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OBSERVATIONS ON THE MYTH OF ER

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Let us begin with the geography and cosmography of the Myth.

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The Meadow of the Judgment-seat, between the two openings of Tartarus (in and out) on the one side, and the two corresponding openings of Heaven on the other side, is also the meeting-place of the Souls which return from their thousand years' sojourn in Tartarus and Heaven. From the Meadow they journey, always above ground, till they come to a rainbow-coloured light, straight like a pillar, extended from on high throughout the Heaven and the Earth." This Light is the axis, I take it, on which the whole heavenly system revolves, the Earth fixed in the centre of the system being a globe on the line of the axis. The destination of the Pilgrim Souls is that part of the surface of the globe at which, in the hemisphere where they are, the axis enters on its imaginary course through the centre of the Earth, in order to come out again at the antipodal point in the other hemisphere. The Souls, arrived at the very point where, in the hemisphere where they are, the axis of the Cosmos enters the Earth, are in the place of all places where the Law which controls all things is intuitively plain-they see the Pillar of Light as the Spindle of Necessity. Then, suddenly, the outlook presented to us in the Myth changes like the scene in a dream. It is no longer such a view of the Cosmos from within as we had, a moment ago, while we stood with the Pilgrims on the surface of the Earth, looking up at the Pillar of Light in the sky: we are now looking at the Cosmos from the outside, as if it were an orrery-a model of concentric cups or rings; and Necessity herself is holding the model in her lap, and the three Fates are seated round, and keep turning the eight cups, on each of which, on its edge, a Siren is mounted who sings in tune with her sisters. But the Pilgrim Souls are standing near, looking on at this spectacle. They are on their way, we know, from the Meadow to the Plain of Lethe, both places on the surface of the Earth: it is on the

Earth then, after all, that the throne is placed on which Necessity sits holding in her lap the model, which, like a true dream-thing, is both a little model and the great Cosmos itself.1 In this place, in the presence of Necessity on her throne, the Pilgrim Souls are addressed by the Prophet from his pulpit; then choose, in the turns which the lots determine, lives of men or beasts scattered, it would seem, as little images at their feet; then go before the three Fates, who

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1 Let me illustrate this characteristic of the "dream-thing" from the Dream in the Fifth Book of Wordsworth's Prelude :

On poetry and geometric truth,

And their high privilege of lasting life,
From all internal injury exempt,

I mused; upon these chiefly: and at length,
My senses yielding to the sultry air,

Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream.
I saw before me stretched a boundless plain
Of sandy wilderness, all black and void,
And as I looked around, distress and fear
Came creeping over me, when at my side,
Close at my side, an uncouth shape appeared
Upon a dromedary, mounted high.

He seemed an Arab of the Bedouin tribes:
A lance he bore, and underneath one arm
A stone, and in the opposite hand a shell
Of a surpassing brightness.

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2 I think that Plato may have borrowed his rà Tŵv Biwv napadelyμara here from votive images of trades and callings, and of animals: "The Argive Heraeum," says Mr. Rouse (Greek Votive Offerings, p. 298), "yielded hundreds of animals in bronze and clay: bulls, cows, oxen and oxherds, goats, sheep, cocks, ducks, and other birds, including perhaps a swan.' "" These animals (to which may be added horses, pigs, doves), were, Mr. Rouse supposes, either sacrificial victims or first-fruits of hunting. Referring to human figures he says, p. 79, "It is at least probable that a successful huntsman, artist, craftsman, trader, would dedicate a figure, in character, as a thank-offering for success in his calling.' I remember rightly, a little figure, recognised as that of a "Philosopher," was discovered in the tomb of "Aristotle" found near Chalcis some years ago.

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ratify the chosen doom of each; then pass severally under the throne of Necessity; and thence travel together, through a hot dusty region, till they come to the Plain of Lethe, where no green thing grows, and to the River the water of which no pitcher can hold. When the Souls have drunk of this water the foolish, too much-they fall asleep; but at midnight there is an earthquake and thunder, and suddenly, like meteors, they shoot up to be born again, in terrestrial bodies, in our part of the Earth.

The account given by Plato here is strictly in accordance with the popular belief, which makes Lethe a river entirely above ground, never counts it among the rivers of Tartarus.1 Virgil, in Aen. vi. 705, 714, may be thought to place it under ground; but his description suffers in clearness from compression; and it is not likely that he willingly deserts traditional authority in a matter of such importance as the position of Lethe. His véκvia, as a whole, is derived from a source (considered by Rohde and Dieterich to be the xaтáßaois eis Aidov). common to himself with Pindar, Plato, Plutarch, Lucian, and (according to Dieterich, though here Rohde does not agree with him)2 the writers of certain sepulchral inscriptions which I shall describe in the next section; and where Lethe appears in any of these authors, it never, I believe, appears as one of the infernal, or subterranean, rivers. Indeed, all reasonable doubt as to Virgil's orthodoxy seems to be barred by his statement that the plain in which Souls about to be born again are gathered together near the banks of Lethe has its own sun (Aen. vi. 641). It is evidently above ground somewhere-the writer of the Axiochus would perhaps say in the antipodal hemisphere of the Earth.

