Psyche

The cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

Erwin Rohde

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317830115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2000. This is Volume VI of seven in the Library of Philosophy series on Philosophy of Religion and General Philosophy. Written around 1925, This book entitled Psyche, 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.

Part I

CHAPTER I
BELIEFS ABOUT THE SOUL AND CULT OF SOULS IN THE HOMERIC POEMS

I

§ 1

To the immediate understanding of mankind nothing seems so self-evident, nothing so little in need of explanation, as the phenomenon of Life itself, the fact of man's own existence. On the other hand, the cessation of this so self-evident existence, whenever it obtrudes itself upon his notice, arouses man's ever - renewed astonishment. There are primitive peoples to whom death whenever it occurs seems an arbitrary abbreviation of life: if it is not due to visible forces, then some invisible magic must have caused it. So difficult is it for such peoples to grasp the idea that the present state of being alive and conscious can come to an end of its own accord.

Once reflection on such problems is aroused, life itself, standing as it does on the threshold of all sensation and experience, soon begins to appear no less mysterious than death—that kingdom into which no experience reaches. It may even come about that when they are regarded too long and too hard, light and darkness seem to change places. It was to a Greek poet that the question suggested itself: "Who knows then whether Life be not Death, and what we here call Death be called Life there below?"

From such jaded wisdom and its doubts Greek civilization is still far removed when, though already at an advanced stage in its development, it first speaks to us in the Homeric poems. The poet and his heroes speak with lively feeling of the pains and troubles of life, both in its individual phases and as a whole. The gods have allotted a life of pain and misery to men, while they themselves remain free from care. On the other hand, to turn aside from life altogether never enters the head of anyone in Homer. Nothing may be said expressly of the joy and happiness of life, but that is because such things go without saying among a vigorous folk engrossed in a movement of progress, whose circumstances were never complicated and where all the conditions of happiness easily fell to the lot of the strong in activity and enjoyment. And, indeed, it is only for the strong, the prudent, and the powerful that this Homeric world is intended. Life and existence upon this earth obviously belongs to them—is it not an indispensable condition of the attainment of all particular good things? As for death—the-state which is to follow our life here—there is no danger of anyone mistaking that for life. "Do not try and explain away death to me," says Achilles to Odysseus in Hades; and this would be the answer any Homeric man would have given to the sophisticated poet, if he had tried to persuade him that the state of things after life on this earth is the real life. Nothing is so hateful to man as death and the gates of Hades: for when death comes it is certain that life— this sweet life of ours in the sunlight—is done with, whatever else there may be to follow.

§ 2

But what does follow? What happens when life departs for ever from the inanimate body?

It is strange that anyone should have maintained (as it has been in recent times¹) that in any stage of the development of the Homeric poems the belief can be found that with the moment of death all is at an end: that nothing survives death. We are not warranted lip any statement in either of the two poems (to be found perhaps in their oldest parts, as is suggested) nor yet by the tell-tale silence of the poet, in attributing such an idea either to the poet or his contemporaries. Wherever the occasion of death is described we are told how the dead man (still referred to by his name), or his "Psyche", hastens away into the house of Aides— into the kingdom of Aides and the grim Persephoneia; goes down to the darkness below the earth, to Erebos; or, more vaguely, sinks into the earth itself. In any case, it is no mere nothing that can enter the gloomy depths, nor over what does not exist could one suppose that the divine Pair holds sway below.

But how are we to think of this "Psyche" that, unnoticed daring the lifetime of the body, and only observable when it is "separated" from the body, now glides off to join the multitude of its kind assembled in the murky regions of the "Invisible" (Aïdes)? Its name, like the names given to the "soul" in many languages, marks it off as something airy and breathlike; revealing its presence in the breathing of the living man. It escapes out of the mouth—or out of the gaping wound of the dying—and now freed from its prison becomes, as the name well expresses it, an " image " (εἴδωλον). On the borders of Hades Odysseus sees floating " the images of those that have toiled (on earth)". These immaterial images withdrawing themselves from the grasp of the living, like smoke (Il. xxiii, 100) or a shadow (Od. xi, 207; x, 495), must at least recognizably present the general outlines of the once living person. Odysseus immediately recognizes his mother, Antikleia, in such a shadow-person, as well as the lately dead Elpenor, and those of his companions of the Trojan War who have gone: before him. The psyche of Patroklos appearing to Achilleus by night resembles the dead man absolutely in stature, bodily appearance and expression. The nature of this shadowy double of mankind, separating itself from man in death and taking its departure then, can best be realized if we first make clear to ourselves what qualities it does not possess. The psyche of Homeric belief does not, as might have been supposed, represent what we are accustomed to call " spirit " as opposed to "body". All the faculties of the human " spirit " in the widest sense—for which the poet has a large and varied vocabulary—are indeed only active and only possible so long as a man is still alive when death comes the complete personality is no longer in existence. The body, that is the corpse, now becomes mere " senseless earth " and falls to pieces, while the psyche remains untouched. But the latter is by no means the refuge of "spirit " and its faculties, any more than the corpse is. It (the psyche) is described as being without feeling, deserted by mind and the organs of mind. All power of will, sensation, and thought have vanished with the disintegration of the individual man into his component parts. So far from it being permissible to ascribe the functions of " spirit " to the psyche, it would be more reasonable to speak of a contrast between the two. Man is a living creature, conscious of himself and intelligently active, only so long as the psyche remains within him. But it is not the psyche which communicates its own faculties to man and gives him capacity for life together with consciousness, will and knowledge. It is rather that during the union of the psyche and the body all the faculties of living and acting lie within the empire of the body, of which they are functions. Without the presence of the psyche, the body cannot perceive, feel, or will, but it does not use these or any of its faculties through or by means of the psyche. Nowhere does Homer attribute any such function to the psyche in living man: it is, in fact, only mentioned when its separation from the living man is imminent or has occurred. As the body's shadow-image it survives the body and all its vital powers.

