rite flitted about aimlessly around the spot where his shell, the body, lay. This is the superstition concerning a murdered man. By the 'polluted covert' the ghost stands, to show where the horrid deed was wrought. By virtue of an easy transfer of ideas any other form of interment-burning of the dead when that was customarybecame also the needful passport to the land of shades. Among the Homeric heroes we see every effort made to secure the body for this purpose; and when the corpse of Hector cannot be recovered, some faint image of the funeral rite is performed by burning his clothes.

This belief, too, explains why Elpenor, the comrade of Odysseus, is found by the latter, when he goes to visit the home of Hades, still wandering on the hither side of Styx; and why Patroclus' ghost comes to the bedside of Achilles, and reproaches him that his funeral rites have not yet been performed. In truth, the belief in the importance of funeral rites is too widespread and too well known to need further illustration in this place.'

Among those nationalities with whom the belief in an underground kingdom was most in force, the home and the condition of the dead must alike seem dark and cheerless. Enough of the old belief concerning the vanishing breath remained to make the future itself shadowy; and so perhaps it was a place of emptiness and hollowness, a no-life rather than one of positive pain, that made the early hell. The senseless dead, the simulacra of mortals,' Homer calls the shades; and the same thought is expressed by Isaiah when he says—

Sheol shall not praise Thee, Jehovah,
The dead shall not celebrate Thee;

They that go down into the pit shall not hope for Thy truth:
The living, the living shall praise Thee, as I do this day.2

1 So Virgil:

Hæc omnis quam cernis inops, inhumataque turba est;

Portitor ille Charon; hi quos vehit unda sepulti.'-Æn. vi. 325.

2 Isaiah xxxviii. 18, 19; cf. also Genesis xxxvii. 35, 1 Samuel xxviii. 19.

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269

But when this under world takes a form of greater distinctness, and men begin to try and localise it beneath particular spots of the earth, they imagine more definite roads leading to it; and names, such as Styx and Avernus, which were purely mythical, assume a geographical character. Approaches of this kind to the realm of darkness are the Höllenthäler, hell's glens, and the like, of which we meet so many in Europe. All very deep caves and abysses are believed to lead thither. In a more imaginative way, and in the language of a finer poetry, the downward road is spoken of as the Valley of the Shadow of Death.'

But no living man ventures to the bottom of this dark valley; or if he do go he shall scarcely return. The secrets of that place are well kept. And great was of old the fear of the infernal deities, lest men should pry into their prison house. Wherefore Hades cried aloud when Poseidon was shaking the earth, lest that god should rend it asunder and disclose his mansions to the day-mansions dolorous fearful which the gods themselves loathe.'

The inanimate place, the very cavernous hollow, becomes anon gifted with life; and the mere privation of an earlier faith grows into a more awful and confounding positive.' Hell becomes a being. Most likely this being was at first endowed with the figure of some ravenous animal, some bird or beast of prey, a wolf, a lion, a dog, a hawk, as the experience of each individual people might direct. Greek mythology had its Cerberus, Norse mythology its Fenris wolf. In a mythology a shade more elaborate the same thing is represented by imaginary creatures -dragons, griffins, or what not. The dragons which we meet with in mediæval legend were once, most of them, in some way or other, embodiments of Death. At the door of Strassburg Cathedral, and in one of the stained windows within, the reader may see a representation of the mouth Sheol is misrendered 'grave'in our version. It means 'the place of the dead,' not the place of dead bodies only.

of Hell, in the form of a great dragon's head spouting flame.

Anyone who is acquainted with medieval sculptures and paintings knows how common it is to find this kind of imagery, which exists in virtue of the reversion of popular mythology to primitive forms of thought.

Of a like origin with this hell dragon are most of the fabulous monsters, half human and half animal, whom we meet in Greek mythology-the harpies, for example, the sirens, or the gorgons. If the underground kingdom is seen in the form of a man, he is a monstrous man, such as the ogre of our nursery tales. This ogre is a descendant of the Orcus of classical times, and, I doubt, he better shows us the primitive conception of that being than do any representations in art of the god of hell.

