with Olympus; although the Phæaceans claim to live very near the gods.[31] Yet with the use of burning, and among the Aryan people, the hope gains a measure of strength. The gods of the Aryan were, before everything, gods of the air. As the soul and the smoke mounted upwards, “curled to the clouds,” the belief of its having gone to join the gods—chief god, Dyâus, the air—was impressed more vividly upon his mind. And as the notion of the western journey to the home of the sun was not abandoned, a natural compromise would be to send the soul upwards to the path of the sun, and make its voyage a voyage in heaven, led by the sun or by the wind. But his path still lay westward; the home of the dead ancestors lay beyond the western boundary; there was still an Oceanus to be crossed, and a dark Cimmerian land to be passed through.
The heavenly path taken by the soul becomes, in the eye of mortals, a bridge spanning the celestial arch, and carrying them over the river of death; and men would soon begin asking themselves where lay this heavenly road. Night is necessarily associated with thoughts of death—“Death, and his brother Sleep”—and of the other world. The heavens wear a more awful aspect than by day. The sun has forsaken us, and is himself buried beneath the earth; and a million dwellers in the upper regions, who were before unseen, now appear to sight—the stars, who in so many mythologies are associated with souls. Among the stars we see a bright, yet misty, bow bent overhead: can this be other than the destined bridge of souls? The ancient Indians called this road gods’-path, because besides that it was the way for souls to God, it was also the way from gods to men. They also called it the cow-path—gôpatha, meaning possibly cloud-path—from which it is likely we derive our name for it, “the Milky-way.” The Low-German name for the Milky-way is kau-pat—i.e., kuh-pfad, cow-path. But in their hymns the Indians oftenest speak of it as the path of Yama, the way to the house of Yama, the god of the dead:—
“A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by men, a path I know of:
“On it the wise who have known Brahma ascend to the world Svarga, when they have received their dismissal,” sings a Sanskrit poet.[32]
Another (R. V. i. 38. 5) prays the Maruts, the gods of the wind, not to let him wander on the path of Yama, or, when he does so—that is, when his time shall come—to keep him that he fall not into the hands of Nirrtis, the Queen of Naraka (Tartarus). In another place we find as guardians of the bridge two dogs, the dogs of Yama, and the dead man is committed to their care:—
“Give him, O king Yama, to the two dogs, the watchers, the four-eyed guardians of the path, guardians of men: grant him safety and freedom from pain.”
Thus stands out in its complete development the myth of the Bridge of Souls: a narrow path spanning the arch of heaven, passing over the dwelling of Nirrtis, the Queen of Tartarus (perhaps not clearly distinguishable from the river of death), and reaching at last the country of the wise Pitris, the “fathers” of the tribe, who have gone to heaven before, and who since their death have not ceased to keep watch over the descendants of their race. This road is guarded by two dogs, the dogs of Yama, both wardens of the bridge and likewise psychopomps, or leaders of the soul up the strait road.
This was essentially an Indian myth—or perhaps an Indian and Iranian—and took the place of the myth of the sea journey, as it was conceived by Greeks and Germans. The Indians and Iranians had never a sea of death, so they could not have such ferrymen as the Phæaceans, or legends such as the voyages of Odysseus and the burning of Baldur. In the place of them, and with their mortal river, they adopted this Bridge of Souls. The guardians are manifold in their nature; for their names show them related both to Cerberus, who guards Hades, and to Hermes, who leads the souls of the dead below; and, so far as we can gather from the Vedas, these dogs of Yama discharged both offices, sometimes keeping the bridge and sometimes conducting souls along it. “Give him,” says the prayer, “O Yama, to the two dogs.” No doubt their terrors were for the wicked only, and they are thus apt images of death:—
“Death comes to set thee free;
Oh, meet him cheerily
As thy true friend.”[33]
Still, as we see from their appearance, the dreadful aspect of death predominates. In like forms, as dogs or wolves, they return time out of mind in Norse mythology and in Middle-Age legend.
It has been said that this myth of the Bridge of Souls was essentially Indian and Iranian (old Persian). It is often most difficult to ascertain what were the ancient Persian beliefs: but in this case the myth has been handed down to us from the Persians through the Arabs, a people possessing of right no part or lot in its construction. It is generally acknowledged that Mohammed took from the Persians that famous bridge so vividly described in the Korân.[34] Es-Sirât is the bridge’s name. It is finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, and is, besides, guarded with thorns and briars along all its length. Nevertheless, when, at the last day, the good Muslim comes to cross it, a light will shine upon him from heaven, and he will be snatched across like lightning or like the wind; but when the wicked man or the unbeliever approaches, the light will be hidden, and, from the extreme narrowness of the bridge and likewise becoming entangled in the thorns, he will fall headlong into the abyss of fire that is beneath. This is the fragment of our old Aryan mythology which the Mohammedan has taken to himself to form an image of hell and of punishment after death. It is significant that from the Persians should have been inherited the most gloomy myth concerning the Bridge of Souls. For from the same source we (Christians) gain our fearfullest notions of the Devil.
