8

The Two Paths in the Afterlife

At this point it is necessary to discuss the connection between the order of ideas I have outlined so far and the problem of one’s destiny in the afterlife. In this context too, reference should be made to teachings that have almost entirely been lost in recent times.

The belief that everybody’s soul is immortal is rather odd; very little evidence of it can be found in the world of Tradition. In Tradition, a distinction was made between true immortality, which corresponded to participation in the Olympian nature of a god, and mere survival; also, various forms of possible survival came into play and the problem of the postmortem condition of each individual was analyzed, always taking into consideration the various elements present in the human aggregate, since man was far from being reduced to the simple binomial “soul-body.”

What continuously emerges in various forms in ancient traditions is the teaching that in man, in addition to the physical body, there are essentially three entities or principles, each endowed with its own character and destiny. The first principle corresponds to the conscious “I” typical of the waking state, which arose with the body and was formed in parallel with its biological development; this is the ordinary personality. The second principle was called “demon,” ‘ manes,” ” lar,” and even “double.” The third and last principle corresponds to what proceeds from the first entity after death; for most people, it is the “shadow.”

As long as a person belongs to “nature,” the ultimate foundation of a human being is the daemon or “demon,” (δαίμων in Greek); in this context the term does not have the evil connotation Christianity bestowed upon it. When man is considered from a naturalistic point of view, the demon, could be defined as the deep force that originally produced consciousness in the ;finite form that is the body in which it lives during its residence in the visible world. This force eventually remains “behind” the individual, in the preconscious and in the subconscious dimensions, as the foundation of organic processes and subtle relations with the environment, other beings, and with past and future destiny; these relations usually elude any direct perception. In this regard, in many traditions the demon corresponds to the so-called double, which is perhaps a reference to the soul of the soul or the body itself; this “double” has also often been closely associated with the primordial ancestor or with the totem conceived as the soul and the unitary life that generated a stock, a family, a gens, or a tribe, and therefore it has a broader sense than the one given to it by some schools of contemporary ethnology. The single individuals of a group appear as various incarnations or emanations of this demon or totem, which is the “spirit” pulsating in their blood; they live in it and it lives in them, though transcending them, just as the matrix transcends the particular forms it produces out of its own substance. In the Hindu tradition the demon corresponds to that principle of man’s inner being called liṅga-sarīra. The word liṅga contains the idea of a generating power; hence, the possible derivation of genius from genere, which means to act in the sense of begetting; and hence, the Roman and Greek belief that the genius or lar (demon) is the same procreating force without which a family would become extinct. It is also very significant that totems have often been associated with the “souls” of selected animal species, and that especially the snake, essentially a telluric animal, has been associated in the classical world with the idea of demon or of genius. These two instances bear witness to the fact that in its immediacy this force is essentially subpersonal, and belongs to nature and to the infernal world. Thus, according to the symbolism of the Roman tradition, the seat of the lares is underground; they are in the custody of a female principle, Mania, who is the Mater Larum.

According to esoteric teachings, at the death of the body an ordinary person usually loses his or her personality, which was an illusory thing even while that person was alive. The person is then reduced to a shadow that is itself destined to be dissolved after a more or less lengthy period culminating in what was called “the second death.”^[1] The essential vital principles of the deceased return to the totem, which is a primordial, perennial, and inexhaustible matter; life will again proceed from this matter and assume other individual forms, all of which are subject to the same destiny. This is the reason why totems, manes, lares, or penates (the gods of the Roman people, “to whom we owe the breath within us and by whom we possess our bodies and our power of thought” ^[2] were identified with the dead; the cult of the ancestors, the demons, and the invisible generating force that is present in everybody was often confused with the cult of the dead. The “souls” of the deceased continued to exist in the dii manes into whom they were dissolved, but also in those forces of the stock, the race, or the family in which the life of these dii manes was manifested and perpetuated.

This teaching concerns the naturalistic order. There is, however, a second teaching relating to a higher order and a different, more privileged, aristocratic, and sacred solution to the problem of survival after death. It is possible to establish a connection here with the ideas expressed above concerning those ancestors who, through their “victory,” bestowed a sacred legacy upon the ensuing patrician generations that reenact and renew the rite.

