(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."

(17) It is also worth mentioning the remark of Philolaus. This Pythagorean speaks as follows: "The ancient theologians and seers testify that the soul is conjoined to the body to suffer certain punishments, and is, as it were, buried in this tomb." And Pindar speaks of the Eleusinian mysteries as follows: "Blessed is he who has seen before he goes under the earth; for he knows the end of life and knows also its divine beginning. Similarly in the Phaedo Plato does not hesitate to write as follows: " And these men who established our mysteries..." down to the words "and will dwell with the gods." And what when he says, " As long as we have still the body and our soul is involved in such evil, shall we never have sufficient possession of that which we desire?" Does he not hint that birth is the cause; of the worst evils? And in the Phaedo he bears witness again: " All who have rightly been concerned with philosophy run the risk that other men will fail to notice that their sole object is to pursue death and dying."

(16) Herodotus, it is clear, makes Solon say the same as this: "0 Croesus, every man is a misfortune." And his myth about Cleobis and Biton has obviously no other intention than to disparage birth and praise death. " As scattered leaves, so is mankind," says Homer.41 And in the Cratylus Plato attributes to Orpheus the doctrine that the soul in this body is suffering punishment. This is what he says: "Some say that the body is a tomb of the soul, as being buried in it for the present life. And because the soul expresses (semainei) by this body whatever it may wish to express, so it is rightly called a tomb (sema). The Orphics, in particular, seem to have given it this name, as they think the soul suffers punishment for its misdeeds,"

(6) Punishments after death, on the other hand, and penal retribution by fire, were pilfered from the Barbarian philosophy both by all the poetic Muses and by the Hellenic philosophy. Plato, accordingly, in the last book of the Republic, says in these express terms: "Then these men fierce and fiery to look on, standing by, and hearing the sound, seized and took some aside and binding Aridaeus and the rest hand, foot, and head, and throwing them down, and flaying them, dragged them along the way, tearing their flesh with thorns." For the fiery men are meant to signify the angels, who seize and punish the wicked. "Who maketh," it is said, "His angels spirits; His ministers flaming fire." It follows from this that the soul is immortal. For what is tortured or corrected being in a state of sensation lives, though said to suffer. Well! Did not Plato know of the rivers of fire and the depth of the earth, and Tartarus, called by the Barbarians Gehenna, naming, as he does prophetically, Cocytus, and Acheron, and Pyriphlegethon, and introducing such corrective tortures for discipline? But indicating "the angels" as the Scripture says, "of the little ones, and of the least, which see God," and also the oversight reaching to us exercised by the tutelary angels? he shrinks not from writing, "That when all the souls have selected their several lives, according as it has fallen to their lot, they advance in order to Lachesis; and she sends along with each one, as his guide in life, and the joint accomplisher of his purposes, the demon which he has chosen." Perhaps also the demon of Socrates suggested to him something similar.

PLUTO, magnanimous, whose realms profound Are fix'd beneath the firm and solid ground, In the Tartarian plains remote from fight, And wrapt forever in the depths of night; Terrestrial Jove, thy sacred ear incline, And, pleas'd, accept thy mystic's hymn divine. Earth's keys to thee, illustrious king belong, 7 Its secret gates unlocking, deep and strong. 'Tis thine, abundant annual fruits to bear, For needy mortals are thy constant care. To thee, great king, Avernus is assign'd, The seat of Gods, and basis of mankind. Thy throne is fix'd in Hade's dismal plains, Distant, unknown to rest, where darkness reigns; Where, destitute of breath, pale spectres dwell, In endless, dire, inexorable hell; And in dread Acheron, whose depths obscure, Earth's stable roots eternally secure. O mighty dæmon, whose decision dread, The future fate determines of the dead, With captive Proserpine, thro' grassy plains, Drawn in a four-yok'd car with loosen'd reins, Rapt o'er the deep, impell'd by love, you flew 'Till Eleusina's city rose to view; There, in a wond'rous cave obscure and deep, The sacred maid secure from search you keep, The cave of Atthis, whose wide gates display An entrance to the kingdoms void of day. Of unapparent works, thou art alone The dispensator, visible and known. O pow'r all-ruling, holy, honor'd light, Thee sacred poets and their hymns delight: Propitious to thy mystic's works incline, Rejoicing come, for holy rites are thine.

