The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

by T. R. Glover

The dæmons are not slow to speak; it is we who are slow to hear. "In truth we men recognize one another's thoughts, as it were feeling after them in the dark by means of the voice. But the thoughts of the dæmons are luminous and shine for those who can see; and they need no words or names, such as men use among themselves as symbols to see images and pictures of what is thought, while, as for the things actually thought, those they only know who have some peculiar and dæmonic light. The words of the dæmons are borne through all things, but they sound only for those who have the untroubled nature and the still soul—those, in fact, whom we call holy and happy (daimoníous)."[[93]] Most people think the dæmon only comes to men when they are asleep, but this is due to their want of harmony. "The divine communicates immediately (di autoû) with few and but rarely; to most men it gives signs, from which rises the so-called Mantic art"[[94]]—prophecy or soothsaying. All souls have the "mantic" faculty—the capacity for receiving impressions from dæmons—though not in an equal degree. A dæmon after all is, from one point of view, merely a disembodied soul, and it may meet a soul incorporated in a body; and thus, soul meeting soul, there are produced "impressions of the future,"[[95]] for a voice is not needed to convey thought.

But if a disembodied soul can foresee the future, why should not a soul in a body also be able? In point of fact, the soul has this power, but it is dulled by the body. Memory is a parallel gift. Some souls only shake off the influence of the body in dreams, some at the approach of death.[[96]] The mantic element is receptive of impressions and of anticipations by means of feelings, and without reasoning process (asyllogistôs) it touches the future when it can get clear of the present. The state, in which this occurs, is called "enthusiasm," god-possession—and into this the body will sometimes fall of itself, and sometimes it is cast into it by some vapour or exhalation sent up by the earth. This vapour or whatever it is (tò mantikòn theûma kaì pneûma) pervades the body, and produces in the soul a disposition, or combination (krâsin), unfamiliar and strange, hard to describe, but from what is said it may be divined. "Probably by heat and diffusion it opens pores [or channels] whereby impressions of the future may be received."[[97]] Such a vapour was found to issue from the ground at Delphi—the accidental discovery of a shepherd, Coretas by name, who spoke "words with God in them" (phônàs enthousiódeis) under its influence; and it was not till his words proved true that attention was paid to the place and the vapour. There is the same sort of relation between the soul and the mantic vapour as between the eye and light.

But does not this vapour theory do away with the other theory that divination is mediated to us by the gods through the dæmons? Plutarch cites Plato's objection to Anaxagoras who was "entangled in natural causes" and lost sight of better causes and principles beyond them. There are double causes for everything. The ancients said that all things come from Zeus; those who came later, natural philosophers (physidoì), on the contrary "wandered away from the fair and divine principle," and made everything depend on bodies, impacts, changes and combinations (krâsis); and both miss something of the truth. "We do not make Mantic either godless or void of reason, when we give it the soul of man as its material, and the enthusiastic spirit and exhalation as its tool or plectron. For, first, the earth that produces these exhalations—and the sun, who gives the earth the power of combination (krâsis) and change, is by the tradition of our fathers a god; and then we leave dæmons installed as lords and warders and guards of this combination (krâseôs), now loosening and now tightening (as if it were a harmony), taking away excessive ecstasy and confusion, and gently and painlessly blending the motive power for those who use it. So we shall not seem guilty of anything unreasonable or impossible."[[98]]

Plutarch gives an interesting account of a potion, which will produce the same sort of effect. The Egyptians compound it in a very mystical way of sixteen drugs, nearly all of which are fragrant, while the very number sixteen as the square of a square has remarkable properties or suggestions. The mixture is called Kyphi, and when inhaled it calms the mind and reduces anxiety, and "that part of us which receives impressions (phantastikòn) and is susceptive of dreams, it rubs down and cleans as if it were a mirror."[[99]]

