I

THE POWER OF THE DEAD TO RETURN TO EARTH


Though there is no period at which the ancients do not seem to have
believed in a future life, continual confusion prevails when they come
to picture the existence led by man in the other world, as we see from
the sixth book of the _Æneid_. Combined with the elaborate mythology of
Greece, we are confronted with the primitive belief of Italy, and
doubtless of Greece too--a belief supported by all the religious rites
in connection with the dead--that the spirits of the departed lived on
in the tomb with the body. As cremation gradually superseded burial, the
idea took shape that the soul might have an existence of its own,
altogether independent of the body, and a place of abode was assigned to
it in a hole in the centre of the earth, where it lived on in eternity
with other souls.

This latter view seems to have become the official theory, at least in
Italy, in classical days. In the gloomy, horrible Etruscan religion, the
shades were supposed to be in charge of the Conductor of the Dead--a
repulsive figure, always represented with wings and long, matted hair
and a hammer, whose appearance was afterwards imitated in the dress of
the man who removed the dead from the arena. Surely something may be
said for Gaston Boissier's suggestion that Dante's Tuscan blood may
account to some extent for the gruesome imagery of the _Inferno_.

Cicero[1] tells us that it was generally believed that the dead lived on
beneath the earth, and special provision was made for them in every