The Other World

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

IF the sun-god was so natural a type of a man-like divinity, a god suffering some of the pains of humanity, a sort of type of man's own ideal life here, it was natural that men should question this oracle concerning their future life and their hopes beyond the grave. We have seen that the Egyptians did so: how they watched the course of the day-star, and, seeing him sink behind the sandy desert, pictured a home of happiness beyond that waste, a place to be reached by the soul after many trials and long wandering in the dim Amenti-land which lay between. The Aryans dwelt, as we know, upon the slopes of the Hindoo-Koosh or in the level plain beneath; and, if the conjecture be reasonable that a great part of the land now a sandy desert was then filled by an inland sea,' many of them must have dwelt upon its borders and seen the sun plunge in its wave each evening. Then or afterwards they saw this, and interpreted what they saw in the very thought of Milton:

" Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor.
So sinks the daystar in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."

And thus a belief grew up among them that after death their souls would have to cross this ocean to some happy paradise which lay beyond in the "home of the sun."

The expectation of a journey after death to reach the home of shades is all but universal; for this reason was food and drink placed with the corpse in the tombs of the stone age: and the opinion that the home of the departed lies in the west is of an almost equally wide extension. The Egyptian religion, which in its wonderful "Book of the Dead" gives the oldest (next to the stone age remains) and one of the completest accounts of primitive belief, expresses both these ideas very clearly; and to lengthen out the soul's journey, which was fancied to last thousands of years, and give incident where all must have been really imaginary, the actual journey of the mummy to its resting-place was lengthened after life to portray the more ghostly wanderings of the spirit. As the body was carried across the Nile to be buried in the desert, so the soul was believed to begin his journey in the dim twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, to cross a river more than once, to advance towards the sun, light gradually breaking upon him the while, until at last he enters the " Palace of the Two Truths," the judgment-hall of Osiris (the sun). Last of all, he walks into the sun itself, or is absorbed into the essence of the deity.

It is clear that in all this we have a nucleus of world-belief touching the soul's future. Yet along with this there is another tendency to view the dead as being still present under the mound which conceals his remains, and in obedience to this feeling the old stone age men scattered "shards, flints, and pebbles," before the mouth of the grave. Such a theory would more naturally incline to view the home of the dead as being in or beneath the earth, while the other view would look for it as lying in the west with the setting sun. So far as we know, the first was the prevailing feeling among the Semitic people. The old Hebrew writers (with whom the hopes of immortality were not strong) speak of going down into the grave,' a place thought of as a misty, dull, unfeeling, almost unreal abode. And lastly, a third element if not universal, common certainly to the Aryan races will be the conception of the soul separating from the body altogether and mounting upwards to some home in the sky. All these elements are found to exist and co-exist in creeds untaught by revelation: and the force of the component parts determines the color of their doctrine about the other world.

Among all the Aryan people the Greeks seem to have turned their thoughts farthest away from the contemplation of the grave, and though the voice of wonder and imagination could not quite be silent upon so important a question, Hades and the kingdom of Hades filled a disproportionately small space in their creed. They shrank from images of Death, and adorned their tombs in cinery urns with wreaths of flowers and figures of the dancing Hours: it is doubtful if the god Thanatos has ever been pictured by Greek art. And from what they have left on record concerning Hades and the realms of death, it is evident that they regarded it chiefly from its merely negative side, in that aspect which corresponds most exactly to the notion of a dark subterraneous kingdom, and not to that of a journey to some other distant land. The etymology of their mythical King of Souls corresponds too with the same notions. Hades means nothing else than A-ides, the unseen. And when it was said that the dead had gone to Hades, all that was literally meant was that it had gone to the unseen place. But later on, the place became personified into the grim deity whom we know in Homer, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, he to whose share fell, in the partition of the world, the land of perpetual night. And the under-world pictured by Homer is just of that voiceless, sightless character which accords with the name of Hades. Even the great heroes lose almost their identity, and all the joy and interest they had in life. To " wander mid shadows a shadow, and wail by impassable streams," is henceforward their occupation.

Not that the Greeks had no idea of another world of the more heavenly sort; ideas obtained as a joint inheritance with their brother nations ; only their thoughts and their poetry do not often centre round such pictures. Their Elysian fields are a western sun's home, just after the pattern of the Egyptian; and so are their islands of the west, where, according to one tradition, the just Rhadamanthus had been transported when he fled from the power of his brother Minos.' Only, observe, there is this difference between such Elysia and the Egyptian house of Osiris the latter was reached across the sandy desert, the former are separated by the ocean from the abode of men. There then are the heavens of the Greek mythology; while the realm of Hades or later on the realm Hades might by contrast be called their Hell. Let us look a little nearer at this heaven-picture.

