Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IVToy, Crawford Howell
HistoryHistory
Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV
Toy, Crawford Howell
Mythology; Religion -- History; Religions -- History; Rites and ceremonies
+82+. In fact, a recognition of a place of happiness and a place of
punishment in the other life accompanies sooner or later a certain stage
of ethical culture in all communities. In India it appears in the late
Vedic and post-Vedic periods, together with the ethical doctrine of
metempsychosis, and though, as is natural in such a stage of
development, various ideas are held respecting the destinies of the good
and the bad, the ethical distinction between these classes of persons,
with a systematic awarding of rewards and punishments, becomes firmly
established: Yama becomes an ethical judge. In the Brahmanas, Manu, and
the Mahabharata, we find a sort of heaven for the virtuous and a hell
for the vicious. While the academic thought of Brahmanism and the
altruistic systems of Jainism and Buddhism looked to the absorption of
the departed into the All, the popular Hindu faith held fast to the
scheme of happiness and wretchedness in the future.[172] As in Dante's
_Divina Commedia_, the heaven was somewhat colorless, the hell more
distinct and picturesque; pain is acute and varied, happiness is calm
and uniform.
+83+. The later Egyptian eschatological development was not unlike the
later Hindu. The good were rewarded with delightful habitations in the
West or with the Sun; the bad were tortured in a gloomy place.[173]
+84+. As regards the early Greek eschatological scheme, it is suggested
by S. Reinach[174] that the descriptions of punishments in Tartarus (as
in the cases of Tantalus and others) arose from misunderstood
representations of the condition of the dead in the other world, they
being represented either as engaged in the occupations of this life, or
as they were at the moment of death. The great punishments, in fact, are
assigned only to heroic mythical offenders, but there seems to be no
reason why the idea of retribution should not be supposed to enter into
such descriptions. Separation of the good from the bad on ethical
grounds appears in Greece in the time of Plato. In various passages he
describes the savage places (Tartarus and others) to which criminals go
after death, and the happy abodes of the virtuous.[175] These abodes
were not with the gods; the occasional translations to heaven (Heracles,
Ganymede) are exceptional honors paid to heroes and favorites.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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