The “heroes” or demigods to whom the higher castes and the noble families of traditional antiquity traced their lineage were beings who at death (unlike most people or unlike those who had been defeated in the trials of the afterlife) did not emanate a “shadow” or the larva of an ego that was eventually destined to die anyway; instead, they were beings who had achieved the self-subsistent, transcendent, and incorruptible life of a “god.” They were those who “had overcome the second death.” This was possible because they had more or less directly imposed upon their own vital force that change of nature I mentioned before when talking about the transcendent meaning of “sacrifice.” Ancient Egyptian traditions clearly articulated the task of creating out of the ka (another name for the “double” or the “demon”) some kind of new incorruptible body (sahu) that was supposed to replace the physical body and “stand on its own feet” in the invisible dimension. In other traditions it is possible to find the identical concept under the names of “immortal body,” “body of glory,” or “resurrection body.” Therefore, if in their traditions the Greeks of Homer’s time (as in the first Aryan period when the Vedas were written) did not contemplate the survival of the soul alone, but instead, believed the survivors (those who had been “kidnapped” or “made invisible” by the gods and who had settled in the “island of the blessed,” where there is no death) retained soul and body in an indissoluble unity, this should not be understood as a coarse materialistic representation, as many historians of religion today are inclined to believe, but as the symbolic expression of the idea of an “immortal body” and the condition for immortality; this idea enjoyed its classical formulation in Far Eastern esotericism, and more specifically, in operative Taoism. The Egyptian sahu, created by the rite, thanks to which the deceased can go on to live in the company of solar gods, indicates a body that has achieved a high degree of knowledge, power, and glory and that has thus become everlasting and incorruptible. This body is referred to in the following formulation: “Your soul lives, your body germinates eternally at Ra’s command without any diminution or defect, just like Ra’s.” In this context the attainment of immortality or the victory over adverse powers of dissolution is related to wholeness, namely, to the inseparability of the soul from the body—better yet, from a body that does not undergo decay. There is a very suggestive Vedic formula: “Leaving behind every fault, go back home. Filled with splendor, be reunited with your body.”^[3] The Christian dogma of the “resurrection of the flesh” that will take place on Judgment Day is the last echo of this idea, which can be traced back to prehistoric times.^[4]

In these instances death did not represent an end but a fulfillment. It was a “triumphal death” bestowing immortality and was the reason why in some Hellenic traditions the deceased was called “hero” and dying was called “generating demigods” (ἥρωα γίνεσθαι); or why the deceased was portrayed wearing a crown (often put on his head by the goddesses of victory) made with the same myrtle that identified those who were going to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries; or why in the Catholic liturgical language the day of death is called dies natalis (day of birth); or why in Egypt the tombs of the deceased who had been dedicated to Osiris were called “houses of immortality,” and the afterlife was conceived as “the land of triumph”; or why in ancient Rome the emperor’s “demon” was worshiped as divine, and why the kings, legislators, victorious generals, and founders of those institutions or traditions that were believed to involve an action and a conquest beyond nature were worshiped as heroes, demigods, gods, and avatars of different deities. The sacred foundation of the authority the elders enjoyed in several ancient civilizations lies in similar ideas. People saw in the eiders, who were closer to death, the manifestation of the divine force that was thought to achieve its full liberation at death.^[5]

