CHAPTER VIII

ORIGINS OF THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY

THE THRACIAN WORSHIP OF DIONYSOS

The popular conception of the continued existence of the souls of the dead, resting upon the cult of the dead, grew up and coalesced with a view of the soul derived from Homeric teaching on the subject, which was in essential, though unrecognized, contradiction with the cult of souls. The popular conception, unchanged in all essentials, remained in force throughout the coming centuries of Greek life. It did not contain within itself the seeds of further development; it did not make any demand for better and deeper ideas of the character and condition of the soul in its independent life after its separation from the body. Still more, it had nothing in it that could have led beyond the belief in the independent future life of those souls to the conception of an everlasting, indestructible, immortal life. The continued life of the soul, such as was implied in and guaranteed by the cult of souls, was entirely bound up with the remembrance of the survivors upon earth, and upon the care, the cult, which they might offer to the soul of their departed ancestor. If that memory dies out, if the venerating thoughtfulness of the living ceases, the soul of the departed is at once deprived of the sole element in which it still maintained its shadow of an existence.

It was impossible, then, that the cult of the souls should produce out of itself the idea of a true immortality of the soul or of the independent life of the soul indestructible by its very nature. Greek religion as it existed among the people of Homer could not shape such a belief of its own accord, and even if it were offered from outside could not have accepted it. It would have meant giving up its own essential character.

If the soul is immortal, it must be in its essential nature like God; it must itself be a creature of the realm of Gods. When a Greek says "immortal" he says "God": they are interchangeable ideas. But the real first principle of the religion of the Greek people is this--that in the divine ordering of the world, humanity and divinity are absolutely divided in place and nature, and so they must ever remain. A deep {254} gulf is fixed between the worlds of mortality and divinity. The relations between man and God promoted by religion depend entirely upon this distinction. The ethical ideas of the Greek popular conscience were rooted in the frank admission of the limitations proper to human capacity which was conditioned by an existence and a fate so different from that enjoyed by the gods; in the renunciation of all human claims to happiness and independence. Poetic fancies about the "Translation" of individual mortals to an unending life enjoyed by the soul still united to the body might make their appeal to popular belief; but such things remained _miracles_ in which divine omnipotence had broken down the barriers of the natural order on a special occasion. It was but a miracle, too, if the souls of certain mortals were raised to the rank of Heroes, and so promoted to everlasting life. The gulf between the human and the divine was not made any narrower on that account; it remained unbridged, abysmal. The bare idea that the gulf did not in reality exist, that actually in the order of nature the inner man, the "Soul" of man belonged to the realm of gods; that as a divine being it had everlasting life--such an idea would involve further consequences about which no one can be in much doubt: it would have contradicted every single idea of Greek popular religion. It never could have become widely held and believed in by the Greek populace.

Nevertheless, at a certain period in Greek history, and nowhere earlier or more unmistakably than in Greece, appeared the idea of the divinity, and the immortality implicit in the divinity, of the human soul. That idea belonged entirely to _mysticism_--a second order of religion which, though little remarked by the religion of the people and by orthodox believers, gained a footing in isolated sects and influenced certain philosophical schools. Thence it has affected all subsequent ages and has transmitted to East and West the elementary principles of all true mysticism: the essential unity of the divine and the human spirit; their unification as the aim of religion; the divine nature of the human soul and its immortality.

The theory and doctrine of mysticism grew up in the soil of an older cult-practice. Greece received from abroad a deeply emotional religious cult, accompanied by practices that stimulated mysterious and extraordinary imaginings. The sparks of momentary illumination struck out by this faith were fed and fanned by mysticism till they became a vivid and enduring flame. For the first time, clearly {255} discernible through its mystical wrappings, we meet with the belief in the indestructibility and eternal life of the soul: we meet it in the doctrines of a mystical sect which united in the worship of Dionysos. The worship of Dionysos must have sown the first seed of the belief in an immortal life of the soul. To explain how this may have happened; to make clear to the mind of the reader how the essence and inner reality of that worship was bound to stir up the belief in an immortal life--such is our next task.

