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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter III: Part I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{life
dionysos
zeus
new
religion
god
gods
orphic
nature
greek}
$Date{1913}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Greece
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter III: Part I

From The Age Of Colonisation To The Peloponnesian War

     The Age of Expansion - Effect of New Conditions on Religion - Demeter -
Dionysos - Savage Features of Myth and Cult - The Hope of Immortality - Orphic
Mysteries - Cosmogony and Theogony - The Other Life - The Eleusinian Mysteries
- Salvation - Other Mysteries and Salvationist Sects - The Ionian Philosophy -
Attacks on the Popular Religion - Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras -
Democritus - The Sophists - Agnosticism - Theories of the Origin of Religion -
Influence of the Sophists - Effect of the Persian Wars - Greek Worship - Holy
Places - Priesthoods - Sacrifices - Expiations - Festivals - Oracles

     In Hesiod, as has already been remarked, a very different spirit breathes
from that which inspired the epic poets.  This difference is in part personal:
the sturdy Boeotian farmer was a man of another race and temperament from the
bards who sang at the courts of Ionian princes; his surroundings and interests
were remote from theirs.  But besides the individuality of the poet we hear in
him the first voice of a new time. In the eighth century began a period of
commercial expansion and colonisation, in which the Ionian cities of Asia
Minor, particularly Miletus, took the lead, closely followed by those of
Euboea and the Isthmus.  All around the eastern end of the Mediterranean, from
Propontis and the Black Sea to the Cyrenaica, and westward to Sicily and
southern Italy, new Greek settlements were planted and old ones acquired new
importance.  The maritime cities, with their extensive commerce, outgrew the
inland towns; the demand for export stimulated domestic industries and led to
production on a commercial scale.  The opening of Egypt under Psammetichos,
and the rise of a new Lydian dynasty which in the end brought most of Asia
Minor this side the Halys under its sway, made new fields for enterprise and
adventure; Greek mercenaries and traders penetrated far into these countries.
Though the colonies were planted by particular cities, and reproduced the
social and political organisation of the old home as they established the
worship of the ancestral gods, they drew to themselves immigrants from many
places, and, in the presence of races of alien speech and custom, the settlers
felt themselves members of one Hellenic people.  Commerce had to be protected
against pirates, colonies against the aggression of neighbours; thus navies
were created, and a new era of Greek politics began.

     The effects of these conditions were manifold and far-reaching not only
abroad but at home.  The landed aristocracy lost its political and social
pre-eminence; rich merchants and manufacturers soon thought themselves quite
as good as the old nobility with their long pedigrees and their unproductive
acres.  Household industries were displaced by manufacture; industrial slavery
became profitable, and foreign slaves were in demand.  The condition of the
free peasant was harder with the decline of agriculture, and the country
people thronged into the cities in the hope of bettering their fortunes.  The
freer life of the colonies reacted on the old country.  The old social order,
in which every man's place and status were fixed, broke down under all these
changes; and as in the modern age of colonisation and emigration,
individualism was the signature of the time in every sphere of life.

     This spirit finds expression in a new form in poetry.  The stately
hexameter measures of Homer and Hesiod give place to elegiacs and the mordant
or familiar iambic; the objective recital of what was done and said in the
far-away past of the heroic age, to the subjectivity of the lyric poet, the
thought and feeling of the individual and the hour, or to moral reflections
and exhortations addressed to his contemporaries.

     The institutions which had sufficed for a simpler time were no longer
adequate for the new economic and social conditions; the customary law had no
provision for commerce and large industry, the administration of law was
ineffective, justice was corrupted or perverted by wealth and influence.  The
censure of their times by the gnomic poets is strikingly similar to what we
read in the Hebrew prophets of the eighth century.  The new classes demanded
reform in polity and law.  First in the colonies, then in Greece itself, men
of character and reputation were called on to draft new constitutions and
legislation - it is enough to name Zaleucus, Charondas, and the Cretan
legists; at Athens, Draco (ca. 624) and Solon (594).  It is significant that
the Solonian constitution, recognising the existing state of things, accepted
the principle of timocracy, in which the citizens were divided into classes on
the basis of their possessions - a graduated aristocracy of wealth.  The laws
aimed to put an end to inveterate evils by reforms in judicial process, and to
stay new ones by prohibiting usury, by sumptuary provisions against luxury in
dress and retinue, and by punishing idleness and beggary.  At home and abroad
the spirit of individual enterprise stimulated by a commercial age easily took
in practice the form "every man for himself." The traditional ethos of the
community was as ill-adapted to this situation as its customary law; the
ancient sanctions, both social and religious, were inadequate.  Moral
aphorisms and cohortations such as we find in Hesiod and the gnomic poets show
how grave the evil was in the eyes of serious men, but it can hardly be
imagined that they were effective to stay it.

