VI
THE JOURNEY TO THE BEYOND
As soon as belief took shape in an underground kingdom where gathered the shades which were separated from the body and from the grave, the idea also arose of a perilous journey which the soul must make in order to win to this distant abode. Such an idea is common to many peoples of the world. In California, the Mojave Indians are said to believe that the departed have to find their way through a complicated maze in search of the happy hunting grounds, which only the good souls can reach, while the wicked wander painfully and endlessly. We know what minutely detailed rules are contained in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, rules to which the deceased had to conform in order that they might travel safely to the Fields of the Blessed. The Orphic tablets, discovered in tombs in Italy,[[357]] have preserved fragments of another guide to the Beyond. For instance, the tablet of Petelia, which goes back to the second or perhaps the third century B. C., begins thus: “Thou shalt find to the left of the house of Hades a well-spring, and by the side thereof standing a white cypress. To this well-spring approach not near. But thou shalt find another by the lake of Memory, cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it. Say ‘I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven. But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves. And so I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly the cold water flowing from the lake of Memory.’ And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy well-spring; and thereafter among the other heroes thou shalt have lordship....”[[358]]
These instructions, which accompanied the member of the sect to his grave,—he bore them about his neck like an amulet,—were supposed to enable him to keep from straying in his posthumous wanderings and help him to accomplish exactly all the acts necessary for his salvation. They were a sort of liturgy of the other side of the grave which would ensure eternal happiness to the faithful. “Courage (εὐψύχει); be valiant (θάρρει); no man is immortal on earth,” such is the exhortation frequently expressed in epitaphs. It probably reproduces a ritualistic formula intended to sustain the shade which had to blaze its path in the Beyond.
The Etruscans also had libri Acheruntici, books of Acheron which were attributed to the sage Tages and which treated of the fate of the dead. These made known, in particular, what were the rites by which souls could be transformed into gods (di animales). Their very title betrays a Greek teaching, and there are reasons for believing that the teaching of the Pythagoreans was not without influence on their composition.[[359]] It is hardly doubtful that they were concerned with the path which the Manes of human beings must follow in order to go down into the infernal regions. The Etruscan stelae and cinerary urns often show this journey to Hades: sometimes the dead are placed, like heroes, in a war chariot; sometimes in a cart protected by a canopy and exactly copied from the peasants’ carts; and often nothing would indicate that these travellers are but shades, were not the significance of the scene defined by the presence of some deity of the nether world, like Charon. The great sarcophagus of Vulci in the Boston Museum bears a fine representation of this type, where the character of the travellers is shown by a winged Fury standing behind their carriage.
Thus the idea that the dead have to tramp a long road descending into the depths of the earth before they reach their last abode, was accepted in Italy as in Greece from a very ancient period. How did men imagine this road? Their conception of it is connected with a whole group of Pythagorean doctrines which go back to a remote age.
The old poetry of Hesiod already speaks of two roads of life, a short and easy road which is that of vice, and the path of virtue, which is at first steep and rugged but becomes less hard as soon as the top of the slope is reached. Everyone knows the use which the sophist Prodicus makes of this ancient comparison in the famous myth of Hercules at the crossroads.[[360]] In it, two women appear to the youthful hero, and one seeks to draw him to the path of deceitful pleasures while the other succeeds in conducting him to the path of austere labours which leads to true happiness. This same conception, which is transmitted through the whole of antiquity, inspired the Pythagoreans with the symbol of the letter Y, formed of a vertical spike topped by two divergent branches. The spike is the road common to all men until they have reached the age of reason and responsibility. Subsequently they must choose between the right and the left branches. The former, say these moralists, is steep and rough and at first requires strenuous effort, but when those who climb it have gained its summit they obtain a well-deserved rest. The other road is at first level and pleasant, but it leads to harsh rocks and ends in a precipice over which the wretched man who has followed it is hurled. This symbol was popular in antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages, a fact of which a curious proof, additional to those in the texts, has lately been found. This is a relief, accompanied by an inscription, dating from the first century of our era, which has been discovered at Philadelphia in Lydia.[[361]] It decorated, as the epitaph shows, the tomb of a Pythagorean, and it is divided into compartments by mouldings in the form of the letter Y. Below, to the right, a child is seen, in the care of a woman who is designated as Virtue (Ἀρετή); above, a ploughman, driving his plough, stands for the hard and persevering labour of the good man, who, still higher, lies on a couch before a table like the guest at a “funeral banquet” because he has obtained the reward of his toil. On the left side there is also, below, a woman with a child, but she stands for wantonness (Ἀσωτεία); above her a figure is indolently lying on a bed; and still further above, the same figure is seen falling into a gulf, head downwards, in chastisement of his vices.
