by Peter Watson
Moon symbolism appears to be associated with early notions of time (see Genesis 1:14–19).22 The fact that the moon at times has a crescent shape induced early people to see in this an echo of the horns of the bull, so that like the sun the moon was also on occasions compared to this divinity. Finally, like the sun, the death and rebirth of the moon meant that it was associated with fertility. The existence of the menstrual cycle convinced certain early peoples that the moon was ‘the master of women’ and in some cases ‘the first mate’.23
The sky gods also played a role in another core idea: the afterlife. We know that from Palaeolithic times early man had a rudimentary notion of the ‘afterlife’, because even then some people were buried with grave goods which, it was imagined, would be needed in the next world. Looking about them, early humans would have found plenty of evidence for an afterlife, or death and rebirth. The sun and the moon both routinely disappeared and reappeared. Many trees lost their leaves each year but grew new ones when spring came. An afterlife clearly implies some sort of post-mortem existence and this introduces a further core belief, what the historian S. G. Brandon has called humanity’s ‘most fundamental concept’: the soul. It is, he says, a relatively modern idea (compared with the afterlife) and even now is far from universal (though his colleague E. B. Tylor thought it the core to all religions).24 A very common belief is that only special human beings have souls. Some primitive peoples ascribe souls to men and not to women, others the reverse. In Greenland there was a belief that only women who had died in childbirth had souls and enjoyed life thereafter. According to some peoples, the soul is contained in different parts of the body: the eye, the hair, the shadow, the stomach, the blood, the liver, the breath, above all the heart. For some primitive peoples, the soul leaves the body via the top of the head, for which reason trepanning has always been a common religious ritual.25 Similarly in Hindu the soul is not the heart but, ‘being “the size of a thumb” (at death)’, it lives in the heart. The Rig Veda recognised the soul as ‘a light in the heart’. The Gnostics and the Greeks saw the soul as the ‘spark’ or ‘fire’ of life.26
But there was also a widespread feeling that the soul is an alternative version of the self.27 Anthropologists such as Tylor put this down to primitive man’s experience of dreams, ‘that in sleep they seemed to be able to leave their bodies and go on journeys and sometimes see those who were dead.’28 Reflecting on such things, primitive peoples would naturally have concluded that a kind of inner self or soul dwelt in the body during life, departing from it temporarily during sleep and permanently at death.29
For the ancient Egyptians, there were two other entities that existed besides the body, the ka and the ba. ‘The former was regarded as a kind of double of the living person and acted as a protective genius: it was represented by a hieroglyphic sign of two arms upstretching in a gesture of protection.’ Provision had to be made for it at death and the tomb was called the het ka, or ‘house of death’.30 ‘Of what substance it was thought to be compounded is unknown.’31 The ba, the second entity, is usually described as the ‘soul’ in modern works on ancient Egyptian culture, and was depicted in art as a human-headed bird. This was almost certainly meant to suggest it was free-moving, not weighed down by the physical limitations of the body. In the illustrations to the Book of the Dead, dating from about 1450 BC, the ba is often shown perched on the door of the tomb, or watching the fateful post-mortem weighing of the heart. ‘But the concept was left somewhat vague and the ba does not seem to have been conceived as the essential self or the animating principle.’32
The Egyptians conceived individuals as psycho-physical organisms, ‘no constituent part being more essential than the other’. The elaborate burial rites that were practised in Egypt for three millennia all reflected the fact that a person was expected to be ‘reconstituted’ after death. This explains the long process of embalmment, to prevent the decomposition of the corpse, and the subsequent ceremony of the ‘Opening of the Mouth’, designed to revivify the body’s ability to take nourishment. ‘The after-life was never etherealised in the Egyptian imagination, as it was in some quarters, but we do find that as soon as man could set down his thoughts in writing, the idea that man is more than flesh and blood is there.’33