Thus, as far as the destiny of the soul after death is concerned, there are two opposite paths. The first is the “path of the gods,” also known as the “solar path” or Zeus’s path, which leads to the bright dwelling of the immortals. This dwelling was variously represented as a height, heaven, or an island, from the Nordic Valhalla and Asgard to the Aztec-Inca “House of the Sun” that was reserved for kings, heroes, and nobles. The other path is that trodden by those who do not survive in a real way, and who slowly yet inexorably dissolve back into their original stocks, into the “totems” that unlike single individuals, never die; this is the life of Hades, of the “infernals,” of Niflheim, of the chthonic deities.^[6] This teaching is found in the Hindu tradition where the expressions deva-yāna and pitṛ-yāna signify “path of the gods,” and “path of the ancestors” (in the sense of manes), respectively. It is also said: ”These two paths, one bright and the other dark, are considered eternal in the universe. In the former, man goes out and then comes back; in the latter he keeps on returning.” The first path “leading to Brahman,” namely, to the unconditioned state, is analogically associated with fire, light, the day, and the six months of the solar ascent during the year; it leads to the region of thunderbolts, located beyond the “door of the sun.” The second path, which is related to smoke, night, and the six months of the sun’s descent leads to the moon, which is the symbol of the principle of change and becoming and which is manifested here as the principle regulating the cycle of finite beings who continuously come and go in many ephemeral incarnations of the ancestral forces.^[7] According to an interesting symbolism, those who follow the lunar path become the food of the manes and are “sacrificed” again by them in the semen of new mortal births. According to another significant symbol found in the Greek tradition, those who have not been initiated, that is to say, the majority of people, are condemned in Hades to do the Danaïdes’ work; carrying water in amphorae filled with holes and pouring it into bottomless barrels, thus never being able to fill them up; this illustrates the insignificance of their ephemeral lives, which keep recurring over and over again, pointlessly. Another comparable Greek symbol is Ocnus, who plaited a rope on the Plains of Lethe. This rope was continually eaten by an ass. Ocnus symbolizes man’s activity, while the ass traditionally embodies the “demonic” power; in Egypt the ass was associated with the snake of darkness and with Am-mit, the “devourer of the dead.”

In this context we again find the basic ideas concerning the “two natures” that I discussed in the first chapter. But here it is possible to. penetrate deeper into the meaning of the existence in antiquity not only of two types of divinities, (the former Uranian and solar, the latter telluric and lunar), but also of the existence of two essentially distinct types (at times even opposed to each other) of rite and cult.^[8] A civilization’s degree of faithfulness to Tradition is determined by the degree of the predominance of cults and rituals of the first type over those of the second type. Likewise, the nature and the function of the rites proper to the world of “spiritual virility” is specified.

A characteristic of what today goes by the name of the “science of religions” is that whenever by sheer chance it finds the right key to solve a “mystery,” it reaches the conclusion that this key is good to solve all mysteries. Thus, when some scholars learned about the idea of the totem, they began to see totems everywhere. The “totemic” interpretation was shamelessly applied to the forms found in great civilizations, since some scholars thought that the best explanation for them could be derived from earlier studies on primitive tribes. Last but not least, a sexual theory of the totem eventually came to be formulated.

I will not say that the shift from the totems of those primitive populations to a traditional regality was a historical development; at most, it was an evolution in an ideal sense. A regal or an aristocratic tradition arises wherever there is dominion over the totems and not dominion of the totems, and wherever the bond is inverted and the deep forces of the stock are given a superbiological orientation by a supernatural principle in the direction of an Olympian “victory” and immortality. To establish ambiguous promiscuities that make individuals more vulnerable to the powers on which they depend as natural beings, thus allowing the center of their being to fall deeper and deeper into the collective and into the prepersonal dimensions and to “placate” or to propitiate certain infernal influences, granting them their wish to become incarnated in the souls and in the world of men—this is the essence of an inferior cult that is only an extension of the way of being of those who have no cult and no rite at all. In other words, it is the characteristic of the extreme degeneration of higher traditional forms. To free human beings from the dominion of the totems; to strengthen them; to address them to the fulfillment of a spiritual form and a limit; and to bring them in an invisible way to the line of influences capable of creating a destiny of heroic and liberating immortality—this was the task of the aristocratic cult.^[9] When human beings persevered in this cult, the fate of Hades was averted and the “way of the Mother” was barred. Once the divine rites were neglected, however, this destiny was reconfirmed and the power of the inferior nature became omnipotent again. In this way, the meaning of the abovementioned Oriental teaching is made manifest, namely, that those who neglect the rites cannot escape “hell,” this word meaning both a way of being in this life and a destiny in the next. In its deepest sense, the duty to preserve, nourish, and develop the mystical fire (which was considered to be the body of the god of the families, cities, and empires, as well as, according to a Vedic expression, the “custodian of immortality”^[10] without any interruption concealed the ritual promise to preserve, nourish, and develop the principle of a higher destiny and contact with the overworld that were created by the ancestor. In this way this fire is most intimately related to the fire, which especially in the Hindu and in the Greek view and, more generally speaking, in the Olympian-Aryan ritual of cremation, burns in the funeral pyre; this fire was the symbol of the power that consumes the last remains of the earthly nature of the deceased until it generates beyond it the “fulgurating form” of an immortal.^[11]

