Finally, a third element--if not universal, common certainly to the Aryan races--will be the conception of the soul separating from the body altogether and mounting upwards to some home in the sky. All these elements are found to exist and coexist in early creeds, and the force of the component parts determines the colour of man’s doctrine about the other world.
[Sidenote: The other world of the Aryans.]
Among all the Aryan peoples the Greeks seem to have turned their thoughts farthest away from the contemplation of the grave; and though the voice of wonder and imagination could not quite be silent upon so important a question, Hades and the kingdom of Hades filled a disproportionately small space in their creed. They shrank from images of Death, and adorned their tombs or cinerary urns with wreaths of flowers and figures of the dancing Hours: it is doubtful if the god Thanatos (Death) has ever been pictured by Greek art.[96] And from what they have left on record concerning Hades and the realms of death, it is evident that they regarded it _chiefly_ from its merely negative side, in that aspect which corresponds most exactly to the notion of a dark subterraneous kingdom, and not to that of a journey to some other distant land. The etymology of their mythical King of Souls corresponds, too, with the same notions. Hades means nothing else than A-eidês, the unseen. And when it was said that the dead had gone to Hades, all that was literally meant was that it had gone to the unseen place. But later on, the place became personified into the grim deity whom we know in Greek mythology, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, he to whose share fell, in the partition of the world, the land of perpetual night. The underworld pictured by Homer is just of that voiceless, sightless character which accords with the name of Hades. Even the great heroes lose almost their identity, and all the joy and interest they had in life. To ‘wander mid shadows a shadow, and wail by impassable streams,’ is henceforward their occupation.
Not that the Greek had _no_ idea of another world of the more heavenly sort; ideas obtained as a joint inheritance with their brother nations; only their thoughts and their poetry do not often centre round such pictures. Their Elysian fields are a western sun’s home, just after the pattern of the Egyptian; and so are their Islands of the Blest, where, according to one tradition, the just Rhadamanthus had been transported when he fled from the power of his brother Minôs.[97] Only, observe, there is this difference between these Paradises and the Egyptian house of Osiris--the latter was reached across the sandy desert, the former are separated by the ocean from the abode of men. These are the _Heavens_ of the Greek mythology; while the realm of Hades--or later on the realm Hades--might by contrast be called their Hell. Let us look a little nearer at this heaven-picture.