by E R Dodds
1 For notes to chapter v see pages 156-178.
Let us begin by asking exactly what it was that was new in the new pattern of beliefs. Certainly not the idea of survival. In Greece, as in most parts of the world,4 that idea was very old indeed. If we may judge by the furniture of their tombs, the inhabitants of the Aegean region had felt since Neolithic times that man's need for food, drink, and clothing, and his desire for service and entertainment, did not cease with death.5 I say advisedly "felt," rather than "believed"; for such acts as feeding the dead look like a direct response to emotional drives, not necessarily mediated by any theory. Man, I take it, feeds his dead for the same sort of reason as a little girl feeds her doll; and like the little girl, he abstains from killing his phantasy by applying reality-standards. When the archaic Greek poured liquids down a feeding-tube into the livid jaws of a mouldering corpse, all we can say is that he abstained, for good reasons, from knowing what he was doing; or, to put it more abstractly, that he ignored the distinction between corpse and ghost—he treated them as "consubstantial."6
To have formulated that distinction with precision and clarity, to have disentangled the ghost from the corpse, is, of course, the achievement of the Homeric poets. There are passages in both poems which suggest that they were proud of the achievement, and fully conscious of its novelty and importance.7 They had indeed a right to be proud; for there is no domain where clear thinking encounters stronger unconscious resistance than when we try to think about death. But we should not assume that once the distinction had been formulated it was universally or even generally accepted. As the archaeological evidence shows, the tendance of the dead, with its implication of identity between corpse and ghost, went quietly on, at any rate in Mainland Greece; it persisted through (some would say despite) the temporary vogue of cremation,8 and in Attica became so wastefully extravagant that legislation to control it had to be introduced by Solon, and again by Demetrius of Phaleron.9
There was no question, then, of "establishing" the idea of survival; that was implicit in age-old custom for the thing in the tomb which is both ghost and corpse, and explicit in Homer for the shadow in Hades which is ghost alone. Nor, secondly, was the idea of rewards and punishments after death a new one. The post-mortem punishment of certain offences against the gods is in my opinion referred to in the Iliad,10 and is undoubtedly described in the Odyssey; while Eleusis was already promising its initiates favoured treatment in the afterlife as far back as we can trace its teaching, i.e., probably in the seventh century.11 No one, I suppose, now believes that the "great sinners" in the Odyssey are an "Orphic interpolation,"12 or that the Eleusinian promises were the result of an "Orphic reform." In Aeschylus, again, the post-mortem punishment of certain offenders is so intimately tied up with the traditional "unwritten laws" and the traditional functions of Erinys and Alastor that I feel great hesitation about pulling the structure to pieces to label one element in it "Orphic."13 These are special cases, but the idea was there; it looks as if all that the new movement did was to generalise it. And in the new formulation we may sometimes recognise echoes of things that are very old. When Pindar, for example, consoles a bereaved client with a description of the happy afterlife, he assures him that there will be horses and draught-boards in Heaven.14 That is no new promise: there were horses on Patroclus' funeral pyre, and draught-boards in the tombs of Mycenaean kings. The furniture of Heaven has altered little with the centuries; it remains an idealised replica of the only world we know.
Nor, finally, did the contribution of the new movement consist in equating the psyche or "soul" with the personality of the living man. That had already been done, apparently first in Ionia. Homer, indeed, ascribes to the psyche no function in the living man, except to leave him; its "esse" appears to be "superesse" and nothing more. But Anacreon can say to his beloved, "You are the master of my psyche"; Semonides can talk of "giving his psyche a good time"; a sixth-century epitaph from Eretria can complain that the sailor's calling "gives few satisfactions to the psyche."15 Here the psyche is the living self, and, more specifically, the appetitive self; it has taken over the functions of Homeric thumos, not those of Homeric noos. Between psyche in this sense and sōma (body) there is no fundamental antagonism; psyche is just the mental correlate of soma. In Attic Greek, both terms can mean "life": the Athenians said indifferently or And in suitable contexts each can mean "person":16 thus Sophocles can make Oedipus refer to himself in one passage as "my psyche," in another as "my soma"; in both places he could have said "I."17 Even the Homeric distinction between corpse and ghost is blurred: not only does an early Attic inscription talk of the psyche dying, but Pindar, more surprisingly, can speak of Hades with his wand conducting to "the hollow city" the somata of those who die—the corpse and the ghost have reverted here to their old consubstantiality.18 I think we must admit that the psychological vocabulary of the ordinary man was in the fifth century in a state of great confusion, as indeed it usually is.
