Hellenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering death; and to
discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing
does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final,
in their character, marking not the start but the close of a
civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of
Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo--of
redemption. But the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian
mysteries, the worship of souls and ancestors, always persisted
underneath. "In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology,
among its more important elements must be counted the belief in the
continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and
in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and
the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the
Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which
the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, _Psyche_, "Die
Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic
idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a
philosophical principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a
hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural
science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration of the axiom of the
perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support to a
theological speculation.
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