Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [132]
But there surely is also a major contrast between the two stories. Odysseus gives up immortality for fame. On the other hand, the story of Demeter is linked to a seasonal, repeating pattern, in which immortality of some sort inheres to the proper initiation into the natural cycle of seasonal variation. It is an immortality that comes from instruction, from agrarian rhythm, from householding, and from the Greeks’ traditionally female-gendered values of natural repetition and continuity. In the end, however, immorality is available to a much wider group of humans, men and women, than is the older heroic ideal represented by Odysseus. Only a few men could hope for the fame which Odysseus and his compatriots received. But a much wider group of people (men and women) could take advantage of the initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries.
It is worth digressing for a few moments to see how broad the pattern provided by Demeter and Persephone is. In Greek myth, Persephone’s plight helps explain the alternation of seasons in Greece. A number of divinities in other societies are said to die or revive for similar reasons.31 The Norse pantheon was viewed as immortal for a time until the “twilight of the gods” when they will all die. “The Green Knight” of English courtly romance survives decapitation by Sir Gawain. The story suggests that this resurrection represents the agricultural year itself, with its repeated patterns of growth and decay. It is worthwhile emphasizing that the Eleusinian mysteries were only the most famous of this kind of cult. There were several others of great antiquity in Greece, including Orphic and Bacchic mysteries. In the Hellenistic period, a number of national religions of non-Greek countries package themselves for diaspora and become popular mysteries throughout the Roman world-Isis, Mithras, the great mother Cybele, Adonis, and many others. The religion of Christianity starts in a Jewish milieu but picks up the language of mystery religions when it enters the Hellenistic and Roman world in the second and third centuries.
Other Myths of Heroes
AFTER THE Homeric period, many different notions of immortality coexisted with the older notions remembered in legend and epic. The Greeks told stories of heroes like Hercules, Perseus, or Castor and Pollux who, after dying, mounted to heaven. One other exception to the universal call of Hades was the cult of heroes. Every culture has its heroes but Greek culture listed them among the gods, not among humans. They were, in a sense, humans who had been apotheosized, deified, changed into gods. They were immortalized not just by fame and legend but also by ascent to the stars and memorialized, most of all, by their hero cult.
Great heroes had ascended to become astral constellations: Herakles, Orion, Perseus, and many of the other characters named in their dramas. But there were many, many more heroes in ancient Greece. Much like saints, the heroes each had their shrine (herōon), or at least their own altar (bomos). They were powerful enough to be rewarded with sacrifices (enagizein), begged for their benefices, and worshiped as patron saints by an entire locality. It is on the basis of the hero cults as much as on the basis of “oriental notions of divine kingship” that the Roman Emperors sought out the title divus.
The Greek world also boasted of a number of renowned characters who were revived from death. The noble Alcestis, a paradigm for self-sacrificing wives, died