LIFE, as we know it, was looked upon by the ancient philosophers as death. Plato considered the body as the sepulchre of the soul and in the "Cratylus" acquiesces in the doctrine of Orpheus that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Empedocles, lamenting his connection with this corporeal world, pathetically exclaimed:
For this I weep, for this indulge my woe,
That ever my Oh such novel realms should know.
He also calls this material abode, or the realms of generation,
a joyless region,
Where slaughter, rage, and countless ills reside.
Philolaus, the celebrated Pythagorean, wrote:
The ancient theologists and priests testify that the soul is united with the body for the sake of suffering punishment and that it is buried in the body as in a sepulchre
while Pythagoras himself said:
Whatever we see when awake is death, and when asleep a dream.
This is the truth intended to be expressed in the Mysteries. Pindar, speaking of the Eleusinian Mysteries, says:
Blessed is he who on seeing those common concerns under the earth knows both the end of life and the given end of Jupiter.
Psyche is said to have fallen asleep in Hades through rashly attempting to behold corporeal beauty and the truth intended to be taught by the Lesser Mysteries was that prudent men who earnestly employed themselves in divine concerns were, above all others, in a vigilant state and that imprudent men who pursued objects of a different nature were asleep and only engaged in the delusions of dreams and if they happened to die in this sleep before they were aroused they would be afflicted with similar, but still sharper, visions in a future state.
Matter was regarded by the Egyptians as a certain mire or mud. They called matter the dregs or sediment of the first life. Before the first purification the candidate for initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries was smeared with clay or mire, which it was the object of the purification to wash away. While the soul is in a state of servitude to the body it lives confined as it were in bonds through the dominion of this Titanic life. The Lesser Mysteries were intended to symbolize the condition of the soul while subservient to the body and a liberation from this servitude, through purgative virtues, was what the wisdom of the Ancients intended to signify by the descent into Hades and the speedy return from those dark abodes. They were held to contain perfective rites and appearances and the tradition of the sacred doctrines necessary to the perfection or accomplishment of the most splendid visions. The perfective part, said Proclus, precedes initiation, as initiation precedes inspection.
Dogmatic instruction was not included in the Mysteries: the doctrine of the immortality of the soul traces its origin to sources anterior to the rise of the Mysteries. At Eleusis the way was shown how to secure for the soul after death the best possible fate. The miracle of regeneration rather than the eternity of being was taught.
Plato in the seventh book of the Republic says:
He who is not able by the exercise of his reason to define the idea of the good, separating it from all other objects and piercing as in a battle through every kind of argument; endeavouring to confute, not according to opinion hut according to evidence, and proceeding with all these dialectical exercises with an unshaken reason he who cannot accomplish this, would you not say that he neither knows the good itself, nor anything which is properly demonstrated good? And would you not assert that such a one when he apprehended it rather through the medium of opinion than of science, that in the present life he is sunk in sleep and conversant with delusions and dreams; and that before he is roused to a vigilant state he will descend to Hades, and be overwhelmed with sleep perfectly profound?
Olympiodorus in this MS Commentary on the Gorgias of Plato says of the Elysian fields:
It is necessary to know that the fortunate islands are said to be raised above the sea.... Hercules is reported to have accomplished his last labour in the Hesperian regions, signifying by this that having vanquished an obscure and terrestrial life, he afterwards lived in open day, that is, in truth and resplendent light. So that he who in the present state vanquishes as much as possible a corporeal life, through the exercise of the cathartic virtues, passes in reality into the fortunate islands at the soul, and lives surrounded with the bright splendours of truth and wisdom proceeding from the sun of good.
The esoteric teaching was not, of course, grasped by all initiates: the majority merely recognised or grasped the exoteric doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments. Virgil, in his description of the Mysteries in the Aeneid, confines himself to the exoteric teaching. Aenas having passed over the Stygian lake meets with the three-headed Celberus. By Cerberus must be understood the discriminative part of the soul, of which a dog, on account of its sagacity, is an emblem. The three heads signify the intellective, dianoetic, and doxastic powers. "He dragg'd the three mouth'd dog to upper day," i. e., by temperance, continence, and other virtues he drew upwards the various powers of the soul.
The fable of Persephone, as belonging to the Mysteries, was properly of a mixed nature, composed of all four species of fables theological, physical, animistic, and material. According to the arcana of ancient theology, the Coric order, i. e., that belonging to Persephone, is two-fold, one part supermundane and the other mundane.
Proclus says:
According to the rumour of theologists, who delivered to us the most holy Eleusinian Mysteries, Persephone abides on high, in those dwellings of her mother which she prepared for her in inaccessible places, exempt from the sensible world. But she likewise dwells with Pluto, administering terrestrial concerns, governing the recesses of the earth and imparting soul to beings which are of themselves inanimate and dead.