But from this confusion one fact emerges which is of importance for our enquiry. It was demonstrated by Burnet in his famous lecture on "The Soeratic Doctrine of the Soul,"19 and for that reason need not detain us long. In fifth-century Attic writers, as in their Ionian predecessors, the "self which is denoted by the word psyche is normally the emotional rather than the rational self. The psyche is spoken of as the seat of courage, of passion, of pity, of anxiety, of animal appetite, but before Plato seldom if ever as the seat of reason; its range is broadly that of the Homeric thumos. When Sophocles speaks of testing he is arranging the elements of character on a scale that runs from the emotional (psyche) to the intellectual (gnōmē) through a middle term, which by usage involves both. Burnet's further contention that the psyche "remains something mysterious and uncanny, quite apart from our normal consciousness," is, as a generalisation, much more open to dispute. We may notice, however, that the psyche appears on occasion as the organ of conscience, and is credited with a kind of nonrational intuition.21 A child can apprehend something in its psyche without knowing it intellectually.22 Helenus has a "divine psyche" not because he is cleverer or more virtuous than other men, but because he is a seer.23 The psyche is imagined as dwelling somewhere in the depths of the organism,24 and out of these depths it can speak to its owner with a voice of its own.25 In most of these respects it is again a successor to the Homeric thumos.
Whether it be true or not that on the lips of an ordinary fifth-century Athenian the word psyche had or might have a faint flavour of the uncanny, what it did not have was any flavour of puritanism or any suggestion of metaphysical status.26 The "soul" was no reluctant prisoner of the body; it was the life or spirit of the body,27 and perfectly at home there. It was here that the new religious pattern made its fateful contribution: by crediting man with an occult self of divine origin, and thus setting soul and body at odds, it introduced into European culture a new interpretation of human existence, the interpretation we call puritanical. Where did this notion come from? Ever since Rohde called it "a drop of alien blood in the veins of the Greeks,"28 scholars have been scanning the horizon for the source of the alien drop. Most of them have looked eastward, to Asia Minor or beyond.29 Personally, I should be inclined to begin my search in a different quarter.
The passages from Pindar and Xenophon with which we started suggest that one source of the puritan antithesis might be the observation that "psychic" and bodily activity vary inversely: the psyche is most active when the body is asleep or, as Aristotle added, when it lies at the point of death. This is what I mean by calling it an "occult" self. Now a belief of this kind is an essential element of the shamanistic culture which still exists in Siberia, and has left traces of its past existence over a very wide area, extending in a huge arc from Scandinavia across the Eurasian land-mass as far as Indonesia;30 the vast extent of its diffusion is evidence of its high antiquity. A shaman may be described as a psychically unstable person who has received a call to the religious life. As a result of his call he undergo
es a period of rigorous training, which commonly involves solitude and fasting, and may involve a psychological change of sex. From this religious "retreat" he emerges with the power, real or assumed,31 of passing at will into a state of mental dissociation. In that condition he is not thought, like the Pythia or like a modern medium, to be possessed by an alien spirit; but his own soul is thought to leave its body and travel to distant parts, most often to the spirit world. A shaman may in fact be seen simultaneously in different places; he has the power of bilocation. From these experiences, narrated by him in extempore song, he derives the skill in divination, religious poetry, and magical medicine which makes him socially important. He becomes the repository of a supernormal wisdom.