The gods, he says, are our first and chiefest friends.[[100]] Not every one indeed so thinks—"for see what Jews and Syrians think of the gods!"[[101]] But Plutarch insists that there is no joy in life apart from them. Epicureans may try to deliver us from the wrath of the gods, but they do away with their kindness at the same moment; and Plutarch holds it better that there should even be some morbid element (pháthos) of reverence and fear in our belief than that, in our desire to avoid this, we should leave ourselves neither hope, nor kindness, nor courage in prosperity, nor any recourse to the divine when we are in trouble.[[102]] Superstition is a rheum that gathers in the eye of faith, which we do well to remove, but not at the cost of knocking the eye out or blinding it.[[103]] In any case, its inconvenience is outweighed "ten thousand times" by the glad and joyous hopefulness that counts all blessing as coming from the gods. And he cites in proof of this that joy in temple-service, to which reference has already been made. Those who abolish Providence need no further punishment than to live without it.[[104]]

But the pleasures of faith are not only those of imagination or emotion. For while the gods give us all blessings, there is none better for man to receive or more awful for God to bestow than truth. Other things God gives to men, mind and thought he shares with them, for these are his attributes, and "I think that of God's own eternal life the happiness lies in his knowledge being equal to all that comes; for without knowledge and thought, immortality would be time and not life."[[105]] The very name of Isis is etymologically connected with knowing (eidénai); and the goal of her sacred rites is "knowledge of the first and sovereign and intelligible, whom the goddess bids us seek and find in her."[[106]] Her philosophy is "hidden for the most part in myths, and in true tales (lógois) that give dim visions and revelations of truth."[[107]] Her temple at Sais bears the inscription: "I am all that has been and is and shall be, and my veil no mortal yet has lifted."[[108]] She is the goddess of "Ten Thousand Names."[[109]]

Plutarch connects with his belief in the gods "the great hypothesis" of immortality. "It is one argument that at one and the same time establishes the providence of God and the continuance of the human soul, and you cannot do away with the one and leave the other."[[110]] If we had nothing divine in us, nothing like God, if we faded like the leaves (as Homer said), God would hardly give us so much thought, nor would he, like women with their gardens of Adonis, tend and culture "souls of a day," growing in the flesh which will admit no "strong root of life." The dialogue, in which this is said, is supposed to have taken place in Delphi, so Plutarch turns to Apollo. "Do you think that, if Apollo knew that the souls of the dying perished at once, blowing away like mist or smoke from their bodies, he would ordain so many propitiations for the dead, and ask such great gifts and honours for the departed—that he would cheat and humbug believers? For my part, I will never let go the continuance of the soul, unless some Herakles shall come and take away the Pythia's tripod and abolish and destroy the oracle. For as long as so many oracles of this kind are given even in our day, it is not holy to condemn the soul to death."[[111]] And Plutarch fortifies his conviction with stories of oracles, and of men who had converse with dæmons, with apocalypses and revelations, among which are two notable Descents into Hades,[[112]] and a curious account of dæmons in the British Isles.[[113]]

The theory of dæmons lent itself to the explanation of the origin of evil, but speculation in this direction seems not to have appealed to Plutarch. He uses bad dæmons to explain the less pleasant phases of paganism, as we shall see, but the question of evil he scarcely touches. In his book on Isis and Osiris he discusses Typhon as the evil element in nature, and refers with interest to the views of "the Magian Zoroaster who, they say, lived about five hundred years before the Trojan War." Zoroaster held that there were two divine beings, the better being a god, Horomazes (Ormuzd), the other a dæmon Areimanios (Ahriman), the one most like to light of all sensible things, the other to darkness and ignorance, "and between them is Mithras, for which reason the Persians call Mithras the Mediator." But the hour of Mithras was not yet come, and in all his writings Plutarch hardly alludes to him more than half a dozen times.[[114]] It should be noted that, whatever his interest in Eastern dualism with its Western parallels, Plutarch does not abandon his belief in the One Ultimate Good God.