(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.

(1) [Hermes:] Concerning Soul and Body, son, we now must speak; in what way Soul is deathless, and whence comes the activity in composing and dissolving Body. For there's no death for aught of things [that are]; the thought this word conveys, is either void of fact, or [simply] by the knocking off a syllable what is called "death", doth stand for "deathless". For death is of destruction, and nothing in the Cosmos is destroyed. For if Cosmos is second God, a life that cannot die, it cannot be that any part of this immortal life should die. All things in Cosmos are parts of Cosmos, and most of all is man, the rational animal.

(5) Still more unreasonably:

There are men, bound to human bodies and subject to desire, grief, anger, who think so generously of their own faculty that they declare themselves in contact with the Intelligible World, but deny that the sun possesses a similar faculty less subject to influence, to disorder, to change; they deny that it is any wiser than we, the late born, hindered by so many cheats on the way towards truth.

Their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare deathless, divine; but the entire heavens and the stars within the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal Principle, though these are far purer and lovelier than their own souls- yet they are not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in the heavens, since they are the loudest in complaint of the disorder that troubles our earth. We are to imagine the deathless Soul choosing of design the less worthy place, and preferring to abandon the nobler to the Soul that is to die.

Equally unreasonable is their introduction of that other Soul which they piece together from the elements.

How could any form or degree of life come about by a blend of the elements? Their conjunction could produce only a warm or cold or an intermediate substance, something dry or wet or intermediate.

Besides, how could such a soul be a bond holding the four elements together when it is a later thing and rises from them? And this element- soul is described as possessing consciousness and will and the rest- what can we think?

Furthermore, these teachers, in their contempt for this creation and this earth, proclaim that another earth has been made for them into which they are to enter when they depart. Now this new earth is the Reason-Form of our world. Why should they desire to live in the archetype of a world abhorrent to them?

Then again, what is the origin of that pattern world? It would appear, from the theory, that the Maker had already declined towards the things of this sphere before that pattern came into being.

Now let us suppose the Maker craving to construct such an Intermediate World- though what motive could He have?- in addition to the Intellectual world which He eternally possesses. If He made the mid-world first, what end was it to serve?

To be a dwelling-place for Souls?

How then did they ever fall from it? It exists in vain.

If He made it later than this world- abstracting the formal-idea of this world and leaving the Matter out- the Souls that have come to know that intermediate sphere would have experienced enough to keep them from entering this. If the meaning is simply that Souls exhibit the Ideal-Form of the Universe, what is there distinctive in the teaching?

(16) But if that Principle can never fall to evil and we have given a true account of the soul's entry or presence to body, what are we to say of the periodic Descents and Returns, the punishments, the banishment into animal forms? That teaching we have inherited from those ancient philosophers who have best probed into soul and we must try to show that our own doctrine is accordant with it, or at least not conflicting.

We have seen that the participation of things here in that higher means not that the soul has gone outside of itself to enter the corporeal, but that the corporeal has approached soul and is now participant in it; the coming affirmed by the ancients can be only that approach of the body to the higher by which it partakes of life and of soul; this has nothing to do with local entry but is some form of communion; by the descent and embodiment of current phrasing must be understood not that soul becomes an appanage of body but that it gives out to it something of itself; similarly, the soul's departure is the complete cessation of that communion.

The various rankings of the universe will determine various degrees of the communion; soul, ultimate of the Intellectual, will give forth freely to body as being more nearly of the one power and standing closer, as distance holds in that order.

The soul's evil will be this association, its good the release. Why? Because, even unmerged, a soul in any way to be described as attached to this universe is in some degree fallen from the All into a state of partition; essentially belonging to the All, it no longer directs its act Thither: thus, a man's knowledge is one whole, but he may guide himself by no more than some single item of it, where his good would lie in living not by some such fragment but by the total of his knowing.

