Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/622

 Persephone the road of death into a road to bliss; the Love whom 'no immortal may escape nor any of mankind whose life passeth it as a day, but whoso hath him is as one mad '; and the only true consummation of such love was wedlock.

This conception necessarily implied the equality of men with their gods in the future life; and that future equality was sometimes represented as no more than a return to that which was in the beginning. 'One is the race of men with the race of gods; for one is the mother that gave to both our breath; yet are they sundered by powers wholly diverse, in that mankind is as naught, but heaven is builded of brass that abideth ever unshaken .' So sang Pindar of the past and of the present; but the Orphic tablet which has been already quoted carries on the thought into the future:

'Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below, Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal. For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race, But Fate laid me low'

So far with Pindar. But the dead man's claims do not end there: 'I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the Under-*world'; already had he received a foretaste of that divine wedlock which implied equality with the gods; and so there comes the answer, 'Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.'

This idea commended itself even to thinkers who did not believe in bodily survival after death. Plato, in the Phaedo, where above all things is taught the perishable nature of the body and the immortality of the soul alone, yet avails himself of the belief that the pure among mankind shall attain even to god-*head hereafter. To him the pure are not the initiated indeed, but the earnest strivers after wisdom. In his theory of retributive metempsychosis he surmises that those who have followed the lusts of the flesh shall hereafter enter the ranks of asses and other lustful beasts; that those who have wrought violence shall enter the ranks of wolves and hawks and kites; that those who have practised what is popularly accounted virtue, but without true understanding, shall enter the ranks of harmless and social creatures, bees, wasps, and ants, or even the ranks of men once