     Political and social unrest was universal.  A century of class conflict
was the consequence, the country people trying to get a foothold in the city,
the descendants of immigrants to get equal rights with the old citizens, the
new rich to get a hand in the government.  The old political order gave way
before the rising demos; tyrants took advantage of the dissolution and
resulting disorder to usurp sole power.

     These profound social, economic, and political changes were not without
their effect upon religion.  It was easy for the colonists to erect altars to
the gods of the home land, but they could not transfer to them the sacredness
of the ancient holy places at which their fathers had worshipped for
centuries, the local myths and the festival rites which attached to them - in
a word, the thousand associations by which religion was rooted in its native
soil.  The peoples on whose shores the Greek settlements were planted had gods
whom the newcomers identified with their own, and myths and rites of barbarian
origin were engrafted upon the worship of Greek deities.

     The country people who poured into the cities brought with them rustic
gods and cults, which grew in importance with the increasing numbers and power
of the demos.  They may sometimes have been favoured by tyrants - who often
posed as the champions of the masses against the classes - in preference to
the older gods, whose cults were in the hands of certain noble families by
hereditary right.  Of these deities Demeter was the most prominent.  Demeter,
as has already been noted, was an old Greek goddess of the soil and the crops;
when, incensed with the gods for permitting the abduction of her daughter, she
refrains from exercising her divine functions, men plough and sow in vain,
humankind is threatened with starvation and the gods with the cessation of
offerings.  Like other agrarian deities, she is also connected with the abode
of the buried dead beneath the earth.  In the myth which forms the subject of
the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, her daughter Persephone, while gathering flowers
with her maiden comrades, is seized by Hades and carried off to his nether
realm. The mourning mother, veiling her godhead, serves as a nurse in the
household of Keleos, King of Eleusis, and by her abstention brings men and
gods to such straits that Zeus intervenes and sends Hermes to bring Persephone
back to earth.  She has, however, tasted the food of Hades, and must therefore
return to live with him a third of the time; but each year, when earth is
blooming with fragrant spring flowers, she comes up from the murky gloom, "a
great marvel to gods and mortal men."

     As a goddess of husbandry Demeter did not supplant the older deities of
the state; at Athens the chief agricultural festivals are celebrated in honour
of Athena and Apollo, at Argos to Hera; those of Demeter are supplementary, or
have their seats in rural demes.  Nor did she ever, in her own person, become
the mistress of the nether world.  Her great importance in the history of
Greek religion lies not in her public cults, but in the mysteries to which we
shall return presently.

     Unlike Demeter, who is a Hellenic deity minorum gentium tardily admitted
into the company of the Olympians, Dionysos is a foreigner from half-barbarous
Thrace.  That he also was closely associated with the life of nature,
particularly with wild nature, is clear both from myth and from ritual; it was
only in Greece, however, that he became specifically the god of the vine.  The
phallus, which is so conspicuous in Dionysiac ritual, belongs to a wide-spread
type of vegetation magic, and the bull is in numerous religions the embodiment
of the reproductive forces not only of animal but of plant life.

     In the Homeric epics Dionysos is a foreigner: the Iliad (VI, 130 ff.), as
a warning to men not to contend with the gods, tells the fate of the Thracian
hero Lycurgus, who, armed with an ox-goad, chased "the nurses of the raving
Dionysos," and so terrified the god himself that he plunged for refuge to the
depths of the sea.  The savage features of the worship of Dionysos were
clearly the first thing that struck the Greeks: the raving god had raving
worshippers, especially women votaries, the maenads, who, roaming by night
upon the mountains, waving torches, circling in wild dances, crying aloud upon
the name of the god, brought on the Bacchic frenzy; living beasts were rent
limb from limb, the quivering flesh and dripping blood were fiercely devoured.
There are more than suggestions in the myths that human victims were sometimes
used in the same way.  The god himself receives the significant epithet,
"raw-flesh-eater."

