This doctrine of transmigration claims to transport hell to earth and to explain, as moral allegories, all the fables which the poets had invented.[189] The _Inferi_ are nothing else than the dwellings of our globe, which is the lowest of the nine circles of the world. The true Hades is the wicked man’s life in which he is tortured by his vices. The rivers of hell—Cocytus, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon and Styx—are anger, remorse, sadness and hate, which cause man to suffer. The Furies are the passions, scourging him with whips and burning him with torches; and similarly an ingenious interpretation is given to each of the pains suffered by Tantalus, Sisyphus, the Danaïdes and the others.[190] This exegesis led finally to an absolute denial of the existence of hell, but such radical scepticism was in too flagrant contradiction to the old beliefs to be willingly accepted by the minds which remained attached to them. Hence arose attempts to bring these beliefs into harmony with the psychology generally admitted. A first theory, to which we will have to return when speaking of the nature of the surviving souls,[191] seems to have been invented in Alexandria and to have been inspired by Egyptian religion.[192] The authors who first allude to it, one Greek and one Roman, are contemporaries who wrote about the year 200 B. C., the critic Aristarchus and the poet Ennius, but the transmission of the doctrine can be traced through literary traditions down to the end of antiquity. It divides the human composite not into two but into three parts—the body, the soul and the shade. The body is destroyed beneath the earth; the soul, which is a particle of the divine ether, rises after death towards its place of origin; but a form (εἴδωλον) of subtle matter detaches itself from the corpse, and it is this semblance (_simulacrum_) or shade (_umbra_) which goes down to the infernal regions. The existence of these regions could thus be maintained, but they were no longer held to receive the celestial principle which gave intelligence.