paeeed into a peaceful eacietmoe. As many individual# took out the aeeuredneee of theae ri^te» Hade# waa beginning to become the grand aaaenblage of these happy aoula. Plato adds to the deacri^tion of Hade# three judges who uould appear to be hie own invention. Thle, like many other details, was added to mythology as a portion of popular beliefs.
Those who have taken a false oath, parricides, violators of the laws of hospitality are made by AristophsMS (in
the Frogs) to *lie in the nud*-^# form of p e n s i f originally anticipated for the uninitiated in some Orphie private mysteries, but now transferred by him to those guilty of moral misdemeanours. The incottsistmcy with the promises made in the eqrsteries ihemselvee in* volved in such conceptions may have been the lésa observed Just beeause tdie idea of a future system of compensation in
aecordance with the requlrsBMmts of morality wee never seriously or fhlly deyel^ed* bt$ remained merely a smtter of vague suggestion. In circumstances of real need tiiat ideal never satisfied anyone in Greece. Man espected to see the retributive power of the gods
visiblp activé upon earth; those in whom esperlenoa weakened this belief would not have derived much comfort
from the idea of dcapensation hereafter. However, in fact, the future life had little meaning or bearing over the lives of the individuals. The major group
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vker# these Ideas vere uj^eld would be within the mystics and the rati&er IgnerMt and imfortunate masses. The later Greeks could midce gr##d: fun of tihe lands beyond such as Oknos plaiting rope idiich is gnawed by his she-ass as fast as hè can plait it. then too there are men and women
who are foreed to pour water from broken pitchers into bottomless jars as a never«endiag task for their failure to participate in the rights of initiation.
Idiat had they to do with pictures of an underworld of purgatory maé torment
in eapiation of all isuiginary types and degrees of sin, as in 0ante*s ghastly Hell? It is true that even such dark fancies of the Christian Hell are in part derived from GreWc sources. But
it was only the misguided fancy of particular isolated sects that could call forth such pictures as thess; and recommend itself to a philosophic
peculation khieh in its worst excesses violently contradicted all the most fi»da* mental principles of Greek culture.
The people and the religion of OrMce^ the mysteriea which her cities opanised and deemed holy# may be freely acquitted of all such aberrations.^*
Because writers could p e a k in such terms of humour it would certainly indicate that it had little theological
significance.
from the South of Italy and from Sicily came the mystery religion of the Ophics, named for their patron
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saint Orpheus. Their belief in immortality stems from a myth of Dionysus# the child of Zeus# t o m to pieces and devoured by the Titans. The story mas told that they had
eaten the body of the infant and Zeus out of rage struck them with a thunder bolt. And from their ashes cai&e man kind. Thus Men contains a dual nature# one of good
(Dionysiac) and one of evil (Titanic). The Titans were evil but they contained divine flesh# hecæe those (Mankind) created from two distinctive natures contained two natures also. The flesh embodied the evil aspects and thus dis integrated# but the soul was made of divine substance which gave rise to IsmBortality* ’The myth reflects the conscious ness of the divided self; its framers must have known the
sense of sin as surely as they found the promise of regeneration in the resurrection or rebirth of their divinity.
The Orphies maintained that there was no imposed barrier b e t w e œ man and the gods and hence everyone had the opportunity to become immortal. They took in the belief of transmigration in which thm soul is of divine nature and wanders through earthly bodies until it finally shakes off its flesh. %)wever# one of their great diffi culties was the failure to devel<^ the full consequences
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of their theology. The only real requirement vaa atonement through the process of initiation but it had little influ ence on the rest of life. The whole enyhasis was iq^on purifying the flesh in order to p r^ ar e it for reunion with the divine. The essence of the Orphic teachings
included these three important factors; the body was
Aought to be a prison or tomb for the soul ( 6^/^^ ^ ^ the teaching of transmigration and the means to ^&ow how mMn could be delivered from bodily life and the circle of
r ^irth by finding his divinity. We have already s e « bow man has obtained two natures. The meaning of re-*
ligion lay in the process by idiich one rids himself of the evil nature and retains only the good. Though man had become a wanderer from the gods, by means of the purifi cation rites he now could obtain "true" salvation. "It is a great mistake to associate G r e ^ eschatology only with the doctrine of immortality of the soul. The G r e ^ s had a lot to say about punishwnt in the underworld, and
it was the Orphies who were their teachers."^
One of the Orphic plates fotmd in Soutiiem Italy r e W s like this: "You will find in the realms of Hades on the left hand a luring. And by it a %diite cypress standing. Do not go near this ^ring. But you will find
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another# running viU& cool water from the lake of Memory. There are guardian# before it. You moat say# am a child
of earth and the starry heaven; X come from a heavenly
race. You yonrselvea know this. I am perishing with thirst; but give me quickly the cool water idiich runs from the
lake of memory. * And they will give you to drink of the 35
divine spring. . This has obviously broken through the rehirth cycle. While it is held that the future life
is to be spent in the underworld the eventual goal of
their later thinkers was to ascend to the heavenly height#. Even later we find in the writings of Pindar
(5th /C B# C.) that Radee has become merely an intermediate state^ ^ o r them the sun shines in his stureogth in the world beneath# ihile here it is night; and in fields of crisBSon roses before their city the incense*tree gives shade and golden fruits hang heavy. . . On the other side the sluggish rivers of gloomy night vomit forth their illisiitable daidcness."^^ The believer could look in this life toward the Islands of the Blest.
Certainly no examination of G r e A thought would be complete without a reflection on Platons ideas and espec* ially on the Ihaedo which is the magnum opus of the doctrirm of immortality.
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\
Plato— periu^s the greatest mind we know among ancient writers^ the thinker whose ideas did so much to shape all
subsequent thought among the Greeks and Romans* indeed to shape thought in the Christian Church* too* up to our own day— believed passionately in
the immortality of the individual soul. He believed also passionately that* according as men chose good or evil* their lot would be happy or unhappy after death. But he knew that* tov him* all pictures of the future life* beyond those fundamental convictions* were Just guessing. When he put
forward leyths with descripticms of the other world* he made it (j^te clear that he did not mean them to be a statement of fact. The different isyths do not in their details agree with each other. Plato meant his myths simply to em body in an imaginative way so that his convictions might be realised* without his committing himself to a
statement that they actually woyld be realised precisely in that way.
The Phaedo describes the death of Socrates* philosopher* and beloved teacher of Plato. Socrates more than any other man revolutionized the entire Weitanschamma of man’s thought. From a total and cooylete interest in the world about them* Socrates challenged all men to an exam
ination of their inner selves. Men had tended to Judge
the inner life by using the world as their norm or standard. Mow Socrates asked that they might Judge the outer world by their Innermost selves. This was then the strongest
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