Infernal justice is a court of appeal from earthly justice. Like the City,[[430]] Hades has its tribunal, but the judges who sit there are infallible; it has its laws which are unremittingly applied to whoever has broken those of his country; it has its executioners, responsible for carrying out its sentences—the Furies, and later the demons. Similarly, the pains of Hades are always conceived as an imitation of those which were every day inflicted on criminals. The guilty were bound in unbreakable chains, as in the prisons; the Erinyes struck them with their whips, as they were flogged at the order of the magistrates; fierce monsters bit them, as their bodies were thrown to the beasts or devoured by them in an infamous charnel-place. The old custom of retaliation continued to be followed in the other world, where the dead were treated as in life they had treated their victims.[[431]] Elsewhere we can recognise an imitation of the torments inflicted on the accused, who were subjected to torture to make them confess their fault.
Penal law enacted a determined punishment for every kind of offence; the law which ruled in Hades had similarly to inflict particular pains for each kind of fault. This logical deduction led to a new development of penalties beyond the grave. As gradually the moralists and criminalists detailed and classified the breaches of divine and human law, so the authors of apocalypses multiplied the categories of those who suffered in the nether world. They imagined the most fearful tortures, in order to frighten sinners and drive them to seek in some religious purification a means of escape from so terrible a lot. In a myth which Plutarch has introduced into his book on the belated vengeance of the gods,[[432]] he shows us hypocrites, who have hidden their wretchedness under the appearance of virtue, obliged to reverse their entrails so that the inner side of them may be seen, haters who devour each other, and misers plunged into and plucked out from lakes of burning gold, icy lead and jagged iron.
The text which describes these sufferings of the other world in greatest detail is the fragment of the apocryphal apocalypse of Peter, which was found in Egypt some thirty years ago and dates at least from the second century of our era. The vision of hell here opposed to that of heaven is like a first sketch for the tragic picture of the dwelling of the damned which Dante was to draw in his Inferno. The fragment enumerates a long series of criminals who are punished by black-robed angels and receive the treatment appropriate to the nature of their faults. Blasphemers are hanged by the tongue; the mouths of false witnesses are filled with fire; the rich who have been merciless to the poor roll, clothed in rags, on sharp and burning pebbles. Other tortures are like the sports of macabre fancy: thus adulterers are hanged by the feet, their heads plunged in burning mud; murderers are flung into a cave filled with serpents that bite them, the shades of their victims watching their anguish.
A learned philologist[[433]] has undertaken to prove that this repulsive picture of the dwelling of the damned had its origin in the Orphic books. If, however, he refers to ancient, genuine Orphism, he is certainly mistaken. The light fantasy of the ancient Greeks never laid heavy stress on the horrors of Tartarus; their luminous genius took no pleasure in describing these dark atrocities.[[434]] There is no evidence that they ever formulated, point by point, a penal code which applied in the kingdom of Pluto. The Romans, whose legal mind might have led them to do so, were kept from such aberrations by their lack of imagination. Their infernal mythology remained rudimentary: even Virgil, who is the interpreter of the Hellenic tradition, never alluded except in passing to the infinitely diverse forms of crimes and their punishments.[[435]] The Etruscans peopled the infernal regions with awful monsters: they gave Charon and the Erinyes a wild semblance which recalls the devils of the Middle Ages, but we never find them drawing up an inventory of the breaches of the moral law in order that a punishment might be applied to each of these.
Everything points to the conclusion that this infernal theology developed in the East. The Egyptians described at length in the “Book of the Dead” the pains of those who despised the precepts of Osiris, and illustrated these sufferings with pictures. The only pagan writing in which we find a classification of sinners and of their torments, analogous to that contained in the revelation of the apocryphal gospel of Peter, is the Mazdean “Book of Arta Viraf,” which, although of late date, has antecedents which certainly go back very far. The Persian religion, which more than any other brings the Spirit of Evil and his hordes of demons into relief, was certainly not unconnected with the development of infernal eschatology, even in the West, as is indicated by the fact that these demons succeeded the Furies as executors of the divine sentences. It was under the influence of these exotic religions that the descriptions were propagated of refined tortures, terrifying to the adepts of the conventicles in which they were revealed. The mysteries which spread under the Roman Empire accentuated the contrast between the delights of heaven and the sufferings of hell. These esoteric sects gave birth to the literature which was to be perpetuated through the Middle Ages, and inspire numbers of visionaries, poets and artists. Certain authors of treatises on demonology in antiquity must have revelled in inventing unheard-of atrocities, as later the hagiographers took pleasure in describing the inconceivable torments inflicted on martyrs.
Among all the forms of punishment that by fire predominates. The idea that the Erinyes burnt the damned with their torches is ancient, and the Pyriphlegethon is an igneous river surrounding Tartarus. Certain authors went beyond this. Lucian in his “True Histories” describes the island of the impious as an immense brazier whence rise sulphurous and pitchy flames. Thus was born into the world in the Greco-Roman period a doctrine which was to survive its fall and last to modern times. The ancients certainly connected this infernal fire with the treatment inflicted on those condemned to be burnt alive; but this exceptional punishment could not inspire an eschatological conception which included all the dead. The opinion has been advanced that the choice of fire was due to the belief that this element purifies.[[436]] Fire would have been at first the means of destroying, in the Beyond as in this world, the uncleanliness of souls, before it became the instrument of their eternal torture. But a scientific theory seems here to have influenced religious faith. The physicians admitted the existence of an incandescent mass in the interior of the earth, which produced volcanic eruptions and hot springs. As Tartarus was situated in the uttermost depths of the underworld, it was conceived as a vast brazier in which the sulphur and bitumen vomited by the volcanoes were boiling for the punishment of sinners.[[437]]
But this adaptation of the pains of Tartarus to contemporary physics could not save them from philosophical criticism. While the pagan priests, to the terror of credulous minds, imagined more and more inhuman punishments for the guilty souls, the reaction of reason against these cruel inventions necessarily gathered strength. We have seen elsewhere how the polemics of philosophers forcibly attacked these life-poisoning beliefs and succeeded in a great measure in destroying them.[[438]] Even those who did not deny the future life rejected these fables of hell. There was an attempt to save the principle of posthumous retribution by replacing the doctrine of chastisement in Hades by that of the metempsychosis. We now will try, while considering this theory of transmigration in its various aspects, to show how such substitution was effected.
The mind of savages does not, like our science, distinguish between three kingdoms of nature. It supposes the same energy to animate all the beings who surround us, all of whom are taken to be like ourselves. The primitives often attribute human or even divine intelligence to beasts; and the belief is found throughout the two hemispheres that the spirits of the dead can incarnate themselves in animals and even lodge in plants. Men refrain from the slaughter or gathering of certain species, from eating their flesh or fruit, for fear of hurting a chief or relative who has gone to inhabit them. This animistic basis is common to a number of different peoples and is at the foundation of the system of metempsychosis.
But that which makes the grandeur of this theory, which won countless adepts throughout the centuries and the world, is that it transformed this naïve idea, which had no moral bearing, into a doctrine of retribution and liberation. To come back to the earth, to imprison itself in a body which soiled and tortured it, became a punishment inflicted on the guilty soul. The soul could not attain to supreme felicity until it had purified itself by long suffering and had gradually, through a cycle of rebirths, freed itself from carnal passions.