§ 2

In the spiritual life of men and nations, it is not by any means the extravagant or, in one sense or another, the abnormal that is most difficult for our sympathetic understanding to grasp. By clinging to a traditional and too narrow formula for the Greek spirit we make difficulties for ourselves; but it is not really a matter of serious perplexity, if we reflect upon it, to understand how Greek religion at the height of its development regarded "madness" (~mani/a~) as a religious phenomenon of wide-reaching importance. Madness, in this sense, is a temporary destruction of physical balance, a condition in which the self-conscious spirit is overwhelmed, "possessed" by a foreign power, as our authorities explain it to us. This madness "which comes not from mortal weakness or disease, but from a divine banishment of the commonplace"[1\8] found effective application in the _mantic_ and _telestic_ arts. Its effects were so common and well recognized that the truth and importance of such religious madness (entirely distinguishable from bodily disease was treated as a fact of experience not merely by philosophers, but by the doctors themselves.[2\8] For us it only remains obscure how such "divine mania" was fitted into the regular working order of the religious life; the sensations and experiences themselves belonging to this condition are made intelligible enough by a whole host of analogies. In fact if the truth were told we should rather have to admit that it is easier for us to sympathize with such overflowing of sensation and all that goes with it than with the opposite pole of Greek religious life, the calm and measured composure with which man lifted up heart and eye to the gods, as the patterns of all life and the patrons of a serenity as brilliant and unmoved as that of the clear heavens themselves.

But how came it that in the character of a single people such extravagance of emotion was combined with a fast-bound and regulated equilibrium of temper and behaviour? The answer is that these opposing features sprang from two {256} different sources. They were not originally combined in Greece. The Homeric poems hardly give any hint of that overflowing of religious emotion which later Greek peoples knew and honoured as a heaven-sent madness. It spread among the Greeks themselves in the train of a religious agitation, we might almost say revolution, of which Homer records, at most, only the first faint essays. It had its origin in the religion of Dionysos, and in company with this religion enters as something new and strange into Greek life.

The Homeric poems do not recognize Dionysos as belonging to the gods of Olympos, but they are aware of his existence. It is true they nowhere plainly[3\8] refer to him as the wine-god honoured in joyful festivals, but we read (in the narrative of Glaukos' meeting with Diomedes) of the "frenzied" Dionysos and his "Nurses" who were attacked by the Thracian Lykourgos.[4\8] The _Mainas_, the frenzied woman of the Dionysos-cult, was such a well-known phenomenon, so familiar in men's minds, that the word could be used in a simile to explain the meaning of something else.[5\8] In this form the worship of the god first came to the notice of the Greeks; this was the origin of all the other festivals of Dionysos that later Greece developed in so many different directions.[6\8] They learnt to know Dionysos Bakcheios, "who makes men frenzied,"[7\8] as he was worshipped in his own country.

That the original home of Dionysos-worship was in Thrace, that his cult, popular among many of the Thracian peoples,[8\8] was

## particularly honoured among the southernmost of the Thracian stocks

who were best known to the Greeks and lived on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Hebros and Axios and in the mountainous country behind--to all this the Greeks themselves bore frequent and manifold witness.[9\8] The god whose name the Greeks knew in its Greek form "Dionysos" had, it appears, among the numerous and divided Thracian peoples various appellations of which those most familiar to the Greeks were Sabos and Sabazios.[10\8] The Greeks must have known and remarked on the nature and worship of the god at an early period of their history. They may have met with him in Thrace itself. At all periods they had an extensive and varied intercourse with this country and must in the early days of their wanderings have passed through it on their way to their future home. They may have had further opportunities of knowing it from the Thracian races or tribes who, according to a few isolated legends, had dwelt in primitive times in certain localities of Central Greece. The ethnographical material of these {257} legends was regarded as founded on fact by the great historians of the fifth and fourth centuries.[11\8]