In Mesopotamia the situation was different. They believed that the gods had withheld immortality from humans–that’s what made them human–but man was still regarded as a psycho-physical organism. Unlike the Egyptians, however, they regarded the psychical part as a single entity. This was called the napistu, which, originally meaning ‘throat’, was extended to denote ‘breath’, ‘life’ and ‘soul’. This napistu, however, was not thought of as the inner essential self, but the animating life principle and what became of the napistu at death isn’t clear. Although they didn’t believe in immortality, the ancient Mesopotamians did believe in a kind of post-mortem survival, a contradiction in terms in a way.34 Death, they believed, wrought a terrible change in a person–he was transformed into an etimmu. ‘The etimmu needed to be nourished by mortuary offerings, and it had the power to torment the living, if it were neglected…among the most feared of Mesopotamia’s demonology were the etimmus of those who had died unknown and received no proper burial rites. But, even when well provided for, the afterlife was grim. They dwelt in kurnu-gi-a, the land of no return, where dust is their food and clay their substance…where they see no light and dwell in darkness.’35
The origins of the Hindu religion are far more problematical than any of the other major faiths. After Sir William Jones, a British judge living and working in India in the late eighteenth century, first drew attention to the similarity of Sanskrit to various European languages, scholars have hypothesised the existence of an early proto-European language, from which all others evolved, and a proto-Indo-Aryan people, who spoke the ‘proto-language’ and helped in its dispersal. In its neatest form, this theory proposes that these people were the first to domesticate the horse, an advantage which helped their mobility and gave them a power over others.
Because of their link to the horse, the proto-Indo-Aryans are variously said to have come from the steppe land between the Black Sea and the Caspian, between the Caspian and the Aral Sea, or from other locations in central Asia. The most recent research locates the homeland in the Abashevo culture on the lower Volga and in the Sintashta-Arkaim culture in the southern Urals. From there, according to Asko Parpola, a Finnish professor of Indology, ‘the domesticated horse and the Indo-Aryan language seem to have entered south Asia in the Gandhara grave culture of north Pakistan around 1600 BC’. The most important aspect of their migration is held to have been in north-west India, around the Indus valley, where the great early civilisation of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro suffered a mysterious decline in the second millennium BC, for which the Indo-Aryans are held responsible. It is the Indo-Aryans who are held to have composed the Rig Veda. Their place of origin, and their migration, are said to be reflected in the fact that the Finno-Ugaric language shows a number of words borrowed from what became Sanskrit, that the Andronovo tribes of the steppes show a culture similar to that described in the Rig Veda, and that they left a trail of names, chiefly of rivers (words which are known to be very stable), as they moved across central Asia. They also introduced the chariot (and therefore the horse) into India, and iron–again, items mentioned in the Rig Veda.36 Finally, the general setting of the Rig Veda is pastoral, not urban, meaning it was written down before the Indo-Aryans arrived in the mainly urban world of the Indus valley.
This view has been severely criticised in recent years, not least by Indian scholars, who argue that this ‘migrationist’ theory is ‘racist’, developed by Western academics who couldn’t believe that India generated the Rig Veda all by herself. They argue that there is no real evidence to suggest that the Indo-Aryans came from outside and they point out that the heartland of the Rig Veda more or less corresponds to the present-day Punjab. Traditionally, this presented a problem because that name, Punj
ab, based on the Sanskrit, panca-ap, means ‘five rivers’, whereas the Rig Veda refers to an area of ‘seven rivers’ with the Sarasvati as the most majestic.37 For many years no one could identify the Sarasvati among today’s rivers, and it was therefore regarded by some as a ‘celestial’ entity. However, in 1989, archaeologists discovered the bed of a once-massive, now dried-up river, six miles wide in places, and this was subsequently confirmed by satellite photographs.38 Along this dried river bed (and a major tributary, making seven rivers in all in the Punjab) are located no fewer than 300 archaeological sites. This thus confirms, for the indigenists at least, not only that the area of the Rig Veda was inside India, but that the drying-up of the river helps explain the collapse of the Indus valley civilisation.39 They also point to recent research on the astronomical events in the Rig Veda which, they say, confirm that these scriptures are much older than the 1900–1200 BC date traditionally ascribed. They argue that the astronomy, and the associated mathematics, show that the Indo-Aryans were indigenous to north-west India, that that is where the Indo-European languages began, and that Indian mathematics were much in advance of those elsewhere. While this debate is inconclusive at the moment (there are serious intellectual holes in both the migrationist and the indigenous theories), it remains true that Indian mathematics was very strong historically, and that, as was discussed in the last chapter, a very old script–perhaps the oldest yet discovered–was unearthed recently in India.