Now in Scythia, and probably also in Thrace, the Greeks had come into contact with peoples who, as the Swiss scholar Meuli has shown, were influenced by this shamanistic culture. It will suffice to refer on this point to his important article in Hermes, 1935. Meuli has there further suggested that the fruits of this contact are to be seen in the appearance, late in the Archaic Age, of a series of seers, magical healers, and religious teachers, some of whom are linked in Greek tradition with the North, and all of whom exhibit shamanistic traits.32 Out of the North came Abaris, riding, it was said, upon33 an arrow, as souls, it appears, still do in Siberia.34 So advanced was he in the art of fasting that he had learned to dispense altogether with human food.35 He banished pestilences, predicted earthquakes, composed religious poems, and taught the worship of his northern god, whom the Greeks called the Hyperborean Apollo.36 Into the North, at the bidding of the same Apollo, went Aristeas, a Greek from the Sea of Marmora, and returned to tell his strange experiences in a poem that may have been modelled on the psychic excursions of northern shamans. Whether Aristeas' journey was made in the flesh or in the spirit is not altogether clear; but in any case, as Alföldi has shown, his one-eyed Arimaspians and his treasure-guarding griffons are genuine creatures of Central Asiatic folklore.37 Tradition further credited him with the shamanistic powers of trance and bilocation. His soul, in the form of a bird,38 could leave his body at will; he died, or fell entranced, at home, yet was seen at Cyzicus; many years later he appeared again at Metapontum in the Far West. The same gift was possessed by another Asiatic Greek, Hermotimus of Clazomenae, whose soul travelled far and wide, observing events in distant places, while his body lay inanimate at home. Such tales of disappearing and reappearing shamans were sufficiently familiar at Athens for Sophocles to refer to them in the Electra without any need to mention names.39
Of these men virtually nothing is left but a legend, though the pattern of the legend may be significant. The pattern is repeated in some of the tales about Epimenides, the Cretan seer, who purified Athens of the dangerous uncleanness caused by a violation of the right of sanctuary. But since Diels provided him with a fixed date40 and five pages of fragments, Epimenides has begun to look quite like a person—even though all his fragments were composed, in Diels's opinion, by other people, including the one quoted in the Epistle to Titus. Epimenides came from Cnossos, and to that fact he may perhaps have owed something of his great prestige: a man who had grown up in the shadow of the Palace of Minos might well lay claim to a more ancient wisdom, especially after he had slept for fifty-seven years in the cave of the Cretan mystery-god.41 Nevertheless, tradition assimilated him to the type of a northern shaman. He too was an expert in psychic excursion; and, like Abaris, he was a great faster, living exclusively on a vegetable preparation whose secret he had learned from the Nymphs and which he was accustomed to store, for reasons best known to himself, in an ox's hoof.42 Another singular feature of his legend is that after his death his body was observed to be covered with tattoo-marks.43 Singular, because the Greeks used the tattoo-needle only to brand slaves. It may have been a sign of his dedication as servus dei; but in any case to an archaic Greek it would probably suggest Thrace, where all the best people were tattooed, and in particular the shamans.44 As for the Long Sleep, that is of course a widespread folktale;45 Rip Van Winkle was no shaman. But its place at the beginning of the Epimenides-saga suggests that the Greeks had heard of the long "retreat" which is the shaman's novitiate and is sometimes largely spent in a condition of sleep or trance.46
From all this it seems reasonable to conclude that the opening of the Black Sea to Greek trade and colonisation in the seventh century, which introduced the Greeks for the first time47 to a culture based on shamanism, at any rate enriched with some remarkable new traits the traditional Greek picture of the Man of God, the These new elements were, I think, acceptable to the Greek mind because they answered to the needs of the time, as Dionysiac religion had done earlier. Religious experience of the shamanistic type is individual, not collective; but it appealed to the growing individualism of an age for which the collective ecstasies of Dionysus were no longer wholly sufficient. And it is a reasonable further guess that these new traits had some influence on the new and revolutionary conception of the relation between body and soul which appears at the end of the Archaic Age.48 One remembers that in Clearchus' dialogue On Sleep what convinced Aristotle "that the soul is detachable from the body" was precisely an experiment in psychic excursion.49 That, however, was a work of fiction, and relatively late at that. Whether any of the Men of God whom I have so far mentioned drew such general theoretical conclusions from his personal experiences, we are entitled to doubt. Aristotle, indeed, thought there were grounds for believing that Hermotimus anticipated his more famous townsman Anaxagoras in his doctrine of nous; but this may mean only, as Diels suggested, that for evidence of the separability of nous Anaxagoras appealed to the experiences of the old local shaman.50 Epimenides, again, is said to have claimed that he was a reincarnation of Aeacus and had lived many times on earth51 (which would explain Aristotle's statement that his divination was concerned not with the future but with the unknown past).52 Diels thought that this tradition must have an Orphic source; he attributed it to an Orphic poem forged in Epimenides' name by Onomacritus or one of his friends.53 For a reason which will appear presently, I am less certain about this than Diels was; but whatever view one takes, it would be unwise to build very much on it.