     That the Greeks were repelled by such savagery is plain; but that it had
for them a singular attraction is no less plain.  The irrational and the
horrible have, in fact, a fascination of their own, and it has been often
noted that the rites of uncivilised peoples, in proportion to their
strangeness, seem to more cultivated neighbours to embody a mysterious wisdom
or a peculiarly efficacious magic.  Other and deeper reasons for the spread of
the religion of Dionysos in Greece and for the hold it gained will come under
consideration later.  That the progress of the new religion was not
uncontested appears from numerous myths of the calamities that befell such as
opposed the god and his worshippers.  Euripides has made one of these the
subject of the Bacchae: Pentheus, King of Thebes, tries to keep the women from
joining the wild revels of Dionysos; he is torn to pieces by the maenads,
headed by his own mother, who in her madness takes him for a wild animal.  Of
similar purport are the legends of Minyas at Orchomenos, of the Proetidae at
Argos, and others.  The point of them all is the terrible vengeance the
spurned god takes on his enemies.

     The worship of Dionysos seems to have made its way into Greece by more
than one route.  In Boeotia, Orchomenos and Thebes were ancient centres of the
religion; the myth of the god's birth was localised at the latter.  It may be
inferred from the silence of the Homeric Hymn to the Pythian Apollo that when
that poem was composed Dionysos had not yet invaded Delphi; but when he came,
with the prestige of popularity already achieved in Boeotia and perhaps in
Attica, the priesthood of Apollo seem to have given him a friendly reception,
assigning to him the three winter months, and themselves organising the revels
of his women votaries on Mount Parnassus.  The religion of Dionysos was
probably introduced into Athens in the time of the monarchy, and it had been
received in some of the country demes before it reached the capital; the
Pisistratidae were especially addicted to his worship.  An early and important
centre of the religion was Crete; the worship flourished also in the
Peloponnesus and in the Greek cities of Asia Minor.

     In becoming a Greek god, the wild Thracian deity was tamed and civilised;
in the public cults of classical times the savage features of his original
worship have pretty much disappeared, or linger only, like the savage rites of
the older Hellenic religions, in obscure corners.  If one of his great
festivals at Athens, the Lenaia, still bears in its name the memory of the
"wild women," the wildness had been conventionalised. In Attica, where
Dionysos in his character of god of the vine takes his place by the side of
Demeter the goddess of the grain crops, the broaching of the jars of last
year's wine at the Anthesteria in February is a feast in his honour, but that
the vintage is not his great festival is one of the many things which show
that his vinous character is secondary.  The Attic festivals of Dionysos fall
in the winter and spring (December to March).  The torches at the Lenaia, the
phallic procession and songs, particularly at the rural Dionysia, characterise
them as Bacchic; but in other features they took the common type of Attic
celebrations.  They are of the greatest importance for the history not only of
religion but of literature, for out of the dances and mummery of the Dionysia
the Attic drama was evolved.

     The religion of Dionysos gave freer room to the emotional element than
the worship of the old Hellenic gods.  Not that this element was lacking in
the latter, but, speaking generally, it was kept within decorous bounds and
expressed in dignified and measured forms; elevation rather than excitement
was the prevailing mood of the festivals of Apollo or Athena.  The Thracian
cult of Dionysos had a different character: through it men strove to
experience religion by union with the godhead. As they enacted the savage
myth, rushing breathless through the mysterious solitudes of the mountains by
the light of flaring torches, or rending the victim limb from limb and tearing
its palpitating flesh with their teeth, the divine frenzy overcame them, the
god himself possessed them.  In all ages and in the most diverse religions men
have sought thus to feel the divine life throbbing fiercely in their pulses,
their senses quickened to perceive the unseen world.  Consciousness,
overwhelmed by the incoming flood of god-consciousness, swoons, and man is
rapt into the fulness of the godhead with its all-comprehending intuition and
ineffable beatitude. It is a long way from the maenad to the Neoplatonic
philosopher, but both in their own ways sought - and found - the supreme
experience of God.

     It is altogether likely that the Thracian ritual had at the beginning
another and more practical significance.  Dionysos was, as we have seen, the
power which revealed itself in the life of trees and plants and in the new
life which awakes after the wintry death of nature.  Midwinter ceremonies to
call the god to life again, or, in more primitive apprehension, to put new
life and power into him, are common, and the cults which have grown out of
what we from our superior standpoint call "vegetation magic" have elsewhere a
tragic or an orgiastic character. ^1

[Footnote 1: In climates where it is not icy winter but the burning sun of
summer which is the death of nature, the rites of mourning and resuscitation,
of course, fall in corresponding seasons.]

