At the present time, when theologians and those who have most aptitude for such discussions are arguing “in thoughts more elevate” of the soul’s future life, and its rewards and punishments therein, the pre-historic student is tempted to let his thoughts wander backwards over a different aspect of the same subject, in an effort to link again the chain of belief concerning heaven and hell, which joins this present with a long-forgotten past. The difficulty which we feel in uniting ourselves in thought with past ages, arises surely more often from the imperfection of our sympathies than from the deficiency of our positive knowledge. So many questions which were once new have long been settled, so many experiments have been tried, such experiences have been lived through since then; it is so impossible that the earlier conditions of life and society should return; and we cannot bring ourselves to make the effort of imagination necessary to place us in harmony with bygone times. But there are some few questions which seem as far from settlement now as they ever were; one of these is the question concerning the destiny of man after death, the character of his journey into that undiscovered country, and the sort of life he will lead when there.
“A riddle which one shrinks
To challenge from the scornful sphinx.”
Some would dissuade us from the continuance of these (so they say) unfruitful speculations; but it is very certain that man must change his nature before they will lose their fascination for him; and until he does so, he cannot read without sympathy the guesses which past generations of men have made towards the solution of the same problems. For them, indeed, these solutions have lost their interest, as ours will soon do for us. Whatever lot that new condition may hold in store, eternal pleasure or eternal pain, they have tried it now; whatever scene the dark curtain hides, they have passed behind it. This is very certain: as that we soon must. But so long as we remain here upon this upper earth, we must be something above or below humanity if we refuse ever to let our thoughts wander toward the changes and chances of another life.
Not, indeed, that questions of this sort have ever had for the majority of men in one age, or for the collective mass of human kind, an all-absorbing interest. If we choose to look closely into the matter, and to test men’s opinion as it is displayed in their actions (the only real opinion), we shall at first perhaps be struck by the slight belief which they possess in a future state. For it is slight compared to their “notional assent,” that which they think they believe concerning it. With the majority, faith upon this point is at best but shadowy, of an otiose character suitable for soothing the lots of others, and sometimes, alas! called into requisition to relieve us from the stings of conscience on account of the pain which our own misconduct or neglect has introduced therein. And as it is with us, so, save under exceptional conditions, it has always been with men in the full vigour and enjoyment of life. There have been times when one aspect of the future—its terror—has been realized with an intensity, and has exercised an influence upon life and conduct, such as is unknown in our days. But these times have not been ordinary ones, and we are apt, I think, even to over-estimate the force of faith during the Middle Ages. That term, “dark ages,” overrides our fancy; “we can never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping.”[5] But, then, neither have the most light-hearted and sceptical of people been able to shut their eyes utterly to the warnings of death. We are wont to think of the Greeks as of just such a light-hearted, and in a fashion sceptical, temperament, and to contrast the spirit of Hellas with the spirit of mediæval Europe. Scarcely any thought of death, or of judgment after death, disturbs the serenity of Greek art, such as it has come down to us. Thanatos is not to be found;[6] even the tombs are adorned with representations of war and of the chase, or with figures of the dancing Hours. And yet Greek art was not without its darker side. It had, like mediæval poetry, its Dante—Polygnotus, namely—who adorned the pilgrims’ house at Delphi with frescoes representing the judgment and the tortures of the damned,—a Greek Campo Santo. He would have given us a different impression of the Greek mind in presence of the fact of mortality, and shown us how easily we are led to exaggerate the divergence in thought between different nations and different times.
So we find as far back as we can test the belief of men, certain theories touching the fate of the soul after death, which represent, in the germ at least, the prevalent opinions of our own day; and out of some of which these opinions have sprung. First among these, probably in point of time, stands the purely sceptical theory which takes its rise from the earliest efforts of language to give expression to the unseen. Casting about for a name for the essential part of man, the life or soul of him, language finds at first that it has no suitable word, and then supplies its want by using the breath—the ψυχη, spiritus—in this sense. Like the vital spark itself, the breath is seen to depart when the man dies. Whither has it gone? The purely negative, the purely sceptical answer would be, “It has disappeared.” The answer actually given in most religious creeds is, “It has gone to the unseen place,” or the concealed place; as the Greeks said, to Hades (Ἀ-ίδης); or, as our Northern ancestors said, to Hel.[7] Thus, out of pure negation we have the beginning of a myth: the spirit becomes something definite, and the place it has gone to is partly realized. The unseen place is underground, gained by a dark valley which stretches there from the upper earth. Enough of the old belief remains to keep this home of the dead itself dark and shadowy and lifeless. “The senseless dead, the simulacra of mortals,” as Homer says. And we remember how even a hero like Achilles “would rather be on earth and serve for hire to a man of mean estate, than rule a king among the dead.”
The same thought is expressed by the Hebrew poet,[8]
“Sheol shall not praise thee, Jehovah,
The dead shall not celebrate thee;
They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth;
The living, the living, shall praise thee, as I do this day.”
No people have held up this destructive side of death, this negative theory of a future, with sharper outline than the Greeks and Hebrews. What a contrast to the teaching of modern religions is that line, “They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth!” Other people have found themselves unable to rest at this point; they have endowed their place with a personality, but, still strongly impressed with its horrors, this personality is grim and fearful. Even with the Greeks, Hades is a person, not a place; with the Teutons, Hel has gone through the same transformation: and a thousand other images of horror to be met with in different creeds, devouring dragons, dogs who, like Cerberus, threaten those who are journeying to the underground kingdom, can be shown by their names to have sprung from merely negative images of death, the unseen, the coverer, the concealer, the cave of night.
In contrast therefore with all these myths stand those which, after death, send the soul upon a journey to some paradise, believed generally to lie in the west. If these first are myths of hell, the second series may be fairly described as myths of heaven. Nor can it be certainly proved that the more cheerful view of the other world is of a later growth in time than the first which seems so primitive. We see indications of it in the interments of old stone-age grave mounds. While among historical people the older Hebrews are the exponents of the gloomier Sheol, the most hopeful picture of the soul’s future finds expression in the ritual service of the Egyptians. There we have a complete history of the dead man’s journey across the Nile and through the twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, until at last it reaches the home of the sun. And, to come nearer home, among all those peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the Indo-European family of nations, we shall find the evidences of a double belief, the belief in death as of a dim underground place or as a devouring monster, and the contrasting faith in death as a journey undertaken to reach a new country where everything is better and happier than upon earth.
This is the myth of an earthly paradise, not, like our heaven, disconnected altogether from the world, but a distant land lying somewhere in the west, and forming part of the imaginary geography of those times: so the belief is, more than others, a realistic one, mingling with the daily experience of men and influencing deeply their daily life. The necessary portal of death is even sometimes lost sight of altogether, as when in the Middle Ages we find men undertaking more than one expedition in search of the earthly paradise, and when we find the current belief that in certain weathers was visible from the west coast of Ireland that happy island to which St. Brandon and his disciples had been carried when they left this world. For this reason, though the notion of the western paradise is essentially the same for all the human race, its local colouring constantly varies, changing with the geographical position of each people: if they change their homes and advance, as they will probably do, towards the land of promise, it moves away before them, as the rainbow moves from us. The Egyptians had their myth of the soul’s journey, drawing all its distinctive features from the special character of their land, chiefly from the commanding influence which a great neighbouring desert exercised upon their imagination. But for our ancestors, the parents of the Indo-European races, the place of the desert was supplied by the sea.