That One Soul- member of the Intellectual kosmos and there merging what it has of partial into the total- has broken away, so to speak, from the All to the part and to that devotes itself becoming partial with it: thus fire that might consume everything may be set to ply its all-power upon some trifle. So long as the soul remains utterly unattached it is soul not singled out; when it has accepted separation- not that of place but that of act determining individualities- it is a part, no longer the soul entire, or at least not entire in the first sense; when, on the contrary, it exercises no such outward control it is perfectly the All-Soul, the partial in it latent.

As for the entry into the World of the Shades, if this means into the unseen, that is its release; if into some lower place, there is nothing strange in that, since even here the soul is taken to be where the body is, in place with the body.

But on the dissolution of the body?

So long as the image-soul has not been discarded, clearly the higher will be where that is; if, on the contrary, the higher has been completely emancipated by philosophic discipline, the image-soul may very well go alone to that lower place, the authentic passing uncontaminated into the Intellectual, separated from that image but nonetheless the soul entire.

Let the image-offspring of the individuality- fare as it may, the true soul when it turns its light upon itself, chooses the higher and by that choice blends into the All, neither acting now nor extinct.

But it is time to return to our main theme:

(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.

(12) Thus also those skilled in the mysteries forbid "to eat the heart;" teaching that we ought not to gnaw and consume the soul by idleness and by vexation, on account of things which happen against one's wishes. Wretched, accordingly, was the man whom Homer also says, wandering alone, "ate his own heart." But again, seeing the Gospel supposes two ways - the apostles, too, similarly with all the prophets - and seeing they call that one "narrow and confined" which is circumscribed according to the commandments and prohibitions, and the opposite one, which leads to perdition, "broad and roomy," open to pleasures and wrath, and say, "Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, and standeth not in the way of sinners." Hence also comes the fable of Prodicus of Ceus about Virtue and Vice. And Pythagoras shrinks not from prohibiting to walk on the public thoroughfares, enjoining the necessity of not following the sentiments of the many, which are crude and inconsistent. And Aristocritus, in the first book of his Positions against Heracliodorus, mentions a letter to this effect: "Atoeeas king of the Scythians to the people of Byzantium: Do not impair my revenues in case my mares drink your water;" for the Barbarian indicated symbolically that he would make war on them. Likewise also the poet Euphorion introduces Nestor saying,- "We have not yet wet the Achaean steeds in Simois."

(39) And Plato having said,"Wherefore also the gods, knowing men, release sooner from life those they value most, "Menander wrote: "Whom the gods love, dies young." And Euripides having written in the OEnomaus: "We judge of things obscure from what we see;" and in the Phoenix: "By signs the obscure is fairly grasped?- Hyperides says, "But we must investigate things unseen by learning from signs and probabilities." And Isocrates having said, "We must conjecture the future by the past," Andocides does not shrink from saying, "For we must make use of what has happened previously as signs in reference to what is to be." Besides, Theognis having said: "The evil of counterfeit silver and gold is not intoler able, O Cyrnus, and to a wise man is not difficult of detection; But if the mind of a friend is hidden in his breast, If he is false, and has a treacherous heart within, This is the basest thing for mortals, caused by God, And of all things the hardest to detect,"- Euripides writes: "Oh Zeus, why hast thou given to men clear tests Of spurious gold, while on the body grows No mark sufficing to discover clear The wicked man?"

(14) It is clear that Heraclitus regards birth as something evil when he says: "When men are born they are fain to live and suffer death," or rather go to their rest, "and they leave children who also suffer death." Empedocles is obviously in agreement with him when he says: "When I saw the place, so strange it was, I wept and wailed." And further: "For out of the living he made the dead, changing their forms." And again; "0 woe, unhappy race of mortals, wretched men! Out of what kind of dissensions and groans were you born!” And the Sibyl also says: "Mortal men are ye, and fleshly, being nothing," like the poet who writes: "Earth nurtures nothing weaker than a man."

