Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks — John Shaqi
Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the GreeksRohde, Erwin
Religion
Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks
Rohde, Erwin
Greece -- Religion
Such an idea--that the psyche should dwell with the living and fully
conscious personality, like an alien and a stranger, a feebler
double of the man, as his "other self"--this may well seem very
strange to us. And yet this is what so-called "savage" peoples,[5\1]
all over the world, actually believe. Herbert Spencer in particular
has shown this most decisively. It is therefore not very surprising
to find the Greeks, too, sharing a mode of thought that lies so
close to the mind of primitive mankind. The earlier age which handed
down to the Greeks of Homer their beliefs about the soul cannot have
failed any more than other nations to observe the facts upon which a
fantastic logic based the conclusion of man's double personality. It
was not the phenomena of sensation, will, perception, or thought in
waking and conscious man which led to this conclusion. It was the
experience of an apparent {7} double of the self in dreaming, in
swoons, and ecstasy, that gave rise to the inference of a two-fold
principle of life in man, and of the existence of an independent,
separable "second self" dwelling within the viable self of daily
life. One has only to listen to the words of a Greek writer of a
later period who, far more explicitly than Homer, describes the
nature of the psyche and at the same time lets us see the origin of
the belief in such an entity. Pindar (fr. 131) tells us that the
body obeys Death, the almighty, but the image of the living creature
lives on ("since this alone is derived from the gods": which, of
course, is not Homeric belief); for it (this _eidôlon_) is
_sleeping_ when the limbs are active, but when the body is asleep it
often reveals the future in a dream. Words could hardly make it
plainer that in the activities of the waking and conscious man, the
image-soul has no part. Its world is the world of sleep. While the
other "I", unconscious of itself, lies in sleep, its double is up
and doing. In other words, while the body of the sleeper lies
wrapped in slumber, motionless, the sleeper in his dream lives and
sees many strange and wonderful things. It is "himself" who does
this (of that there can be no doubt), and yet not the self known and
visible to himself and others; for that lies still as death beyond
the reach of sensation. It follows that there lives within a man a
second self, active in dreaming. That the dream experiences are
veritable realities and not empty fancies for Homer is also certain.
He never says, as later poets often do, that the dreamer "thought"
he saw this or that. The figures seen in dreams are real figures,
either of the gods themselves or a "dream spirit" sent by them, or a
fleeting "image" (eidôlon) that they allow to appear for a moment.
Just as the dreamer's capacity for vision is no mere fancy, so, too,
the objects that he sees are realities. In the same way it is
something real that appears to a man asleep as the shape of a person
lately dead. Since this shape can show itself to a dreamer, it must
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