Footnotes

1. The Egyptian tradition referred to those who are damned in the afterlife judgment as “twice dead.” They become the victims of the infernal monster Amam (“The Devourer”) or Am-mit (“The Corpse Eater”). The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains formulations designed to help a person “to elude the second death in the next world.” “Judgment” is just an allegory. It is rather an impersonal and objective process, as the symbol of the scale weighing the “hearts” of the deceased seems to suggest, since nothing could prevent a scale from being weighed down by the greater weight. As far as the “sentencing” is concerned, it also presupposes the inability to realize some possibilities of immortality granted in the postmortem; these possibilities are alluded to by some traditional teachings, from Egypt to Tibet, and described in their respective “Books of the Dead.” Also, see the Aztec traditions concerning the “trials” undergone by the deceased and the magical formulas employed by them.

2. Macrobius, Satumalia, 3.4.

3. Ṛg Veda, 10.14.8.

4. D. Merezhkovsky (Dante [Bologna, 1939]), wrote: “In Paleolithic times soul and body were believed to be inseparable; united in this world they remained joined together in the next world too. As strange as it may seem, cave men knew a ‘resurrection of the flesh’ which a Socrates and a Plato, with their ‘immortality of the soul,’ seem to have forgotten.”

5. Such a justification of the authority of the leaders is still preserved among some primitive populations.

6. Among Assyrian-Babylonian people we find conceptions of a larval state, similar to the Hellenic Hades, awaiting the majority of people after death.

Also, see the Jewish notion of the dark and cold sheol in which the deceased, including prestigious figures such as Abraham and David, led an unconscious and impersonal existence. The notion of torments, terrors and punishments in the afterlife (like the Christian notion of “hell”) is very recent and extraneous to the pure and original forms of Tradition; in these forms we find only the difference between the aristocratic, heroic, solar, and Olympian survival for some, and the dissolution, loss of personal consciousness, larval life, or return into the cycle of generation for the others. In various traditions (e.g., in Egypt and in ancient Mexico) the fate of the postmortem of those who underwent the latter destiny was not even considered.

7. In Maitrāyaṇī Upaniṣad (6.30) the “path of the ancestors” is also called “the path of the Mother,” more on which later. See also Bhagavadgrītā, 8.24–26.

8. All the main characteristics of the Greek religion are related to the opposition between chthonic and Olympian deities. The opposition was not merely between Hades, Persephone, Demeter, Dionysus and Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo. It was not just a matter of the difference between two orders of gods, but also of the opposition between radically different cults; the consequences of this opposition affected even the smallest details of the daily cult. In the second part of this work I will show an analogous opposition, including its development, in other civilizations.

9. In some traditions there is the belief in two demons: a divine and friendly demon (the “good demon” or αγαθός δαîμων) and an earthly demon, subjected to the body and to passions. The former may represent transformed influences, or the “triumphal” heredity that the individual can confirm and renew or betray whenever he gives in to his inferior nature, expressed by the other demon.

10. Concerning the relationship between the fire tended by noble families and a divine survival, see The Laws of Manu, 2.232.

11. This form is the same superindividual form of the divine ancestor or of the god into whom the limited consciousness of the individual becomes transformed; this is why in Greece the name of the deceased sometimes was substituted with the name of the founding father of his stock. We may also refer to the Zen koan: “Show me the face you had before you were born.”