Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

by Erwin Rohde

We are thus for the first time introduced to Heroes as beings of a higher kind, mentioned side by side with the gods, and like them to be worshipped with regularly offered sacrifice. Their cult, like that of the gods, is by implication of long standing: it does not have to be reorganized, but is merely established in the form ancestral ordinances had given it. We see at this turning-point of Greek religious development how defective our knowledge is of the history of religious ideas in primitive Greece. This is our earliest record, and it has been preserved to us by a mere accident, but it points backwards and beyond itself to a long previous history in the worship of such guardian deities of the country—of which, however, we have hardly a scrap of early evidence.[2] We should in fact, from the meagre remains of the literature that is so important from this point of view, especially the lyric poetry of the seventh and early sixth centuries, hardly have derived a suspicion of the existence of this quite un-Homeric element in the religious life of Greece.[3] When at last the stream of surviving literature begins to flow more broadly, then, indeed, the Heroes are often referred to. Pindar’s Hymns of Victory and Herodotos’ History cover the generations that lived through the Persian wars and the following fifty years. From them we can see with overwhelming distinctness how strong at that time was the belief in the existence and potency of Heroes even among men of education who had not been too much influenced by the fashionable enlightenment of the time. In the beliefs of the people, in the religious customs of countries and cities, the national Heroes have their recognized place beside the gods. The representatives of states swear by the gods and the Heroes of the country:[4] it is to the gods and Heroes of Greece that the pious attribute the victory over the Barbarians.[5] So well established, indeed, was the validity of the Greek belief in Heroes that even the Persian magi in the army of Xerxes made libation by night in the Troad to the Heroes buried there.[6] [116]

§ 2

If now we inquire into the nature and essence of this species of higher beings that was as yet unknown to, or disregarded by, the epic we get little information on the subject from direct statements as to their nature by writers of antiquity. We can, however, learn a great deal about them from what we are told of individual Heroes and more particularly from what we know of the peculiar nature of the religious worship paid to them.[7] The Heroes were worshipped with sacrifice like the gods; but these sacrifices were very different from the offerings that were made to the Olympians.[8] They differ in time, place, and character. Sacrifice was made to the gods in broad daylight, to Heroes towards evening or at night;[9] and not on raised altars, but on low, and sometimes hollow, sacrificial hearths close to the ground.[10] For them were slain animals of black colour and male sex,[11] and in sacrificing, the heads of the animals were not turned upwards towards heaven as they were when offered to the gods, but were bent down to the ground.[12] The blood of these animals was allowed to run down into the ground or into the sacrificial hearth, that the Heroes might have their “appeasement of blood”.[13] The carcass was completely burnt, for no living man might taste of it.[14] This peculiar mode of worshipping the Heroes was in strict usage described by a different name from that used of the sacrifices to the gods.[15] On special occasions a sacrificial meal of cooked food was prepared, to which the Hero was invited as a guest.[16] They are near by in the earth itself, and there is no need in their case, as for the Olympians, to send up the savour of sacrifice in smoke to heaven.

This sacrificial ritual is in those features which distinguish it from that commonly in use for the gods of Olympos precisely identical with that by which the gods who dwelt under the earth, and, later, even the souls of dead men, were honoured. This will seem quite natural if we regard the Heroes as closely related to the chthonic deities on the one hand, and to the dead on the other. In fact, they are nothing else than the spirits of dead men who now dwell beneath the earth, immortal like the gods of that underworld, and almost equal to them in power. Their real nature as the souls of great men of the past, who have died but have not been deprived of conscious existence, is made plain by another mode of doing honour to them originally belonging to them and them only—I mean the yearly repeated celebration of Funeral Games.

Athletic contests for chieftains at the funeral of a prominent [117] one of their number were known to Homer, and we have already referred to them among other relics in epic poetry of a once powerful cult of souls.[17] But Homer knew nothing of their repetition, and certainly not of an annual recurrence of such funeral celebrations.[18] Games celebrated afresh after the lapse of a definite period became known to the Greeks only when the cult of Heroes had reached its maturity. Many of these contests were connected perpetually with the yearly festivals of individual Heroes, and were intended to honour their memory.[19] Even in historical times, generally on the command of the Delphic oracle, annual contests were instituted in honour of Heroes.[20] It was the mode of worship proper to Heroes, and men realized that in holding such contests they were really repeating the funeral ceremonies of a dead man.[21] The cult of Heroes was the earliest breeding ground of the Agôn, that most characteristic feature of Greek life and school of the individualism that made the greatness of Greece. It was not unreasonable that afterwards many of the victors at the great Agônes were themselves raised by popular superstition to the number of the Heroes. The greatest Games of all, to which all Greece assembled, the Pythian, Olympian, Nemean, and Isthmian, were during the historical period, it is true, celebrated in honour of gods; but that they had been originally instituted as Funeral Games of Heroes and only subsequently transferred to higher guardianship was, at any rate, the general opinion of antiquity.[22]

§ 3

The Heroes are, then, spirits of the dead, and not a species of inferior deities or “demigods”;[23] and quite distinct again from the “daimones” known to later speculative thought and, indeed, to popular superstition. These latter are divine spirits of a lower order; but spirits which have always been exempt from death because they have never entered into the finite existence of men. The Heroes on the other hand have once been living men; from being men they have become Heroes, and that only after their death.[24] Furthermore, they have now entered upon a higher stage of existence as a special class of beings who are named by the side of gods and men.[25] In them we meet with something quite unknown to the Homeric poems—souls which after their death and separation from the body have a higher imperishable life.

