Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

THIS book offers an account of the opinions held by the Greeks about the life of the human soul after death, and is thus intended as a contribution to the history of Greek religion. Such an undertaking has in a special measure to contend with the difficulties that face any inquiry into the religious life and thought of the Greeks. Greek religion was a natural growth, not a special foundation, and the ideas and feelings which gave it its inward tone and outward shape never received abstract formulation. It expressed itself in religious performances alone: it had no sacred books from which we might determine the inward meaning and interconnexion of the ideas with which the Greeks approached the gods created by their faith. The central essence of the religion held by the Greek people, in spite of this absence of conceptual formulation—or perhaps because of it—preserved its original character to a remarkable degree: the speculations and fancies of Greek poets continually refer to this central nucleus. Indeed the poets and philosophers in such of their writings as have come down to us are our only authorities for the religious thought of the Greeks. In the present inquiry they have naturally had to be our guides for the greater part of the way. But though under the special conditions of Greek life the religious views of poets and philosophers represent an important side of Greek religion, they yet allow us to perceive very clearly the independent and self-determined position with regard to the ancestral religion retained by the individual. The individual believer might always, if his own temper and disposition allowed him, give himself up to the plain and unsophisticated emotions which had shaped and decided the faith of the people and the religious performances of popular εὐσέβεια. But we should know very little of the religious ideas that filled the mind of the believing Greek if we had to do without the evidence of philosophers and poets (and of some Attic orators as well) in whose words dumb and inarticulate emotion finds expression. The inquirer would, however, be entirely on the wrong track and be led to some remarkable conclusions who ventured without more ado to deduce from the religious ideas that find expression in Greek literature a complete Theology of the Greek people. Where direct literary statements and allusions fail us we are left with nothing but surmises in face of the religion of the Greeks and its inmost guiding forces. Of course there are plenty of people of sanguine temperament and industrious fancy who find no difficulty in producing for our benefit the most admirable solutions of the problem. Others in varying degrees of good faith press the emotions of Christian piety into the service of explaining ancient faith in gods. Thus injustice is done to both forms of religion and an understanding of the essentials of Greek belief in its true and independent reality is made completely impossible. A good example of this is provided by the Eleusinian Mysteries, and by that favourite topic of controversy (which has, indeed, received more than its due share of attention from students of religion), the amalgamation of the worship of gods and the belief in Souls said to have taken place therein. Nowhere else has the complete unprofitableness of the attempt to make use of the shifting ideas and tendencies of modern civilization to explain the underlying motive forces of these significant cult practices, been more strikingly and repeatedly demonstrated. On this head in particular the author of the present work has renounced all attempts to cast a fitful and ambiguous light upon the venerable gloom of the subject by the help of the farthing dip of his own private imaginings. There is no denying that here as in so many departments of ancient there is something greater and finer that eludes our grasp. Read more