The Myth of Er

The school of Athens by Raphael
Image Source: Wikipedia

Plato concluded his book The Republic, in a dialogue between Socrates and Plato’s brother Glaucon, through the account of a man called Er. Socrates teaches that the soul is ever-living and never dies. The doctrine of soul being immortal can be explained as follows-

Socrates says that anything that is evil destroys and corrupts whereas anything that is good preserves and benefits. Every soul present in the universe has some evil and good maintained in it. Our eyes are likely to be affected by the evil of infection and to the good of beauty, our body to diseases and to the good of clothes and ornaments, timber to rot and good to beautiful furniture. All the sources of evil are hence innate hence, everything surviving is destroyed by its own natural, inborn evil and wicked. If a soul isn’t destroyed by its native evil, nothing in this world can corrupt it. Everything has a peculiar evil that causes its destruction. A soul can be marred or spoiled, but it can’t be destroyed. Hence the cycle of unification and separation of body with soul continued for eternity. 

Er was a man who had died during a battle and twelve days after his death, he came to life with his body still fresh, laying on the funeral pyre and proceeded to describe, the mechanism of the eternal cycle of the soul, that he had witnessed in the other world.

Er had described that he traveled in company of many others in a mysterious place in which there were two gaps (passages) adjoining other in the sky (heaven) and two gaps exactly opposite in the earth (hell) and between these gaps, there was a meadow where sat the judges who sent the unjust souls downwards in the gaps of hell and sent the just souls upwards towards heaven. Er was admonished of participating in the process and was ordered to listen and observe and report everything that he has seen in the other world to the mankind. So, he beheld the souls ascending and descending to the gaps. He also saw other souls departing from each gap. The souls arriving from the earth had travel-stained experience and wailed about their sufferings that they had seen and faced during the journey in hell whereas the soul arriving from the heaven described the amazing beauty, leisure, satisfaction and enjoyments of the heaven above the two gaps. Er also said that for each crime the criminal souls suffered a tenfold punishment and the cycle of punishment begun every century. They faced extreme tortures and penalties. The virtuous soul on the other hand were given rewards in the heaven.

The souls from other worlds gladly met each other in the meadow, as people do during festivals and asked questions about the two worlds.

After seven days, the souls in the meadow traveled till they saw a straight pillar of light, the brightest and the clearest light ever seen stretched across the sky and the earth. And at the edge of the light, there stood the Spindle of Necessity by means of which all revolutions of the universe are kept up.

The Spindle of Necessity is based on the Ptolemaic system. Greeks used to believe that earth is in the center of the cosmos and is stationary with the sun, moon and other planets revolving around it. 

  Image Source: Wikipedia

The handle and hook of the distaff and whorl of the spindle were made of steel unlike any other ordinary distaff, which is made of wood. The whorl is described as a divine tool, that consisted of eight rims in total inserted nicely within each other. The distaff spins around the knees of Ananke, or goddess necessity and inevitability (a primordial goddess). She is the enforcer of fate, destiny and circumstances.

The spindle of necessity represents the thread of life. The thread represents the human life and the three sisters were responsible for the human fate.

The spindle was in command of the three daughters of necessity: Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos, all three collectively known as The Moirai. The Moirai were dressed in white robes with garlands on their heads. The thread of life of every mortal was in control of the Moirai. The trinity that defines destiny:

Necessity with her three daughters. Note the spindle with the 8 rims. Source: Wikipedia.

• Clotho:  She is the one who spins the thread of the human life from the distaff on the spindle of necessity and is the personification of the present.
• Lachesis: She takes hold of each thread and measures the thread spun on Clotho’s spindle with her rod and is the assigner of the lots drawn by the souls. She decides the time for which a living being will remain alive in his next life. She is the personified as past.
• Atropos: The oldest third fate sister who cuts the thread spun by Clotho deciding the time and cause of death of each human life. She is the personification of future.

An interpreter then commanded the souls. He said that it is with this spindle of necessity a new cycle of mortal existence is to begin. The souls were asked to draw lots and were told to choose their next lives wisely. The destiny will not be allotted to the souls, but the souls will choose their destiny for the new lives themselves. The interpreter said:

“Virtue owns no master: he who honors her shall have more of her, and he who slights her, less.”

The responsibility of the next life lies with the chooser, he is alone responsible for his fate in his future life. Therefore, every soul should choose a life wisely with moderation and the heaven will hold no account of guilt for the wrong choices opted. Next, the interpreter threw lots to the crowd and everyone proceeded to choose their destiny according to the slot allotted. The assembly was full of living creatures of every kind. There was every sort of human life present from sovereigns to poor, from beautiful to uncelebrated men, skilled and unskilled women but none of the souls had a settled character because during the course of life the soul stretched and flexed itself and its nature kept on changing.

Socrates says that everything exists in combined state- wealth and poverty, disease and health, ugly and beautiful, love and loathe, good and evil; and a mean between these extremes. Socrates further tells Glaucon that there should be a science which may enable a man to understand the difference between good and evil and by its means we can choose a better life by carefully calculating all combinations and magnitudes of the extremes mentioned above. For example, what kind of evil can be made out of if beauty is combined with poverty or wealth. Or what sort of evil can be produced by adding different ingredients of weakness or bodily strength, high birth or lower birth, private or public life. Socrates suggests that before selecting his next life, the soul should remember that when he enters the future world, his soul should be able to escape the evil and should avoid harming others. The soul should select a life that steers a middle course between all the extremes and rejecting anything in excess. Greek always admired the qualities in moderation and believed that anything in excess can be detrimental to the soul.

The soul with the first lot, thoughtlessly, chose the life of a dictator. His soul failed to examine the doomed life of a despot and therein, he was fated to devour his own children in the next life. His soul bewailed his choice and blamed his destiny and not upon himself. This soul had come from heaven and had lived a virtuous life in his previous birth. Er had told that more than half of the people who had come from heaven chose their next lives in a careless manner whereas the souls which had come from the earth chose very wisely because they had known pain in their lives for a very long time and had also seen it in others and therefore, opted for a virtuous and easier life. This can be because maybe when we are used to luxuries even though if we were virtuous, we become perpetual and our desires grow to extremes and ultimately, we lose our subconsciousness and become immoral. The experiences from the past lives guided most of the choices. Animals chose human lives and human souls chose easier animal lives. Famous human personalities like Thamyras, Orpheus, Ajax, Thersites and Agamemnon shrunk from becoming a man as they recollected the extreme atrocities and deceit they faced as humans.

The souls were then dispatched with the destinies they had selected by Lachesis and they swung through the spindle and traveled further.

After that all souls traveled to the plain of forgetfulness through dreadful heat and by the evening, they came by the River Lethe (river of unmindfulness) whose water can’t be held in a vessel and by drinking its water the souls experienced complete forgetfulness. It is interesting to note that the souls were compelled to drink water from the river, the souls clearly didn’t want to forget about their previous existence. But in order to reincarnate, erasing past memories was necessary. This used to happen maybe because the mortals are not allowed to attain omniscience and divinity of the heaven, so they must forget everything. Less prudent souls had to drink more water than the wise ones.

After that the souls went to sleep and in a moment of thunder, they were sent to their new births. Er himself was prevented from drinking water from Lethe and thence, in a mystical fashion, he woke up on his funeral pyre and recounted every detail of the twelve-day journey that he had experienced in the immortal world.

Plato concludes by saying that our soul has the power to entertain all sorts of good and evil, therefore, its in our hands to cease our soul from defiling itself and earn great virtues and wisdom so that we would always be guided to the upward road which makes its way to the gaps of the heaven.