Was the soul which, after a long expiation, had reached the Elysian Fields and the sphere of the stars, always to descend thence, seized with a blind love for the body, and to pass again through the trials of another earthly life? No, the ancient Orphics already flattered themselves that by their cathartic rites they obtained for the soul an escape from the fatal cycle of generation and regaining of heaven for ever. The Pythagoreans inherited this doctrine, which they kept until the Roman period. In spite of the contrary opinion of certain thinkers, pagan philosophers and priests generally taught that after pilgrimages, more or less long, after a succession of deaths and rebirths, the purified spirits returned to dwell for ever in their celestial country. It was to this goal that the mysteries promised to lead their initiate; this was the end which the sages flattered themselves that they attained by their virtue. It will be understood that such a hope, combined with the suppression of eternal damnation in Hades, led necessarily to the doctrine of the eventual salvation of all souls. We know this system especially through Origen, but he merely reproduced a theory to which the evolution of pagan ideas had led. We have seen that metempsychosis helped the philosophers to shake, if not to ruin, the belief in infernal punishment. But this belief again had power towards the end of antiquity, when the dualist sects which were the outcome of Persian Mazdeism were propagated and when Plato became the supreme authority in philosophy. We touched on this point, in another lecture,[463] when we showed how the idea of a demons’ prison in the bosom of the earth triumphed. Thus, when the Roman world was in its decline, men came back to the old threefold distinction of the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. The very guilty, who cannot be corrected, are hurled into Tartarus, where they suffer for ever the punishment of their incurable wickedness. Souls less corrupt are subjected to purification, either by passing through the elements or by undergoing successive reincarnations, and thus they regain their original nature before they are readmitted to their first dwelling. Finally, the most perfect souls, those of the wise who have freed themselves from the domination of the body and have not let themselves be contaminated by matter, and those of the pious faithful, to whom religious lustrations have given back their purity or whom initiations to the mysteries have made equal to the gods, at once rise again to the celestial spheres. In the next lecture we shall speak of the rewards reserved for them in the dwelling of the blessed. VIII THE FELICITY OF THE BLESSED