     In religions of this type the hope of another life for man frequently
emerges. ^2 He too dies like nature, like the nature god; why may he not live
again like him?  The conception lies the nearer because the deities of plant
life are also often gods of the earth from which the plants spring, and in
which seeds, like men, are buried.  The Greeks, as has been noted above,
thought of the dead as dwelling in the tombs and having the same needs as when
they were alive; but they also imagined a common abode of the shades in the
recesses of the earth - a dismal, phantom-like existence, from which they
shrank with all their healthy love of life. The ancient Thracians seem to have
entertained similar notions and to have imagined Hades yet more dismally as a
kind of a quagmire; the borboros, the slimy mud, which is so characteristic a
feature of the Orphic hell, is derived from that source.

[Footnote 2: This is particularly true of the religions of the Mediterranean
area and the nearer East.]

     Such is by nature the lot of mortals; a blessed immortality belongs to
the gods only.  For man, then, the only hope of escape from the gloomy nether
world is participation in the divine nature.  It is not, however, to the
bright Olympians who know naught of struggle and pain and death, but to gods
who have shared these experiences, who have triumphed over death and risen to
new life, that the hope of immortality attaches itself, for in their victory
is the evidence that death can be overcome, and their example shows the way.
It was, therefore, not Zeus nor Apollo, but Demeter-Kore and Dionysos to whom
men turned for eternal life.  The experience of union with Dionysos, the
Bacchic enthusiasm, thus acquired a new value; it was the earnest and
assurance of immortal blessedness.

     The public cults exhibit little or no trace of these ideas, which were
brought into Greece by a second wave of Dionysiac religion particularly
associated with the name of Orpheus, a Thracian singer, who, after charming
with his lyre wild beasts and savage men and even moving the heart of the
queen of Hades, was torn to pieces by the maenads, thus, as Proclus
significantly says, suffering the like fate as his god.  The Orphic gospel had
reached Athens in the time of the Pisistratid tyranny; Onomacritus, who lived
at the court of Hippias, is said by Aristotle and other Greek authors to have
composed - or forged - Orphic scriptures, and modern scholars have attributed
to him the interpolation of the torments of exemplary sinners in the Nekyia of
the Odyssey.  With the literary question we are not here concerned; enough
that from the middle of the sixth century on the influence of Orphic doctrine
is to be seen on every hand.

     As a way of salvation for the individual it spread by a missionary
propaganda and gathered its converts into societies not unlike the early
Christian churches.  There were rites of initiation having the character of
purifications, scriptures claiming the authority of revelation, symbols, and
sacraments.  A rule of life was enjoined which forbade animal sacrifice and
the eating of flesh - a natural corollary of the belief in the transmigration
of souls - and regulating diet, dress, and conduct to the end of avoiding
uncleanness.  The organisation of these voluntary societies seems to have been
loose, and there is no sign of a central authority nor of a uniform standard
of belief or practice; it is altogether probable that there were considerable
differences among them in both respects.  In some places the orgiastic
features of the Dionysiac rites were perpetuated, while elsewhere the
enthusiasm took a soberer tone.

     Dionysos is not the only god whose name is linked with these mysteries.
Sabazios, a deity of the Thracians' Phrygian kinsman is invoked; his votaries
in their exaltation become Saboi as those of Dionysos are Bacchoi or Bacchai.
Zagreus also, whom some of the ancients connect with Crete, is peculiarly an
Orphic divinity.  But whatever diversities there were in rite and myth,
however barbarian and Hellenic elements are blended, the important fact
remains that in the Orphic circles a new kind of religion was introduced in
Greece.  The old religions concerned themselves with this world only: the gods
gave protection and prosperity to the state; on individuals they bestowed
health and strength and beauty, welfare and happiness, long life, and the good
things of this life richly to enjoy; and that was all men asked of them.  So
long as the sum of human desire was no more than nature could satisfy, these
religions sufficed; but to the aspirations and yearnings of the soul for a
supernatural good, for an eternal divine life, and for a foretaste of it now,
they had no answer.  The Orphic gospel awakened the consciousness of this need
and promised its satisfaction.  Like other redemptive religions, it addressed
itself to the individual; it demanded personal faith, and set forth a plan of
salvation; by its purifications the initiate put off the old man which is
corrupt; its sacraments and mystic rites made him partaker of the divine
nature; myth and ceremony excited the emotions, while theology offered to
thinkers a solution of the problems of God, the universe, and man.  Taking for
itself a sphere unoccupied by the older religions, it did not come into
collision with them: it did not undertake to distribute mundane goods; they
had nothing to do with the supernal blessedness.

