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

by Erwin Rohde

§ 8

And evidence of these ancient beliefs we can now see with our eyes and touch with our hands. Owing to an inestimable series of fortunate circumstances, we are enabled to catch a glimpse of a far distant period of Greek history, which not only supplies a background to Homer, but makes him cease to be the earliest source of our information upon Greek life and thought. He is brought suddenly much nearer, perhaps deceptively nearer, to ourselves. The last decades of excavation in the citadel and lower town of Mycenæ and other sites in the Peloponnese right into the centre of the peninsula and as far northwards as Attica and Thessaly, have resulted in the discovery of graves—shaft-graves, chamber-graves, and elaborately constructed domed vaults, which were built and walled up in the period before the Dorian invasion. These graves prove to us—what was already hinted at by a few isolated expressions in Homer[45]—that the Greek “Age of Burning” was preceded, as in the case of the Persians, Indians, and Germans, by a period in which the dead were buried in the ground intact.[46] The lords and ladies of golden Mycenæ, and lesser folk, too (in the graves at Nauplia, in Attica, etc.), were buried when they died. Chieftains take with them into the grave a rich paraphernalia of gorgeous furniture and ornaments—unburnt like their own bodies; they rest upon a bed of small stones, and are covered by a layer of loam and pebbles;[47] traces of smoke and remains of ashes and charred wood bear witness to the fact that the dead were laid upon the place where the “sacrifice for the dead” had already been made; upon the hearth where offerings had been previously burnt inside the grave chamber.[48] This may very well be a burial procedure of the most primeval antiquity. Our oldest “Giants’” graves, in whose treasures no metal of any kind is found, and whose age is on that account considered to be pre-Teutonic, exhibit similar features. Either on the ground, or, occasionally, on a specially prepared basis of fire-brick, the sacrificial fire is lighted, and, when it has burnt out, the corpse is set down upon the place and given [23] a covering of sand, loam, and stone.[49] Remains of burnt sacrificial animals (sheep and goats) have also been found in the graves at Nauplia and elsewhere.[50] In conformity with such different burial customs, the conceptions then held of the nature and powers of the disembodied spirits must have differed widely from those of the Homeric world. Offerings to the dead at a funeral occur in Homer only on special and isolated occasions and accompanied by an obsolete and half-understood ritual. Here they were the regular procedure both with rich and poor alike. But why should they have made offerings to their dead if they did not believe in their power? And why should they have taken away gold and jewellery and art treasures of all kinds and in astonishing quantities from the living and given them to the dead if they had not believed that the dead could find enjoyment in their former possessions even in the grave? Where the material body still remains intact, there the second self can at least occasionally return. Its treasured possessions laid by its side in the tomb are there to prevent its appearing uninvited in the outer world.[51]

Supposing, however, that the soul could return if and where it liked, it is evident that the cult of the dead would not be confined to the occasion of the funeral. And, indeed, that very circumstance—the prolongation of the cult paid to the dead beyond the time of the funeral—of which we could not find a vestige in Homer, can at last (as it seems to me) be traced in pre-Homeric Mycenæ. Over the middle one of four shaft-graves found on the citadel stands an altar which can only have been placed there after the grave was closed and sealed up.[52] It is a round altar, hollow inside, and not closed in at the bottom; in fact, a sort of funnel standing directly upon the earth. If, now, the blood of the victim, mingled with the various drink-offerings, were poured down into this receptacle, the whole would flow downwards into the ground beneath and to the dead man lying there. This is no altar (βωμός) such as was in use in the worship of the gods above, but a sacrificial hearth (ἐσχάρα) for the worship of the inhabitants of the underworld. This structure corresponds closely with the description we have of the hearths upon which offerings were made in a later age to “Heroes”, i.e. the souls of transfigured human beings.[53] Here, then, we have a contrivance for the permanent and repeated worship of the dead; for such worship alone can this structure have been intended. The funeral offering to the dead had already been completed inside the grave-chamber. We thus find a [24] meaning in the “beehive” tombs, for the vaulted main-chamber, beside which the corpse lay in a smaller chamber by itself. They were evidently intended to allow sacrifices to be made inside them—and not once only.[54] At least this is the purpose which the outer chamber serves elsewhere in double-vaulted graves. The evidence of the eye is therefore able to establish the truth of what could only be made out with difficulty from the Homeric poems. We can thus see that there had been a time in which the Greeks, too, believed that after the separation of body and soul the psyche did not entirely cease from intercourse with the upper world. Such a belief naturally called forth a cult of the soul, which lasted on even when the method of burying the body had changed, and even survived into Homeric times, when, with the prevalence of other beliefs, such observances ceased to have any meaning.