In Vedic thought, man’s life fell into two phases. His earthly life was seen as the more desirable. The hymns of the Rig Veda speak of a people living life to the full–valuing good health, eating and drinking, material luxuries, children.40 But there was a post-mortem phase, the quality of which was, to an extent, determined by one’s piety on earth. However, the two phases were definitive: there was no idea whatsoever that the soul might return to live again on earth–that was a later invention. In the early stage, when Vedic bodies were buried, the dead were imagined as living in an underworld, presided over by Yama, the death-god.41 The dead were buried with personal articles and even food, though what part of a person was thought to survive is not clear.42 The Indo-Aryans thought of an individual as composed of three entities–the body, the asu, and the manas. The asu was in essence the ‘life principle’, equivalent to the Greek psyche, while the manas were the seat of the mind, the will and the emotions, equivalent to the Greek thymos. There appears to have been no word, and no idea, for the soul as an ‘essential self’. Why there was a change from burial to cremation isn’t clear either.
If one accepts the existence of souls, it follows that there is a need for a place where they can go, after death. This raises the question of where a whole constellation of associated ideas came from–the afterlife, resurrection, and heaven and hell.
The first thing to say is that heaven, hell and the immortal soul were relative latecomers in the ancient world.43 The modern concept of the immortal soul is a Greek idea, which owes much to Pythagoras. Before that, most ancient civilisations thought that man had two kinds of soul. There was the ‘free-soul’, which represented the individual personality. And there were a number of ‘body-souls’ which endowed the body with life and consciousness.44 For the early Greeks, for example, human nature was composed of three entities: the body, the psyche, identified with the life principle and located in the head; and the thymos, ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’, located in the phrenes, or lungs.45 During life, the thymos was regarded as more important but it didn’t survive death, whereas the psyche became the eidolon, a shadowy form of the body.
This distinction was not maintained beyond the sixth century BC, when the psyche came to be thought of as both the essential self, the seat of consciousness and the life principle. Pindar thought the psyche was of divine origin and therefore immortal.46 In developing the idea of the immortal soul Pythagoras was joined by Parmenides and Empedocles, other Greeks living alongside him in southern Italy and Sicily. They were associated with a mystical and puritanical sect known as the Orphics, who at times were ‘fanatical vegetarians’. This appears to have been part of a revolt over sacrifice and the sect used mind-altering drugs–hashish, hemp and cannabis (though here the scholarship is very controversial). These ideas and practices are said to have come from the Scythians, whose homeland was north of the Black Sea (and was visited by Homer). They boasted a curious cult, surrounding a number of individuals suffering a chronic physical disease, possibly haemochromatosis, and possibly brought on by rich iron deposits in the area. This condition culminates in total impotence and eunuchism. There are a number of accounts of cross-dressing in the area and these individuals may have led the funerary ceremonies in Scythia, at which ecstasy-inducing drugs were used.47 Was this cult the foundation for Orphism and were the trances and hallucinations induced by drugs the mechanism whereby the Greeks conceived the idea of the soul and, associated with it, reincarnation? Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato all believed in reincarnation and in metempsychosis–the idea that souls could come back in other animals and even in plants. The Orphics believed that the actual form the soul took on reincarnation was a penalty for some ‘original sin’.48 Both Socrates and Plato shared Pindar’s idea of the divine origin of the soul and it is here that the vision took root that the soul was in fact more precious than the body. This was not, it should be said, the majority view of Athenians, who mainly thought of souls as unpleasant things who were hostile to the living. Many Greeks did not believe that there was life after death.*
