Treatise on the Gods by H. L. Mencken

Author:H. L. Mencken [Mencken, H. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, 20th Century, Literary Collections, essays, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
ISBN: 9780307830920
Google: xF5M0xkD1hUC
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-20T00:23:39.064523+00:00

8

As we have seen, primitive man probably imagined a sort of Hell before ever he conceived the notion of a Heaven. All he knew with any surety about the dead was that their ghosts occasionally came back to disturb his dreams at night, or to afflict him with sickness, or to annoy him otherwise, and so he naturally concluded that they were more or less uncomfortable in their own abode, whatever and wherever it was, else they would not leave it. Thus the place of departed spirits came to be thought of as an unpleasant domain, and no one wanted to go to it any sooner than he could help. How long the dead remained in it, of course, was unknown, but the available evidence indicated that it was not for long.

The concept of a post mortem existence stretching over endless years did not arise until man began to remember his history. Listening around the fire to tales of heroes long dead, he would naturally see them in dreams afterward, if only vaguely, and so he would believe that their spirits still lived, far beyond the span of ordinary ghosts. One may fancy that the notion of a Heaven, in the elemental sense of a place measurably more attractive than the common abode of the dead, flowed out of it. It would be hard to think of dead chiefs and high priests wandering about that common abode, cheek by jowl with proletarian ghosts and sharing their unhappy yearning to come back to earth. Something better was necessary for men of extraordinary merit—and by merit, of course, rank and prowess were understood, not mere virtue. The Teutonic Valhalla was by no means open to the general; it was reserved very strictly for heroes who had died in battle. In the South Seas ideas of the same sort are widespread. The plain people are doomed normally to go to a very cheerless Limbo, but for nobles there is something better, with food in abundance and plenty of wives and servants to wait upon them. If a commoner aspires to this more charming place, he must pay a priest to teach him how to coax and flatter the guardian of its portal. Among the Aztecs, an ordinary man, at death, went to Mictlan, a sombre and inhospitable realm, but nobles and priests went to the Mansion of the Sun, where all was warm and comfortable. Spence suggests that the rapid conversion of the Aztec people to Christianity, following the coming of the Spaniards, was due far less to the zeal and eloquence of the Spanish priests than to the yearning of everyone to escape Mictlan. The Christian Heaven seemed identical with the Mansion of the Sun, and when news got about that anyone who was baptized would go to it, multitudes presented themselves at the fount.

The ancients located their Heavens and Hells in widely dispersed places, and according to the dictates of a lush and protean fancy. There were Heavens underground and Heavens in the sky, Hells under rivers and Hells on the tops of mountains.

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