Part 4 — VI. REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS.

194The ancient theologists and priests testify that the soul is conjoined to the body through a certain punishment, and that it is buried in this body as in a sepulchre.—Philolaus, (a Pythagorean.)

Search thou the path of the soul, whence she came, or what way, after serving the body, by joining work with sacred speed, thou shalt raise her again to the same state whence she fell.—Zoroaster.

Death has no power th’ immortal soul to slay,

That, when its present body turns to clay,

Seeks a fresh home, and with unlessened might

Inspires another frame with life and light.

So I myself (well I the past recall),

When the fierce Greeks begirt Troy’s holy wall,

Was brave Euphorbus: and in conflict drear

Poured forth my blood beneath Atrides’ spear.

The shield this arm did bear I lately saw

In Juno’s shrine, a trophy of that war.

Pythagoras, in Dryden’s Ovid.

He [Plato] spoke of Him

The lone, eternal One, who dwells above,

And of the soul’s untraceable descent

From that high fount of spirit, through all the grades

Of intellectual being, till it mix

With atoms vague, corruptible and dark.

Nor yet ev’n thus, though sunk in earthly dross,

Corrupted all, nor its ethereal touch

Quite lost, but tasting of the fountain still

As some bright river, which has rolled along

Through meads of flowery light and mines of gold

When poured at length into the dusky deep

Disdains to take at once its briny taint,

But keeps unchanged awhile the lustrous tinge

Or balmy freshness of the scenes it left.

Moore.

195

VI.

REINCARNATION AMONG THE ANCIENTS.

The origin of the philosophy of reincarnation is prehistoric. It antedates the remotest antiquity all over the world, and appears to be cognate with mankind, springing up spontaneously as a necessary corollary of the immortality of the soul; for its undiminished sway has been wellnigh universal outside of Christendom. In the earliest dawn of Mother India it was firmly established. The infancy of Egypt found it dominant on the Nile. It was at home in Greece long before Pythagoras. The most ancient beginnings of Mexico and Peru knew it as the faith of their fathers.

I. In sketching the course of this thought among the men of old, the first attention belongs to India. Brahmanism, the most primitive form of this faith, has gone through vast changes during the four thousand years of history. The initial form of it, dating back into the remotest mists of antiquity and descending to the first chapters of authentic chronology, was an ideally simple nature-worship. The Rig Veda and the oldest sacred hymns display the beauty of this adoration for every phase of nature, centering with especial fondness upon light as the supreme power, and upon the cow as the favorite animal. Professor Wilson’s 196and Max Müller’s translations have opened to the English race the charming thought of this primordial people, whose great child-souls found objects of reverence in all things. There were no distinct gods, but everything was divine, and through all they saw the flow of ever-changing life. Gradually an ecclesiastical system climbed up around this religion, clothing, stifling, and at last burying the vital organism, until Sakya Muni’s reaction started Buddhism into vigorous growth as the beautiful protest against the disfigured and decayed form. About Buddhism, too, there has arisen a heavy weight of lifeless ritual, but every breath of life with which the slumbering mother and daughter continue their existence is perfumed with the roseattar of reincarnation. How they have since continued to disseminate the idea of reincarnation is suggested in chapter IX, for the East of to-day is essentially a sculptured picture of what has been monotonously enduring for twenty centuries.

Of the ancient Indians we learn through Pliny, Strabo, Megasthenes, Plutarch, and Herodotus, who describe the Gymnosophists and Brachmans as ascetic philosophers who made a study of spiritual things, living singly or in celibate communities much like the later Pythagoreans. Porphyry says of them: “They live without either clothes, riches or wives. They are held in so great veneration by the rest of their countrymen that the king himself often visits them to ask their advice. Such are their views of death that with reluctance they endure life as a piece of necessary bondage to nature, and haste to set the soul at liberty from the body. Nay, often, when in good health, and no evil to disturb them, they depart life, advertising it beforehand. No man hinders them, but all reckon 197them happy, and send commissions along with them to their dead friends. So strong and firm is their belief of a future life for the soul, where they shall enjoy one another, after receiving all their commands, they deliver themselves to the fire, that they may separate the soul as pure as possible from the body, and expire singing hymns. Their old friends attend them to death with more ease than other men their fellow-citizens to a long journey. They deplore their own state for surviving them and deem them happy in their immortality.” When Alexander the Great first penetrated their country he could not persuade them to appear before him, and had to gratify his curiosity about their life and philosophy by proxy, though he afterward witnessed them surrender themselves to the flames.

