Part 35 (2/2)
Of course it is not surprising that parricides and perjurers, and others who had committed crimes against G.o.d or man, could not be admitted.
In the Mysteries of Mithras, a lecture was repeated to the Initiate on the subject of Justice. And the great moral lesson of the Mysteries, to which all their mystic ceremonial tended, expressed in a single line by Virgil, was _to practise Justice and revere the Deity_;--thus recalling men to justice, by connecting it with the justice of the G.o.ds, who require it and punish its infraction. The Initiate could aspire to the favors of the G.o.ds, only because and while he respected the rights of society and those of humanity. ”The sun,” says the chorus of Initiates in Aristophanes, ”burns with a pure light for us alone, who, admitted to the Mysteries, observe the laws of piety in our intercourse with strangers and our fellow-citizens.” The rewards of initiation were attached to the practice of the social virtues. It was not enough to be initiated merely. It was necessary to be faithful to the _laws_ of initiation, which imposed on men duties in regard to their kind. Bacchus allowed none to partic.i.p.ate in his Mysteries, but men who conformed to the rules of piety and justice. Sensibility, above all, and compa.s.sion for the misfortunes of others, were precious virtues, which initiation strove to encourage. ”Nature,” says Juvenal, ”has created us compa.s.sionate, since it has endowed us with tears. Sensibility is the most admirable of our senses. What man is truly worthy of the torch of the Mysteries; who such as the Priest of Ceres requires him to be, if he regards the misfortunes of others as wholly foreign to himself?”
All who had not used their endeavors to defeat a conspiracy; and those who had on the contrary fomented one; those citizens who had betrayed their country, who had surrendered an advantageous post or place, or the vessels of the State, to the enemy; all who had supplied the enemy with money; and in general, all who had come short of their duties as honest men and good citizens, were excluded from the Mysteries of Eleusis. To be admitted there, one must have lived equitably, and with sufficient good fortune not to be regarded as hated by the G.o.ds.
Thus the Society of the Initiates was, in its principle, and according to the true purpose of its inst.i.tution, a society of virtuous men, who labored to free their souls from the tyranny of the pa.s.sions, and to develop the germ of all the social virtues. And this was the meaning of the idea, afterward misunderstood, that entry into Elysium was only allowed to the Initiates: because entrance to the sanctuaries was allowed to the virtuous only, and Elysium was created for virtuous souls alone.
The precise nature and details of the doctrines as to a future life, and rewards and punishments there, developed in the Mysteries, is in a measure uncertain. Little direct information in regard to it has come down to us. No doubt, in the ceremonies there was a scenic representation of Tartarus and the judgment of the dead, resembling that which we find in Virgil: but there is as little doubt that these representations were explained to be allegorical. It is not our purpose here to repeat the descriptions given of Elysium and Tartarus. That would be aside from our object. We are only concerned with the great fact that the Mysteries taught the doctrine of the soul's immortality, and that, in some shape, suffering, pain, remorse, and agony, ever follow sin as its consequences.
Human ceremonies are indeed but imperfect symbols; and the alternate baptisms in fire and water intended to purify us into immortality, are ever in this world interrupted at the moment of their antic.i.p.ated completion. Life is a mirror which reflects only to deceive, a tissue perpetually interrupted and broken, an urn forever fed, yet never full.
All initiation is but introductory to the great change of death Baptism, anointing, embalming, obsequies by burial or fire, are preparatory symbols, like the initiation of Hercules before descending to the Shades, pointing out the mental change which ought to precede the renewal of existence. Death is the true initiation, to which sleep is the introductory or minor mystery. It is the final rite which united the Egyptian with his G.o.d, and which opens the same promise to all who are duly prepared for it.
The body was deemed a prison for the soul; but the latter was not condemned to eternal banishment and imprisonment. The Father of the Worlds permits its chains to be broken, and has provided in the course of Nature the means of its escape. It was a doctrine of immemorial antiquity, shared alike by Egyptians, Pythagoreans, the Orphici, and by that characteristic Bacchic Sage, ”the Preceptor of the Soul,” Silenus, that death is far better than life; that the real death belongs to those who on earth are immersed in the Lethe of its pa.s.sions and fascinations, and that the true life commences only when the soul is emanc.i.p.ated for its return.
And in this sense, as presiding over life and death, Dionusos is in the highest sense _the_ LIBERATOR: since, like Osiris, he frees the soul, and guides it in its migrations beyond the grave, preserving it from the risk of again falling under the slavery of matter or of some inferior animal form, the purgatory of Metempsychosis; and exalting and perfecting its nature through the purifying discipline of his Mysteries.
”The great consummation of all philosophy,” said Socrates, professedly quoting from traditional and mystic sources, ”is _Death_: He who pursues philosophy aright, _is studying how to die_.”