No people have painted the destructive aspect of death, the negative theory of a future, with a sharper outline than did the Greeks and Hebrews. What a contrast to the teaching of modern religions is the line

They that go down into the pit shall not hope for Thy truth.

Yet Greeks and Hebrews have not abstained from endowing the unseen place' with some personality. In Greek literature we may almost trace the processes by which Hadês, from being impersonal, becomes personal, and then returns once more to be merely a place. Of a man dying it is not seldom said in Homer that hateful darkness seized him:' here was a half-personality which was calculated soon to lead to a complete one. Hadês is accordingly generally a person in Homer. The Icelandic goddess, Hel, went through the same transformation that we can trace in the case of Hadês. From being the concealed place she grew to be the queen of the dead, and then again degenerated to be only the home of the dead. Of the thousand other images of horror to be met with in

1 E.g. Il. v. 45.

THE JOURNEY OF THE SOUL.

271

different creeds-devouring dragons, fire-breathing serpents, or dogs who, like Cerberus, threaten those who are journeying to the underground kingdom-the most part can, from their names, be shown to have arisen out of the merely negative images of death, the unseen,' the 'coverer,' the 'concealer,' the cave of night.'

In contrast with all these myths stand those which after death send the soul upon a journey to some happy home of the departed, to a paradise which is generally believed to be in the west. If the first are myths of hell, the second series may be fairly described as myths of heaven. Nor can it be clearly proved that the more cheerful view of the other world is of a later growth in time than the one which we have been describing, seeing the evidence which the Stone Age interments seem to offer upon this point. For if the dead man had need of his weapons of war, of his captives and his wives, his life to come could not have differed for the worse from his life here. And if, among historic peoples, the earlier Hebrews were the exponents of the gloomy Sheol, the most hopeful picture of the soul's future finds expression in the ritual service of the Egyptians. 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 traces of a double belief, the belief, on the one hand, in death as a dim underground place, or as a devouring monster, and the contrasting belief in death as a journey made towards a new country where everything is better and happier than on earth.

There is nothing distinctively Aryan in the notion of a journey of the soul after death. Every nation has possessed it, and almost every people, moreover, has associated it with the travel of the sun to his setting. But there is something in this phase of belief which makes it, wherever it appears, more national and characteristic than the other creed touching the under world; and that is the necessity

which its mythology is under of changing according to the geographical position of those who hold it. The paradise whither the soul was imagined travelling was certainly in one sense another world,' but it was not so in the sense in which we use that term. The ancient paradise was in no way distinctly separated in thought from the earth on which men lived; and the way to it was always supposed to lie somewhere in this visible world. Therefore the idea of heaven varied according to men's outlook over this earth. The Egyptian, for example, saw the sun set behind a trackless desert which he had never crossed and never desired to cross while alive. This desert was in his belief a twilight land ruled over by the serpent king Apap.' It lay upon the left bank of his sacred Nile, while the cities of the living were upon the right bank; and so the Egyptian Book of the Dead' gives us a picture of the dead man's journey, in which all the geographical features of Egypt reappear. The ritual shows the departed twice ferried across a sacred River of Death (the Nile), travelling through the dark land of Apap or of Amenti, ever advancing towards the sun, light breaking upon him the while, till he comes to the Palace of the Two Truths, the judgment hall of Osiris: Osiris being the sun which has set.

Last of all we see him walking into the sun itself, or absorbed into the essence of the deity.

Our Aryans used the same imagery, with variations of local colouring. In both myths there is the same childlike confusion of thought between the subjective and the objective; between the position of the myth-maker and that of the phenomenon out of which he weaves his story. Because towards sunset the sun grows dim and the world too, it is imagined that the sun has now reached a dim twilight place, such as the Egyptians pictured in their region of

Apap, the immense, a personification of the desert, and hence of death. He may be compared with the great mid-earth serpent (midgard worm) of the Norse mythology, which is a personification of the sea and death in one. See infra.