So the shades of the old mythology had become a garment of which reason rid itself, when it left this lower world to attain to its celestial home. But the theologians disputed at length on the origin of this psychic integument. When it was admitted that the passions and emotions were due to the action of the planets, the εἴδωλον, being conceived, as we have said, to be the seat of sensitive life, had necessarily to be formed in the seven spheres, through which the soul passed as it descended to earth, and to be decomposed when it passed through them again in its ascension.[[423]] This is the doctrine supported by the Neo-Platonists. They merely apply a new name to this cloak of reason, that of vehicle (ὄχημα), which is at first synonymous with εἴδωλον as this word was last accepted. Plato in his myths had several times spoken of the chariot (ὄχημα) in which souls ascended, especially in the famous passage of the Phaedrus, where he depicted them as trying to follow the course of the gods towards the summit of heaven,[[424]] and above all in the Timaeus, where he says that God, having made men equal in number to the stars, caused them to mount on these stars as on a chariot.[[425]] This vehicle was, according to the philosopher’s late interpreters, an ethereal envelope, analogous to the “astral body” of modern theosophists, which grew thicker and thicker by the accession of new elements, as the soul was gradually lowered to the earth;[[426]] and it was by the composition of these elements that the temperament of the newly born child was determined. This luminous body was attracted after death by stars of the same nature as those whence it derived its origin, and in particular by the sun, and it thus acquired a force of ascension which once again bore divine reason to the highest point of the heavens. We will not lay stress on the speculation of the last masters of the school, such as Jamblichus or Proclus, who imagined, on the subject of this subtle matter, yet more subtle distinctions and transformed the former conception of the “vehicle.” It is enough that we have shown how the old belief in the shades who peopled Hades was modified, when it came to be thought that souls travelled in the air and among the constellations, until at last the Platonist theory of the psychic vehicle was reached.
VII
THE SUFFERINGS OF HELL AND METEMPSYCHOSIS
How did belief in the sufferings of hell develop? of what elements was it formed? through what vicissitudes has it passed?—these are questions which it is difficult to answer precisely, for the reason that the pains reserved for the impious in the Beyond were in the Greco-Latin world taught especially by mystic sects, who placed them in contrast to the bliss granted to the initiate. It is possible, however, to note the genesis and general evolution of the opinions on this point which reigned in the Roman Empire.
Already in the Odyssey three who are surpassingly guilty detach themselves from the grey crowd of the shades who lead an uncertain life in Hades—Tityus, Tantalus and Sisyphus.[[427]] All three committed grave assaults on the gods, who in revenge condemned them to eternal torture: the gigantic body of Tityus is unceasingly gnawed by vultures; Tantalus is plunged in a pond the water of which flees from his eager lips, while above him is a tree of which the fruit escapes from his hand as he wishes to seize it; Sisyphus unendingly rolls to the top of a hill a rock which always tumbles back down the slope. These souls, in order that their suffering may be more cruelly felt, have in Hades a vitality beyond that of the common run of the dead, who are pale, flimsy, half animate phantoms.[[428]]
To this Homeric triad of sufferers especially chastised by the divinity, further unhappy souls, whom an inexpiable crime had vowed to everlasting pains, were afterwards added: Ixion turning on the wheel to which he was fixed, Theseus and Pirithous enchained, the Danaïdes carrying water in a leaking vessel, and others. Thus was formed a group of legendary personalities whose crimes and punishments came to be the traditional themes of every description and representation of Tartarus in poetry and art until the downfall of paganism.
But these convicted souls were no longer conceived, as they were by Homer, to be exceptional offenders on whom the gods avenged a personal insult. They had come to be the prototypes of men who, for like faults, would be similarly chastised, the terrible examples of the lot which divine wrath reserved for all who provoked it. They were explained as the incarnations of the different passions and vices, the representatives of the various classes of sinners on each of which a determined punishment was inflicted.
The first authors of this new conception seem to have been the Orphic and Pythagorean theologians. Homer names only one class of criminals whom the Erinyes torture beneath the ground, the perjurers. But here again the motive of the punishment is a direct provocation of the gods; by the formula of execration which ended their oath, the perjurers had surrendered themselves to divine vengeance, if they broke their faith; and this is why a place apart among the sufferers of the underworld was always kept for them.
The Orphics, who were the first to separate in the underworld the region of Tartarus from the Elysian Fields, were also innovators as regarded the character of these contrasting dwelling-places. Notably, there was among their books a Descent into Hades (Κατάβασις εἰς Ἅιδου), which described its joys and pains. If the blessed were admitted to the flowery meadows where they enjoyed the delight of a perpetual feast, the profane, those who had not been purified by the rites of the sect, were plunged in darkness and mire, which was either intended to recall the moral uncleanness of all who had not taken part in the cathartic ceremonies, or else implied that these shades were figured like the penitents who, seated in the mud of the road, proclaimed their sins to passers-by.[[429]]
Orphism conceived the suffering undergone beyond the tomb as an expiation. The soul which had not been able on earth to keep itself from the pollution of matter and to escape from the passions, thus found again the qualities which it had lost. After a fixed term, it returned to another life wherein it had another chance to render itself worthy of the lot of the Blessed—we shall speak presently of this transmigration. Moreover, the intercession of the living in favour of the dead, the sacrifices offered up on their behalf, could, according to the Orphics, deliver them from their pains.
But the Orphics taught also that side by side with those who thus purified themselves in infernal regions before returning to earth, there were others, more guilty, who were vowed to eternal punishment. The old Homeric belief was thus taken up and developed. The evil souls, whose ways nothing could mend, were immured for ever in the underground prison, where they became the companions of the great criminals whom mythology plunged in Tartarus. This capital distinction between the two classes of the inhabitants of hell, those condemned for a time and those condemned in perpetuity, was transmitted down to Virgil and appears distinctly in the Aeneid.