Irish Druids And Old Irish Religions

was in the East, so that the worshippers might face the Happy West.

Homer's reputed poems are unlike in their records of the dead. The Iliad knows no apotheosis; the Odyssey has it. Coleridge observes, "In the Iliad, Castor and Pollux are mentioned in the ordinary language denoting death and burial, and no more. In the Odyssey, we have the account of their ultimate resuscitation, which finally became the popular fable."

Alluding to the Homeric Hades--Aides and Erebos.--W. E. Gladstone writes--"A particular portion of the unseen world, apparently special in its character, is stated to be situated as far below Aides as our earth is below heaven. It bears the name of Tartaros, and it appears to have been reserved for preter-human offenders." The condition of the departed generally was not very joyous; Gladstone shows this as follows--"The Hellenic dead are wanderers in the Shades, without fixed doom or occupation". Again--"The Greek personages, recently dead, do not appear to have been either rewarded or punished; an Achilles bitterly complains of the sheer want of interest this life."

In Homer's Nekromanteia, we have the intercourse of Ulysses with the dead. He employs necromantic arts in his descent into Hades, which were strictly of a Babylonia character, and the whole description reminds us of the fabled descent of the Assyrian goddess to the Sheol. The ghosts gather round Ulysses at the smell of the blood his offerings, and, inspired thereby, "expressed dark things to come." Tiresias then says--

"Know to the spectres that thy beverage taste,
The scenes of life recur, and actions past."

We are assured that when the hero sought to embrace friend--

p. 289