The cult of this Thracian divinity differed in every particular from anything that we know of from Homer as Greek worship of the gods. On the other hand, it was closely related to the cult paid by the Phrygians, a people almost identical with the Thracians, to their mountain-mother Kybele. It was thoroughly orgiastic in character. The festival was held on the mountain tops in the darkness of night amid the flickering and uncertain light of torches. The loud and troubled sound of music was heard; the clash of bronze cymbals; the dull thunderous roar of kettledrums; and through them all penetrated the "maddening unison" of the deep-toned flute,[12\8] whose soul Phrygian _aulêtai_ had first waked to life. Excited by this wild music, the chorus of worshippers dance with shrill crying and jubilation.[13\8] We hear nothing about singing:[14\8] the violence of the dance left no breath for regular songs. These dances were something very different from the measured movement of the dance-step in which Homer's Greeks advanced and turned about in the _Paian_. It was in frantic, whirling, headlong eddies and dance-circles[15\8] that these inspired companies danced over the mountain slopes. They were mostly women who whirled round in these circular dances till the point of exhaustion was reached;[16\8] they were strangely dressed; they wore _bassarai_, long flowing garments, as it seems, stitched together out of fox-skins;[17\8] over these were doeskins,[18\8] and they even had horns fixed to their heads.[19\8] Their hair was allowed to float in the wind;[20\8] they carried snakes sacred to Sabazios[21\8] in their hands and brandished daggers or else thyrsos-wands, the spear-points of which were concealed in ivy-leaves.[22\8] In this fashion they raged wildly until every sense was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement, and in the "sacred frenzy" they fell upon the beast selected as their victim[23\8] and tore their captured prey limb from limb. Then with their teeth they seized the bleeding flesh and devoured it raw.

It is easy enough, by following poets' descriptions and plastic representations of such scenes, to elaborate still further the picture of this nocturnal festival of fanatic enthusiasm. But, we must ask, what was the _meaning_ of it all? We shall get nearest to the truth if we will exclude as far as possible all theories imported from unrelated provinces of thought and fix our attention solely on what, for the participants, was the result of it all--the result anticipated and consciously proposed by them, and therefore the recognized object, or, at least, one {258} of the recognized objects of these strange proceedings. The participators in these dance-festivals induced intentionally in themselves a sort of mania, an extraordinary exaltation of their being. A strange rapture came over them in which they seemed to themselves and others "frenzied", "possessed".[24\8] This excessive stimulation of the senses, going even as far as hallucination,[25\8] was brought about, in those who were susceptible to their influence, by the delirious whirl of the dance, the music and the darkness, and all the other circumstances of this tumultuous worship.[26\8] This extreme pitch of excitement was the result intended. The violently induced exaltation of the senses had a religious purpose, in that such enlargement and extension of his being was man's only way, as it seemed, of entering into union and relationship with the god and his spiritual attendants. The god is invisibly present among his inspired worshippers. At any rate, he is close at hand, and the tumult of the festival is to bring him completely into their midst.[27\8] There are various legends about the disappearance of the god into another world and his return thence to mankind.[28\8] Every second year his return is celebrated, and it is just this Appearance, this "Epiphany" of the god, that gives the reason and the motive of the festival. The Bull-God, in the most ancient and primitive form of the belief, appeared in person among the dancers,[29\8] or else the imitated roaring of a bull produced by hidden "Mimes of Terror" served to suggest the invisible Presence.[30\8] The worshippers, too, in furious exaltation and divine inspiration, strive after the god; they seek communion with him. They burst the physical barriers of their soul. A magic power takes hold of them; they feel themselves raised high above the level of their everyday existence; they seem to _become_ those spiritual beings who wildly dance in the train of the god.[31\8] Nay, more, they have a share in the life of the god himself; nothing less can be the meaning of the fact that the enraptured servants of the god call themselves by the name of the god. The worshipper who in his exaltation has become one with the god, is himself now called Sabos, Sabazios.[32\8] The superhuman and the infra-human are mingled in his person; like the frenzied god[33\8] he throws himself upon the sacrificial animal to devour it raw. To make this transformation of their nature outwardly manifest, the participants in the dance-festival wear strange dress: they resemble in their appearance the members of the wild _thiasos_ of the god;[34\8] the horns they set on their heads recall the horned, bull-shaped god himself, etc.[35\8] The whole might be called a religious drama, since {259} everything is carefully arranged so as to suggest to the imagination the actual presence of the mysterious figures from the spirit world. At the same time, it is something more than mere drama, for it can hardly be doubted that the players themselves were possessed by the illusion of living the life of a strange person. The awe-inspiring darkness of night, the music, especially that of the Phrygian flute, to which the Greeks attributed the power of making its hearers "full of the god",[36\8] the vertiginous whirl of the dance--all these may very well, in suitably disposed natures,[37\8] have really led to a state of visionary exaltation in which the inspired person saw all external objects in accordance with his fancy and imagination. Intoxicating drinks, to which the Thracians were addicted, may have increased the excitement;[38\8] perhaps they even used the fumes derived from certain seeds, with which the Scythians and Massagetai knew how to intoxicate themselves.[39\8] We all know how even to day in the East the smoke of hashish may make men visionaries and excite religious raptures[40\8] in which the whole of nature is transformed for the enthralled dreamer. "Only when thus possessed did the Bakchai drink milk and honey out of the rivers; their power ceased when they came to themselves again," says Plato.[41\8] For them the earth flowed with milk and honey, and the air was filled with the sweet odours of Syria.[42\8] Hallucination was accompanied by a state of feeling in which pain itself was only an added stimulus to sensation or in which the visionary became completely insensible to pain, as is not unusual in such states of exaltation.[43\8]