All soul is part of the Universal Soul, whose totality is Dionusos; and it is therefore he who, as Spirit of Spirits, leads back the vagrant spirit to its home, and accompanies it through the purifying processes, both real and symbolical, of its earthly transit. He is therefore emphatically the _Mystes_ or Hierophant, the great Spiritual Mediator of Greek religion.
The human soul is itself [Greek: da??????] a G.o.d _within_ the mind, capable through its own power of rivalling the canonization of the Hero, of making itself immortal by the practice of the good, and the contemplation of the beautiful and true. The removal to the Happy Islands could only be understood mythically; everything earthly must die; Man, like dipus, is wounded from his birth, his real elysium can exist only beyond the grave. Dionusos died and descended to the shades.
His pa.s.sion was the great Secret of the Mysteries; as Death is the Grand Mystery of existence. His death, typical of Nature's Death, or of her periodical decay and restoration, was one of the many symbols of the _palingenesia_ or second birth of man.
Man descended from the elemental Forces or t.i.tans [Elohim], who fed on the body of the Pantheistic Deity creating the Universe by self-sacrifice, commemorates in sacramental observance this mysterious pa.s.sion; and while partaking of the raw flesh of the victim, seems to be invigorated by a fresh draught from the fountain of universal life, to receive a new pledge of regenerated existence. Death is the inseparable antecedent of life; the seed dies in order to produce the plant, and earth itself is rent asunder and dies at the birth of Dionusos. Hence the significancy of the _phallus_, or of its inoffensive subst.i.tute, the obelisk, rising as an emblem of resurrection by the tomb of buried Deity at Lerna or at Sais.
Dionusos-Orpheus descended to the Shades to recover the lost Virgin of the Zodiac, to bring back his mother to the sky as Thyone; or what has the same meaning, to consummate his eventful marriage with Persephone, thereby securing, like the nuptials of his father with Semele or Danae, the perpetuity of Nature. His under-earth office is the depression of the year, the wintry aspect in the alternations of bull and serpent, whose united series makes up the continuity of Time, and in which, physically speaking, the stern and dark are ever the parents of the beautiful and bright.
It was this aspect, sombre for the moment, but bright by antic.i.p.ation, which was contemplated in the Mysteries: the human sufferer was consoled by witnessing the severer trials of the G.o.ds; and the vicissitudes of life and death, expressed by apposite symbols, such as the sacrifice or submersion of the Bull, the extinction and re-illumination of the torch, excited corresponding emotions of alternate grief and joy, that play of pa.s.sion which was present at the origin of Nature, and which accompanies all her changes.
The greater Eleusiniae; were celebrated in the month Boedromion, when the seed was buried in the ground, and when the year, verging to its decline, disposes the mind to serious reflection. The first days of the ceremonial were pa.s.sed in sorrow and anxious silence, in fasting and expiatory or l.u.s.tral offices. On a sudden, the scene was changed: sorrow and lamentation were discarded, the glad name of Iacchus pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth, the image of the G.o.d, crowned with myrtle and bearing a lighted torch, was borne in joyful procession from the Ceramicus to Eleusis, where, during the ensuing night, the initiation was completed by an imposing revelation. The first scene was in the [Greek: p???a??], or outer court of the sacred enclosure, where amidst utter darkness, or while the meditating G.o.d, the star illuminating the Nocturnal Mystery, alone carried an unextinguished torch, the candidates were overawed with terrific sounds and noises, while they painfully groped their way, as in the gloomy cavern of the soul's sublunar migration; a scene justly compared to the pa.s.sage of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. For by the immutable law exemplified in the trials of Psyche, man must pa.s.s through the terrors of the under-world, before he can reach the height of Heaven. At length the gates of the _adytum_ were thrown open, a supernatural light streamed from the illuminated statue of the G.o.ddess, and enchanting sights and sounds, mingled with songs and dances, exalted the communicant to a rapture of supreme felicity, realizing, as far as sensuous imagery could depict, the antic.i.p.ated reunion with the G.o.ds.
In the dearth of direct evidence as to the detail of the ceremonies enacted, or of the meanings connected with them, their tendency must be inferred from the characteristics of the contemplated deities with their accessory symbols and mythi, or from direct testimony as to the value of the Mysteries generally.
The ordinary phenomena of vegetation, the death of the seed in giving birth to the plant, connecting the sublimest hopes with the plainest occurrences, was the simple yet beautiful formula a.s.sumed by the great mystery in almost all religions, from the Zend-Avesta to the Gospel. As Proserpina, the divine power is as the seed decaying and destroyed; as Artemis, she is the principle of its destruction; but Artemis Proserpina is also Cote Soteria, the Saviour, who leads the Spirits of Hercules and Hyacinthus to Heaven.
