The worship of Mithras, the Persian god of created light and all earthly wisdom, who in time became identified with the sun, was conducted in natural and artificial caves found in every part of the Roman Empire where his cult flourished until superseded by Christianity; and in these caves very elaborate initiations of seven degrees were carried out. The cave itself signified the lower world, into which during the ordeals of initiation the neophyte was supposed to enter while out of the physical body, that the soul might be purged by many trials.[549] In Mexico the cavern of Chalchatongo led to the plains of paradise, evidently through initiations; and Mictlan, a subterranean temple, similarly led to the Aztec land of the dead.[550]
Among the most widespread and characteristic features of contemporary primitive races we find highly developed mysteries (puberty institutions) of the same essential character as these ancient mysteries. They are to uncivilized youth what the Greek Mysteries were to Greek youth, and what colleges and universities are to the youth of Europe and America, though perhaps more successful than these last as places of moral and religious instruction. These mysteries vary from tribe to tribe, though in almost all of them there is what corresponds to the Death Rite in Freemasonry; that is to say, there is either a symbolical presentation of death in a sacred drama—as there was among the Greeks in their complete initiatory rites—or a state of actual trance imposed upon each neophyte by the priestly initiators. The sanctum sanctorum of these primitive mysteries is sometimes in a natural or artificial cavern (as was the rule with respect to the Ancient Mysteries and St. Patrick’s Purgatory on Saints’ Island); sometimes in a structure specially prepared to exclude the light; or else the neophytes are symbolically or literally buried in an underground place to be resurrected greatly purified and strengthened.[551] And the mystic purification at the sea-shore and spiritual re-birth sought in the cave at Eleusis by the highly cultured Athenians and their fellow Greeks, or among other cultured and uncultured ancient and modern peoples through some corresponding initiation ceremony, find their parallel in the purification and spiritual re-birth still sought in the Christian Purgatory, now ‘Prison Chapel’, and in the lake waters, amid the solitude of sacred Lough Derg, Ireland, by thousands of earnest pilgrims from all parts of the world.[552]
There is a correspondence between this conclusion and what was said about the initiatory aspects of the Aengus Cult; and should we try to connect the Purgatory with some particular sun-cult of a character parallel to that of the Aengus Cult we should probably have to name Lug, the great Irish sun-god, because of the significant fact that the purgatorial rites on Station Island come to an end on the Festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the 15th of August, a date which apparently coincides sufficiently to represent, as it probably does, the ancient August Lugnasadh, the 1st of August, a day sacred to the sun-god Lug, as the name indicates.[553]
If we are to class together the original Purgatory, New Grange, Gavrinis, and other Celtic underground places, as centres of the highest religious practices in the past, we should expect to discover that many similar structures or natural caverns existed in pagan Ireland, as indeed we find they did. Thus in different Irish manuscripts various caves are mentioned,[554] and most of them, so far as they can be localized, are traditionally places of supernatural marvels, and often (as in the case of the last one enumerated, the Cave of Cruachan) are directly related to the under-world.[555] Another of these caves is described as being under a church, which circumstance suggests that the church was dedicated over an underground place originally sacred to pagan worship, and, as we may safely assume, to pagan mysteries.
The curious custom among early Irish Christians, of retiring for a time to a cave, seems to show the lasting into historical times of the pagan cave-ritual now surviving at Lough Derg only. The custom seems to have been common among the saints of Britain and of Scotland;[556] and in Stokes’s Tripartite Life of Patrick (p. 242) there is a very significant reference to it. In the Mabinogion story of Kulhwch and Olwen there seems to be another traditional echo of the times when caves were used for religious rites or worship, in the author’s reference to the cave of the witch Orddu as being ‘on the confines of Hell’. A cave was thus popularly supposed to lead to Hades or an underworld of fairies, demons, and spirits; again just as in St. Patrick’s Purgatory. Purely Celtic instances of this kind might be greatly multiplied.
