The other world of the Aryans.
Among all the Aryan peoples the Greeks seem to have turned their thoughts farthest away from the contemplation of the grave; and though the voice of wonder and imagination could not quite be silent upon so important a question, Hades and the kingdom of Hades filled a disproportionately small space in their creed. They shrank from images of Death, and adorned their tombs or cinerary urns with wreaths of flowers and figures of the dancing Hours: it is doubtful if the god Thanatos (Death) has ever been pictured by Greek art.[96] And from what they have left on record concerning Hades and the realms of death, it is evident that they regarded it chiefly from its merely negative side, in that aspect which corresponds most exactly to the notion of a dark subterraneous kingdom, and not to that of a journey to some other distant land. The etymology of their mythical King of Souls corresponds, too, with the same notions. Hades means nothing else than A-eidês, the unseen. And when it was said that the dead had gone to Hades, all that was literally meant was that it had gone to the unseen place. But later on, the place became personified into the grim deity whom we know in Greek mythology, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, he to whose share fell, in the partition of the world, the land of perpetual night. The underworld pictured by Homer is just of that voiceless, sightless character which accords with the name of Hades. Even the great heroes lose almost their identity, and all the joy and interest they had in life. To ‘wander mid shadows a shadow, and wail by impassable streams,’ is henceforward their occupation.
Not that the Greek had no idea of another world of the more heavenly sort; ideas obtained as a joint inheritance with their brother nations; only their thoughts and their poetry do not often centre round such pictures. Their Elysian fields are a western sun’s home, just after the pattern of the Egyptian; and so are their Islands of the Blest, where, according to one tradition, the just Rhadamanthus had been transported when he fled from the power of his brother Minôs.[97] Only, observe, there is this difference between these Paradises and the Egyptian house of Osiris—the latter was reached across the sandy desert, the former are separated by the ocean from the abode of men. These are the Heavens of the Greek mythology; while the realm of Hades—or later on the realm Hades—might by contrast be called their Hell. Let us look a little nearer at this heaven-picture.
The River of Death.
The Caspian Sea—or by whatever name we call the great mediterranean sea which lay before them—would be naturally, almost inevitably, considered by the Aryans from their home in Bactria to bound the habitable world. The region beyond its borders would be a twilight-land like the land of Apap (the desert-king) of the Egyptians; and still farther away would lie the bright region of the sun’s proper home. And these ideas would be both literal—cosmological conceptions, as we should call them—and figurative, or at least mythical, referring to the future state of the soul. The beautiful expression of the Hebrew for that twilight western region, ‘the valley of the shadow of death,’ might be used for the Apap-land in its figurative significance, and not the less justly because there creeps in here the other notion of death as of a descending to the land of shades, for the two ideas of the western heaven and the subterraneous hell were never utterly separated, but, among the Aryans at any rate, constantly acted and reacted upon one another. So with the Greeks we have as a cosmological conception—or let us say, more simply, a part of their world-theory—the encircling river Oceanus, with the dim Cimmerian land beyond; and we have the Eylsian fields and the islands of the blest for the most happy dead. And then by a natural transfer of ideas the bounding river becomes the river of death—Styx and Lethê—and is placed below the earth in the region of death. Even the Elysian fields at last suffer the same change: they too pass below the earth.
The Indian religion, too, has its river of death. ‘On the fearful road to Yama’s door,’ says a hymn, ‘is the terrible stream Vaitaranî, in order to cross which I sacrifice a black cow.’[98]
This river of death must be somehow crossed. The Greeks, we know, had their grim ferryman.
‘Portitor has horrendus aquas et flumina servat
Terribili squalore Charon: cui plurima mento
Canities inculta jacet; stant lumina flamma,’ etc.
The Indians crossed their river of death by a bridge, which was guarded by two dogs, not less terrible to evildoers than Charon and Cerberus.
‘A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by men, a path I know of.