If we now ask—as our Homeric psychologists generally do—which, in the face of this mysterious association between a living body and its counterfeit the psyche, is the "real " man, we find that Homer in fact gives contradictory answers. Not infrequently (indeed, in the first lines of the Iliad) the material body is contrasted,² as the " man himself ", with the psyche—which cannot therefore be any organ or component part of the living body. On the other hand, that which takes its departure at death and hastens into the realm of Hades is also referred to by the proper name of the person as "himself"³—which means that here the shadowy psyche (for nothing else can go down to Hades) is invested with the name and value of the complete personality, the " self " of the man. But those who draw from these phrases the conclusion that either the body or the psyche must be the " real man " have, in either case,⁴ left out of account or unexplained one half of the recorded evidence. Regarded without prejudice, these apparently contradictory methods of speaking simply prove that both the visible man (the body and its own faculties) and the indwelling psyche could be described as the man's "self". According to the Homeric view, human beings exist twice over: once as an outward and visible shape, and again as an invisible " image " which only gains its freedom in death. This, and nothing else, is the Psyche.

Such an idea—that the psyche should dwell within the living and fully conscious personality, like an alien and a stranger, a feebler double of the man, as his " other self "— this may well seem very strange to us. And yet this is what so-called " savage " peoples,⁵ all over the world, actually believe. Herbert Spencer in particular has shown this most decisively. It is therefore not very surprising to find the Greeks, too, sharing a mode of thought that lies so close to the mind of primitive mankind. The earlier age which handed down to the Greeks of Homer their beliefs about the soul cannot have failed any more than other nations to observe the facts upon which a fantastic logic based the conclusion of man's double personality. It was not the phenomena of sensation, will, perception, or thought in waking and conscious man which led to this conclusion. It was the experience of an apparent double of the self in dreaming, in swoons, and ecstasy, that gave rise to the inference of a two-fold principle of life in man, and of the existence of an independent, separable " second self " dwelling within the visible self of daily life. One has only to listen to the words of a Greek writer of a later period who, far more explicitly than Homer, describes the nature of the psyche and at the same time lets us see the origin of the belief in such an entity. Pindar (fr. 131) tells us that the body obeys Death, the almighty, but the image of the living creature lives on ("since this alone is derived from the gods ": which, of course, is not Homeric belief); for it (this eidôlon) is sleeping when the limbs are active, but when the body is asleep it often reveals the future in a dream. Words could hardly make it plainer that in the activities of the waking and conscious man, the image-soul has no part. Its world is the world of sleep. While the other " I ", unconscious of itself, lies in sleep, its double is up and doing. In other words, while the body of the sleeper lies wrapped in slumber, motionless, the sleeper in his dream lives and sees many strange and wonderful things. It is " himself " who does this (of that there can be no doubt), and yet not the self known and visible to himself and others; for that lies still as death beyond the reach of sensation. It follows that there lives within a man a second self, active in dreaming. That the dream experiences are veritable realities and not empty fancies for Homer is also certain. He never says, as later poets often do, that the dreamer " thought " he saw this or that. The figures seen in dreams are real figures, cither of the gods themselves or a " dream spirit " sent by them, or a fleeting " image " (eidôlon) that they allow to appear for a moment. Just as the dreamer's capacity for vision is no mere fancy, so, too, the objects that he sees are realities. In the same way it is something real that appears to a man asleep as the shape of a person lately dead. Since this shape can show itself to a dreamer it must of necessity still exist; consequently it survives death, though, indeed, only as a breath-like image, much as we have seen reflections of our own faces mirrored in water.⁶ It cannot, indeed—this airy substance—be grasped or held like the once visible self; and hence comes its name, the " psyche ". The primeval argument for such a counterpart of man is repeated by Achilleus himself (Il. xxiii, 103 f.) when his dead friend appears to him and then vanishes again: so, then, ye Gods, there yet lives in Hades' house a psyche and shadowy image (of man), but there is no midriff in it (and consequently none of the faculties which preserve the visible man alive).

The dreamer, then, and what he sees in his dream proves the existence of an alter ego in man.⁷ Man, however, also observes that his body may suffer a deathlike torpor without the second self being occupied with dream experiences. In such moments of " swoon", according to Greek thought and actual Homeric expression, " the psyche has left the body."⁸ Where had it gone? No man could tell. But on this occasion it conies back again: whereupon the " spirit is gathered again into the midriff ". If ever, as happens in the case of death, the psyche should become c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preliminary Note to the Seventh and Eighth Edition
• Translator’s Note
• Part I
• PART II
• Appendix I. Consecration of persons struck by lightning