But though the Heroes have once been men, it does not follow that all men become Heroes after their death. On the contrary, the Heroes, even though their number was not fixed [118] and limited, but continually admitted additions, remained an exception, a select minority which for that reason alone can be contrasted with ordinary humanity. The chief figures, the outstanding representatives of this heroic company, we may say, were those whose lifetime was fixed by legend or history in the distant past—who were in fact the ancestors of later humanity. The worship of Heroes is not, then, a cult of souls, but in a narrower sense a cult of ancestors. Even their name, as it appears, distinguishes the Heroes as men of the past. In the Iliad and the Odyssey “Hero” is the honourable title of chieftains, and also, generally, of all free men.[26] Poetry of later centuries, so far as it touched upon the events of the legendary past, continued to use the word “Hero” in this sense. But when in post-Homeric times the speaker, whether he is a poet or prose-writer, regards the matter from the point of view of contemporary life, then by “Hero”, if he is referring to a man at all, he means a man of those days when, according to the Homeric poems, this honourable title was still in use among living men—he refers in a word to men belonging to the legendary past celebrated in poetry.[27] In Hesiod’s narrative of the Five Ages of Men, the use of the word Hero is confined to the Champions of the wars at Thebes and Troy; they are called, as though by their special name, the “divine race of Heroes”.[28] For Hesiod the “Heroes” are by no means the transfigured dead of past generations.[29] He knows well enough of such transfigured dead of a still earlier past, but these he calls “Daimones”. And so, too, when in after times the name of Hero is applied to these favoured individuals who enjoy a higher life after their death, the name which in itself did not imply the higher nature of such departed spirits is evidently intended to show that the lifetime of those who had received this privilege after their death occurred in a legendary past. As these men of the distant past had been “Heroes” during their life, so, too, they must be called after their death. But the meaning of the word Hero has undergone a change, and now contains the additional notion of unending transfigured existence. The worship of the Heroes reveals itself as something quite new, a form of religious belief and cult, of which the Homeric poems at least gave no inkling. And, indeed, the conception of such transfigured ancestral souls living on in a higher state must have been a novel one, if no special word of ancient coinage could be found to express it, and a long-standing word of the epic vocabulary had to be pressed into a new sense.

Whence came this new thing? If we try to derive it from [119] a natural process of development in the Homeric view of life we shall find ourselves in the greatest perplexity when it comes to showing the connecting links between two such widely different conceptions. It would not avail us much to say that the prestige of the epic was such that those whom it had honoured in song must have appeared so glorious and distinguished among mankind that it was natural for later imagination to transform them to demigods and to worship them as such. The Homeric poems, so violently opposed to any idea of a conscious or active existence of the soul after death, could hardly have brought it about that those very champions whom it had represented as indeed dead and departed to the distant land of Hades should be regarded as still living and exercising an influence from out their graves. Moreover, it is in the highest degree improbable that in the process of historical development it should have been just the champions of the epic from whose worship the cult of Heroes arose; for in cult, at any rate, with negligible exceptions, those champions played little part. And, indeed, that any cult at all should have arisen from the mere suggestions of fancy, such as the epic offered, is in itself unlikely. And it is essentially upon a religious cult that the belief in Heroes is founded.

In fact after all that has been hitherto shown, what we see most plainly is the contrast between the belief in Heroes and Homeric conceptions. The fanciful thought of the translation of individuals to Islands of the Blest or the underground dwellings did not itself conflict with the implications of Homeric eschatology. The miraculous preservation in an immortal existence of men whom the gods loved did not involve the separation of soul from body, nor the consequence of that separation—the dim borderland existence of the disembodied soul. But the belief in Heroes was a different matter; that involved the continuation of a conscious mode of being, in the neighbourhood of the living, after death, and in spite of the separation of soul from body. This directly contradicts Homeric psychology. We should have to give up the attempt altogether to bring this new belief into any real relationship with earlier development—if we could not draw upon what we have learnt from our previous investigations. In the Homeric poems themselves, in striking contrast with the general conception there prevailing of the insubstantiality of the disembodied soul, we found vestiges of a once-vigorous cult of the soul which implied the existence of a corresponding belief in the conscious after-life of the soul and its lingering [120] in the neighbourhood of the living. From the study of Hesiod’s picture of the Five Ages of Men, we saw that, in fact, vestiges of an ancient belief in the continued and enhanced existence of dead men, of which no clear trace remained in Homer, had been preserved at least in occasional remote corners of the Greek countryside. But it was only the dead of a legendary past who were regarded by Hesiod as “Daimones”: the poet could relate no similar marvels from more recent periods, and still less of men in his own lifetime. Thus, we have in this case traces of ancestor-worship indeed, but not of a general worship of souls that is elsewhere the normal development of the worship of ancestors. So, then, in the worship of Heroes, what we have before us is not a general cult of the soul but a cult of ancestors. We may express the matter in this way: in the cult of the “Hero” a still burning spark of ancient belief is kindled to renewed flame—it is not the appearance of something entirely strange and new, but something long past and half-forgotten is awakened to new life. Those Daimones which arose from the men of the earlier golden and silver ages—whom the poet of the “Works and Days” had situated in the dimmest and remotest past—what are they but the “Heroes” worshipped by later ages under a new name and brought down nearer to the period of contemporary life?