An Irish precursor of Dante

by Charles Stuart Boswell

To Dante, Virgil appeared as the sacer vates in every sense of the term. As a poet, he towered above all other masters of the craft with whom Dante was acquainted; the testimony of ages had concurred in pronouncing him to be the repository and the exponent of the wisdom and learning of the ancient world, the only secular wisdom and learning to which the Middle Ages could turn for instruction and guidance. His fourth Eclogue had led the Church to acclaim him as one of those pagan seers to whom, jointly with the Sibyls, a share in the preparation for the Gospel had been committed by Divine appointment, while the sixth Æneid directly associated him with the Sibyls themselves; finally, his great poem expressed the very spirit of that Roman Empire, of which the theory at least constituted the basis and framework of the ecclesiastical and civil polity of Christendom.

However, the task which Dante had set himself was nothing less, according to his own affirmation,[49] than to expound the scheme of Divine Providence with respect to ‘man, in so far as by his merit or demerit, by virtue of freewill, he is liable to remunerative or punitive Justice’;[50] and by the moving picture of ‘the condition of souls after death,’[51] ‘to withdraw those living in the present life from the state of misery, and to conduct them unto the state of bliss.’[52] Having no desire to innovate upon the accepted beliefs, but rather to expound them in their utmost completeness, and in accordance with the fulness of knowledge, he naturally, and necessarily, availed himself of the materials preserved in Christian legend and popular tradition. These materials, in great measure, were the product of a fusion in the primitive Church of the speculations of the Hellenistic schools with an abundant heritage of analogous conceptions, which had been bequeathed to it by the earlier dispensation.

Long before the Christian era, a gradual process of accretion had been going on within the Jewish Church. In the days of their freedom, the people of Israel had addicted themselves but little to speculations concerning the Otherworld; during the captivity, however, they had come into contact with the richer mythology of the conquering nations, and after the return they fell under the influence of the various schools of philosophy, whose teaching, coloured with a theosophic tinge of continually increasing depth, permeated Syria in common with all other lands in which the Hellenistic culture prevailed. These various influences combined to produce a more spiritual type of religion, and a more elaborate eschatology, than had originally entered into the national faith of Israel.

The legend of a Vision of the Otherworld, in the East as in Hellas, had gradually developed from the most primitive beginnings, the first appearance of it occurring at a very early stage of popular tradition. The sacred books of Assyria, which themselves embodied much of the mythology of the earlier Accadian race, record the descent into Hades of the goddess Ishtâr, in quest of the waters of life, and of the national hero Gisdubar, who, like Odysseus and Æneas, had gone thither seeking counsel from the shades of his ancestors. The abodes of the dead are approached through seven successive gates, guarded by monsters, and at each sits a porter who strips the souls that enter of some part of their raiment, until, after passing the last gate, they enter the world of shades as naked as when they came into the world they have just left. Gisdubar, who had been conveyed to the regions of the dead by a ferry, wherein we see the prototype of Charon’s boat, was met on his arrival by monsters, between man and scorpion in shape, who directed him to the abode of the blest, situate ‘at the mouth of the rivers.’ He accordingly reached a grove by the sea-shore, at the estuary of a river, which was the Waters of Death. The trees in this grove were laden with precious stones, and guarded by two maidens, who shut the door against Gisdubar, because he bore the marks of the Divine wrath upon him. The Chaldean Elysium is described as a mountain lying beneath a sky of silver, and bearing crops without need of tillage. Here the souls of heroes and great men dwell for ever, reclining on couches, and drinking the waters of life.[53] These waters are represented in the story of the descent of Ishtâr as proceeding from under a golden throne, set in the midst of Hades, whereon sat the Spirits of Earth. In the grove of Eridu stood a Tree of Life, which appears to have been a World Tree, like Yggdrasil, and at the same time to have possessed the property of restoring life and strength to the individual. This tree was guarded by cherubim, whose heads were like the heads of hawks or eagles. From this Elysium a way led to Arali, the abode of the dead in general.

