Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [126]
According to Bruno Snell, the first writer to talk systematically of a “soul” as anything recognizable to us was the philosopher Heraclitus, who called the soul “psyche,” distinguished it from the body, and said that the soul is endowed with a “logos,” a rational plan, which was common to humanity and amenable to education. These concepts, according to Snell and Rohde, Heraclitus got from the lyric poets, who described our mental states in much more detail than did Homer.
As in the other ancient cultures, the Greeks faced questions of personal identity not only directly but often obliquely by asking the question: “What will become of me?” The soul, the shade, the anemos, the thymos all helped Greeks understand not only what remained after death but who it was that was doing the thinking and speaking and how to describe these internal processes. The ancient Greeks were sure that the soul separated from the body in dreams and trances; it left the body behind at death. The sophisticated notion of a consistent self in Greek philosophy is the product of a long process of visualization of the next life as well as this one, a meditation on what is the lasting outcome of a life, what is its transcendent meaning.
In fact, like the ancient Egyptian documents, the most early Greek documents could envision a person in several different ways, without a necessary unified view of the “self.” What is different, however, is that through the early lyric poets, they also took an interest in how the self grew and progressed, emotionally and intellectually. They could discuss perception as “taking something in,” or “learning,” with the term daena, cognate to one of the Persian words for the moral self, the daena. There were several words to describe seeing and thinking. Also, forgetting (lanthanesthai) and remembering (mimneskesthai) were extremely important to notions of the “self.” Memory itself played a crucial part in Plato’s proof for the transcendent immortality of the soul.
The early Greeks burned their dead heroes near the battlefield. Perhaps this ritual too is congruent with the notion that the soul separates from the body. But, in more normal circumstances, as when someone died in peacetime, the dead might equally well be entombed or buried. What is unchangeable is that not to be properly cared for through funeral rites was a great disgrace, for soldier or civilian, as Patroklus reminds Achilles. Improper care could bring the ghost back to haunt the perpetrators, as an unburied person was not allowed to enter Hades.10 Sometimes the ghosts could actually become vampires.11 The rite was just more difficult to perform in wartime, therefore more appreciated. Several epitaphs make clear that normally the Greeks assumed that proper rites were effective in keeping the ancestor well-behaved after death, and that proper commemoration at specific intervals kept the memory of the departed alive and socialized within the community and, simultaneously, vindictive ghosts at bay.
Burial Practices
THE FIRST OF these rites was the funeral. The funeral (kedeia) had three distinct phases. They were (1) laying out the body (prothesis), (2) its conveyance to the place of cremation or interment (ekphora), and (3) the disposition proper which was the deposition of the cremated or inhumated remains. Prayers were offered for the chthonic deities to receive the dead kindly; texts of them are sometimes found on tombstones. From the eighth to the fourth century BCE, inhumation and cremation were practiced concurrently, though the popularity of each waxed and waned.12 In Rome, once the correct funeral rituals were performed, the deceased officially belonged to the Di Manes, the communal, sainted