That a belief in a future existence formed a prominent and controlling feature in the creed of the Etruscans4 is abundantly shown by the contents of their tombs. They would never have produced and preserved paintings, tracings, types, of such a character and in such quant.i.ties, had not the doctrines they shadow forth possessed a ruling hold upon their hopes and fears.
The symbolic representations connected with this subject may be arranged in several cla.s.ses. First, there is an innumerable variety of death bed scenes, many of them of the most touching and pathetic character, such as witnesses say can scarcely be looked upon without tears, others of the most appalling nature, showing perfect abandonment to fright, screams, sobbing, and despair. The last hour is described under all circ.u.mstances, coming to all sorts of persons, prince, priest, peasant, man, mother, and child.
Patriarchs are dying surrounded by groups in every posture of grief; friends are waving a mournful farewell to their weeping lovers; wives are torn from the embrace of their husbands; some seem resigned and willingly going, others reluctant and driven in terror.
The next series of engravings contain descriptions and emblems of the departure of the soul from this world, and of its pa.s.sage into the next. There are various symbols of this mysterious transition: one is a snake with a boy riding upon its back, its amphibious nature plainly typifying the twofold existence allotted to man.
The soul is also often shown m.u.f.fled in a veil and travelling garb, seated upon a horse, and followed by a slave carrying a large sack of provisions, an emblem of the long and dreary journey about to be taken. Horses are depicted harnessed to cars in which disembodied spirits are seated, a token of the swift ride
3 Saturnal. lib. i. cap. 7.
4 Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, ch. xii.
of the dead to their doom. Sometimes the soul is gently invited, or led, by a good spirit, sometimes beaten, or dragged away, by the squalid and savage Charun, the horrible death king, or one of his ministers; sometimes a good and an evil spirit are seen contending for the soul; sometimes the soul is seen, on its knees, beseeching the aid of its good genius and grasping at his departing wing, as, with averted face, he is retiring; and sometimes the good and the evil spirits are leading it away together, to abide the sentence of the tribunal of Mantus. Whole companies of souls are also set forth marching in procession, under the guidance of a winged genius, to their subterranean abode.
Finally, there is a cla.s.s of representations depicting the ultimate fate of souls after judgment has been pa.s.sed. Some are shown seated at banquet, in full enjoyment, according to their ideas of bliss. Some are shown undergoing punishment, beaten with hammers, stabbed and torn by black demons. There are no proofs that the Etruscans believed in the translation of any soul to the abode of the G.o.ds above the sky, no signs of any path rising to the supernal heaven; but they clearly expected just discriminations to be made in the under world. Into that realm many gates are shown leading, some of them peaceful, inviting, surrounded by apparent emblems of deliverance, rest, and blessedness; others yawning, terrific, engirt by the heads of gnashing beasts and furies threatening their victim.
"Shown is the progress of the guilty soul From earth"s worn threshold to the throne of doom; Here the black genius to the dismal goal Drags the wan spectre from the unsheltering tomb, While from the side it never more may warn The better angel, sorrowing, flees forlorn.
There (closed the eighth) seven yawning gates reveal The sevenfold anguish that awaits the lost.
Closed the eighth gate, for there the happy dwell.
No glimpse of joy beyond makes horror less."
In these lines, from Bulwer"s learned and ornate epic of King Arthur, the dire severity of the Etruscan doctrine of a future life is well indicated, with the local imagery of some parts of it, and the impenetrable obscurity which enwraps the great sequel.
CHAPTER V.
EGYPTIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
IN attempting to understand the conceptions of the ancient inhabitants of Egypt on the subject of a future life, we are first met by the inquiry why they took such great pains to preserve the bodies of their dead. It has been supposed that no common motive could have animated them to such lavish expenditure of money, time, and labor as the process of embalming required. It has been taken for granted that only some recondite theological consideration could explain this phenomenon. Accordingly, it is now the popular belief that the Egyptians were so scrupulous in embalming their dead and storing them in repositories of eternal stone, because they believed that the departed souls would at some future time come back and revivify their former bodies, if these were kept from decay. This hypothesis seems to us as false as it is gratuitous. In the first place, there is no evidence of it whatever, neither written testimony nor circ.u.mstantial hint.
Herodotus tells us, "The Egyptians say the soul, on the dissolution of the body, always enters into some other animal then born, and, having pa.s.sed in rotation through the various terrestrial, aquatic, and arial beings, again enters the body of a man then born."1 There is no a.s.sertion that, at the end of the three thousand years occupied by this circuit, the soul will re enter its former body. The plain inference, on the contrary, is that it will be born in a new body, as at each preceding step in the series of its transmigrations. Secondly, the mutilation of the body in embalming forbids the belief in its restoration to life.
