The belief of mankind that a soul or ghost survives the body has been so nearly universal as to appear like the spontaneous result of an instinct. We propose to trace the history of opinions concerning the physical destination of this disembodied spirit, its connection with localities, to give the historical topography of the future life.
The earliest conception of the abode of the dead was probably that of the Hebrew Sheol or the Greek Hades, namely, the idea born from the silence, depth, and gloom of the grave of a stupendous subterranean cavern full of the drowsy race of shades, the indiscriminate habitation of all who leave the land of the living. Gradually the thought arose and won acceptance that the favorites of Deity, peerless heroes and sages, might be exempt from this dismal fate, and migrate at death to some delightful clime beyond some far shore, there, amidst unalloyed pleasures, to spend immortal days. This region was naturally located on the surface of the earth, where the cheerful sun could shine and the fresh breezes blow, yet in some untrodden distance, where the gauntlet of fact had not smitten the sceptre of fable. The paltry portion of this earth familiar to the ancients was surrounded by an unexplored region, which their fancy, stimulated by the legends of the poets, peopled with mythological kingdoms, the rainbow bowers and cloudy synods of Olympus, from whose glittering peak the Thunderer threw his bolts over the south; the Golden Garden of the
3 Ennead ii. lib. ix.: Contra Gnosticos, cap. 4.
4 Helmholtz, Edinburgh Phil. Msg., series iv. vol. xi.: Interaction of Natural Forces.
5 Thomson, Ibid. Dec. 1854: Mechanical Energies of the Solar System.
Hesperides, whose dragons lay on guard in the remote west; the divine cities of Meru, whose encircling towers pierced the eastern sky; the Banquet Halls of Ethiopia, gleaming through the fiery desert; the fragrant Islands of Immortality, musical and luring in the central ocean; the happy land of the Hyperboreans, beyond the snowy summits of northern Caucasus:
"How pleasant were the wild beliefs That dwelt in legends old! Alas! to our posterity Will no such tales be told. We know too much: scroll after scroll Weighs down our weary shelves: Our only point of ignorance Is centred in ourselves."
There was a belief among the Persians that Kaf, a mountain two thousand miles high, formed a rim to the flat world and prevented travellers from ever falling off.6 The fact that the earth is a globe inhabited on all sides is a comparatively recent piece of knowledge. So late as in the eighth century Pope Zachary accused Virgilius, an Irish mathematician and monk, of heresy for believing in the existence of antipodes.7 St. Boniface wrote to the Pope against Virgilius; and Zachary ordered a council to be held to expel him from the Church, for "professing, against God and his own soul, so perverse and wicked a doctrine." To the ancients all beyond the region they had traversed was an unknown land, clothed in darkness, crowded with mystery and allurement. Across the weltering wastes of brine, in a halcyon sea, the Hindu placed the White Isle, the dwelling of translated and immortalized men.8 Under the attraction of a mystic curiosity, well might the old, wearied Ulysses say,
"Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew."
Decius Brutus and his army, as Florus relates, reaching the coast of Portugal, where, for the first time, they saw the sun setting in the blood tinged ocean, turned back their standards with horror as they beheld "the huge corpse of ruddy gold let down into the deep." The Phoenician traders brought intelligence to Greece of a people, the Cimmerians, who dwelt on the borders of Hades in the umbered realms of perpetual night. To the dying Roman, on the farthest verge of the known horizon hovered a vision of Elysian Fields. And the American