(5) Tell me, in what place is our friend Terentius, Caecilius, Plautus, Varro, if thou knowest; Tell me if they are damned, and in what alley." "These, Persius and myself, and others many," Replied my Leader, "with that Grecian are Whom more than all the rest the Muses suckled, In the first circle of the prison blind; Ofttimes we of the mountain hold discourse Which has our nurses ever with itself. Euripides is with us, Antiphon, Simonides, Agatho, and many other Greeks who of old their brows with laurel decked. There some of thine own people may be seen, Antigone, Deiphile and Argia, And there Ismene mournful as of old. There she is seen who pointed out Langia; There is Tiresias' daughter, and there Thetis, And there Deidamia with her sisters." Silent already were the poets both, Attent once more in looking round about, From the ascent and from the walls released; And four handmaidens of the day already Were left behind, and at the pole the fifth Was pointing upward still its burning horn,

(2) ’Twixt Heaven and Earth, upon the waves of Cosmos, is it dragged in contrary directions, for ever racked with ceaseless pains ; so that in this its deathless nature doth afflict the soul, in that because of its unceasing sense, it hath the yoke of ceaseless torture set upon its neck. Know, then, that we should dread, and be afraid, and [ever] be upon our guard, lest we should be entangled in these [toils]. For those who do not now believe, will after their misdeeds be driven to believe, by facts not words, by actual sufferings of punishment and not by threats.

(1) When, [then,] the soul’s departure from the body shall take place,—then shall the judgment and the weighing of its merit pass into its highest daimon’s power. And when he sees it pious is and just,—he suffers it to rest in spots appropriate to it. But if he find it soiled with stains of evil deeds, and fouled with vice,—he drives it from Above into the Depths, and hands it o’er to warring hurricanes and vortices of Air, of Fire, and Water.

(12) But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? Here surely is a contradiction; on the one side the Soul is above all guilt; on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation; it is doomed to the lower world, it passes from body to body.

We may take either view at will: they are easily reconciled.

When we tell of the sinless Soul, we make Soul and Essential-Soul one and the same: it is the simple unbroken Unity.

By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a groupment, we include that other, that phase of the Soul which knows all the states and passions: the Soul in this sense is compound, all-inclusive: it falls under the conditions of the entire living experience: this compound it is that sins; it is this, and not the other, that pays penalty.

It is in this sense that we read of the Soul: "We saw it as those others saw the sea-god Glaukos." "And," reading on, "if we mean to discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it free of all that has gathered about it, must see into the philosophy of it, examine with what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what Existences it is what it is."

Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator yet another. The retreat and sundering, then, must be not from this body only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes place at birth; or rather birth is the coming-into-being of that other phase of the Soul. For the meaning of birth has been indicated elsewhere; it is brought about by a descent of the Soul, something being given off by the Soul other than that actually coming down in the declension.

Then the Soul has let this image fall? And this declension is it not certainly sin?

If the declension is no more than the illuminating of an object beneath, it constitutes no sin: the shadow is to be attributed not to the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object were not there, the light could cause no shadow.

And the Soul is said to go down, to decline, only in that the object it illuminates lives by its life. And it lets the image fall only if there be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall, not as a thing cut off, but as a thing that ceases to be: the image has no further being when the whole Soul is looking toward the Supreme.

The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this image separate existence; he puts the shade of Hercules in the lower world and Hercules himself among the gods: treating the hero as existing in the two realms at once, he gives us a twofold Hercules.

It is not difficult to explain this distinction. Hercules was a hero of practical virtue. By his noble serviceableness he was worthy to be a God. On the other hand, his merit was action and not the Contemplation which would place him unreservedly in the higher realm. Therefore while he has place above, something of him remains below.

(19) The soul in man, however - not every soul, but one that pious is - is a daimonic something and divine. And such a soul when from the body freed, if it have fought the fight of piety - the fight of piety is to know God and to do wrong to no man - such a soul becomes entirely mind. Whereas the impious soul remains in its own essence, chastised by its own self, and seeking for an earthly body where to enter, if only it be human. For that no other body can contain a human soul; nor is it right that any human soul should fall into the body of a thing that doth possess no reason. For that the law of God is this: to guard the human soul from such tremendous outrage.