The bridge cannot be always the Milky-way. In at least one Sanskrit hymn we learn—
“Upon it, they say, there are colours, white, and blue, and brown, and gold, and red.
“And this path Brahma knows, and he who has known Brahma shall take it; he who is pure and glorious.”
Here the singer is evidently describing the rainbow. Now in the Norse cosmology the rainbow had the same name as the Indian patha-devayano, gods’-path. The Eddas call it As-bru, the bridge of the Æsir, or gods. Its other name, Bifröst, the trembling mile, it may even have inherited from the Milky-way, for that, when we look at it, seems to be always trembling. Asbru or Bifröst, then, is the bridge whereby the gods descend to earth. One end of it reaches to the famous Urdar fount, where sit the weird sisters three—the Nornir, or fates. “Near the fountain which is under the ash stands a very fair house, out of which come three maidens, named Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld (Past, Present, Future). These maidens assign the lifetime of men, and are called Norns.”[35] To their stream the gods ride every day along Bifröst to take counsel. For in the Norse creed the gods know not the hidden things of the future, nor have power to ward them off. Fate and death, the Twilight of the Gods, lies ahead for them also, as these things lie ahead of mortals.
It is possible that a trace of the rainbow bridge is to be seen in the Greek myth of the asphodel meadows, which are a part of the infernal regions. But no other trace of the Bridge of Souls—if this be one—is to be found throughout the range of Hellenic mythology.
The Eddas have nothing to say of the Milky-way. But we have clear evidence that it was considered by the German people a path for the dead. Indeed, in the scanty legends which survive, we can trace the characteristic features of the Indian myth of the bridge guarded by Yama’s dogs, and the souls led along it by the wind-god. The wind-god of the north is the father of gods, none less than Odin himself; and this is why Odin is described as riding with his Valkyriur to the battle-fields, to choose from the dead the heroes who shall go with him to Valhöll, the hall of the chosen. It is because, as the wind-god, he collects the breath of the departed. Odin and Freyja (Air and Earth) divide the slain, says one legend—that is, the bodies go to earth, the breath goes to heaven. Now, in the Middle Ages, when Odin-worship had been overthrown, the gods of Asgaard descended to Helheim; from being deities they were turned into fiends. Odin still pursued his office as leader of the souls; but now he was huntsman of hell. One of the commonest appearances of this fiend, therefore, is as a huntsman—called the Wild Huntsman. He is heard by the peasants of the wild mountain districts at this day. He is companioned by two dogs, and his chase goes on along the Milky-way all the year through, save during the twelve nights which follow Christmas. During that time he hunts on earth, and the peasant will do well to keep his door well-barred at night. If he does not, one of the hell-hounds will rush in and lie down in the ashes of the hearth. No power will move him during the ensuing year, and for all that time there will be trouble in the house. When the hunt comes round again he will rise from his couch and rush forth, wildly howling, to join his master.
A gentler legend is that which we find preserved in a charming poem of the Swede, Torpelius, called “The Winter Street”—another of the names for the Milky-way. With this, in the form in which it has been rendered into English,[36] we may end our list of legends connected with the Sea of Death or the Bridge of Souls. The story is of two lovers:—
“Her name Salami was, his Zulamyth;
And each so loved, each other loved. Thus runs the tender myth:
“That once on earth they lived, and, loving there,
Were wrenched apart by night, and sorrow, and despair;
And when death came at last, with white wings given,
Condemned to live apart, each reached a separate heaven.
“Yet loving still upon the azure height,
Across unmeasured ways of splendour, gleaming bright,
With worlds on worlds that spread and glowed and burned,
Each unto each, with love that knew no limit, longing turned.
“Zulamyth half consumed, until he willed
Out of his strength one night a bridge of light to build
Across the waste—and lo! from her far sun,
A bridge of light from orb to orb Salami had begun.
“A thousand years they built, still on, with faith,
Immeasurable, quenchless, so my legend saith,
Until the winter street of light—a bridge
Above heaven’s highest vault swung clear, remotest ridge from ridge.
“Fear seized the Cherubim; to God they spake—
‘See what amongst thy works, Almighty, these can make!’
God smiled, and smiling, lit the spheres with joy—
‘What in my world love builds,’ he said, ‘shall I, shall Love itself destroy?’”
C. F. Keary.