From this emotional conflict psychology arose. Man could no longer keep death away from him, for he had tasted of it in his grief for the deceased, but he did not want to acknowledge it, since he could not imagine himself dead. He therefore formed a compromise and concealed his own death but denied it the significance of destroying life, a distinction for which the death of his enemies had given him no motive. He invented spirits during his contemplation of the corpse of the person he loved, and his consciousness of guilt over the gratification which mingled with his grief brought it about that these first created spirits were transformed into evil demons who were to be feared. The changes wrought by death suggested to him to divide the individual into body and soul, at first several souls, and in this way his train of thought paralleled the disintegration process inaugurated by death. The continued remembrance of the dead became the basis of the assumption of other forms of existence and gave him the idea of a future life after apparent death. These later forms of existence were at first only vaguely associated appendages to those whom death had cut off, and enjoyed only slight esteem until much later times; they still betrayed a very meagre knowledge. The reply which the soul of Achilles made to Odysseus comes to our mind: Erst in the life on the earth, no less than a god we revered thee, We the Achaeans; and now in the realm of the dead as a monarch Here thou dost rule; then why should death thus grieve thee, Achilles? Thus did I speak: forthwith then answering thus he addressed me. Speak not smoothly of death, I beseech, O famous Odysseus, Better by far to remain on the earth as the thrall of another, E'en of a portionless man that hath means right scanty of living, Rather than reign sole king in the realm of the bodiless phantoms. Odysseus XI, verse 484-491 Translated by H. B. Coterill. Heine has rendered this in a forcible and bitter parody: The smallest living philistine, At Stuckert on the Neckar Is much happier than I am, Son of Pelleus, the dead hero, Shadowy ruler of the Underworld. It was much later before religions managed to declare this after-life as the more valuable and perfect and to debase our mortal life to a mere preparation for the life to come. It was then only logical to prolong our existence into the past and to invent former existences, transmigrations of souls, and reincarnations, all with the object of depriving death of its meaning as the termination of life. It was as early as this that the denial of death, which we described as the product of conventional culture, originated.