The brain was extracted, and the skull stuffed with cotton. The entrails were taken out, and sometimes, according to Porphyry2 and Plutarch,3 thrown into the Nile; sometimes, as modern examinations have revealed, bound up in four packages and either replaced in the cavity of the stomach or laid in four vases beside the mummy.
It is absurd to attribute, without clear cause, to an enlightened people the belief that these stacks of brainless, eviscerated mummies, dried and shrunken in ovens, coated with pitch, bound up in a hundredfold bandages, would ever revive, and, inhabited by the same souls that fled them thirty centuries before, again walk the streets of Thebes! Besides, a third consideration demands notice. By the theory of metempsychosis universally acknowledged to have been held by the Egyptians it is taught that souls at death, either immediately, or after a temporary sojourn in h.e.l.l or heaven has struck the balance of their merits, are born in fresh bodies; never that they return into their old ones. But the point is set beyond controversy by the discovery of inscriptions, accompanying pictures of scenes ill.u.s.trating the felicity of blessed souls in heaven, to this effect: "Their bodies shall repose in their tombs forever; they live in the celestial regions eternally, enjoying the presence of the Supreme G.o.d." 4 A writer on this subject says, "A people who believed in the transmigration
1 Herod. lib. ii. cap. 123.
2 De Abstinentia, lib. iv. cap. 10.
3 Banquet of the Seven Wise Men.
4 Champollion, Descr. de l"Egypte, Antiq. tom ii. p. 132. Stuart"s Trans. of Greppo"s Essay, p. 262.
of souls would naturally take extraordinary pains to preserve the body from putrefaction, in the hope of the soul again joining the body it had quitted." The remark is intrinsically untrue, because the doctrine of transmigration coexists in reconciled belief with the observed law of birth, infancy, and growth, not with the miracle of transition into reviving corpses. The notion is likewise historically refuted by the fact that the believers of that doctrine in the thronged East have never preserved the body, but at once buried or burned it. The whole Egyptian theology is much more closely allied to the Hindu, which excluded, than to the Persian, which emphasized, the resurrection of the body.
Another theory which has been devised to explain the purpose of Egyptian embalming, is that "it was to unite the soul permanently to its body, and keep the vital principle from perishing or transmigrating; the body and soul ran together through the journey of the dead and its dread ordeal." 5 This arbitrary guess is incredible. The preservation of the body does not appear in any way not even to the rawest fancy to detain or unite the soul with it; for the thought is unavoidable that it is precisely the absence of the soul which const.i.tutes death. Again: such an explanation of the motive for embalming cannot be correct, because in the hieroglyphic representations of the pa.s.sage to the judgment the separate soul is often depicted as hovering over the body, 6 or as kneeling before the judges, or as pursuing its adventures through the various realms of the creation. "When the body is represented," Champollion says, "it is as an aid to the spectator, and not as teaching a bodily resurrection. Sharpe"s opinion that the picture of a bird poised over the mouth of a mummy, with the emblems of breath and life in its claws, implies the doctrine of a general physical resurrection, is an inferential leap of the most startling character. What proof is there that the symbol denotes this? Hundreds of paintings in the tombs show souls undergoing their respective allotments in the other world while their bodily mummies are quiet in the sepulchres of the present. In his treatise on "Isis and Osiris," Plutarch writes, "The Egyptians believe that while the bodies of eminent men are buried in the earth their souls are stars shining in heaven." It is equally nonsensical in itself and unwarranted by evidence to imagine that, in the Egyptian faith, embalming either retained the soul in the body or preserved the body for a future return of the soul. Who can believe that it was for either of those purposes that they embalmed the mult.i.tudes of animals whose mummies the explorer is still turning up? They preserved cats, hawks, bugs, crocodiles, monkeys, bulls, with as great pains as they did men.7 When the Canary Islands were first visited, it was found that their inhabitants had a custom of carefully embalming the dead. The same was the case among the Peruvians, whose vast cemeteries remain to this day crowded with mummies. But the expectation of a return of the souls into these preserved bodies is not to be ascribed to those peoples. Herodotus informs us that "the Ethiopians, having dried the bodies of their dead, coat them with white plaster, which they paint with colors to the likeness of the deceased and encase in a transparent substance. The dead, thus kept from being offensive, and yet plainly visible, are retained a