Every detail confirms the picture of a condition of wild excitement in which the limitations of ordinary life seemed to be abolished. These extraordinary phenomena transcending all normal experience were explained by saying that the soul of a person thus "possessed"[44\8] was no longer "at home"[45\8] but "abroad", having left its body behind. This was the literal and primitive meaning understood by the Greek when he spoke of the "ekstasis" of the soul in such orgiastic conditions of excitement.[46\8] This ekstasis is "a brief madness", just as madness is a prolonged ekstasis.[47\8] But the ekstasis, the temporary _alienatio mentis_ of the Dionysiac cult was not thought of as a vain purposeless wandering in a region of pure delusion, but as a _hieromania_,[48\8] a sacred madness in which the soul, leaving the body, winged its way to union with the god.[49\8] It is now with and in the god, in the condition of _enthousiasmos_; those who are possessed by this are ~e/ntheoi~; they live and have their being in the god.[50\8] While still retaining {260} the finite Ego, they feel and enjoy to the full the infinite powers of all life.

In _ekstasis_ the soul is liberated from the cramping prison of the body; it communes with the god and develops powers of which, in the ordinary life of everyday, thwarted by the body, it knew nothing. Being now a spirit holding communion with spirits it is able to free itself from Time and see what only the spiritual eye beholds--things separated from it in time and space. The enthusiastic worship of the Thracian servants of Dionysos gave birth to the _inspiration mantikê_,[51\8] a form of prophecy which did not (like prophecy as it invariably appears in Homer) have to wait for accidental, ambiguous and external signs of the god's will, but on the contrary entered immediately into communion with the world of gods and spirits and in this heightened spiritual condition beheld and proclaimed the future. This power belonged to men only in _ekstasis_, in religious madness, when "the God enters into men". The _Mainads_ are the official exponents of this _mantikê_ of inspiration.[52\8] It is simple and intelligible enough that the Thracian cult of Dionysos, which was throughout a means of stimulating men to a condition of extreme exaltation that they might enter into direct communion with the spirit-world, also encouraged the prophesying of inspired seers, who in their rapt exaltation and frenzy became clairvoyant. Among the Thracian Satrai there was a tribe called the Bessoi who produced _prophêtai_, and these were in charge of an oracle of Dionysos situated on the top of a high mountain. The prophetess of this temple was a woman who gave prophecies like the Pythia at Delphi, that is to say, in a state of rapt ecstasy. This, at least, is what Herodotos says,[53\8] and we have many other accounts of Thracian _mantikê_ and its close connexion with the orgiastic cult of Dionysos.[54\8]

§ 3

The Greek type of religion, perhaps from its very origin, certainly at the earliest period of its development in which it becomes accessible to our observation--the period to which the Homeric poems belong--had no leaning to anything resembling an excited emotional worship like that practised by the Thracians in their orgiastic cult of Dionysos. The whole movement wherever it came to their notice must have struck the Greeks of Homer as something strange and barbaric, attractive only through the interest ever attached to the unknown. And yet--the fact is certain--the thrilling tones {261} of this "enthusiastic" worship awoke an answering chord deep in the hearts of many Greeks; in spite of all that was strange they must have recognized a familiar accent in it--something that, however outlandishly expressed, could appeal to the common nature of mankind.