     The Orphic literature which has been transmitted to us is in considerable
part a product of later centuries, but the substantial antiquity of its ruling
ideas is evinced by the allusions to them in the poets from Pindar down, and
especially by their influence in the development of philosophy.  The Orphic
Theogony, of which only fragments are preserved, is closely related to
Hesiod's, which in the main lines it follows, transforming it in the spirit of
its pantheistic theology.  In the beginning - so the rhapsodic theogony ran ^1
- were Chaos (Space), Chronos (Time), and Aither (the Primal Matter).  Chronos
forms the world-egg; cleft by the generative forces in it, the two halves of
the shell form the firmament and the earth, while from it emerges Protogonos
(the First-Born), called also Phanes (the Manifest) and Erikapaios. ^2 Phanes
produces Night, the great mother; gods and men and all things in nature spring
from him, he is the universal light and life and intelligence.  When, in the
series of divine generations, the age of Zeus arrives, he swallows Phanes - a
way of saying that the supreme deity of the Greek religion is what he is by
virtue of the indwelling of the universal godhead.  Zeus is for the Orphics
another Phanes:

     Zeus was first, Zeus of the vivid lightning, last; Zeus the head, Zeus
the middle, of Zeus were all things made.  Zeus is the support of the earth
and of the starry heaven; Zeus is male, Zeus the immortal bride, Zeus the
breath of air in all things, Zeus the rush of tireless flame; Zeus is the root
of the sea, Zeus is the sun and the moon; Zeus is the king, Zeus the ruler of
all things.  For, having concealed all beings, he again to the gladsome light
brought them forth from his holy heart, working wonders.

[Footnote 1: For the present purpose it is unnecessary to consider variant
forms.]

[Footnote 2: This all-god is Dionysos in his cosmic aspect.]

     Among the children of Zeus the greatest in the Orphic theology is
Dionysos, also called Zagreus, son of Zeus by Persephone, whom he has
designated to succeed him in the rule of the world.  The Titans, striving to
recover the dominion for themselves, lure the child into their power, rend him
in pieces in the form of a bull, which he assumes in the vain effort to escape
them, roast and devour him; only his heart is saved by Athena, and lives again
in the third Dionysos, the son of Zeus and Semele. Zeus consumes the Titans
with fire from heaven and scatters their ashes to all the winds.  But through
their cannibal feast - a mythical counterpart of the orgiastic rending of the
Dionysos-bull - the essence of Dionysos has entered into the Titans
themselves, and their wind-borne ashes convey the germ of the divine life into
all animate things; the human soul is such a particle of the godhead.  There
are traces of a version in which man is formed of the ashes of the Titans, and
has thus a dual nature, Dionysiac and Titanic, divine and demonic.

     At death - such seems to have been the primitive conception of the
transmigration - the soul is carried hither and thither by the wind, until it
enters into another body. ^1 The body is the prison-house of the soul, the
tomb in which it is buried; it can attain life and freedom only by deliverance
from the body.

[Footnote 1: When it came to be the prevalent belief that the souls of men go
at death to the nether world and are re-embodied only after a period of
retribution there, it was held that it is only the souls of animals and plants
which are breathed out into the air and carried by it into other plants or
animals.]

     The Orphic imagination expatiated on the misery of those who went down to
Hades.  The marsh, or quagmire, of the Thracian nether world lends a
characteristic feature to the Orphic hell: there those who in this world have
not been purged of their defilement by the rites of the sect, its initiatory
purifications and katharmata, wallow in filth, the appropriate destiny of
their unclean souls!