These naïve scenes decorated, as we have said, a burial place. Many other tombs are not so elaborate, but express the same symbolism by opposing the hard labour of man, represented on the lower part of the stele, to the rest which this same man enjoys on the upper part of the stone, that is, in heaven.[[362]] The symbol of the Y was early applied to the future life by the Pythagoreans, who transferred the roads representing the courses of the moral and the immoral life to Hades. Their stories of the descent to the nether world depicted the journey of the dead in the same way, and it is still thus described in the sixth book of the Aeneid. The dead first follow a common road; and those whose lot is still undetermined wait in this first abode, just as on earth children are not yet separate at the uncertain age at which they have not yet made their decision for virtue or for vice. At the crossroads of earthly existence the choice must be made; at the crossroad of the infernal regions (τρίοδος) the judges of souls are seated,[[363]] and send to the right those who have by their merits made themselves worthy to enter the Elysian Fields, while they drive to the left the wicked who are to be hurled into Tartarus. For in both worlds “right” is to the Pythagorean, as to the soothsayers, synonymous with “good,” and “left” synonymous with “evil.”
The original conception was necessarily transformed and explained symbolically when the abode of virtuous souls was transported to heaven. The stories of the ancients were no longer taken in their literal sense, but an allegorical meaning, allowing them to be brought into harmony with the new beliefs, was given to them. Henceforward one of the two roads leads to the higher regions, the road, namely, of the Blessed (ὁδὸς μακάρων) or of the gods. The other, the path of men, is that which after long windings brings back to earth the impure souls who accomplish the cycle of their migrations and must be reincarnated in new bodies.
A passage of Cicero’s Tusculans,[[364]] which is directly inspired by the Phaedo of Plato, is instructive as to the transformation which ideas underwent. “There are,” it says, “two roads and two courses for souls which issue from the body. The souls which are sullied with human vice and have abandoned themselves to passions ... follow a crooked path which leads them away from the dwelling of the gods; but for the souls which have kept their innocence and purity and have, while in human bodies, imitated the life of the gods, there is an easy return to the beings from whose abode they descended to the earth.” In the same way Virgil, as we have said elsewhere,[[365]] is apparently faithful to the traditional topography of Hades, but does not regard it as really situated in the underground. There were even attempts to fix precisely the itinerary which souls had to follow in the upper spheres. Seneca pleasantly ridicules these beliefs in his satire on the apotheosis of Claudius, affirming that emperors went to heaven by the Appian Way. The Milky Way, originally regarded as the path of the sun, remained, according to an opinion which persisted until the end of antiquity, the road by which gods and heroes rose to the zenith.[[366]] It was said to cut the zodiac in the tropical signs of Cancer and Capricorn, and it was there that those gates opened by which souls went down from heaven to earth and rose from earth to heaven.[[367]] The former of these gates was called the Gate of Men, the other the Gate of Gods.
We will return later (p. 162) to the theories which assign different dwellings in the starry spheres to pure spirits and tell of their passing through the celestial gates. We would merely note that the allegory of the two roads, of which one is the road of God and heaven and eternal life and the other that of Satan, hell and death, is found in the most ancient Christian literature, and is justifiably likened by Lactantius[[368]] to the Pythagorean Y, which is at the origin of all the later symbolism.