Pagan Origin of Purgatorial Doctrine
The metrical romance of Orfeo and Herodys in Ritson’s Collection of Metrical Romances[557] illustrates how in Britain (and Britain—even England—is more Celtic than Saxon) the Grecian Hell or Hades was looked on as identical with the Celtic Fairyland. This is quite unusual; and for us is highly significant. It shows that in Britain, at the time the romance was written, there was no essential difference between the underworld of fairies and the underworld of shades. Pluto’s realm and the realm where fairy kings and fairy queens held high revelry were the same. The difference is this: Hades was an Egyptian and in turn a Greek conception, while Fairyland was a Celtic conception; they differ as the imagination at work on a philosophical doctrine differs among the three peoples, and not otherwise. And, as Wright has shown, the origin of Purgatory in the Roman Church is very obscure. As to the location of Purgatory, Roman theology confesses it has nothing certain to say.[558] The natural conclusion, as we suggested in our study of Re-birth, would seem to be that the Irish doctrine of the Otherworld in all its aspects, but especially as the underground world of the Sidhe or fairy-folk, was combined with the pagan Graeco-Roman doctrine of Hades in St. Patrick’s Purgatory, and hence gave rise to the modern Christian doctrine of Purgatory.
Christian Rites in Honour of the Departed
We may now readily pass from an examination of world-wide rites concerned with death and re-birth, which are based on an ancient sun-cult, to an examination of their shadows in the theology of Christianity, where they are commonly known as the rites in honour of the departed. It seems to be clear at the outset that the Christian Fête in Commemoration of the Dead, according to its history, is an adaptation from paganism; and with so many Irish ecclesiastics, or else their disciples, educated in the Celtic monasteries of Britain and Ireland, having influence in the Church during the early centuries, there is a strong probability that the Feast of Samain had something to do with shaping the modern feast, as we have suggested in the preceding chapter; for both feasts originally fell on the first of November. Roman Catholic writers record that it was St. Odilon, Abbot of Cluny, who instituted in 998 in all his congregations the Fête in Commemoration of the Dead, and fixed its anniversary on the first of November; and that this fête was quickly adopted by all the churches of the East.[559] To-day in the Roman Church both the first and second of November are holy days devoted to those who have passed out of this life. The first day, the Fête of All the Saints (La Toussaint), is said to have originated thus: the Roman Pantheon—Pantheon meaning the residence of all the gods—was dedicated to Jupiter the Avenger, and when Christianity triumphed the pagan images were overthrown, and there was thereupon originally established, in place of the cult of all the gods, the Fête of all the Saints.[560] Why La Toussaint should have become a feast of the dead would be difficult to say unless we admit the ancient Celtic feast of the dead as having amalgamated with it. This we believe is what took place; for if the Fête in Commemoration of the Dead was, as some authorities hold, established by St. Odilon to fall on the first of November, in direct accord with Samain or Halloween, then at some later period it was displaced by La Toussaint, for now it is celebrated on the second of November.
Likewise prayers and masses for the dead, which annually receive emphasis on the first two days of November, seem to have had their origin in pre-Christian cults. According to Mosheim, in his Histoire ecclésiastique,[561] the usage of celebrating the Sacrament at the tombs of martyrs and at funerals was introduced during the fourth century; and from this usage the masses for the saints and for the dead originated in the eighth century. Prior to the fourth century we find the newly converted Christians in all parts of Celtic Europe, and in many countries non-Celtic, still rendering a cult to ancestral spirits, making food offerings at the tombs of heroes, and strictly observing the very ancient November feast, or its equivalent, in honour of the dead and fairies. Then, very gradually, in the course of four centuries, the character of the Christian cults and feasts of the saints and of the dead seems to have been determined. The following citation will serve to illustrate the nature of Irish Christian rites in honour of the dead:—In the Lebar Brecc[562] we read: ‘There is nothing which one does on behalf of the soul of him who has died that doth not help it, both prayer on knees, and abstinence, and singing requiems, and frequent blessings. Sons are bound to do penance for their deceased parents. A full year, now, was Maedóc of Ferns, with his whole community, on water and bread, after loosing from hell the soul of Brandub son of Echaid.’