Speaking generally, and in comparison with the ancient Semitic and the mediaeval and even later spirit of Europe, we must pronounce the Hellenic temperament of the earlier and classical period as wholly innocent of fanaticism. The history of Hellas is not stained by any “war of religion”; and no religious hierarchy in Hellas ever possessed the power or displayed the will to suppress art or persecute science and thought. It might occasionally happen that individuals were in danger of punishment if they insulted or openly flouted the civic worship or introduced new deities; but that the State should protect itself thus is not fanaticism. The least tolerant of cities was the enlightened Athens. But her record in this matter is a spotless page compared with the history of any later European State. Hellas owed this happy immunity to her cooler religious temper, to the equilibrium of the other life-forces within her, and to her comparative freedom from dark and cruel superstitious fears.
It is specially in regard to such salient features of the religious temperament as we have been considering that the early Hellene asserted his spiritual independence of the East.
CHAPTER XII.
Eschatologic Ideas of East and West.
Religions are often found to differ fundamentally in their conceptions of the fate of the departed spirit of man, and in the prominence and importance they assign to the posthumous life. There is, in fact, a group of religions which we might term “other-worldly,” because certain dogmas concerning the world after death are made the basis on which their aspirations and ideals of conduct are constructed; to this group belong Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and the old Egyptian creed. There are other religions, also of a highly developed type, in which eschatologic doctrine plays no forcible or constructive part either in the theology or in the ethics. Such were the Mesopotamian, primitive Judaism, and the early Hellenic.
Our question concerning the evidences in the second millennium of Mesopotamian influences on the Western Aegean demands, then, at least a brief comparison of the Sumerian-Babylonian, and Hellenic eschatology. Our knowledge of the former is derived from certain epic poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh, “The Descent of Ishtar,” and the poem dealing with the marriage of Nergal and Erishkigal, the Queen of the dead; secondly, from a few inscriptions of various periods, alluding to burial or the status of the dead; thirdly, and this is the most important source, from the recent excavations of certain “necropoleis.”[205.1] The Hellenic facts have been sufficiently set forth for the present purpose in a former series of lectures.
In the picture of the lower world presented by the two literatures, a certain general agreement is discoverable, but none closer than they reveal with the conceptions of other peoples. Both accept as an undoubted fact the continued existence of the soul after death, and both imagine this existence as shadowy, profitless, and gloomy. Both also vaguely locate the abode of the soul under the earth, with a downward entrance somewhere in the west.[205.2] In both we find the idea of a nether river to be crossed, or “the waters of death”;[205.3] of a porter at the gates of “hell,” and of a god and goddess as rulers of the lower world; while the mountain of the Babylonian underworld on which the gods were supposed to have been born was unknown to Hellenic mythology.[205.4] Such coincidences are no criterion of a common origin of belief; for these traits recur in the death-lore of many and widely scattered races.
As against them, we must take into account certain salient differences. The lot of the departed in the Babylonian epic account appears drearier even than in the Homeric, just as the Babylonian religious poetry inclines to the more sombre tones and the more violent pathos. The dead inhabit “the house wherein he who enters is excluded from the light, the place where dust is their bread, and mud their food. They behold not the light, they dwell in darkness, and are clothed, like birds, in a garment of feathers; and over door and bolt the dust is scattered.”[206.1] This is more hopeless than the Homeric meadow of Asphodel, where the souls still pursue the shadow of their former interests, and some tidings of the earth may penetrate to give them joy. Also, the demoniac terrors of the lower world are more vividly presented in Babylonian than in Hellenic literature and art. The demons of disease that perform the bidding of Allatu, the Queen of Hell, are closely connected with the ghost-world; we learn from the formulae of exorcism that the haunting demon that destroyed a man’s vital energies might be a wandering spectre. “O Shamash, a horrible spectre for many days hath fastened itself on my back, and will not loose its hold upon me.… he sendeth forth pollution, he maketh the hair of my head to stand up, he taketh the power from my body, he maketh my eyes to start out, he plagueth my back, he poisoneth my flesh, he plagueth my whole body… whether it be the spectre of my own family and kindred, or the spectre of one who was murdered, or whether it be the spectre of any other man that haunteth me.”[206.2]
Now it is possible that the curse of the demon was powerful both in the earlier and later periods of ancient, as it is powerful to-day in modern, Greece; the demon might be a ghost or a revenant. And it has been the ambition of a small group of scholars in this country to prove that the higher literature and art of Greece, that reveals so fair and sane an imagination of the unseen world, is only a thin veil drawn over much that was grotesque and ghastly in the popular superstition. Even Homer reveals forms of terror in Hades; and we have ugly tales of demons sucking blood, and ravaging the land like the Ποινή of Megara. It is not necessary to labour this point. Probably every ancient race has been sorely tried at one time or other by the burden of demonology; even our hardy ancient kinsmen of Iceland had their vampires and strangling ghosts, that figure occasionally in their saga. But the great peoples of our Western civilisation are those who have struggled free from this obsession into the light of progressive secular life. Such also—we have the right to believe—was the early Greek. To draw the distinction too sharply between the cultured and the uncultured strata may be a source of fallacy, especially when it is ancient Hellas that we are dealing with, where the artist was usually a man of the people and the people certainly delighted in the work of their poets, and were strangely susceptible to the healing influences of music. If Greek poetry, then, and art strove to banish the ugliest forms of the demon-world, and thereby worked with purifying and tranquillising influence on the temperament, so much the better for the Greek peasant. It is probably wrong, therefore, to regard the average Hellene as a nightmare-ridden man. But we might dare to say this of the Babylonian; and his imaginary terrors were fostered by his religious liturgical poetry, and to some extent by his art. For most of his hymns are formulae of exorcisms, incantations against demons and spectres. But such liturgy played relatively a very small part in Greek ritual; and this is one of the strongest facts that can be brought to witness against the theory of early Babylonian influence.
Yet both the Greek and the Babylonian feared the miasma of the dead. Ishtar’s threats at the portal of Hell, a tremendous outburst of infernal poetry, is a strong witness to this feeling: “Thou warder, open thy door, open thy door that I may enter in. If thou openest not thy door that I may not enter, I will crash thy door into splinters, I will burst the bolt, I will splinter the threshold and tear up the wings of the door: I will lead forth the dead that they shall eat and drink: the dead shall keep company with the living.” What lends part of its force to this great passage is the dreadful thought that the living should be haunted by the multitude of the ghosts that would pollute the living person and the light of day.
Shamash the sun-god is the natural enemy of ghosts, and is therefore appealed to in the incantation quoted just above to drive away the demon-spectres. He seems to stand here in the same relation of antipathy to the ghost-world as the “pure” Apollo stood for the Greek.