5 Bonomi and Arundel on Egyptian Antiq., p. 46.
6 Pl. x.x.xiii. in Lepsius" Todtenb. der. Agypter.
7 Pettigrew, Hist of Egyptian Mummies, ch. xii.
whole year in the houses of their nearest relatives. Afterwards they are carried out and placed upright in the tombs around the city." 8 It has been argued, because the Egyptians expended so much in preparing lasting tombs and in adorning their walls with varied embellishments, that they must have thought the soul remained in the body, a conscious occupant of the dwelling place provided for it.9 As well might it be argued that, because the ancient savage tribes on the coast of South America, who obtained their support by fishing, buried fish hooks and bait with their dead, they supposed the dead bodies occupied themselves in their graves by fishing! The adornment of the tomb, so lavish and varied with the Egyptians, was a gratification of the spontaneous workings of fancy and affection, and needs no far fetched explanation. Every nation has its funeral customs and its rites of sepulture, many of which would be as difficult of explanation as those of Egypt. The Scandinavian sea king was sometimes buried, in his ship, in a grave dug on some headland overlooking the ocean.
The Scythians buried their dead in rolls of gold, sometimes weighing forty or fifty solid pounds. Diodorus the Sicilian says, "The Egyptians, laying the embalmed bodies of their ancestors in n.o.ble monuments, see the true visages and expressions of those who died ages before them. So they take almost as great pleasure in viewing their bodily proportions and the lineaments of their faces as if they were still living among them." 10 That instinct which leads us to obtain portraits of those we love, and makes us unwilling to part even with their lifeless bodies, was the cause of embalming. The bodies thus prepared, we know from the testimony of ancient authors, were kept in the houses of their children or kindred, until a new generation, "who knew not Joseph," removed them. Then nothing could be more natural than that the priesthood should take advantage of the custom, so a.s.sociated with sacred sentiments, and throw theological sanctions over it, shroud it in mystery, and secure a monopoly of the power and profit arising from it. It is not improbable, too, as has been suggested, that hygienic considerations, expressing themselves in political laws and priestly precepts, may at first have had an influence in establishing the habit of embalming, to prevent the pestilences apt to arise in such a climate from the decay of animal substances.
There is great diversity of opinion among Egyptologists on this point. One thinks that embalming was supposed to keep the soul in the body until after the funeral judgment and interment, but that, when the corpse was laid in its final receptacle, the soul proceeded to accompany the sun in its daily and nocturnal circuit, or to transmigrate through various animals and deities. Another imagines that the process of embalming was believed to secure the repose of the soul in the other world, exempt from transmigrations, so long as the body was kept from decay.11 Perhaps the different notions on this subject attributed by modern authors to the Egyptians may all have prevailed among them at different times or among distinct sects. But it seems most likely, as we have said, that embalming first arose from physical and sentimental considerations naturally operating, rather than from any
8 Lib. iii. cap. 24.
9 Kenrick, Ancient Egypt, vol. i. ch. xxi. sect. iii.
10 Lib. i. cap. 7.
11 Library of Entertaining Knowledge, vol. ii. ch. iii.
theological doctrine carefully devised; although, after the priesthood appropriated the business, it is altogether probable that they interwove it with an artificial and elaborate system of sacerdotal dogmas, in which was the hiding of the national power.
The second question that arises is, What was the significance of the funeral ceremonies celebrated by the Egyptians over their dead? When the body had been embalmed, it was presented before a tribunal of forty two judges sitting in state on the eastern borders of the lake Acherusia. They made strict inquiry into the conduct and character of the deceased. Any one might make complaint against him, or testify in his behalf. If it was found that he had been wicked, had died in debt, or was otherwise unworthy, he was deprived of honorable burial and ignominiously thrown into a ditch. This was called Tartar, from the wailings the sentence produced among his relatives. But if he was found to have led an upright life, and to have been a good man, the honors of a regular interment were decreed him. The cemetery a large plain environed with trees and lined with ca.n.a.ls lay on the western side of the lake, and was named Elisout, or rest. It was reached by a boat, the funeral barge, in which no one could cross without an order from the judges and the payment of a small fee. In these and other particulars some of the scenes supposed to be awaiting the soul in the other world were dramatically shadowed forth. Each rite was a symbol of a reality existing, in solemn correspondence, in the invisible state. What the priests did over the body on earth the judicial deities did over the soul in Amenthe. It seems plain that the Greeks derived many of their notions concerning the fate and state of the dead from Egypt. Hades corresponds with Amenthe; Pluto, with the subterranean Osiris; Mercury psychopompos, with Anubis, "the usher of souls;" Aacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthos, with the three a.s.sistant G.o.ds who help in weighing the soul and present the result to Osiris; Tartarus, to the ditch Tartar; Charon"s ghost boat over the Styx, to the barge conveying the mummy to the tomb; Cerberus, to Oms; Acheron, to Acherusia; the Elysian Fields, to Elisout.12 Kenrick thinks the Greeks may have developed these views for themselves, without indebtedness to Egypt. But the notions were in existence among the Egyptians at least twelve hundred years before they can be traced among the Greeks.13 And they are too arbitrary and systematic to have been independently constructed by two nations. Besides, Herodotus positively affirms that they were derived from Egypt. Several other ancient authors also state this; and nearly every modern writer on the subject agrees in it.