This enthusiastic Thracian cult was in fact only a special expression, conforming to their peculiar national characteristics, of a religious impulse that is to be found all over the earth, and which breaks out in every stage of civilization. It must, indeed, answer to an instinctive need of human nature, and be rooted in the physical and psychical constitution of man. In moments of supreme exaltation man felt the presence above him and around him of mighty powers that seemed to express themselves even in his own personal life. These he was no longer to confront in pious and fearful awe, passively confined within the limits of his own separate personality: he was to break down every barrier and clasp them to his heart, making them his own in unconditional surrender. Mankind needed not to wait for that strange product of poetry and thought, Pantheism, before it could experience this instinctive need to lose its own private existence, for a moment, in the divine. There are whole races of men, not otherwise among the most distinguished members of the human family, who have a special tendency and gift for such expansion of the human consciousness into the supra-personal. They have an urgent impulse to such rapt and visionary states, and they regard the enticing or horrifying visions that visit them in those states as actual experiences of another world into which their "souls" have for a brief while been transported. In every part of the world there are peoples who regard such ecstatic exaltation as the only true religious act, the only way of intercourse with the spirit-world available to man, and base their religious performances principally upon such ceremonial as experience has shown to be most capable of inducing the ecstasies and visions. The means most commonly adopted by such peoples to produce the desired intensity and stimulation of feeling is a violently excited dance prolonged to the point of exhaustion, in the darkness of night, to the accompaniment of tumultuous music. Sometimes whole companies of the people induce in themselves a state of religious excitement by wild and furious dancing.[55\8] More often selected individuals, specially susceptible to such impressions, suffer their "souls" to be drawn out by music and dancing and every other sort of stimulating influence, and made to visit the world of spirits and gods.[56\8] Such "magicians" and priests who can place {262} themselves in immediate contact of soul with the spirit world, are to be found all over the globe. The shamans of Asia, the "medicine men" of North America, the Angekoks of Greenland, the Butios of the Antilles, the Piajes of the Caribbees are merely special cases of a universal type, essentially the same in all its different manifestations. Africa, Australia, and the island world of the Pacific are equally familiar with them. Both their performances and the range of ideas that lie behind them belong to a type of religious experience that occurs with the regularity of a natural phenomenon, and must therefore not be regarded as abnormal. Even among Christian peoples of long standing, the smouldering fires of this primitive and emotional type of religion are ever ready to burst out again in renewed flames, and those who feel their warmth are kindled to a more than human sense of life and vigour.[57\8] Conventionality and traditionalism, even the substitution of a cold and spurious mimicry for real feeling, are of course quite compatible with a form of religion which consists so much in the display of emotion. But even so, the most cautious observers[58\8] have declared that by such violent stimulation of every sense the "magicians" are thrown into a state of quite unfeigned exaltation. In accordance with the character and content of their normal modes of thought, the hallucinations to which the magicians are subject differ in different cases; but as a general rule their frenzy opens to them a way of immediate intercourse, frequently of complete communion of being, with the gods. This is the only explanation which will account for the fact that, like the inspired Bakchantes of Thrace, the magicians and priests of so many peoples are called by the name of the divinity to whom their "enthusiastic" worship elevates them.[59\8] The impulse to union with God, the extinction of the individual in the divine--these are what form the fundamental points of contact between the mysticism of the most highly cultivated and talented people and the emotional religion of primitive "savages". Even the external machinery of excitement and stimulation are not always dispensed with by the mystics:[60\8] they are always the same as those with which we are already familiar in the orgiastic religion of primitive peoples--music, the giddy whirl of the dance, narcotic stimulants. Thus (to take the most striking example out of many that might be given) the dervishes of the Orient whirl round in their violent dances to the rattle of drums, and the sound of flutes till the last stages of excitement and exhaustion are reached. The purpose of it all is vividly expressed by the {263} most fearless of all the mystics, Jelaleddin Rumi, in the words: "He that knows the power of the dance dwells in God; for he has learnt that Love can slay.[61\8] Allah hu! . . ."

