‘On it the wise, who had known Brahma, ascend to the dwellings of Svarga, when they have received their dismissal.’[99] So sings a poet.
Swarga is the Bright Land (svar, to shine), i.e. the Home of the Sun. The names of the two guardian dogs, too, are interesting. They are the sons of that Saramâ whom we have already seen sent by Indra to recover his lost cattle, whose name signifies the breeze of morning. Saramâ’s two sons, the dogs of Yama, being so closely connected with the god of the under-world—as Saramâ is with Indra the sun-god—might be guessed as the winds of evening or, more vaguely, the evening, as Saramâ is the morning. They are so; and by their name of Sârameyas, are even more closely related to Hermes than Saramâ was.[100] We now know why to Hermes was allotted the office of Psychopomp, or leader of the shades to the realm of Hades—or at least we partly know; for we see that he is the same with the two dogs of Yama in the Indian myth. But they are also connected by name with another much more infernal being, Cerberus. Their individual names were Cerbura[101] the spotted, and Syama the black. Thus the identity of nature is confirmed by the identity of name.
Death and Sleep are twin-brothers, and we need not be surprised to find the Sârameyas, or rather a god Sârameyas, addressed as a sort of god of sleep, a divine hound, the protector of the sleeping household, as we do find in a very beautiful poem of the Rig-Vedas.[102]
‘Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house; oh, thou who takest all shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend.
Bay at the robber, Sârameyas, bay at the thief; why bayest thou at the singer of Indra? why art thou angry with me? sleep, Sârameyas.
The mother sleeps, the father sleeps, the dog sleeps, the clan-father[103] sleeps, the whole clan sleeps; sleep thou, Sârameyas.
Those who sleep by the cattle, those who sleep by the wain, the women who lie on the couches, the sweet-scented ones, all these we bring to slumber.’
How these verses breathe of the fragrant air of early pastoral life! In their names, again, of ‘black’ and ‘spotted’ it is very probable that the dogs typified two appearances of night—black or starry.
The heavenward journey.
And yet we must remember that Hermes is not a god of night, or sleep, but strictly and properly of the wind, and that his name, as that of Sârameyas, bears this meaning in its construction. The god who bore away the souls to the other world, however connected with the night, ‘the proper time for dying,’ must have been originally the wind. And in this we see an exquisite appropriateness. The soul is, in its original and literal meaning, the breath[104]—‘the spirit does but mean the breath.’ What more natural, therefore, than that the spirit should be carried away by the wind-god? This was peculiarly an Aryan idea. Yet let it not be laid to the Aryans’ charge, as though their theories of the soul and future life were less spiritual than those of other nations: quite the contrary was the case. So far as they abandoned the notion of the existence of the body in another state and transferred the future to the soul, their ideas became higher, and their pictures of the other world more amplified. But how, it may be asked, did the Aryans pass to their more spiritual conception of the soul? The more external causes of this progress it is worth while briefly to trace.
The sun, it has been said, acted powerfully upon men’s minds in pointing the hopes of futurity. And in sketching the sun-myth which lay concealed in the story of the life of Heracles, we noticed one feature which suggests thoughts about a not yet mentioned element in the funeral rites of the Aryans. The fiery setting of the sun would itself suggest a fiery funeral, and pre-eminently so to a race who seem to have been addicted more than any other to this form of interment. Balder, the Northern sun-god, likewise receives such a funeral, and this more even than the death of Heracles exemplifies the double significance of the sun’s westering course. For he sails away upon a burning ship. When, therefore, this fire-burial was thoroughly established in custom as the most heroic sort of end, it is not likely that men would longer rely upon their belief that the body continued in an after-life. The thought of the dead man living in his grave or travelling thence to regions below must, or should, by the consistent be definitely abandoned. In place of it, a theory of the vital faculty residing in the breath, which almost amounts to a soul distinct from the body, is accepted. Or, if the doubting brethren still require some visible representation of this vital power, the smoke[105] of the funeral pyre may typify the ascending soul. Nay, it would appear as though inanimate things likewise had some such essence, which by the fire could be separated from their material form. For what would formerly have been placed with the dead in the grave is now placed upon the pyre. In the funeral of Patroclus (Il. xxiii.) we have a complete picture of these reformed rites, which seems to be applicable to all the Aryan folk; nor surely could we wish for anything more striking and impressive. The fat oxen and sheep are slain before the pyre, and with the fat from their bodies and with honey the corpse is liberally anointed. Then twelve captives are sacrificed to the manes of the hero; they and his twelve favourite dogs are burnt with him upon the pile. We soon see the reason for the anointing of the corpse with fat, and taking so much pains that it should be thoroughly consumed. It was necessary for the peace of the shade that his body should be thoroughly burned; for the funeral ceremony was looked upon as the inevitable portal to Hades; without it the ghost still lingered upon earth unable to cross the Stygian stream. So afterwards, when the pile will not burn, Achilles prays to the North and the West Winds and pours libations to them that they may come and consummate the funeral rite. All night as the flame springs up Achilles stands beside it, calling upon the name of his friend and watering the ground with libations from a golden cup. Toward morning the flame sinks down; and then the two winds, according to the beautiful language of mythology, return homeward across the Thracian sea.
All the Aryan nationalities practised cremation in some form or other, or had practised it; most only gave it up upon the introduction of Christianity. The time is too remote, therefore, to say when this form of interment was in truth a novelty; and the fact that the bronze age in Europe is, as distinguished from that of stone, a corpse-burning age, is one of the reasons which urge us to the conclusion that the bronze-using invaders were of the Aryan family.[106] The Indians, owing to their excessive reverence for Agni the fire-god, adhered to the practice most faithfully; though the very same reason (namely, their regard for the purity of fire) made the reformed Iranian religion utterly repudiate it—a fact which might seem strange did we not know how Zoroastrianism was sometimes governed by a spirit of opposition to the older faith.[107] Among the Norsemen about the time of the introduction of Christianity into Scandinavia, Burn? or Bury? became a test-question, and a constant cause of dispute between the rival creeds.
Other world of the Norsemen.