(91) This Animastic Spirit which blessed men have called the Pneumatic Soul, becometh a god, an all-various Dæmon, and an Image (disembodied), and in this form of Soul suffereth her punishments The Oracles, too, accord with this account; for they assimilate the employment of the Soul in Hades, to the delusive visions of a dream.

(145) Stoop not down unto the Darkly-Splendid World; wherein continually lieth a faithless Depth, and Hades wrapped in clouds, delighting in unintellible images, precipitous, winding, a black ever-rolling Abyss; ever espousing a Body unluminous, formless and void.

(2) "This is the spirit of light who has come in them. And by the will of the majesty the spirit gazed up at the infinite light, that his light may be pitied and the likeness may be brought up from Hades. And when the spirit had looked, I flowed out—I, the son of the majesty—like a wave of light and like a whirlwind of the immortal spirit. And I blew from the cloud of the hymen upon the astonishment of the unconceived spirit. The cloud separated and cast light upon the clouds. These separated so that the spirit might return. Because of this the mind took shape. Its rest was shattered. For the hymen of nature was a cloud that cannot be grasped; it is a great fire. Similarly, the afterbirth of nature is the cloud of silence; it is an august fire. And the power that was mixed with the mind—it, too, was a cloud of nature that was joined with the darkness that had aroused nature to unchastity. And the dark water was a frightful cloud. And the root of nature, which was below, was crooked, since it is burdensome and harmful. The root was blind to the bound light, which was unfathomable because it had many appearances.

(4) Mine eyes he loosed, and said: "Direct the nerve Of vision now along that ancient foam, There yonder where that smoke is most intense." Even as the frogs before the hostile serpent Across the water scatter all abroad, Until each one is huddled in the earth. More than a thousand ruined souls I saw, Thus fleeing from before one who on foot Was passing o'er the Styx with soles unwet. From off his face he fanned that unctuous air, Waving his left hand oft in front of him, And only with that anguish seemed he weary. Well I perceived one sent from Heaven was he, And to the Master turned; and he made sign That I should quiet stand, and bow before him. Ah! how disdainful he appeared to me! He reached the gate, and with a little rod He opened it, for there was no resistance. "O banished out of Heaven, people despised!" Thus he began upon the horrid threshold; "Whence is this arrogance within you couched? Wherefore recalcitrate against that will, From which the end can never be cut off, And which has many times increased your pain?

(10) "Our way of speaking"- for myths, if they are to serve their purpose, must necessarily import time-distinctions into their subject and will often present as separate, Powers which exist in unity but differ in rank and faculty; they will relate the births of the unbegotten and discriminate where all is one substance; the truth is conveyed in the only manner possible, it is left to our good sense to bring all together again.

On this principle we have, here, Soul dwelling with the divine Intelligence, breaking away from it, and yet again being filled to satiety with the divine Ideas- the beautiful abounding in all plenty, so that every splendour become manifest in it with the images of whatever is lovely- Soul which, taken as one all, is Aphrodite, while in it may be distinguished the Reason-Principles summed under the names of Plenty and Possession, produced by the downflow of the Nectar of the over realm. The splendours contained in Soul are thought of as the garden of Zeus with reference to their existing within Life; and Poros sleeps in this garden in the sense of being sated and heavy with its produce. Life is eternally manifest, an eternal existent among the existences, and the banqueting of the gods means no more than that they have their Being in that vital blessedness. And Love- "born at the banquet of the gods"- has of necessity been eternally in existence, for it springs from the intention of the Soul towards its Best, towards the Good; as long as Soul has been, Love has been.

Still this Love is of mixed quality. On the one hand there is in it the lack which keeps it craving: on the other, it is not entirely destitute; the deficient seeks more of what it has, and certainly nothing absolutely void of good would ever go seeking the good.

It is said then to spring from Poverty and Possession in the sense that Lack and Aspiration and the Memory of the Ideal Principles, all present together in the Soul, produce that Act towards The Good which is Love. Its Mother is Poverty, since striving is for the needy; and this Poverty is Matter, for Matter is the wholly poor: the very ambition towards the good is a sign of existing indetermination; there is a lack of shape and of Reason in that which must aspire towards the Good, and the greater degree of effort implies the lower depth of materiality. A thing aspiring towards the Good is an Ideal-principle only when the striving will leave it still unchanged in Kind: when it must take in something other than itself, its aspiration is the presentment of Matter to the incoming power.

