Astronomical Myths: Based on Flammarions's "History of the Heavens"

by J. F. Blake; Camille Flammarion

Some indeed considered that the whole physical constitution of the world was a scaffold or a model, and that there was a real theological universe hidden beneath this semblance. No one omitted from his system the spiritual heaven in which the angels and just men might spend their existence; but in addition to this there were places whose reality was believed in, but whose locality is more difficult to settle, and which therefore were moved from one place to another by various writers, viz., the infernal regions, purgatory, and the terrestrial paradise.

We will here recount some of those legends, which wielded sufficient sway over men's minds as to gain their belief in the veritable existence of the places described, and in this way to influence their astronomical and cosmographical ideas.

And for the first we will descend to the infernal regions with Plutarch and Thespesius.

This Thespesius relates his adventures in the other world. Having fallen head-first from an elevated place, he found himself unwounded, but was contused in such a way as to be insensible. He was supposed to be dead, but, after three days, as they were about to bury him, he came to life again. In a few days he recovered his former powers of mind and body; but made a marvellous change for the better in his life.

He said that at the moment that he lost consciousness he found himself like a sailor at the bottom of the sea; but afterwards, having recovered himself a little, he was able to breathe perfectly, and seeing only with the eyes of his soul, he looked round on all that was about him. He saw no longer the accustomed sights, but stars of prodigious magnitude, separated from each other by immense distances. They were of dazzling brightness and splendid colour. His soul, carried like a vessel on the luminous ocean, sailed along freely and smoothly, and moved everywhere with rapidity. Passing over in silence a large number of the sights that met his eye, he stated that the souls of the dead, taking the form of bubbles of fire, rise through the air, which opens a passage above them; at last the bubbles, breaking without noise, let out the souls in a human form and of a smaller size, and moving in different ways. Some, rising with astonishing lightness, mounted in a straight line; others, running round like a whipping-top, went up and down by turns with a confused and irregular motion, making small advance by long and painful efforts. Among this number he saw one of his parents, whom he recognised with difficulty, as she had died in his infancy; but she approached him, and said, "Good day, Thespesius." Surprised to hear himself called by this name, he told her that he was called Arideus, and not Thespesius. "That was once your name," she replied, "but in future you will bear that of Thespesius, for you are not dead, only the intelligent part of your soul has come here by the particular will of the gods; your other faculties are still united to your body, which keeps them like an anchor. The proof I will give you is that the souls of the dead do not cast any shadow, and they cannot move their eyes."

Further on, in traversing a luminous region, he heard, as he was passing, the shrill voice of a female speaking in verse, who presided over the time Thespesius should die. His genius told him that it was the voice of the Sibyl, who, turning on the orbit of the moon, foretold the future. Thespesius would willingly have heard more, but, driven off by a rapid whirlwind, he could make out but little of her predictions. In another place he remarked several parallel lakes, one filled with melted and boiling gold, another with lead colder than ice, and a third with very rough iron. They were kept by genii, who, armed with tongs like those used in forges, plunged into these lakes, and then withdrew by turns, the souls of those whom avarice or an insatiable cupidity had led into crime; after they had been plunged into the lake of gold, where the fire made them red and transparent, they were thrown into the lake of lead. Then, frozen by the cold, and made as hard as hail, they were put into the lake of iron, where they became horribly black. Broken and bruised on account of their hardness, they changed their form, and passed once more into the lake of gold, and suffered in these changes inexpressible pain.

In another place he saw the souls of those who had to return to life and be violently forced to take the form of all sorts of animals. Among the number he saw the soul of Nero, which had already suffered many torments, and was bound with red-hot chains of iron. The workmen were seizing him to give him the form of a viper, under which he was destined to live, after having devoured the womb that bore him.

The locality of these infernal regions was never exactly determined. The ancients were divided upon the point. In the poems of Homer the infernal regions appear under two different forms: thus, in the Iliad, it is a vast subterranean cavity; while in the Odyssey, it is a distant and mysterious country at the extremity of the earth, beyond the ocean, in the neighbourhood of the Cimmerians.

The description which Homer gives of the infernal region proves that in his time the Greeks imagined it to be a copy of the terrestrial world, but one which had a special character. According to the philosophers it was equally remote from all parts of the earth. Thus Cicero, in order to show that it was of no consequence where one died, said, wherever we die there is just as long a journey to be made to reach the "infernal regions."

The poets fixed upon certain localities as the entrance to this dismal empire: such was the river Lethe, on the borders of the Scythians; the cavern Acherusia in Epirus, the mouth of Pluto, in Laodicœa, the cave of Zenarus near Lacedæmon.