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The object of this section is to point to a detail—the twin-streams, Eunoè and Lethe, of the Earthly Paradise (Purg. xxviii.)—in which Dante's vision of Purgatory reproduces-I

1 See Thiemann, Platonische Eschatologie, p. 18.

2 Dieterich, Nek. 128 f., 135, and Rohde, Psy. ii. 217.

3 It ought to be mentioned that this section was written, and the substance of it read in the course of a public lecture, and also to a private society, before the appearance of Miss Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, and her " Query" in The Classical Review, Feb. 1903, p. 58.

think, independently-a distinctive feature of that Orphic ritual and mythology to which Plato is largely indebted for his account of the Soul's xá@apois as a process of forgetting and remembering as a series of transmigrations through which the particulars of sense, the evils and sins of the flesh, are forgotten or left behind, and the universal Ideas, long obscured, are, at last, so clearly remembered that they can never be forgotten any more, but become the everlasting possession of the Soul, finally disembodied and returned to its own star.

It is easy to account, from the literary sources open to Dante, for the presence of rivers, and more particularly of Lethe, in his Earthly Paradise. On the one hand, the description of Eden in Genesis would suggest the general idea of rivers girding the Earthly Paradise; while, on the other hand, the proximity of Purgatory to the Earthly Paradise makes it natural that Lethe should be one of these riversthat first reached by one coming up from Purgatory. The drinking of Lethe, according to Aen. vi. and the current mythology, is the act with which a period of purgatorial discipline is closed by those Souls which are about to pass again into the flesh. In placing the Earthly Paradise on the top of a lofty mountain Dante followed a prevalent medieval belief; and, although he seems to have drawn on his own imagination in placing Purgatory on the slopes of this mountain, it was natural, and in accordance with the current mythology, that he should place it there, close to the Earthly Paradise or Elysium; for the Lethe of Aen. vi. is evidently in the same region as Elysium,

Interea videt Aeneas in valle reducta

Seclusum nemus et virgulta sonantia sylvis,

Lethaeumque domos placidas qui praenatat amnem.2

The presence, then, of Lethe, the purgatorial stream, in Dante's Earthly Paradise is easily accounted for by reference to the mythological authorities open to him. But for the association of Eunoè, the stream of Memory, with Lethe, the stream of Forgetfulness, it does not seem possible to account in this way. The common mythology gives Lethe alone.

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1 See Vernon's Readings on the Purgatorio, ii. 285-293. Lethe girds the Earthly Paradise on the side of Earth, Eunoè on the side of Heaven.

2 Virg. Aen. vi. 703.

is not likely that Dante had heard of the twin streams-Lethe and Mnemosyne-of the Orphic cult; at any rate, in the absence of evidence that he had heard of them, it seems better to suppose that the very natural picture of a stream of Memory beside the stream of Forgetfulness occurred to him spontaneously, as it had occurred to others, who, like himself, were deeply concerned to find expression for their hope of κálapois. For the twin streams of the Orphic cult which resemble Dante's Lethe and Eunoè so closely, we must turn to the sepulchral inscriptions mentioned at the end of the last section. These are certain directions for the ghostly journey to be made by initiated persons, written in hexameter verse on gold tablets found in graves at Thurii and Petelia in South Italy, and now preserved in the British Museum. These tablets were described by Comparetti in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, iii. p. 111 ff., and are printed by Kaibel in his Insc. Gr. Sic. et It. p. 157. Kaibel assigns them to the third or fourth century B.C. I shall quote the one that was found at Petelia." It gives directions to an initiated person who hopes to get out of the Cycle of Incarnationsκύκλου τ ̓ αὖ λῆξαι καὶ ἀναπνεῦσαι κακότητος—having been completely purified. Such a person, the verses say, must avoid the fountain on the left hand with a white cypress growing near it, evidently the water of Lethe, although the tablet does not name it. It is to the right that the purified Soul of the μúσTηs must turn, to the cool water of Mnemosyne. The guardians of the well he must address in set form of words, thus-" I am the child of Earth and Heaven: I am parched with thirst; I perish; give me cool water to drink from the well of Memory." And the guardians will give him water to drink from the holy well, and he will be translated to dwell for ever with the Heroes :

εὑρήσεις δ ̓ Αΐδαο δόμων ἐπ ̓ ἀρίστερα κρήνην,
παρ' δ ̓ αὐτῇ λευκὴν ἑστηκυῖαν κυπάρισσον.
ταύτης τῆς κρήνης μηδὲ σχεδὸν ἐμπελάσειας·

1 For further description of the Petelia Tablet (in the Brit. Museum, Gold Ornament Room, Table-case H) and other Orphic golden tablets (e.g. the Eleuthernae Tablet from Crete, in the National Museum, Athens), the reader may consult Miss Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. 573 ff., with Appendix by Mr. G. G. A. Murray, pp. 660 ff.

2 See Lobeck, Aglaoph. p. 800.

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