, the
Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, and others.[136]

+68+. These pictures of the future world are crude, and usually stand
side by side with others; they are experiments in eschatology. But the
constructive imagination moved more and more toward an organized
underground hades as the sole abode of the dead--the place to which all
the dead go. Such a hades is found among the civilized peoples of
antiquity, Egyptians, Semites, Hindus, Greeks, and Romans, and, in more
recent times, among the Teutons (Scandinavians). The suggestion for this
position may have come from the grave (though it does not appear that
the grave was regarded as the permanent abode of the dead), and from
caverns that seemed to lead down into the bowels of the earth. The
descent of souls into a subterranean world offered no difficulties to
early imagination: ghosts, like the Australian ancestors, could move
freely where living men could not go; where there was no cavern like
that by which AEneas passed below,[137] they could pass through the
ground.

+69+. A lower region offered a wide land for the departed, with the
possibility of organization of its denizens. Ghosts gradually lost their
importance as a factor in everyday life; sights and sounds that had been
referred to wandering souls came to be explained by natural laws. Wider
geographical knowledge made it difficult to assign the ghosts a mundane
home, and led to their relegation to the sub-mundane region. Further,
the establishment of great nations familiarized men with the idea that
every large community should have its own domain. The gods were
gradually massed, first in the sky, the ocean, and hades, and then in
heaven. For the dead the first organization (if that term may be
allowed) was in hades; the separation into heaven and hell came later. A
specific divine head of the Underworld is found in Egypt, Babylonia and
Assyria, India, Greece, Rome, but not in Israel. Such a definite system
of government could exist only when something approaching a pantheon had
been established; the Babylonians, for example, whose pantheon was
vague, had also a vague god of hades.

+70+. Theories of the occupations of the dead varied in the early
civilized stage, before the rise of the idea of ethical retribution in
the other life. In the absence of earthly relations, imagination could
conceive of nothing for them to do, and hence an ardent desire for the
continuance of earthly life.[138] For the Hebrews the Und