II

Homer consistently assumes the departure of the soul into an inaccessible land of the dead where it exists in an unconscious half-life. There it is without clear self-consciousness and consequently neither desires nor wills anything. It has no influence on the upper world, and consequently no longer receives any share of the worship of the living. The dead are beyond the reach of any feelings whether of fear or love. No means exists of forcing or enticing them back again. Homer knows nothing of necromancy or of oracles of the dead,[55] both common in later Greek life. Gods come into the poems and take part in the action of the story; the souls of the departed never do. Homer’s immediate successors in the Epic tradition think quite differently on this point; but for Homer the soul, once relegated to Hades, has no further importance.

If we think how different it must have been before the time of Homer, and how different it certainly was after him, we can hardly help feeling surprise at finding at this early stage of Greek culture such extraordinary freedom from superstitious fears in that very domain where superstition is generally most deeply rooted. Inquiries, however, into the origin and cause of such an untroubled attitude must be made very cautiously and a completely conclusive answer must not be expected. More especially it must be borne in mind that in these poems we have to do, directly and immediately, at least, only with the poet and his circle. The Homeric Epos can only be called “folk poetry” in the sense that it was adapted to the [25] acceptance of the whole family of Greek-speaking people who welcomed it eagerly and transformed it to their own uses; and not because the “folk” in some mystical sense had a share in its composition. Many hands contributed to the composition of the poem, but they merely carried it further in the general direction which had been given to it not by the “Folk” or by the “Saga” tradition, as is sometimes too confidently asserted, but by the authority of the greatest poetic genius that the Greeks or, indeed, mankind ever knew. The tradition once formed was handed on by a close corporation of master-poets and their pupils who preserved, disseminated, continued and imitated the original great poet’s work. If, then, we find on the whole, and apart from a few vagaries in detail, a single unified picture of the world, of gods and men, life and death, given in these two poems, that is the picture which shaped itself in the mind of Homer and was impressed upon his work, and afterwards preserved by the Homeridai. It is plain that the freedom, almost the freethinking, with which every possible occurrence in the world is regarded in these poems, cannot ever have been characteristic of a whole people or race. And not only the animating spirit, but even the outward shape that is given in the two epic poems to the ideal world surrounding and ruling over the world of men, is the work of the poet. It was no priestly theology that gave him his picture of the gods. The popular beliefs of the time, each peculiar to some countryside, canton, or city, must, if left to themselves, have split up into even more contradictory varieties of thought than they did in later times when there existed some few religious institutions common to all Hellas to act as centres of union. The poet alone must have been responsible for the conception and consistent execution of the picture of a single and unified world of gods, confined to a select company of sharply characterized heavenly beings, grouped together in certain well-recognized ways and dwelling together in a single place of residence above the earth. If we listened to Homer alone we should suppose that the innumerable local cults of Greece, with their gods closely bound to the soil, hardly existed. Homer ignores them almost entirely. His gods are pan-Hellenic, Olympian. In fact, in his picture of the gods, Homer fulfilled most completely his special poetic task of reducing confusion and superfluity to uniformity and symmetry of design—the very task which Greek idealism in art continually set before itself. In his picture Greek beliefs about the gods appear absolutely uniform—as uniform as dialect, political condition, manners, [26] and morals. In reality—of this we may be sure—no such uniformity existed; the main outlines of pan-Hellenism were doubtless there, but only the genius of the poet can have combined and fused them into a purely imaginary whole. Provincial differences in themselves interested him not at all. So, too, in the special question that we are considering, if we find him speaking of a single kingdom of the underworld, the resort of all departed spirits ruled over by a single pair of divinities and removed as far from the world of men and their cities as the Olympian dwelling of the Blessed Ones is in the opposite direction, who shall say how far he represents naive popular belief in such matters? On this side Olympus, the meeting place of all the gods that rule in the daylight;[56] on that the realm of Hades that holds in its grasp the unseen spirits that have left this life behind—the parallel is too apparent to be due to anything but the same simplifying and co-ordinating spirit in the one case as in the other.