(18) But perhaps this school will maintain that, while their teaching leads to a hate and utter abandonment of the body, ours binds the Soul down in it.

In other words: two people inhabit the one stately house; one of them declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but none the less maintains his residence in it; the other makes no complaint, asserts the entire competency of the Architect and waits cheerfully for the day when he may leave it, having no further need of a house: the malcontent imagines himself to be the wiser and to be the readier to leave because he has learned to repeat that the walls are of soulless stone and timber and that the place falls far short of a true home; he does not see that his only distinction is in not being able to bear with necessity assuming that his conduct, his grumbling, does not cover a secret admiration for the beauty of those same "stones." As long as we have bodies we must inhabit the dwellings prepared for us by our good sister the Soul in her vast power of labourless creation.

Or would this school reject the word Sister? They are willing to address the lowest of men as brothers; are they capable of such raving as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the Heavens and the very Soul of the Kosmos? Such kinship, it is true, is not for the vile; it may be asserted only of those that have become good and are no longer body but embodied Soul and of a quality to inhabit the body in a mode very closely resembling the indwelling. of the All-Soul in the universal frame. And this means continence, self-restraint, holding staunch against outside pleasure and against outer spectacle, allowing no hardship to disturb the mind. The All-Soul is immune from shock; there is nothing that can affect it: but we, in our passage here, must call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from the beginning by a great conception of life, annulled by matured strength.

Attaining to something of this immunity, we begin to reproduce within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly bodies: when we are come to the very closest resemblance, all the effort of our fervid pursuit will be towards that goal to which they also tend; their contemplative vision becomes ours, prepared as we are, first by natural disposition and afterwards by all this training, for that state which is theirs by the Principle of their Being.

This school may lay claim to vision as a dignity reserved to themselves, but they are not any the nearer to vision by the claim- or by the boast that while the celestial powers, bound for ever to the ordering of the Heavens, can never stand outside the material universe, they themselves have their freedom in their death. This is a failure to grasp the very notion of "standing outside," a failure to appreciate the mode in which the All-Soul cares for the unensouled.

No: it is possible to go free of love for the body; to be clean-living, to disregard death; to know the Highest and aim at that other world; not to slander, as negligent in the quest, others who are able for it and faithful to it; and not to err with those that deny vital motion to the stars because to our sense they stand still- the error which in another form leads this school to deny outer vision to the Star-Nature, only because they do not see the Star-Soul in outer manifestation.

(2) Now, amongst the profane, some illogically think to go to a non-existence; others that the bodily blending with their proper souls will be severed once for all, as unsuitable to them in a Divine life and blessed lots, not considering nor being sufficiently instructed in Divine science, that our most Godlike life in Christ has already begun. But others assign to souls union with other bodies, committing, as I think, this injustice to them, that, after (bodies) have laboured together with the godly souls, and have reached the goal of their most Divine course, they relentlessly deprive them of their righteous retributions. And others (I do not know how they have strayed to conceptions of such earthly tendency) say, that the most holy and blessed repose promised to the devout is similar to our life in this world, and unlawfully reject, for those who are equal to the Angels, nourishments appropriate to another kind of life. None of the most religious men, however, will ever fall into such errors as these; but, knowing that their whole selves will receive the Christ-like inheritance, when they have come to the goal of this present life, they see more clearly their road to incorruption already become nearer, and extol the gifts of the Godhead, and are filled with a Divine satisfaction, no longer fearing the fall to a worse condition, but knowing well that they will hold firmly and everlastingly the good things already acquired. Those, however, who are full of blemishes, and unholy stains, even though they have attained to some initiation, yet, of their own accord, have, to their own destruction, rejected this from their mind, and have rashly followed their destructive lusts, to them when they have come to the end of their life here, the Divine regulation of the Oracles will no longer appear as before, a subject of scorn, but, when they have looked with different eyes upon the pleasures of their passions destroyed, and when they have pronounced blessed the holy life from which they thoughtlessly fell away, they are, piteously and against their will, separated from this present life, conducted to no holy hope, by reason of their shameful life.