The Caspian Sea or by whatever name we call the great mediterranean sea which lay before them would be naturally, almost inevitably, considered by the Aryans from their home in Bactria to bound the habitable world. The region beyond its borders would be a twilight land like the land of Apap (the desert-king) of the Egyptians: and still farther away would lie the bright region of the sun's proper home. And these ideas would be both literal cosmological conceptions, as we should call them and figurative, or at least mythical, referring to the future state of the soul. The beautiful expression of the Hebrew for that twilight western region, "the valley of the shadow of death," might be used for the Apap land in its figurative significance, and not the less justly because there creeps in here the other notion of death as of a descending to the land of shades,1 for the two ideas of the western heaven and the subterraneous hell were never utterly separated, but, among the Aryans at any rate, constantly acted and reacted upon one another. So with the Greeks we have as a cosmological conception or let us say, more simply, a part of their world-theory the encircling river Oceanus, with the dim Cimmerian land beyond ; and we have the Elysian fields and the islands of the west for the most happy dead. And then by a natural transfer of ideas the bounding river becomes the river of death Styx and Lethe and is placed in the region of death ; even the Elysian fields at last suffer the same change.

The Indian religion, too, has its river of death. " On the fearful road to Yama's door," says a hymn, " is the terrible stream Vaitarani, in order to cross which I sacrifice a black cow." This river of death must be somehow crossed. The Greeks, we know, had their grim ferryman.

" Portitor has horrendus aquas et flumina servat
Terribili squalore Charon : cui plurima mento
Canities inculta jacet; stant lumina fiamma," &c.

The Indians crossed their river of death by a bridge, which was guarded by two dogs, not less terrible to evil-doers than Charon and Cerberus.

"A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by men, a path I know of."

On it the wise, who had known Brahma, ascend to the dwellings of Svarga, when they have received their dismissal.

The names of these two dogs are interesting. They are the sons of that Saramâ whom we have already seen sent by Indra to recover the lost cattle, whose name, too, signified the breeze of morning. Her two sons, the dogs of Yama, being so closely connected with the god of the under-world as Saramâ is with Indra the sun-god might be guessed as the winds of evening or, more vaguely, the evening, as Saramâ is the morning. They are so ; and by their name of Sârameyas, are even more closely related to Hermes than Saramâ was. We now know why to Hermes was allotted the office of Psychopomp, or leader of the shades to the realm of Hades or at least we partly know; for we see that he is the same with the two dogs of Yama in the Indian myth. But they are also connected by name with another much more infernal being, Cerberus. Their individual names were Cerbura the spotted, and Syama the black. Thus the identity of nature is confirmed by the identity of name.

Death and sleep are twin-brothers, and we need not be surprised to find the Sârameyas, or rather a god Sârameyas, addressed as the god of sleep, the protector of the sleeping household, as we do find in a very beautiful poem of the Rig-Vedas.'

"Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house; oh, thou who takest all shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend.

Bay at the robber, Sârameyas, bay at the thief ; why bayest thou at the singer of Indra, why art thou angry with me, sleep Sârameyas ? The mother sleeps, the father sleeps, the dog sleeps, the clan-father sleeps, the whole clan sleeps, sleep thou, Sârameyas.

Those who sleep by the cattle, those who sleep by the wain, the women who lie on the couches, the sweet-scented ones, all these we bring to slumber."

How these verses breathe of the fragrant air of early pastoral life ! In their names, again, of " black " and " spotted," it is very probable that the dogs typified two appearances of night, black or starry.

And yet we must remember that Hermes is not a god of night, or sleep, but strictly and properly of the wind, and that his name, as that of Sârameyas, bears this meaning in its construction. The god who bore away the souls to the other world, however connected with the night, "the proper time for dying," must have been originally the wind. And in this we see an exquisite appropriateness. The soul is in its original and literal meaning the breath'—" the spirit does but mean the breath." What more natural therefore than that the spirit should be carried away by the wind-god. This was peculiarly an Aryan idea. Yet let it not be laid to their charge as though their theories of the soul and future life were less spiritual than those of other nations: quite the contrary was the case. So far as they abandoned the notion of the existence of the body in another state and transferred the future to the soul, their ideas became higher, and their pictures of the other world more amplified. But how, it may be asked, did the Aryans pass to their more spiritual conception of the soul ? The more external causes of this progress it is worth while briefly to trace.