§ 2

It would, however, be an equally complete misunderstanding of the relation in which Homer stood to the popular beliefs of his time if we imagined that relation to be one of opposition, or even supposed him to have taken up an attitude resembling that of Pindar or the Attic Tragedians towards the conventional opinions of their time. These later poets often enough allow us to see quite clearly the intentional departure from normal opinion represented by their more advanced conceptions. Homer, on the contrary, is as free from controversy as he is from dogma. He does not offer his pictures of God, the world and fate as anything peculiar to himself; and it is natural, therefore, to suppose that his public recognized them as substantially the same as their own. The poet has not taken over the whole body of popular belief, but what he does say must have belonged to popular belief. The selection and combination of this material into a consistent whole was the poet’s real work. If the Homeric creed had not been so constructed in essentials that it corresponded to the beliefs of the time, or, at least, could be made to correspond, then it is impossible to account (even allowing for the poetic tradition of a school) for the uniformity that marks the work of the many poets that had a hand in the composition of the two poems. In this narrow sense it can be truly said that Homer’s poems represent the popular belief of their time; not, indeed, the belief of all Greece, but only of the Ionian [27] cities of the coasts and islands of Asia Minor in which the poet and his songs were at home. In a similarly restricted sense may the pictures of outward life and manners that we find in the Iliad and the Odyssey be taken as a reflection of the contemporary life of the Greeks with particular reference to that of the Ionians. This life must have differed in many respects from that of the “Mycenæan civilization”, and there can be little doubt that the reasons for this difference are to be sought in the long-continued disturbances which marked the centuries that divide Homer from the age of Mycenæ, more especially in the Greek migrations, both in what they destroyed and what they created. The violent invasion of northern Greek peoples into the central mainland and the Peloponnese, the destruction of ancient empires and their civilization, the foundation of new Dorian states held by right of conquest, the great migrations to the Asiatic coasts, and the institution of a new life on foreign soil—all these violent modifications of the old course of existence must have dealt a severe blow at the whole fabric of that civilization and culture. In the same way we find that the cult of Souls and the conception of the fate of departed spirits which governed this cult did not remain in Ionia (the beliefs of which country are reflected in Homer) what it had been at the height of the Mycenæan period. To this change, as to the others which accompanied it, we may well suppose that the struggles and wanderings of the intermediate period contributed a good deal. Homer’s clear-sighted vision that transcends the limits of city and even of racial gods, faiths, and worships, would hardly be explicable without the freedom of movement beyond the boundaries of country, the common life shared with companions of other races, the widened knowledge of all the conditions of foreign life, such as must have resulted from the dislocations and migrations of whole peoples. It is true that the Ionians of Asia Minor did, as we can prove, take a good many of their religious observances with them to their new homes. The migrations, however, did not preserve the connexion between the old homes and the new country with anything like the closeness that marked the later colonization; and when the colonists left the familiar soil behind, the local cults attached to the soil must often have had to be abandoned, too. Now the worship of ancestors, connected as it was with the actual graves of those ancestors, was essentially a local cult. Remembrance of the great ones of the past might survive transplantation, but not their religious worship, which could only be offered at the one spot [28] where their bodies lay buried and which had now been left behind in an enemy’s country. The deeds of ancestors lived on in song, but they themselves began to be relegated to the domain of poetry and imagination. Imagination might adorn the story of their earthly life, but a world that was no longer reminded of their power by the regularly repeated performance of ceremonial, ceased to pay honour to their disembodied souls. Thus the most highly developed form of the cult of Souls—ancestor worship—died out, and the later version of the same thing, the cult of those of the tribe that had died in the new land and been buried there, was prevented from attaining a similar force and development by the newly-introduced practice of burning the bodies of the dead. It may well be that the origin of this new form of funeral rite lay, as has been suggested, in the wish to dismiss the soul of the dead man as quickly and completely as possible from the realm of the living; but it is beyond doubt that the result of this practice was to cut at the root of the belief in the near presence of the departed and the duty of performing the religious observances that were their right; so that such things being deprived of their support, fell into decay and disappeared.