Thus Love is at once, in some degree a thing of Matter and at the same time a Celestial, sprung of the Soul; for Love lacks its Good but, from its very birth, strives towards It.

(2) "And my garment of fire, according to the will of the majesty, went down to what is strong, and to the unclean portion of nature that the power of darkness was covering. And my garment rubbed nature in her covering. And her unclean femininity was strong. And the wrathful womb came up and made the mind dry, resembling a fish that has a drop of fire and a power of fire. And when nature had cast off the mind, she was troubled and wept. When she was hurt and in her tears, she cast off the power of the spirit and remained as I am. I put on the light of the spirit and rested with my garment on account of the sight of the fish. And that the deeds of nature might be condemned, since she is blind, manifold animals came out of her, in accordance with the number of the fleeting winds. All of them came into being in Hades, searching for the light of the mind that took shape. They were not able to stand up against it. I rejoiced over their ignorance.

(5) Let us descend now unto greater woe; Already sinks each star that was ascending When I set out, and loitering is forbidden." We crossed the circle to the other bank, Near to a fount that boils, and pours itself Along a gully that runs out of it. The water was more sombre far than perse; And we, in company with the dusky waves, Made entrance downward by a path uncouth. A marsh it makes, which has the name of Styx, This tristful brooklet, when it has descended Down to the foot of the malign gray shores. And I, who stood intent upon beholding, Saw people mud-besprent in that lagoon, All of them naked and with angry look. They smote each other not alone with hands, But with the head and with the breast and feet, Tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth. Said the good Master: "Son, thou now beholdest The souls of those whom anger overcame; And likewise I would have thee know for certain

(2) Truly I wept, leaning upon a peak Of the hard crag, so that my Escort said To me: "Art thou, too, of the other fools? Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; Who is a greater reprobate than he Who feels compassion at the doom divine? Lift up, lift up thy head, and see for whom Opened the earth before the Thebans' eyes; Wherefore they all cried: 'Whither rushest thou, Amphiaraus? Why dost leave the war?' And downward ceased he not to fall amain As far as Minos, who lays hold on all. See, he has made a bosom of his shoulders! Because he wished to see too far before him Behind he looks, and backward goes his way: Behold Tiresias, who his semblance changed, When from a male a female he became, His members being all of them transformed; And afterwards was forced to strike once more The two entangled serpents with his rod, Ere he could have again his manly plumes. That Aruns is, who backs the other's belly, Who in the hills of Luni, there where grubs The Carrarese who houses underneath,

(5) For the Pythagorean Theano writes, "Life were indeed a feast to the wicked, who, having done evil, then die; were not the soul immortal, death would be a godsend." And Plato in the Phaedo, "For if death were release from everything," and so forth. We are not then to think according to the Telephus of Aeschylus, "that a single path leads to Hades." The ways are many, and the sins that lead thither. Such deeply erring ones as the unfaithful are, Aristophanes properly makes the subjects of comedy. "Come," he says, "ye men of obscure life, ye that are like the race of leaves, feeble, wax figures, shadowy tribes, evanescent, fleeting, ephemeral." And Epicharmus, "This nature of men is inflated skins."

(4) That I may know who these are, and what law Makes them appear so ready to pass over, As I discern athwart the dusky light." And he to me: "These things shall all be known To thee, as soon as we our footsteps stay Upon the dismal shore of Acheron." Then with mine eyes ashamed and downward cast, Fearing my words might irksome be to him, From speech refrained I till we reached the river. And lo! towards us coming in a boat An old man, hoary with the hair of eld, Crying: "Woe unto you, ye souls depraved! Hope nevermore to look upon the heavens; I come to lead you to the other shore, To the eternal shades in heat and frost. And thou, that yonder standest, living soul, Withdraw thee from these people, who are dead!" But when he saw that I did not withdraw, He said: "By other ways, by other ports Thou to the shore shalt come, not here, for passage; A lighter vessel needs must carry thee." And unto him the Guide: "Vex thee not, Charon; It is so willed there where is power to do That which is willed; and farther question not."