     The Greeks had already made some progress in infernal geography, as
appears from the Odyssey (X, 512 ff.); the sectarians appropriated and
improved on it.  They peopled their underworld with monsters borrowed from
folk-lore as well as literature, ^2 "serpents and myriad dreadful beasts," the
hideous Empusa; the hundred-headed earth-dragon, Echnida, which rends men's
vitals; the Spanish sea-serpent that clutches at their lungs; the Tithrasian
Gorgons that tear in pieces their bleeding kidneys with the entrails.  In the
strongest contrast to this is the bliss of the saved. Aristophanes almost
desists from his mocking as he poetically depicts it:

     "And then a breath of flutes envelops thee,
     Thou seest the fairest light, as here above,
     And myrtle groves, and many happy groups
     Of men and women, clapping hands in joy.
     'And who may these be pray?'
     'The mystic band.'" ^1

[Footnote 2: See Aristophanes, Frogs, 137 ff. 293 ff., 474 ff. - The
caricature may accumulate the horrors, but certainly does not invent them.]

[Footnote 1: Frogs, 154 ff.; see also the hymn of the Mystae, ib., 448 ff.]

     The delights of the Dionysiac Elysium were not always so refined; it is
indeed not improbable that Aristophanes is here influenced by Eleusinian
conceptions.  There are persistent allusions to the banquet at which the
garlanded saints spend eternity in drinking: "They seem to think," says Plato,
"that an immortality of drunkenness is the highest reward of virtue." Here, as
in the "miry pit" of hell, we may with much probability surmise that the
Thracian barbarians, who had a name for deep potations, were the authors of
the conception; but it should not be forgotten that intoxicants have been
widely employed as a means of inducing enthusiasm, and vinous exaltation taken
for divine possession. What should eternal bliss be but the perpetuity of this
experience of godfulness?

     As in other redemptive religions, the saved are the initiated, the
members of the mystery-church, who have been purified by its cathartic rites
of admission, and through its sacraments have become partakers of the divine
nature.  On the other hand, as Plato quotes the doctrine, "He who arrives in
Hades uninitiated and without having participated in the mysteries lies in
filth." Even the most conspicuous virtue does not avail for salvation apart
from the church and its means of grace.  This is the logical attitude, and was
always maintained.  It drew from Diogenes the caustic comment, "Will the
robber Pataikon, because he was initiated, fare better after death than
Epaminondas?"

     The moral sense of the Greeks, the more ethical conception of religion
represented particularly by the religion of Apollo and the influence of
Delphi, revolted against a doctrine of salvation by initiation and orgy,
regardless of character, and this temper could not fail to react on the
mysteries themselves.  More or less explicitly and emphatically they insist,
not merely on a life of ceremonial purity according to the rule of the sect,
but on an upright and virtuous life according to common standards of morality
as a condition of salvation. "Many carry the sacred wand, but rare are the
Bacchoi, "became a proverbial saying in their own circle - multitudes take
part in the rites, but few receive the spirit.  In general, however, in accord
with the universal tendency of the redemptive religions, the moral division is
made to run on the ecclesiastical line: the initiated are the pure, the holy,
the righteous; the uninitiated are the unholy and unrighteous.

     Nor is the fate of the lost the same for all.  Hades is not merely the
foul slough into which all unpurified souls sink, as the Homeric Hades was the
gloomy abode of all souls; it becomes a place of retribution where the wicked
suffer the penalty of their misdeeds.  The contrast is well seen in the Orphic
addition at the end of the eleventh book of the Odyssey - the torments of
Tityos with vultures tearing at his liver, of Tantalos, consumed by thirst and
hunger within reach of plenty; of Sisyphos, with knotted muscles pushing the
rock up-hill, which, just as he gains the summit, breaks away and thunders to
the foot again.  A characteristic group in the painting of Polygnotos at
Delphi were the women carrying water in sherds of broken jars; in other
representations they are compelled to carry water in a sieve. ^1 In the
embellishment of hell with picturesque torments the imagination borrows in
part from criminal justice, in part retribution is matched to the offence in
poetic justice, the sinner suffering as he has sinned or by the hand of one
whom he has wronged.  Once started in this way, the inferno became more and
more gruesome as each succeeding representation tried to give new thrills of
the horror which is a morbid pleasure.  When Christianity came, it made itself
heir to these hells; the tortures in the Apocalypse of Peter and later
writings of the sort are of unmistakable Orphic invention, and the
transmission can be followed in unbroken line through the Middle Ages, with
variation and increment of horrors from the barbaric imagination of the north.

[Footnote 1: Originally, perhaps, a popular notion of the fate of the
unmarried, then of the uninitiated (double use of "consummation"); punishment
specifically of the daughters of Danaos who murdered their bridegrooms on the
wedding night.]