II. Herodotus asserts that the doctrine of metempsychosis originated in Egypt. “The Egyptians are the first who propounded the theory that the human soul is imperishable, and that where the body of any one dies it enters into some other creature that may be ready to receive it, and that when it has gone the round of all created forms on land, in water and in air, then it once more enters a human body born for it; and that this cycle of existence for the soul takes place in three thousand years.”^[30] He continues, “Some of the Greeks adopted this opinion, some earlier, others later, as if it were their own.”

The Egyptians held that the human race began after the pure gods and spirits had left earth, when the demons who were sinfully inclined had revolted and introduced guilt. The gods then created human bodies 198for these demons to inhabit, as a means of expiating their sin, and these fallen spirits are the present men and women, whose earthly life is a course of purification. All the Egyptian precepts and religious codes are to this end. The judgment after death decides whether the soul has attained purity or not. If not, the soul must return to earth in renewal of its expiation either in the body of a man, or animal or plant. As the spirit was believed to maintain its connection with the material form as long as this remained, the practice of embalming was designed to arrest the passage of the soul into other forms. The custom of embalming is also connected with their opinion that after three thousand years away from the body the soul would return to its former body provided it be preserved from destruction.^[31] If it is not preserved, the soul would enter the most convenient habitation, which might be a wretched creature. They maintained, too, that the gods frequently inhabited the bodies of animals, and therefore they worshiped animals as incarnations of special divinities. The sacred bodies of these godly visitants were also embalmed as a mark of respect to their particular class of deities. For they placed certain gods in certain animals, the Egyptian Apollo choosing the hawk, Mercury the ibis, Mars the fish, Diana the cat, Bacchus the goat, Hercules the colt, Vulcan the ox, etc. This conceit was but a specialization of their general tenet of pantheism, insisting that all life is divine, that every living thing must be venerated, and that the highest creatures should be most devoutly worshiped.

199The Egyptian conception of reincarnation as shaped by the priesthood is displayed in their classic, “Ritual of the Dead,” which is one of their chief sacred books and describes the course of the soul after death. A copy of it was deposited in each mummy case. It opens with a sublime dialogue between the soul and the God of Hades, Osiris, to whose realm he asks admission. Finally Osiris says, “Fear nothing, but cross the threshold.” As the soul enters he is dazzled with the glory of light. He sings a hymn to the sun and goes on taking the food of knowledge. After frightful dangers are passed, rest and refreshment come. Continuing his journey he reaches at last heaven’s gate, where he is instructed in profound mysteries. Within the gate he is transformed into different animals and plants. After this the soul is reunited to the body for which careful embalming was so important. A critical examination tests his right to cross the subterranean river to Elysium. He is conducted by Anubis through a labyrinth to the judgment hall of Osiris, where forty-two judges question him upon his whole past life. If the decisive judgment approves him he enters heaven. If not, he is sentenced to pass through lower forms of existence according to his sins, or, if a reprobate, is given over to the powers of darkness for purgation. After three thousand years of this he is again consigned to a human probation.

III. Of the old Persian faith, it is difficult to obtain a trustworthy statement, except what is derived from its present form among the Parsees. The Magi, Zoroaster’s followers, believed that the immortal soul descended from on high for a short period of lives in a mortal body to gain experience, and to then return again. When the soul is above it has several abodes, 200one luminous, another dark, and some filled with a mixture of light and darkness. Sometimes it sinks into the body from the luminous abode and after a virtuous life returns above; but if coming from the dark region, it passes an evil life and enters a worse place in proportion to her conduct until purified. The dualism of these fire-worshipers gave reincarnation a briefer period of operation than the other oriental religions.

IV. Pythagoras is mentioned by a Greek tradition as one of the Greeks who visited India before the age of Alexander. It is almost certain that he went to Egypt and received there the doctrine of transmigration which he taught in the Greek cities of lower Italy (B. C. 529). Jamblichus says: “He spent twelve years at Babylon, freely conversing with the Magi, was instructed in everything venerable among them, and learned the most perfect worship of the gods.” He is said to have represented the human soul as an emanation of the world soul, partaking of the divine nature. At death it leaves one body to take another and so goes through the circle of appointed forms. Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” contains a long description of the Pythagorean idea, from which these verses are taken, as translated by Dryden:—

“Souls cannot die. They leave a former home,

And in new bodies dwell, and from them roam.

