more. 'But into the ranks of gods none may enter without having followed after wisdom and so departing hence wholly pure—none save the lover of knowledge[1].' What precise meaning Plato attached to his phrase 'to enter the ranks' ([Greek: eis genos endyesthai] or [Greek: aphikneisthai]), to which he adheres throughout the passage, is a question which agitated the Neoplatonists[2] somewhat needlessly. The phrase is intended either literally throughout or allegorically throughout. If it be allegorical, the meaning must be that all human souls shall enter again into human bodies, but that they shall start this new phase of existence with the qualities of lust, violence, respectability, or real virtue and purity, acquired in the previous life—merely resembling, as nearly as men may, asses, wolves, bees, or gods. Now as regards the first three classes, this allegorical interpretation, if a little forced, is feasible enough; but what of the fourth class? Shall the soul which has attained purity, the very negation of fleshliness in Plato's view, suffer re-incarnation and struggle once more against the flesh? Surely the allegorical explanation is at once condemned. The phrase was intended literally[3]. Plato signified the re-incarnation of the lustful, the violent, and the merely respectable, in the forms of animals of like character, and he signified—I must not say the re-incarnation, for Plato's gods were spiritual and not carnal—but the regeneration of the pure in the form of gods. And in the same spirit Plutarch too contemplated the possibility of some men's souls becoming first heroes, and from heroes rising to the rank of 'daemons,' and from 'daemons' coming to share, albeit but rarely, in real godhead[4].
Thus even the highest aspirations of the most spiritually-minded of pagan thinkers owed much to the purely popular religion. The Orphic tablet links up the popular conception of death as a wedding with the Platonic conception of the deification of the soul. 'I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the underworld': 'Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.'
But if Plato, even in his conception of a purely spiritual life hereafter, owed something to the popular religion, he drew upon it
