Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Among those Greeks who did believe in some form of afterlife, the dead went straight to the underworld which, in the Iliad, was guarded by canine Cerberus. The soul could reach this ‘mirthless place’ only by crossing the river Styx. The underworld was called Hades, which derives from a root word meaning invisible, unseen.⁴⁹ Death seems to have been regarded then as unavoidable. Athena tells Odysseus’ son Telemachus that ‘death is common to all men, and not even the gods can keep it off a man they love . . .’⁵⁰ By the later parts of the Odyssey, however, there has been a change. For example, Proteus tells Menelaus that he will be sent ‘to the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth’. The name Elysion is pre-Greek and so this idea may have begun elsewhere. By the time of Hesiod’s Works and Days (late eighth century BC) we hear of the Islands of the Blessed, to which many heroes will be sent after their lives on earth are over. At much the same time, in epic poems, we hear for the first time of Charon, the ferryman of the dead. In the fifth century, there began in Greece the practice of burying the deceased with an obol, a small coin to pay Charon.⁵¹ Around 432 BC, on an official war monument, the souls of dead Athenians are described as being received by the aither, ‘the upper air’, though their bodies will remain on earth. In Plato and in many Greek tragedies we learn that the Athenians did not seem to believe in rewards and punishments after death. ‘In fact, they do not seem to have expected very much at all. “After death every man is earth and shadow: nothing goes to nothing”.’ (This is a character in one of Euripides’ plays.) In Plato’s Phaedo, Simmias betrays his worry that at his death his soul will be scattered ‘and this is their end’.⁵²

Paradise – the word, at least – is much better documented. It is based on an old Median word, pari = around, and daeza = wall. (The Medes were a civilisation in Iran in the sixth century BC.) The word paridaeza came variously to mean a vineyard, a grove of date palms, a place were bricks were made and even, on one occasion, the ‘red-light’ quarter of Samos. But its most probable association was with royal hunting forests, or simply the lush, shaded gardens that were the prerogative of the aristocracy. This could be allied to the belief, considered below, that only kings and aristocrats could go to paradise, and all others went to hell. There are some indications in Pythagoras’ writings that his idea of the afterlife, and the immortal soul, was reserved for the aristocracy, so this may have been an idea that was born as a way of preserving upper-class privileges at a time when that class was being marginalised, as cities (and merchants) grew more important.

For the Israelites, the soul was never developed as a sophisticated idea. The God of Israel formed Adam from the ʾadamah, the clay, and then breathed ‘the breath of life into him’, so that he became a nephesh, or ‘living soul’.⁵³ This is similar to the Akkadian word napistu, and is associated with blood, the ‘life substance’, which drains away at death.⁵⁴ The Hebrews never had a word for the ‘essential self’ that survived death. We should not forget that the entire book of Job in the Hebrew scriptures is concerned with the problem of faith and suffering and inequality in a life where there is no hereafter (all the rewards promised to the Jews by their God are worldly). Even with the advent of Messianism in Judaism, there is still no concept of the soul. There was the concept of Sheol, but this is more akin to the English word ‘grave’ than Hades, which is how it was often translated. ‘Sheol was located beneath the earth (Psalm 63.10), filled with worms and dust (Isaiah, 14.11) and impossible to escape from (Job, 7.9f.).’ It was only after the exile in Babylon that good and bad departments of Sheol were envisaged, and it became associated with Gehenna, a valley south of Jerusalem where it was at first believed that punishments would be handed out after the Last Judgement. Soon after, it became the name for the fiery hell.⁵⁵