Among those Greeks who did believe in some form of afterlife, the dead went straight to the underworld which, in the Iliad, was guarded by canine Cerberus. The soul could reach this ‘mirthless place’ only by crossing the river Styx. The underworld was called Hades, which derives from a root word meaning invisible, unseen.49 Death seems to have been regarded then as unavoidable. Athena tells Odysseus’ son Telemachus that ‘death is common to all men, and not even the gods can keep it off a man they love…’50 By the later parts of the Odyssey, however, there has been a change. For example, Proteus tells Menelaus that he will be sent ‘to the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth’. The name Elysion is pre-Greek and so this idea may have begun elsewhere. By the time of Hesiod’s Works and Days (late eighth century BC) we hear of the Islands of the Blessed, to which many heroes will be sent after their lives on earth are over. At much the same time, in epic poems, we hear for the first time of Charon, the ferryman of the dead. In the fifth century, there began in Greece the practice of burying the deceased with an obol, a small coin to pay Charon.51 Around 432 BC, on an official war monument, the souls of dead Athenians are described as being received by the aither, ‘the upper air’, though their bodies will remain on earth. In Plato and in many Greek tragedies we learn that the Athenians did not seem to believe in rewards and punishments after death. ‘In fact, they do not seem to have expected very much at all. “After death every man is earth and shadow: nothing goes to nothing”.’ (This is a character in one of Euripides’ plays.) In Plato’s Phaedo, Simmias betrays his worry that at his death his soul will be scattered ‘and this is their end’.52
Paradise–the word, at least–is much better documented. It is based on an old Median word, pari = around, and daeza = wall. (The Medes were a civilisation in Iran in the sixth century BC.) The word paridaeza came variously to mean a vineyard, a grove of date palms, a place were bricks were made and even, on one occasion, the ‘red-light’ quarter of Samos. But its most probable association was with royal hunting forests, or simply the lush, shaded gardens that were the prerogative of the aristocracy. This could be allied to the belief, considered below, that only kings and aristocrats could go to paradise, and all others went to hell. There are some indications in Pythagoras’ writings that his idea of the afterlife, and the immortal soul, was reserved for the aristocracy, so this may have been an idea that was born as a way of preserving upper-class privileges at a time when that class was being marginalised, as cities (and merchants) grew mor
e important.
For the Israelites, the soul was never developed as a sophisticated idea. The God of Israel formed Adam from the ’adamah, the clay, and then breathed ‘the breath of life into him’, so that he became a nephesh, or ‘living soul’.53 This is similar to the Akkadian word napistu, and is associated with blood, the ‘life substance’, which drains away at death.54 The Hebrews never had a word for the ‘essential self’ that survived death. We should not forget that the entire book of Job in the Hebrew scriptures is concerned with the problem of faith and suffering and inequality in a life where there is no hereafter (all the rewards promised to the Jews by their God are worldly). Even with the advent of Messianism in Judaism, there is still no concept of the soul. There was the concept of Sheol, but this is more akin to the English word ‘grave’ than Hades, which is how it was often translated. ‘Sheol was located beneath the earth (Psalm 63.10), filled with worms and dust (Isaiah, 14.11) and impossible to escape from (Job, 7.9f.).’ It was only after the exile in Babylon that good and bad departments of Sheol were envisaged, and it became associated with Gehenna, a valley south of Jerusalem where it was at first believed that punishments would be handed out after the Last Judgement. Soon after, it became the name for the fiery hell.55