The sun, it has been said, acted powerfully upon men's minds in pointing the hopes of futurity. And in sketching the sun-myth which lay concealed in the story of the life of Heracles, we noticed one feature which suggests' thoughts about a not yet mentioned element in the funeral rites of the Aryans. The fiery setting of the sun would itself suggest a fiery funeral, and pre-eminently so to a race who seem to have been addicted more than any other to this form of interment. Baldur, the northern sun-god, likewise receives such a funeral, and this more even than the death of Heracles typifies the double significance of the sun's westering course. For he sails away upon a burning ship. When therefore this fire burial was thoroughly established in custom as the most heroic sort of end, it is not likely that men would longer rely upon their belief that the body continued in an after life, the thought f the dead man living in his grave or travelling thence to regions below must, or should, by the consistent be definitely abandoned. In place of it, a theory of the vital faculty residing in the breath, which almost amounts to a soul distinct from the body, is accepted. Or if the doubting brethren still require some visible representation of this vital power, the smoke 1 f the funeral pyre may typify the ascending soul. Nay, it would appear as though inanimate things likewise had some such essence, which by the fire could be separated from their material form. For what would formerly have been placed with the dead in the grave is now placed upon the pyre. In the funeral of Patroclus (Il. xxiii.) we have a complete picture of these reformed rites, which seem to have become common to all the Aryan folk; nor surely could we wish anything more vivid and impressive. The fat oxen and sheep are slain before the pyre, and with the fat from their bodies and with honey the corpse is liberally anointed. Then twelve captives are sacrificed to the manes of the hero; they and his twelve favorite dogs are burnt with him upon the pile. We soon see the reason for the anointing of the corpse with fat. It was necessary for the peace f the shade that his body should be thoroughly burned; for the funeral ceremony was looked upon as the inevitable portal to Hades; without it the ghost still lingered upon earth unable to cross the Stygian stream. So afterwards, when the pile will not burn, Achilles prays to the North and the West Winds and pours libations to them that they come and consummate the funeral rite. All night as the flame springs up Achilles stands beside it, calling upon the name of his friend and watering the ground with libations from a golden cup. Toward morning the flame sinks down; and then the two winds, according to the beautiful language of mythology, return homeward across the Thracian sea.

All the Aryan nationalities practised cremation in some form or other, or had practised it; most only gave it up upon the introduction of Christianity. The time is too remote, therefore, to say when this form f interment was in truth a novelty; and the fact that the bronze age in Europe is, as distinguished from that of the stony, a corpse-burning age, is one f the reasons which urge us to the conclusion that the bronze-using invaders were f the Aryan family.' The Indians, owing to their excessive reverence for Agni the fire-god, adhered to the practice most faithfully; though the very same reason (namely, their regard for the purity of fire) made the reformed Iranian religion utterly repudiate it a fact which might seem strange did we not know how much Zoroastrianism was governed by a spirit f opposition to the older faith.' Among the Norsemen about the time f the introduction of Christianity into Scandinavia, Burn ? or Bury ? became a test-question, and a constant cause of dispute between the rival creeds.