There is, however, another and a greater Greek shaman who undoubtedly drew theoretical consequences and undoubtedly believed in rebirth. I mean Pythagoras. We need not suppose him to have claimed precisely that series of previous incarnations which was attributed to him by Heraclides Ponticus;54 but there is no good reason to question the statements of our authorities that Pythagoras is the man to whom Empedocles attributed a wisdom gathered in ten or twenty human lives, and that he is also the man whom Xenophanes mocked for believing that a human soul could dwell in a dog.55 How did Pythagoras come by these opinions? The usual answer is "from Orphic teaching," which, if it is true, only pushes the question one step further back. But it is, I think, possible that he was not directly dependent on any "Orphic" source in this cardinal matter; that both he and Epimenides before him had heard of the northern belief that the "soul" or "guardian spirit" of a former shaman may enter into a living shaman to reinforce his power and knowledge.56 This need not involve any general doctrine of transmigration, and it is noteworthy that Epimenides is credited with no such general doctrine; he merely claimed that he himself had lived before, and was identical with Aeacus, an ancient Man of God.57 Similarly Pythagoras is represented as claiming identity with the former shaman Hermotimus;58 but it would appear that Pythagoras extended the doctrine a good deal beyond these original narrow limits. Perhaps that was his personal contribution; in view of his enormous prestige we must surely credit him with some power of creative thinking.
We know at any rate that Pythagoras founded a kind of religious order, a community of men and women59 whose rule of life was determined by the expectation of lives to come. Possibly there were precedents of a sort even for that: we may remember the Thracian Zalmoxis in Herodotus, who assembled "the best of the citizens" and announced to them, not that the human s
oul is immortal, but that they and their descendants were going to live for ever—they were apparently chosen persons, a sort of spiritual élite.60 That there was some analogy between Zalmoxis and Pythagoras must have struck the Greek settlers in Thrace, from whom Herodotus heard the story, for they made Zalmoxis into Pythagoras' slave. That was absurd, as Herodotus saw: the real Zalmoxis was a daemon, possibly a heroised shaman of the distant past.61 But the analogy was not so absurd: did not Pythagoras promise his followers that they should live again, and become at last daemons or even gods?62 Later tradition brought Pythagoras into contact with the other northerner, Abaris; credited him with the usual shamanistic powers of prophecy, bilocation, and magical healing; and told of his initiation in Pieria, his visit to the spirit world, and his mysterious identity with the "Hyperborean Apollo."63 Some of that may be late, but the beginnings of the Pythagoras legend go back to the fifth century at least,64 and I am willing to believe that Pythagoras himself did a good deal to set it going.
I am the more willing to believe it because we can see this actually happening in the case of Empedocles, whose legend is largely composed of embroideries upon claims which he himself makes in his poems. Little more than a century after his death, stories were already in circulation which told how he had stayed the winds by his magic, how he had restored to life a woman who no longer breathed, and how he then vanished bodily from this mortal world and became a god.65 And by good fortune we know the ultimate source of these stories: we have Empedocles' own words, in which he claims that he can teach his pupils to stay the winds and revive the dead, and that he is himself, or is thought to be, a god made flesh— Empedocles is thus in a sense the creator of his own legend; and if we can trust his description of the crowds who came to him in search of occult knowledge or magical healing, its beginnings date back to his lifetime.67 In face of that, it seems to me rash to assume that the legends of Pythagoras and Epimenides have no roots at all in genuine tradition, but were deliberately invented from first to last by the romancers of a later age.