(8) The gloom and depression of the Lesser Mysteries represented the agony of the spiritual soul unable to express itself because it has accepted the limitations and illusions of the human environment. The crux of the Eleusinian argument was that man is neither better nor wiser after death than during life. If he does not rise above ignorance during his sojourn here, man goes at death into eternity to wander about forever, making the same mistakes which he made here. If he does not outgrow the desire for material possessions here, he will carry it with him into the invisible world, where, because he can never gratify the desire, he will continue in endless agony. Dante's Inferno is symbolically descriptive of the sufferings of those who never freed their spiritual natures from the cravings, habits, viewpoints, and limitations of their Plutonic personalities. Those who made no endeavor to improve themselves (whose souls have slept) during their physical lives, passed at death into Hades, where, lying in rows, they slept through all eternity as they had slept through life.

(12) The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens.

Their initial descent is deepened since that mid-part of theirs is compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has ever dwelt.

For the container of the total of things must be a self-sufficing entity and remain so: in its periods it is wrought out to purpose under its Reason-Principles which are perdurably valid; by these periods it reverts unfailingly, in the measured stages of defined life-duration, to its established character; it is leading the things of this realm to be of one voice and plan with the Supreme. And thus the kosmic content is carried forward to its purpose, everything in its co-ordinate place, under one only Reason-Principle operating alike in the descent and return of souls and to every purpose of the system.

We may know this also by the concordance of the Souls with the ordered scheme of the kosmos; they are not independent, but, by their descent, they have put themselves in contact, and they stand henceforth in harmonious association with kosmic circuit- to the extent that their fortunes, their life experiences, their choosing and refusing, are announced by the patterns of the stars- and out of this concordance rises as it were one musical utterance: the music, the harmony, by which all is described is the best witness to this truth.

Such a consonance can have been procured in one only way:

The All must, in every detail of act and experience, be an expression of the Supreme, which must dominate alike its periods and its stable ordering and the life-careers varying with the movement of the souls as they are sometimes absorbed in that highest, sometimes in the heavens, sometimes turned to the things and places of our earth. All that is Divine Intellect will rest eternally above, and could never fall from its sphere but, poised entire in its own high place, will communicate to things here through the channel of Soul. Soul in virtue of neighbourhood is more closely modelled upon the Idea uttered by the Divine Intellect, and thus is able to produce order in the movement of the lower realm, one phase maintaining the unvarying march the other adopting itself to times and season.

The depth of the descent, also, will differ- sometimes lower, sometimes less low- and this even in its entry into any given Kind: all that is fixed is that each several soul descends to a recipient indicated by affinity of condition; it moves towards the thing which it There resembled, and enters, accordingly, into the body of man or animal.

(1) "When the darkness stirred, the light of the spirit appeared to him. When he saw it he was astonished. He did not know that another power was above him. And when he saw that his likeness was dark compared with the spirit, he felt hurt. And in his pain he lifted up, above the height of the members of darkness, his mind, which was the eye of the bitterness of evil. He caused his mind to take shape in a member of the portions of the spirit, thinking that, by staring down at his evil, he would be able to equal the spirit. But he was not able, for he wanted to do an impossible thing, and it did not take place. But in order that the mind of darkness, which is the eye of the bitterness of evil, might not be destroyed, since he was made partially similar, he arose and shone with a fiery light upon all of Hades, that the equality of the faultless light might become apparent. For the spirit benefited from every form of darkness because he appeared in his majesty.

(27) But of what soul; of that which we envisage as the more divine, by which we are human beings, or that other which springs from the All?

Memory must be admitted in both of these, personal memories and shared memories; and when the two souls are together, the memories also are as one; when they stand apart, assuming that both exist and endure, each soon for gets the other's affairs, retaining for a longer time its own. Thus it is that the Shade of Hercules in the lower regions- this "Shade," as I take it, being the characteristically human part- remembers all the action and experience of the life, since that career was mainly of the hero's personal shaping; the other souls going to constitute the joint-being could, for all their different standing, have nothing to recount but the events of that same life, doings which they knew from the time of their association: perhaps they would add also some moral judgement.

What the Hercules standing outside the Shade spoke of we are not told: what can we think that other, the freed and isolated, soul would recount?