That abode is described as ‘a gloomy realm beneath the earth, wherein the spirits of the dead flit about in darkness, with dust and mud for their food and drink.’[54] No hint is there of reward or punishment; the same dreary lot awaits the evil and the good alike so soon as they have quitted the light of day. The only attempt at a differential treatment is found in that aristocratic conception of Elysium which provides a place there for heroes and great men alone; a conception which the ancient inhabitants of Chaldæa shared with many races of very different type and origin, including several of the peoples of Central America and Polynesia, and, apparently, the early Aryans of Europe. In fact, the whole Chaldæan theory of the future life is very rudimentary, notwithstanding the great proficiency in several departments of culture to which the Accadian and Assyrian races had attained.

The Median conquest of Assyria and Babylon introduced the Hebrew exiles to the Zoroastrian religion, with its mythology richer than any which the Semitic or Pre-Semitic races had evolved, and taught them an eschatology more elaborate than their own. The Avesta inculcated an ethic of high morality, and taught a very systematic theory of rewards and punishments in the future life. The experiences of the soul after death are described with great minuteness and copiousness of detail.

For three nights after death the soul sits by the head of the body, and all this time, if a righteous soul, experiences the consciousness of a delight as great as any that the whole living world together are capable of enjoying. At the end of this time it becomes aware of a sweet-scented wind blowing from the south, and feels a pleasant sense of being borne into a place of fragrant trees and verdure. The evil soul, on the contrary, experiences a corresponding amount of misery during its vigil, at the close of which it is assailed by a foul wind from the north. Its vigil ended, every soul, good or bad, had to cross the narrow Chinvât Bridge (cinvata peretush, the ‘Accountant’s Bridge’), where good and evil spirits struggled for possession of it, as did the angels and devils for the soul of Goethe’s Faust, and as Michael and Satan contended for Moses, according to the tradition referred to in the Book of Jude (ver. 9). On reaching the bridge head, the soul of ‘good thoughts, good deeds, good words, and good religion’ was met by a lovely maiden, who was his own conscience. By her he was conducted to the place of Judgment,[55] and there a book was opened wherein had been kept a record of all the good and evil he had wrought in life. Upon his righteousness being admitted, he was received with acclamation by the celestial powers, and a place was allotted to him among their golden seats.[56] The Avestan Elysium is described as a holy mountain, its summit clothed with everlasting light, whither ‘come neither night nor darkness, no cold wind and no hot wind, no deathful sickness, no uncleanness made by the Daêvas [demons], and the clouds cannot reach up to it.’ At the foot of the mountain was a vast sea, a mar del essere, in the midst of which grew the White Haôma (Indian Soma), the Tree of Life. ‘The waters stand there boiling, boiling up in the heart of the sea Pûitika, and when cleansed therein they run back from the sea Pûitika to the tree boura-kasha, towards the well-watered tree, whereon grow the seeds of my plants of every kind.’[57] A godlike bird sits on that tree; when he flies off a thousand branches grow out of it, and when he alights upon it he breaks off a thousand branches.[58] Of this mystical bird, the Bundehesh, one of the later of the sacred books, says, ‘The bird Karshipta dwells in the heavens; were he living on the earth, he would be the king of birds. He brought the Religion into the Var of Yima, and recites the Avesta in the language of birds.’[59] With this we may compare the angel described in Rev. xiv. 6 as an angel di Dio, flying ‘in the midst of Heaven, bearing the everlasting Gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth.’

Distinct from the Elysium of the Gods, and from the abode of the dead, is Yima’s Heaven of Light, a Vara, or hortus conclusus, which is a reduplication of the realm over which he presided in the Golden Age, before this world was created.[60] The Vara was constructed by ‘the fair Yima, the good shepherd,’ at the command of ‘the Maker, Ahura Mazda,’ in view of the destruction that was to come upon the material world, which had become corrupt, so that he might preserve therein the seeds of men and all other living beings, of plants, ‘and of red blazing fires,’ in order that the earth might be replenished. Within this Vara Yima made a reservoir, the banks of which furnished an unfailing supply of food, and were the haunt of birds. To this happy region, as we have seen, the mystical bird Karshipta brought the Avesta, and preached it to the denizens, whose life was one of perpetual mirth and gladness, exempt from heat and cold, sickness, old age, and death; ‘and there [was] no hump-backed, none bulged forward, there; no impotent, no lunatic; no one malicious, no liar; no one spiteful, none jealous; no one with decayed tooth, no leprous to be pent up, nor any of the brands wherewith Angra Mainya stamps the bodies of mortals.’[61]