Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/542

 Pelasgian mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis was held to be an earnest of future bliss, from which the impure or uninitiated were excluded.

Thus then there were two popular conceptions of the future life—the Achaean conception of universal misery in a cold and gloomy under-world, and the Pelasgian conception which distinguished between the lots of the righteous and the unrighteous, and held out to some men the promise of bliss. Now with the former conception, as we have already seen, the belief that the dead eagerly desired dissolution is utterly inconsistent; none could be in haste to pass the gates of Hades with the prospect of nothing but misery within. But where there were hopes of happiness, the eagerness for dissolution as a means of attaining thereto is at once intelligible. This desire then, which has constantly pervaded the mind of the Greek people and has furnished the single motive of their funeral-rites down to the present day, is of Pelasgian origin; and if Homer borrowed it and incongruously combined it with a purely Achaean presentation of the under-world, we must no more judge of its real meaning by the Homeric setting of it than we would form an opinion of the place of the Erinyes or of Demeter in Greek religion by Homer's occasional references to them.

The fact then that Homer, in accordance with the Achaean religion, considered the dissolution of the body to mean the annihilation of the body and represented the soul as alone entering into the lower world is wholly immaterial to the present enquiry. It is the Pelasgian conception of future bliss with which we are concerned; for that alone can account for the eagerness of the dead to obtain dissolution. What then are the blissful occupations of the righteous in the other world? 'Some,' says Pindar, 'take their joy in horses and feats of prowess, and others at the draught-board, and others in the music of lutes.' Clearly these dead are very different beings from the souls which peopled the Homeric under-world. Athletics could be no pastime for feeble unsubstantial spirits; the game of draughts would be ill suited to them that have no mind in them ; and those whose thin utterance is like the squeak of a bat would get and give little pleasure by singing to the lute. No; the pursuits of the dead as depicted by Pindar are the pursuits which men of flesh and blood enjoy;