Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/578

 *rite. Which supposition shall we prefer? There can be no real question. It is impossible to conceive of a people so cynical or so distempered as to darken the wedding-day with grim reminders of death. But to transfer some of the usages of marriage to the funeral-scene was to infuse one ray of hope where all else was sorrow and darkness, to teach that, though the dead and the mourners might grieve for their parting, yet by that parting from the old home the dead was to enter upon a new life, a life of wedded happiness, in the unseen world. For indeed if there were no such intention as this, what was the meaning of the [Greek: loutrophoros] set up over the grave of the unmarried, what the purpose of adorning the dead with wedding-garment and wedding-crown? These two acts at least are no accidents; they reveal a studied purpose of assimilating the usages of death to the usages of marriage; and if that purpose underlay two of the customs enumerated, there is good warrant for the belief that in all the coincidences between marriage-rites and funeral-rites the same thought was operating—that very thought which has been found to be the common property of the Greek race, from one of the masters of ancient tragedy down to the humblest peasant of our day. Custom past and present, ancient literature, modern folk-song, all agree in their presentment of death as a marriage into the house of Hades.

On this popular and withal recondite conception of death were founded, I believe, the highest religious aspirations of the ancient Greeks. Such as had served their gods piously and purely in this life might hope to win a closer union, as of wedlock, with those gods in the life hereafter. To them there could be neither blasphemy nor presumption in their hope; for to pious believers the fabled experience of their own ancestors in this life was a warrant for aspiring themselves to the same bliss at least hereafter; what had been, might be again. Nay, more; not only was the belief that the highest bliss of the hereafter consisted in the marriage of men with their gods free from all reproach of impiety, but it was the logical development of two religious sentiments which we have already reviewed—the desire for close communion between gods and men, and the belief that men after death and dissolution would still enjoy, like their gods, corporeal existence. A previous chapter has been devoted to a detailed examination of the means