The soul, still a dragged captive, will tell of all the man did and felt; but upon death there will appear, as time passes, memories of the lives lived before, some of the events of the most recent life being dismissed as trivial. As it grows away from the body, it will revive things forgotten in the corporeal state, and if it passes in and out of one body after another, it will tell over the events of the discarded life, it will treat as present that which it has just left, and it will remember much from the former existence. But with lapse of time it will come to forgetfulness of many things that were mere accretion.

Then free and alone at last, what will it have to remember?

The answer to that question depends on our discovering in what faculty of the soul memory resides.

(7) The soul of man--often called Psyche, and in the Eleusinian Mysteries symbolized by Persephone--is essentially a spiritual thing. Its true home is in the higher worlds, where, free from the bondage of material form and material concepts, it is said to be truly alive and self-expressive. The human, or physical, nature of man, according to this doctrine, is a tomb, a quagmire, a false and impermanent thing, the source of all sorrow and suffering. Plato describes the body as the sepulcher of the soul; and by this he means not only the human form but also the human nature.

(4) I, by the roots unwonted of this wood, Do swear to you that never broke I faith Unto my lord, who was so worthy of honour; And to the world if one of you return, Let him my memory comfort, which is lying Still prostrate from the blow that envy dealt it." Waited awhile, and then: "Since he is silent," The Poet said to me, "lose not the time, But speak, and question him, if more may please thee." Whence I to him: "Do thou again inquire Concerning what thou thinks't will satisfy me; For I cannot, such pity is in my heart." Therefore he recommenced: "So may the man Do for thee freely what thy speech implores, Spirit incarcerate, again be pleased To tell us in what way the soul is bound Within these knots; and tell us, if thou canst, If any from such members e'er is freed." Then blew the trunk amain, and afterward The wind was into such a voice converted: "With brevity shall be replied to you. When the exasperated soul abandons The body whence it rent itself away, Minos consigns it to the seventh abyss.

(73) There is an eye of justice, which sees all. For two ways, as we deem, to Hades lead- One for the good, the other for the bad. But if the earth hides both for ever, then Go plunder, steal, rob, and be turbulent. But err not. For in Hades judgment is, Which God the Lord of all will execute, Whose name too dreadful is for me to name, Who gives to sinners length of earthly life.

(11) Pluto, the lord of the underworld, represents the body intelligence of man; and the rape of Persephone is symbolic of the divine nature assaulted and defiled by the animal soul and dragged downward into the somber darkness of Hades, which is here used as a synonym for the material, or objective, sphere of consciousness.

(2) And my Conductor, with his spans extended, Took of the earth, and with his fists well filled, He threw it into those rapacious gullets. Such as that dog is, who by barking craves, And quiet grows soon as his food he gnaws, For to devour it he but thinks and struggles, The like became those muzzles filth-begrimed Of Cerberus the demon, who so thunders Over the souls that they would fain be deaf. We passed across the shadows, which subdues The heavy rain-storm, and we placed our feet Upon their vanity that person seems. They all were lying prone upon the earth, Excepting one, who sat upright as soon As he beheld us passing on before him. "O thou that art conducted through this Hell," He said to me, "recall me, if thou canst; Thyself wast made before I was unmade." And I to him: "The anguish which thou hast Perhaps doth draw thee out of my remembrance, So that it seems not I have ever seen thee. But tell me who thou art, that in so doleful A place art put, and in such punishment, If some are greater, none is so displeasing."

(2) In souls, however, which rule over bodies, and precedaneously pay attention to them, and which, prior to generation, have by themselves a perpetual arrangement, essential good is not present, nor the cause of good, which is prior to essence; but to these a certain participation and habit, proceeding from essential good, accedes; just as we see that the participation of beauty and virtue is very different [in these souls] from that which we behold in men. For the latter is ambiguous, and accedes to composite natures as something adventitious. But the former has an immutable and never failing establishment in souls, and neither itself ever departs from itself, nor can be taken away by any thing else. Such, therefore, being the beginning and end in the divine genera, conceive two media between these extreme boundaries, viz. the order of heroes, which has an arrangement more elevated than that of souls, in power and virtue, in beauty and magnitude, and in all the goods which subsist about souls, and which, though it entirely transcends the psychical order, yet, at the same time, is proximately conjoined to it, through the alliance of a similar formed life. But the other medium, which is suspended from the Gods, though it is far inferior to them, is that of dæmons, which is hot of a primarily operative nature, but is subservient to, and follows the beneficent will of the Gods.