The triumphs of modern investigation into the antiquities of Egypt, unlocking the hieroglyphics and lifting the curtain from the secrets of ages, have unveiled to us a far more full and satisfactory view of the Egyptian doctrine of the future life than can be constructed from the narrow glimpses afforded by the accounts of the old Greek authorities. Three sources of knowledge have been laid open to us. First, the papyrus rolls, one of which was placed in the bosom of every mummy. This roll, covered with hieroglyphics, is called the funeral ritual, or book of the dead.
It served as a pa.s.sport through the burial rites. It contained the names of the deceased and his parents, a series of prayers he was to recite
12 Spineto on Egyptian Antiq, Lectures IV., V.
13 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 2d Series, vol. i. ch. 12.
before the various divinities he would meet on his journey, and representations of some of the adventures awaiting him in the unseen state.14 Secondly, the ornamental cases in which the mummies are enclosed are painted all over with scenes setting forth the realities and events to which the soul of the dead occupant has pa.s.sed in the other life.15 Thirdly, the various fates of souls are sculptured and painted on the walls in the tombs, in characters which have been deciphered during the present century:16
"Those mystic, stony volumes on the walls long writ, Whose sense is late reveal"d to searching modern wit."
Combining the information thus obtained, we learn that, according to the Egyptian representation, the soul is led by the G.o.d Thoth into Amenthe, the infernal world, the entrance to which lies in the extreme west, on the farther side of the sea, where the sun goes down under the earth. It was in accordance with this supposition that Herod caused to be engraved, on a magnificent monument erected to his deceased wife, the line, "Zeus, this blooming woman sent beyond the ocean." 17 At the entrance sits a wide throated monster, over whose head is the inscription, "This is the devourer of many who go into Amenthe, the lacerator of the heart of him who comes with sins to the house of justice." The soul next kneels before the forty two a.s.sessors of Osiris, with deprecating a.s.severations and intercessions. It then comes to the final trial in the terrible Hall of the two Truths, the approving and the condemning; or, as it is differently named, the Hall of the double Justice, the rewarding and the punishing. Here the three divinities Horns, Anubis, and Thoth proceed to weigh the soul in the balance. In one scale an image of Thmei, the G.o.ddess of Truth, is placed; in the other, a heart shaped vase, symbolizing the heart of the deceased with all the actions of his earthly life. Then happy is he "Who, weighed "gainst Truth, down dips the awful scale."
Thoth notes the result on a tablet, and the deceased advances with it to the foot of the throne on which sits Osiris, lord of the dead, king of Amenthe. He p.r.o.nounces the decisive sentence, and his a.s.sistants see that it is at once executed. The condemned soul is either scourged back to the earth straightway, to live again in the form of a vile animal, as some of the emblems appear to denote; or plunged into the tortures of a horrid h.e.l.l of fire and devils below, as numerous engravings set forth; or driven into the atmosphere, to be vexed and tossed by tempests, violently whirled in blasts and clouds, till its sins are expiated, and another probation granted through a renewed existence in human form.
We have two accounts of the Egyptian divisions of the universe.
According to the first view, they conceived the creation to consist of three grand departments. First came the earth, or zone of trial, where men live on probation. Next was the atmosphere, or zone of temporal
14 Das Todtenbuch der Agypter, edited with an introduction by Dr.
Lepsius.
15 Ch. ix. of Pettigrew"s History of Egyptian Mummies.
16 Champollion"s Letter, dated Thebes, May 16, 1829. An abstract of this letter may be found in Stuart"s trans. of Greppo"s Essay on Champollion"s Hieroglyphic System, appendix, note N.
17 Basnage, Hist. of the Jews, lib. ii. ch. 12, sect. 19.
punishment, where souls are afflicted for their sins. The ruler of this girdle of storms was Pooh, the overseer of souls in penance.