Yet not forever do the Spirits tarry upon the moon; they descend hither to take charge of oracles, they attend and participate in the highest of the mystic rituals, they act as warders against misdeeds and chastisers of them, and they flash forth as saviours manifest in war and on the sea.
1 For any act that they perform in these matters not fairly but inspired by wrath or for an unjust end or out of envy they are penalized, for they are cast out upon earth again confined in human bodies.
2 To the former class of better Spirits
3 the attendants of Cronos said that they belong themselves as did aforetime the Idaean Dactyls
4 in Crete and the Corybants
5 in Phrygia as well as the Boeotian Trophoniads in Udora
6 and thousands of others in many parts of the world whose rites, honours, and titles persist but whose powers tended to another place as they achieved the ultimate alteration. They achieve it, some sooner and some later, once the mind has been separated from the soul.
7 It is separated by love for the image in the sun through which shines forth manifest the desirable and fair and divine and blessed towards which all nature in one way or another yearns,
8 for it must be out of love for the sun that the moon herself goes her rounds and gets into conjunction with him in her yearning 〈to receive〉 from him what is most fructifying.
9 The substance of the soul is left upon the moon and retains certain vestiges and dreams of life as it were; it is this that you must properly take to be the subject of the statement
Soul like a dream has taken wing and sped,10
for it is not straightway nor once it has been released from the body that it reaches this state but later when, divorced from the mind, it is deserted and alone. Above all else that Homer said his words concerning those in Hades appear to have been divinely inspired
Thereafter marked I mighty Heracles —
His shade; but he is with the deathless gods. . . .11
In fact the self of each of us is not anger or fear or desire just as it is not bits of flesh or fluids either but is that with which we reason and understand
12; and the soul receives the impression of its shape through being moulded by the mind and moulding in turn and enfolding the body on all sides, so that, even if it be separated from either one for a long time, since it preserves the likeness and the imprint it is correctly called an image.
13 Of these, as has been said,
14 the moon is the element, for they are resolved into it
15 as the bodies of the dead are resolved into earth. This happens quickly to the temperate souls who had been fond of a leisurely, unmeddlesome, and philosophical life, for abandoned by the mind and no longer exercising the passions for anything they wither quietly away. Of the ambitious and the active, the irascible and those who are enamoured of the body, however, some pass their time
16 as it were in sleep with the memories of their lives for dreams as did the soul of Endymion
17; but, when they are excited by restlessness and emotion and drawn away from the moon to another birth, she forbids them <to sink towards earth>
18 and keeps conjuring them back and binding them with charms, for it is no slight, quiet, or harmonious business when with the affective faculty apart from reason they seize upon a body. Creatures like Tityus
19 and Typho
20 and the Python
21 that with insolence and violence occupied Delphi and confounded the oracle belonged to this class of souls, void of reason and subject to the affective element gone astray through delusion
22; but even these in time the moon took back to herself and reduced to order. Then when the sun with his vital force has again sowed mind in her she receives it and produces newsouls, and earth in the third place furnishes body.
23 In fact, the earth gives nothing <in giving back> after death all that she takes for generation, and the sun takes nothing but takes back the mind that he gives, whereas the moon both takes and gives and joins together and divides asunder in virtue of her different powers, of which the one that joins together is called Ilithyia and that which divides asunder Artemis.
24 Of the three Fates too Atropos enthroned in the sun initiates generation, Clotho in motion on the moon mingles and binds together, and finally upon the earth Lachesis too puts her hand to the task, she who has the largest share in chance.
25 For the inanimate is itself powerless and susceptible to alien agents, and the mind is impassible and sovereign; but the soul is a mixed and intermediate thing, even as the moon has been created by god a compound and blend of the things above and below and therefore stands to the sun in the relation of earth to moon.”
This,” said Sulla, ‘I heard the stranger relate; and he had the account, as he said himself, from the chamberlains and servitors of Cronus. You and your companions, Lamprias, may make what you will of the tale.’
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