Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In Vedic thought, man’s life fell into two phases. His earthly life was seen as the more desirable. The hymns of the Rig Veda speak of a people living life to the full – valuing good health, eating and drinking, material luxuries, children.⁴⁰ But there was a post-mortem phase, the quality of which was, to an extent, determined by one’s piety on earth. However, the two phases were definitive: there was no idea whatsoever that the soul might return to live again on earth – that was a later invention. In the early stage, when Vedic bodies were buried, the dead were imagined as living in an underworld, presided over by Yama, the death-god.⁴¹ The dead were buried with personal articles and even food, though what part of a person was thought to survive is not clear.⁴² The Indo-Aryans thought of an individual as composed of three entities – the body, the asu, and the manas. The asu was in essence the ‘life principle’, equivalent to the Greek psyche, while the manas were the seat of the mind, the will and the emotions, equivalent to the Greek thymos. There appears to have been no word, and no idea, for the soul as an ‘essential self’. Why there was a change from burial to cremation isn’t clear either.

If one accepts the existence of souls, it follows that there is a need for a place where they can go, after death. This raises the question of where a whole constellation of associated ideas came from – the afterlife, resurrection, and heaven and hell.

The first thing to say is that heaven, hell and the immortal soul were relative latecomers in the ancient world.⁴³ The modern concept of the immortal soul is a Greek idea, which owes much to Pythagoras. Before that, most ancient civilisations thought that man had two kinds of soul. There was the ‘free-soul’, which represented the individual personality. And there were a number of ‘body-souls’ which endowed the body with life and consciousness.⁴⁴ For the early Greeks, for example, human nature was composed of three entities: the body, the psyche, identified with the life principle and located in the head; and the thymos, ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’, located in the phrenes, or lungs.⁴⁵ During life, the thymos was regarded as more important but it didn’t survive death, whereas the psyche became the eidolon, a shadowy form of the body.

This distinction was not maintained beyond the sixth century BC, when the psyche came to be thought of as both the essential self, the seat of consciousness and the life principle. Pindar thought the psyche was of divine origin and therefore immortal.⁴⁶ In developing the idea of the immortal soul Pythagoras was joined by Parmenides and Empedocles, other Greeks living alongside him in southern Italy and Sicily. They were associated with a mystical and puritanical sect known as the Orphics, who at times were ‘fanatical vegetarians’. This appears to have been part of a revolt over sacrifice and the sect used mind-altering drugs – hashish, hemp and cannabis (though here the scholarship is very controversial). These ideas and practices are said to have come from the Scythians, whose homeland was north of the Black Sea (and was visited by Homer). They boasted a curious cult, surrounding a number of individuals suffering a chronic physical disease, possibly haemochromatosis, and possibly brought on by rich iron deposits in the area. This condition culminates in total impotence and eunuchism. There are a number of accounts of cross-dressing in the area and these individuals may have led the funerary ceremonies in Scythia, at which ecstasy-inducing drugs were used.⁴⁷ Was this cult the foundation for Orphism and were the trances and hallucinations induced by drugs the mechanism whereby the Greeks conceived the idea of the soul and, associated with it, reincarnation? Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato all believed in reincarnation and in metempsychosis – the idea that souls could come back in other animals and even in plants. The Orphics believed that the actual form the soul took on reincarnation was a penalty for some ‘original sin’.⁴⁸ Both Socrates and Plato shared Pindar’s idea of the divine origin of the soul and it is here that the vision took root that the soul was in fact more precious than the body. This was not, it should be said, the majority view of Athenians, who mainly thought of souls as unpleasant things who were hostile to the living. Many Greeks did not believe that there was life after death.⁵