§ 4

Wherever a cultus of this kind, making its aim and object the evocation of ecstatic raptures, has taken root--whether in whole races of men or in religious communities--there we find in close alliance with it, whether as cause or effect or both, a peculiarly vital belief in the life and power of the soul of man after its separation from the body. Our comparative glance over the analogous phenomena of other lands has shown us that the exalted worship offered to "Dionysos" among the Thracians was only a single variety of a method, familiar to more than half the human race, of getting into touch with the divine by a religious "enthousiasmos". We therefore expect to find among the Thracians a specially strong and well-developed belief in the life of the "soul". And in fact we find Herodotos telling us of a Thracian tribe, the Getai, whose belief "made men immortal".[62\8] They had only one god, Zalmoxis by name.[63\8] To this god, who dwelt in a cavernous mountain, all the dead of their race, they believed, would one day be gathered and have immortal life.[64\8] The same belief was held by other Thracian tribes, too.[65\8] This creed seems to have had in view the "transplantation"[66\8] of the dead to a blessed life in the hereafter. But, it would seem, this transplantation was not perhaps for ever. We hear of the belief that the dead would "return"[67\8] from the other world; and that this idea existed among the Getai is implied (though the narrator does not clearly understand this) by the absurd pragmatizing fable which Herodotos got from the Greek settlers on the Hellespont and the Pontos.[68\8] In this story (as often in later accounts too Zalmoxis is actually a slave and pupil of Pythagoras of Samos. Whoever invented this fairy-tale was led to it by observing the close relationship between the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul and the Thracian belief. In the same way later observers of the same fact reversed the positions and made Pythagoras the pupil of the Thracian.[69\8] In any case the fact cannot to be doubted that in Thrace people thought they had found again the special doctrine of Pythagoras as to the _transmigration_ of souls. The belief in the "return" of the soul must be interpreted as meaning that the souls of the dead return to life in new bodies and resume their life on earth, to this extent being {264} "immortal". Only so interpreted could it have been held for a moment without coming into conflict with obvious appearances. An allusion in Euripides seems to regard as Thracian such a belief in a recurrent incarnation of the soul.[70\8]

We should be justified in expecting to find an inner connexion between this Thracian belief in immortality, which seems to have made such an impression on our Greek informants, and the religion and "enthousiastic" worship of the same people. Nor are traces lacking of a close association of the Thracian worship of Dionysos and Thracian cult of the Souls.[71\8] But if we ask why the religion of the Thracian Dionysos was attended by a belief in the independent, indestructible life of the soul, a life not confined to the period of its sojourn in the body which at present envelopes it, the answer must be sought not in the nature of the god to whom the cult was offered (that nature being, in fact, insufficiently known to us) but in the nature of the cult itself. The object of that cult--we might almost say its special task--was to exalt its worshippers to a state of "ekstasis" in which their "souls" should be forcibly delivered from the normal circle of their human and circumscribed being, and raised as pure spirits to communion with the god and his company of spirits. The true "Bakchai"[72\8]--those who were really cast into a state of religious madness--found in the rapture of these orgies a new province of experience open before them: they experience things of which they could give no account in the fully conscious light of ordinary day. There can be no doubt that the experiences and visions that their "ekstasis" gave them were regarded by them as the plainest and most literally real of facts.[73\8] The belief in the existence and life of a second self distinct from the body and separable from it was already encouraged by the "experiences" of the separate existence and independent behaviour of that self in dreams and fainting fits.[74\8] How much more strongly and vividly must this belief have been confirmed for those who in the intoxication of those delirious dances had "experienced" for themselves how the soul, freed from the body, could participate in the joys and terrors of the divine existence; not indeed the whole man, body and soul together, but the soul by itself and in separation from the body--the spiritual being invisibly living within the man. The sense of its own divinity, its eternity, which had been blindingly revealed to it in "ekstasis", might be developed by the soul into a lasting persuasion that it was indeed of a divine nature, and called to a divine life which it would enjoy for ever as soon as it was freed from the body, {265} just as it had then enjoyed it for a moment. No mere intellectual arguments could give such powerful support to a spiritualism of this kind as the personal experience itself which, even in this life supplied a foretaste of what the individual was one day to enjoy as his own for ever.