According to Nosselt the following may be taken as the meaning of the myth of Demeter and her lost daughter:
Persephone, the daughter of the all-productive earth (Demeter) is the seed. The earth rejoices at the sight of the plants and flowers, but they fade and wither, and the seed disappears quickly from the face of the earth when it is strewn on the ground. The dreaded monarch of the under world has taken possession of it. In vain the mother Searches for her child, the whole face of nature mourns her loss, and everything sorrows and grieves with her. But, secretly and unseen, the seed develops itself in the lap of the earth, and at length it starts forth: what was dead is now alive; the earth, all decked with fresh green, rejoices at the recovery of her long-lost daughter and everything shares in the joy.
Demeter was worshipped in a two-fold sense by the Greeks as the foundress of agriculture and as goddess of law and order. They used to celebrate yearly in her honour the Thesmophoria, or Festival of Laws.
According to Taylor, the Platonist, Demeter in the legend represents the evolution of that self-inspective part of our nature which we properly determine intellect, and Persephone that vital, self-moving, and animate part which we call soul. Pluto signifies the whole of a material nature, and, according to Pythagoras, the empire of this god commences downward from the Galaxy or Milky Way. Sallust says that among the mundane divinities Ceres is the deity of the planet Saturn. The cavern signifies the entrance into mundane life accomplished by the union of the soul with this terrestrial body. Demeter, who was afraid lest some violence be offered to Persephone on account of her inimitable beauty, conveyed her privately to Sicily and concealed her in a house built on purpose by the Cyclops while she herself directs her course to the temple of Cybele, the mother of the gods.
Here we see the first cause of the soul's descent, viz., her desertion of a life wholly according to intellect, occultly signified by the separation of Persephone and Demeter. Afterwards Jupiter instructed Venus to go and betray Persephone from her retirement that Pluto might be enabled to carry her away, and, to prevent any suspicion in the virgin's mind, he commanded Diana and Pallas to bear her company. The three goddesses on arrival found Persephone at work on a scarf for her mother, on which she had embroidered the primitive chaos and the formation of the world. Venus is significant of desire, which, even in the celestial regions (for such is the residence of Persephone until she is ravished by Pluto) begins silently and fraudulently to creep into the recesses of the soul. Minerva is symbolical of the rational power of the soul; and Diana represents nature, or the merely natural and vegetable part of our composition, both ensnared through the allurements of desire.
In Ovid we have Narcissus, the metamorphosis of a youth who fell a victim to love of his own corporeal form. The rape of Persephone, according to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, was the immediate consequence of her gathering this wonderful flower. By Narcissus falling in love with his shadow in the limpid stream we behold a beautiful representation of a soul, which, by vehemently gazing on the flowing condition of a material body, becomes enamoured of a corporeal life and changed into a life consisting wholly of the mere energies of nature. Pluto, forcing his passage through the earth, seizes on Persephone and carries her away, despite the resistance of Minerva and Diana, who are forbidden by Jupiter to attempt her deliverance.
This signifies that the lapse of the soul into a material nature is contrary to the genuine wish and proper condition. Pluto, having hurried Persephone into the infernal regions, marriage next succeeds. That is to say, the soul having sunk into the profoundities of a material nature, there is the union with the dark tenement of the body. Night is with great beauty and propriety introduced, standing by the nuptial couch and confirming the oblivious league. That is to say, the soul, by union with a material body, becomes familiar with darkness and subject to the empire of night, in consequence of which she dwells wholly with delusive phantoms and till she breaks her fetters is deprived of the perception of that which is real and true.
The nine days of the Festival are significant of the descent of the soul. The soul, in falling Mom her original, divine abode in the heavens, passes through eight spheres, viz., the inerratic sphere and the seven planets, assuming a different body and employing different energies in each, and finally becomes connected with the sublunary world and a terrene body on the ninth.
Demeter and the art of tillage signifies the descent of intellect into the realms of generation and becomes the greatest benefit and ornament which a material nature is capable of receiving: without the participation of intellect in the lower regions of matter nothing but an irrational soul and a brutal life would subsist.
The teaching of the Mysteries was that virtue only could entitle men to happiness and that rites, ceremonies, lustrations, and sacrifices would not supply the® want. Virgil declares that the secret of the Mysteries was the unity of the Godhead. The Mysteries declared that the after life was not necessarily or for all men the shadowy, weary existence which it had hitherto been supposed to be, but that there were rites of purification and sacrifices of a sacramental kind which gave man a better hope for the future. Thus the Eleusinian Mysteries became the chief agent in the conversion of the Greek world from the Homeric view of Hades to a more hopeful belief as to man's state after death.
Pindar says, referring to the Mysteries:
Happy is he who has seen these things before leaving this world: he realises the beginning and the end of life, as ordained by Zeus.
Sophocles wrote:
Oh, thrice blessed the mortals, who, having contemplated these Mysteries, have descended to Hades; for those only will there be a future life of happiness the others there will find nothing but suffering.
Isocrates, in his Panegyrics, says:
Demeter, who came to our country, bestowed on us two priceless gifts, the cultivation of the fruits of the earth, which compelled us to leave our savage state; and the ceremony which brings to the initiated the sweetest consolation at death and the hope of eternity.
(To be continued )
Comentarios