Many other emblems were employed in the Mysteries,--as the dove, the myrtle-wreath, and others, all significant of life rising out of death, and of the equivocal condition of dying yet immortal man.
The horrors and punishments of Tartarus, as described in the Phaedo and the aeneid, with all the ceremonies of the judgments of Minos, Eacus, and Rhadamanthus, were represented, sometimes more and sometimes less fully, in the Mysteries; in order to impress upon the minds of the Initiates this great lesson,--that we should be ever prepared to appear before the Supreme Judge, with a heart pure and spotless; as Socrates teaches in the Gorgias. For the soul stained with crimes, he says, to descend to the Shades, is the bitterest ill. To adhere to Justice and Wisdom, Plato holds, is our duty, that we may some day take that lofty road that leads toward the heavens, and avoid most of the evils to which the soul is exposed in its subterranean journey of a thousand years. And so in the Phaedo, Socrates teaches that we should seek here below to free our soul of its pa.s.sions, in order to be ready to enter our appearance, whenever Destiny summons us to the Shades.
Thus the Mysteries inculcated a great moral truth, veiled with a fable of huge proportions and the appliances of an impressive spectacle, to which, exhibited in the sanctuaries, art and natural magic lent all they had that was imposing. They sought to strengthen men against the horrors of death and the fearful idea of utter annihilation. Death, says the author of the dialogue, ent.i.tled _Axiochus_, included in the works of Plato, is but a pa.s.sage to a happier state; but one must have lived well, to attain that most fortunate result. So that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was consoling to the virtuous and religious man alone; while to all others it came with menaces and despair, surrounding them with terrors and alarms that disturbed their repose during all their life.
For the material horrors of Tartarus, allegorical to the Initiate, were real to the ma.s.s of the Profane; nor in latter times, did, perhaps many Initiates read rightly the allegory. The triple-walled prison, which the condemned soul first met, round which swelled and surged the fiery waves of Phlegethon, wherein rolled roaring, huge, blazing rocks; the great gate with columns of adamant, which none save the G.o.ds could crush; Tisiphone, their warder, with her b.l.o.o.d.y robes; the lash resounding on the mangled bodies of the miserable unfortunates, their plaintive groans, mingled in horrid harmony with the clas.h.i.+ngs of their chains; the Furies, las.h.i.+ng the guilty with their snakes; the awful abyss where Hydra howls with its hundred heads, greedy to devour; t.i.tyus, prostrate, and his entrails fed upon by the cruel vulture: Sisyphus, ever rolling his rock; Ixion on his wheel; Tantalus tortured by eternal thirst and hunger, in the midst of water and with declicious fruits touching his head; the daughters of Danaus at their eternal, fruitless task; beasts biting and venomous reptiles stinging; and devouring flame eternally consuming bodies ever renewed in endless agony; all these sternly impressed upon the people the terrible consequences of sin and vice, and urged them to pursue the paths of honesty and virtue.
And if, in the ceremonies of the Mysteries, these material horrors were explained to the Initiates as mere symbols of the unimaginable torture, remorse, and agony that would rend the immaterial soul and rack the immortal spirit, they were feeble and insufficient in the same mode and measure only, as all material images and symbols fall short of that which is beyond the cognizance of our senses: and the grave Hierophant, the imagery, the paintings, the dramatic horrors, the funeral sacrifices, the august mysteries, the solemn silence of the sanctuaries, were none the less impressive, because they were known to be but symbols, that with material shows and images made the imagination to be the teacher of the intellect.
So, too, it was represented, that except for the gravest sins there was an opportunity for expiation; and the tests of _water_, _air_, and _fire_ were represented; by means of which, during the march of many years, the soul could be purified, and rise toward the ethereal regions; that ascent being more or less tedious and laborious, according as each soul was more or less clogged by the gross impediments of its sins and vices. Herein was shadowed forth, (how distinctly taught the Initiates we know not), the doctrine that pain and sorrow, misfortune and remorse, are the inevitable _consequences_ that flow from sin and vice, as effect flows from cause; that by each sin and every act of vice the soul drops back and loses ground in its advance toward perfection: and that the ground so lost is and will be in reality never so recovered as that the sin shall be as if it never had been committed; but that throughout all the eternity of its existence, each soul shall be conscious that every act of vice or baseness it did on earth has made the distance greater between itself and ultimate perfection.
We see this truth glimmering in the doctrine, taught in the Mysteries, that though slight and ordinary offences could be expiated by penances, repentance, acts of beneficence, and prayers, grave crimes were mortal sins, beyond the reach of all such remedies. Eleusis closed her gates against Nero: and the Pagan Priests told Constantine that among all their modes of expiation there was none so potent as could wash from _his_ soul the dark spots left by the murder of his wife, and his multiplied perjuries and a.s.sa.s.sinations.
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