§ 3

We can thus see at least dimly how it was that the Ionian people of the Homeric age were led by the events of their own history and the alteration in funeral customs into holding that view of the soul which a study of their own poets has persuaded us was theirs. This view can hardly have retained more than a few stray vestiges of the ancient cult of the dead. Still, we should only be in a position to say what were the real reasons for this alteration in belief and custom if we knew and understood more about the intellectual changes that led to the gradual appearance of the Homeric view of the world; a view which included within its range a set of beliefs about the soul. Here it is best to confess our ignorance. We have before us the results only of those changes. From them, however, we can at least perceive that the religious consciousness of the Greeks, among whom Homer sang, had developed in a direction which did not allow much scope to the belief in ghosts and spirits of the dead. The Homeric Greeks had the deepest consciousness of man’s finite nature, of his dependence upon forces that lay without him. To remind himself of this and be content with his lot was his proper form of piety. Over him the gods hold sway, wielding a supernatural power—[29]not infrequently a misguided and capricious power—but a conception of a general world-order is beginning to make its way; of a plan underlying the cross-purposes of individual and common life, working itself out in accordance with measured and appointed lot (μοῖρα). The arbitrary power of individual daimones is thus limited, and it is limited further by the will of the highest of the gods. The belief is growing that the world is, in fact, a cosmos, a perfect organization such as men try to establish in their earthly states. In the face of such conceptions it would be increasingly difficult to believe in the vagaries of a supernatural ghostly order which, in direct opposition to the real heavenly order, is always distinguished by the fact that it stands outside any all-embracing dispensation, and allows full play to the caprice and malice of individual unseen powers. The irrational and the unaccountable is the natural element of the belief in ghosts and spirits; this is the source of the peculiar disquiet inspired by this province of belief or superstition. It owes most of its effect to the instability of its fibres. The Homeric world, on the contrary, lives by reason; its gods are fully intelligible to Greek minds and their forms and behaviour are clearly and easily comprehensible to Greek imagination. And the more distinctly were the gods represented, the more did the spirit-phantoms fade away into empty shadows. There was no one who might have been interested in the preservation and extension of the superstitious side of religion; there was in particular no priesthood with a monopoly of instruction or an exclusive knowledge of the details of ritual and the methods of controlling the behaviour of spirits. If anyone did possess any monopoly of teaching, it was, in this age when all the highest faculties of the spirit found their expression in poetry, the poet and the singer. They, however, showed a completely “secular” outlook even in religious matters. Indeed, these very clear-headed men, belonging to the same stock which in a later age “invented” (if one may be allowed to put it so) science and philosophy, were already displaying a mental attitude that distantly threatened the whole system of that plastic representation of things spiritual which the older antiquity had laboriously constructed.