It was at this compromise that paganism stopped when it reached the term of its evolution. Oriental dualism imposed on it its final formula. It no longer admitted, like the ancients, that all the dead must go down from the grave into immense hollows dug in the bowels of the earth, and it no longer made the Elysian Fields and Tartarus two contiguous domains of the kingdom of Pluto. Nor did it transport them both, side by side, as the pagan theologians of the beginning of our era would have done, to the atmosphere and the starry spheres. It separated them radically, cutting the abode of the souls into two halves, of which it placed one in the luminous sky and the other in subterranean darkness. This was also the conception which, after some hesitation, became generally accepted by the Church, and which for long centuries was to remain the common faith of all Christendom.
The astral religion which became predominant in the Roman Empire may be considered as an intermediary, a connecting link, between the old anthropomorphic paganism and the Christian faith. Instead of moral—or, if you prefer, immoral—beings, stronger than man but subject to all the passions of man, it taught the adoration of the heavenly powers who act on nature, and so led mankind to the worship of the Power who is beyond the heavens. This influence of the astral cults of the East can be clearly perceived in the evolution of the ideas as to future life, and this above all constitutes the historical importance of the subject which I venture to treat in this lecture.
Beliefs which are spread among many peoples of the world relate the immortality of the soul to the heavenly bodies. It was for long naïvely imagined that a new sun was created every evening, or at least every winter, and a new moon born each month, and traces of this primitive idea survived in the religion of antiquity and persist even in our modern speech. But when it was realised that the same celestial luminaries reappeared and resumed their ardour after their fires had died and they had ceased to shine, that the stars which were lit at sunset were those which had been extinguished at dawn, their lot was related to that of man, destined like them to be reborn, after death, to a new life. Various savage tribes thus associate the heavenly bodies, and especially the moon, with the resurrection of the dead. The wan circle which sheds its vague light in the darkness of night causes phantoms to appear to haunt vigils and dreams, and is therefore the power which presides over life beyond the tomb. Among the Greeks of the most ancient period Hecate was at one and the same time the goddess of the moon, the summoner of ghosts and the queen of the infernal realm. In the East astrological ideas mingled with this mythology. It was taught that the moon’s cold and damp rays corrupted the flesh of the dead and thus detached from it the soul which finally abandoned the corpse. The Syrians, at the critical times in which the moonbeams exercised a more active influence on this separation, offered sacrifices on tombs, and the threefold commemoration of the dead on the third, the seventh and the fortieth day in a part of the Eastern Church had its earliest origin in these offerings of the sidereal cults.[217]