In the northern religion too, therefore, we have the same leading ideas which we have signalized in the Indian or Grecian systems. Especially does that notion f the breath f the body, or the smoke of the funeral pyre representing the soul f the hero and carried upward under care f the wind, come prominently forward. This might be expected because, it will be remembered, the wind in the northern mythology is not, as with the Indians, a servant of Yama only, or as with the Greeks a lesser divinity, but the first of all the gods. To Odin is assigned the task f collecting the souls of heroes who had fallen in battle; and there are few myths more poetical than that which pictures him riding to battle fields to execute his mission. He is accompanied by his Valkyriur, "the choosers," a sort f Amazonian houris, half human, half godlike, who ride through the air in the form of swans; wherefore they who are originally perhaps the clouds are often called in the Eddas, Odin's swan maidens. It has been said that this myth lived on in after-ages in the form of the Phantom Army and Herne the Hunter: and the essential part of it, the myth of the soul carried away by the wind, lived on more obscurely in a hundred other tales, some of which we may glance at in our next chapter upon Mythology. But while this idea of the mounting soul is often clearly expressed as for instance where in Beowulf 1 in the last scene, the hero is burnt by the sea-shore, it is said of him that he wand to wolcum, " curled to the clouds," imaging well the curling smoke of the pyre there lingered on throughout other ideas of the death home, a subterraneous land (Helheim, Hel's home) ruled over by the goddess Hel,2 with its infernal Styx-like stream, and the bridge of Indian mythology transferred to the lower world. And so much were the three distinct ideas interwoven, that in the myth of Baldur each one may be traced. For here the sun-god, who is the very origin and prototype f the two more exalted elements f the creed f the heavenward journey,' has himself to stoop downward to the gates of Hel. If this legend sanctified for the heathens the practice of fire burial, they had certainly so much excuse for their obstinate adherence to the older custom, as one of the most beautiful myths ever told might plead for them. We may look upon it in two aspects first as an image of the setting sun, next as an expression of men's thoughts concerning death, and the course f the soul to its future home. If in this Iatter respect the story seems to mix up two different myths concerning the other world, we need not be surprised at that.

Baldur dies, as the sun dies each day, and as the summer dies into winter. He falls, struck by a dart from the hand of his blind brother Hödr (the darkness), and the shadow of death appears for the first time in the homes of Asgard. At first the gods knew not what to make of it, "they were struck dumb with horror," says the Edda;' but seeing that he is really dead, they prepare his funeral pyre. They took his ship Hringhorn (Ringhorn, the disk of the sun), and on it set a pile of wood, with Baldur's horse and his armor, and all that he valued most, to which each god added some worthy gift. And when Nanna, the wife of Baldur, saw the preparations, her heart broke with grief, and she too was laid upon the pile. Then they set fire to the ship, which sailed out burning into the sea.

But Baldur himself has to go to Helheim, the dark abode beneath the earth, where reigns Hel, the goddess of the dead. Then Odin sends his messenger, Hermödr, to the goddess, to pray her to let Baldur return once more to earth. For nine days and nine nights Hermödr rode through dark glens, so dark, that he could not discern anything until he came to the river Gjöll (" the sounding " notice that here the Stygian reappears), over which he rode by Gjöll's bridge, which was pleasant with bright gold. A maiden sat there keeping the bridge ; she inquired of him his name and lineage for, said she, "Yestereve five bands of dead men rid over the bridge, yet they did not shake it so much as thou hast done. But thou hast not death's hue upon thee ; why then ridest thou here on the way to Hel ? "

"I ride to Hel," answered Hermödr, "to seek Baldur. Hast thou perchance seen him pass this way ? "

" Baldur," answered she, " bath ridden over Gjöll's bridge. But yonder, northward, lies the road to Hel."

Hermödr then rode into the palace, where he found his brother Baldur filling the highest place in the hall, and in his company he passed the night. The next morning he besought Hel, that she would let Baldur ride home with him, assuring her how great the grief was among the gods.

Hel answered, " It shall now be proved whether Baldur be so much loved as thou sayest. If, therefore, all things both living and lifeless weep for him, then shall he return.

But if one thing speak against him or refuse to weep, he shall be kept in Helheim."

And when Hermödr had delivered this answer, the gods sent off messengers throughout the whole world, to tell everything to weep, in order that Baldur might be delivered out of Helheim. All things freely complied with this request, both men and every other living thing, and earths, and stones, and trees, and metals, just as thou hast no doubt seen these things weep when they are brought from a cold place into a hot one. As the messengers were returning, and deemed that their mission had been successful, they found an old hag, named Thokk,1 sitting in a cavern, and her they begged to weep Baldur out of Helheim. But she said :

"Thokk will wail Nought quick or dead
With dry eyes For earl's son care I.
Baldur's bale-fire. Let Hel hold her own."

So Baldur remained in Helheim. Such was the sad conclusion of the myth of which the memory is kept up even in these days. For in Norway and Sweden nay, in some parts of Scotland, the bale-fires celebrating the bale or death of the sun-god are lighted on the day when the sun passes the highest point in the ecliptic. Baldur will not, said tradition, remain forever in Helheim. A day will come, the twilight of the gods, when the gods themselves will be destroyed in a final victorious contest with the evil powers. And then, when a new earth has arisen from the deluge which destroys the old, Baldur, the god of Peace, will come from Death's home to rule over this regenerate world. A sublime myth if indeed it can be called a myth.