36 Travels in the Interior of North America, ch. vii.
again, is restored to a new life." 36 Indeed, all who describe the course of initiation agree in declaring that the aspirant was buried for a time within some narrow space, a typical coffin or grave. This testimony is confirmed by the evidence of the ruins of the chief temples and sacred places of the pagan world. These abound with spacious caverns, labyrinthine passages, and curious recesses; and in connection with them is always found some excavation evidently fitted to enclose a human form. Such hollow beds, covered with flat stones easily removed, are still to be seen amidst the Druidic remains of Britain and Gaul, as well as in nearly every spot where tradition has located the celebration of the Mysteries, in Greece, India, Persia, Egypt.37
It becomes a most interesting question whence these symbols and rites had their origin, and what they were really meant to shadow forth. Bryant, Davies, Faber, Oliver, and several other well known mythologists, have labored, with no slight learning and ingenuity, to show that all these ceremonies sprang from traditions of the Deluge and of Noah's adventures at that time. The mystic death, burial, and resurrection of the initiate, they say, are a representation of the entrance of the patriarch into the ark, his dark and lonesome sojourn in it, and his final departure out of it. The melancholy wailings with which the Mysteries invariably began, typified the mourning of the patriarchal family over their confinement within the gloomy and sepulchral ark; the triumphant rejoicings with which the initiations always ended, referred to the glad exit of the patriarchal family from their floating prison into the blooming world. The advocates of this theory have laboriously collected all the materials that favor it, and skilfully striven by their means to elucidate the whole subject of ancient paganism, especially of the Mysteries. But, after reading all that they have written, and considering it in the light of impartial researches, one is constrained to say that they have by no means made out their case. It is somewhat doubtful if there be any ground whatever for believing that traditions concerning Noah's deluge and the ark, and his doings in connection with them, in any way entered into the public doctrines and forms, or into the secret initiations, of the heathen religions. At all events, there can be no doubt that the Arkite theorists have exaggerated the importance and extent of these views beyond all tolerable bounds, and even to absurdity. But our business with them now is only so far as they relate to the Mysteries. Our own conviction is that the real meaning of the rites in the Mysteries was based upon the affecting phenomena of human life and death and the hope of another life. We hold the Arkite theory to be arbitrary in general, unsupported by proofs, and inconsistent in detail, unable to meet the points presented.
In the first place, a fundamental part of the ancient belief was that below the surface of the earth was a vast, sombre under world, the destination of the ghosts of men, the Greek Hades, the Roman Orcus, the Gothic Hell. A part of the service of initiation was a symbolic descent into this realm. Apuleius, describing his initiation, says, "I approached to the confines
36 Golden Ass, Eng. trans., by Thomas Taylor, p. 280.
37 Copious instances are given in Oliver's History of Initiation, in Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry, and in Maurice's Indian Antiquities.
of death and trod on the threshold of Proserpine." 38 Orpheus, to whom the introduction of the Mysteries into Greece from the East was ascribed, wrote a poem, now lost, called the "Descent into Hades." Such a descent was attributed to Hercules, Theseus, Rhampsinitus, and many others.39 It is painted in detail by Homer in the adventure of his hero Ulysses, also by Virgil much more minutely through the journey of Aneas. Warburton labors with great learning and plausibility, and, as it seems to us, with irresistible cogency, to show that these descents are no more nor less than exoteric accounts of what was dramatically enacted in the esoteric recesses of the Mysteries.40 Any person must be invincibly prejudiced who can doubt that the Greek Hades meant a capacious subterranean world of shades. Now, to assert, as Bryant and his disciples do,41 that "Hades means the interior of Noah's ark," or "the abyss of waters on which the ark floated, as a coffin bearing the relics of dead Nature," is a purely arbitrary step taken from undue attachment to a mere theory. Hades means the under world of the dead, and not the interior of Noah's ark. Indeed, in the second place, Faber admits that in the Mysteries "the ark itself was supposed to be in Hades, the vast central abyss of the earth." But such was not the location of Noah's vessel and voyage. They were on the face of the flood, above the tops of the mountains. It is beyond comparison the most reasonable supposition in itself, and the one best supported by historic facts, that the representations of a mystic burial and voyage in a ship or boat shown in the ancient religions were symbolic rites drawn from imagination and theory as applied to the impressive phenomena of nature and the lot of man. The Egyptians and some other early nations, we know, figured the starry worlds in the sky as ships sailing over a celestial sea. The earth itself was sometimes emblematized in the same way. Then, too, there was the sepulchral barge in which the Egyptian corpses were borne over the Acherusian lake to be entombed. Also the "dark blue punt" in which Charon ferried souls across the river of death. In these surely there was no reference to Noah's ark. It seems altogether likely that what Bryant and his coadjutors have constructed into the Arkite system of interpretation was really but an emblematic showing forth of a natural doctrine of human life and death and future fate. A wavering boat floating on the deep might, with striking fitness, typify the frail condition of humanity in life, as when Hercules is depicted sailing over the ocean in a golden cup; and that boat, safely riding the flood, might also represent the cheerful faith of the initiate in a future life, bearing him fearlessly through all dangers and through death to the welcoming society of Elysium, as when Danae and her babe, tossed over the tempestuous sea in a fragile chest, were securely wafted to the sheltering shore of Seriphus. No emblem of our human state and lot, with their mysteries, perils, threats, and promises, could be either more natural or more impressive than that of a vessel launched on the deep. The dying Socrates said "that he should trust his soul on the hope of a future life as upon a raft, and launch away into the unknown." Thus the imagination broods over and explores the shows and secrets, presageful warnings and alluring
38 Golden Ass, Taylor's trans., p. 283.
39 Herodotus, lib. il. cap. cxxii.
40 Divine Legation of Moses, book ii. sect. iv.