In some such way as this, the persuasion of an independent, continued existence of the soul after the death of its body was developed into a belief in the divinity and immortality of the soul. In all such cases it was almost inevitable that the naive distinction between "body" and "soul", natural to simple-minded peoples and individuals, should harden into an _opposition_ between the two. The descent from the heights where the ecstatic and emancipated soul enjoyed its thrilling delights was too sudden; the body could not but seem a burden and a hindrance, almost an enemy of the heaven-born soul. Disparagement of the ordinary existence of every day, a turning aside from this life--these are the natural results of such an advanced spiritualism, even though it may have no speculative basis, when it influences so profoundly the religious temperament of a people as yet untroubled by the subtleties of a scientific culture. A trace of such a depreciation of the earthly life of mankind in comparison with the joys of a free spirit-existence is to be found in what Herodotos and other narrators tell of certain Thracian tribes[75\8] who receive the new-born among their kinsfolk with mourning, and bury their dead with joyful acclamation, for the latter are now beyond the reach of all pain, and are living "in perfect happiness".[76\8] The cheerfulness with which the Thracians faced death in battle[77\8] was explained by the persuasion which they held that death was only an entrance into a higher life for the soul. They were even credited with a real desire for death, for to them "dying seemed so fair".[78\8]

§ 5

Further than this the Thracians--who never quite outgrew a sort of semi-animated torpor of the intellect--could not go on the way marked out for them. The seed of a mystical form of religion that existed in the ecstatic dance-orgies of Dionysos-worship never came to fruition. We never feel with them that we are being taken beyond the region of vague unconscious emotion; it is but a passing illumination that for a moment of wild excitement reveals the near presence of overwhelming spirit-forces.

Not until the flames of such ecstatic worship were fed and nourished by a people of more independent and developed spiritual life, could fitful suggestions be welded into deep and {266} enduring thought. Reflexion upon the nature of the world and of God, the changing and deceptive flow of appearance with the indestructible One Reality behind it; the conception of a divinity that is One, a single light that, divided into a thousand rays and reflected from everything that is, achieves its unity again in the soul of man; such thoughts as these, allied to the dim half-conscious impulse of an enthusiastic dance-worship, might allow the pure waters of the stream of mysticism to run clear at last, freed from the turbid and unsatisfying enthusiasm of popular religious practices.

Thus, for example, among the stern and rigid-minded peoples of Islam, with their stiff, uncompromising Monotheism, there arose, no one knows whence, the inspired dance-orgies of the Dervishes, which then spread far and wide carrying with them the mystical doctrine of the Sûfis, that child of the profound mind of India. Man is God; God is All: such was the pronouncement of the inspired poetry--the special contribution in particular of Persia to this religion of mystic **ecstasy--now in the most transparent simplicity, now in the most gorgeous magnificence of imagery. In the ecstatic dance, which in this case remained in organic connexion with the mystical doctrine (as the soil of the maternal earth with the flowers which she puts forth) new strength was ever being added to the spiritual superstructure. Mystical theory was invigorated by the practical experience, in heightened consciousness, of an internal and unquenchable source of undying power and might. The veil of the world was torn aside for the inspired worshipper; the All-One became sensible and intelligible for him; it poured into his own being; the "deification" of the Mystai was realized in him. "Who knows the power of the Dance dwells in God". . .

Many years before all this, a process of development was completed on Greek soil which has no closer parallel than the special phase of Oriental religion just referred to. Greek religion never indeed (so long at least as the independence of Greek life lasted) went to the extravagant lengths of Oriental mysticism. Even the sense of the infinite had to be expressed by the Greek imagination in plastic form. But for all that, on Greek soil, in the ecstatic Cult of Dionysos, under the influence of Greek reflexion upon God, the world and mankind, the seeds which previously lay undeveloped in the womb of that cult were unfolded in a mystical doctrine, whose guiding principle was the divinity of the human soul and the infiniteness of its life in God. It was from this source that Greek philosophy found the courage to advance a doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

NOTES TO