Nothing can perish, all things change below,

For spirits through all forms may come and go.

Good beasts shall rise to human forms, and men,

If bad, shall backward turn to beasts again.

Thus, through a thousand shapes, the soul shall go

And thus fulfill its destiny below.”

But it is very difficult to determine exactly what the views of Pythagoras were. Aristotle, Plato, and 201Diogenes Laertius say he taught that the soul when released by death must pass through a grand circle of living forms before reaching the human again. From Pythagoras himself we have only some aphorisms of practical wisdom and symbolic sentences; from his disciples a few fragments—all devoid of the grotesque hypothesis generally ascribed to him. Although his name is synonymous with the transmigration of human souls through animal bodies, the strong probabilities are that if this doctrine came from him it was entirely exoteric, concealing the inner truth of reincarnation. Some of his later disciples, especially the author of the work which is attributed to Timæus the Locian, denied that he taught it in any literal sense, and said that by it he meant merely to emphasize the fact that men are assimilated in their vices to the beasts. (See Chapter XII.)

V. Plato is called by Emerson the synthesis of Europe and Asia, and a decidedly oriental element pervades his philosophy, giving it a sunrise color. He had traveled in Egypt and Asia Minor and among the Pythagoreans of Italy. As he died (B. C. 348) twenty years before Alexander’s invasion of India he missed that opportunity of learning the Hindu ideas.

In the great “myth,” or allegory, of Phædrus, the classic description of the relation of the soul to the material world, what he says of the judgment upon mankind and their subsequent return to human or animal bodies coincides substantially with the Egyptian and Hindu religions. But his theory of pre-existence and of absolute knowledge seems to be original. It grows out of his cardinal doctrine (and that of his master Socrates) concerning the reality and 202validity of truth, in opposition to the skepticism of contemporary sophists, who claimed that truth is mere subjective opinion—what each man troweth.

The Phædrus myth is evidently suggested by the splendid religious procession which closed the Athenian festival. With gorgeous ceremony nearly the whole city’s population participated in this crowning glory of their most sacred holiday. The procession wound through the finest streets of the city and then up the steep ascent of the Acropolis, whose precipitous incline kept the horses struggling for a foothold. That elevated site commanded a view of the busy city, the plains beyond, and the distant mountains and sea under the deep blue canopy of the Greek sky, presenting to the worshipers’ sight a panorama of the changing aspects of human life and a type of heaven’s repose. From this picture the poet-philosopher conjures up a sublimer procession marshalled by the king of gods and men, moving through the heavenly orbits of the soul’s progress, until they ascend the celestial dome itself, whence the soul may gaze upon the unspeakable glories of spiritual Truth.^[32]

The Socrates of the dialogue first likens the soul to “a winged team and their charioteer. In the case of the gods both horses and charioteer are all good and of good breed; those of the rest are mixed. And first of all, our charioteer drives a pair; in the next place, the one is good and noble in itself and by breed, while the other is the opposite in both regards. And so the management of the chariot must needs be difficult and harassing. Just how the living being which is immortal is distinguished from that which is 203mortal, I must endeavor to tell you. All that is soul has the charge of that which is soulless, and traverses the whole heaven, appearing now in one form, now in another. When perfect and possessed of wings, she moves in mid air and controls the whole world (kosmos). But if she lose her feathers, she is borne hither and thither until she lays hold of something that is fixed and solid, and there making her home, and taking to herself an earthly body, which seems to be self-moved by reason of the force she furnishes, soul and body are fastened together and come to be called mortal.... But let us take up the reason of that stripping off the feathers by which the soul is brought to its fall. It is as follows: The power of the wing is designed to bear up that which is heavy through mid air, where the race of the gods dwells, and of all that is corporeal this has most in common with the divine; for the divine is the beautiful, the wise, the good, and everything of the sort, and by these the wing of the soul is nourished and groweth especially. But by what is base and evil, and whatever else is the opposite of divine, it wastes away and is destroyed.

“Now Zeus, the great Leader in heaven, leads the van, driving a winged chariot, the marshal and guardian of all. And he is followed by the host of the gods and demons marshalled in eleven bands, for Hestia alone remaineth in the house of the gods, and those of the rest who belong to the number of The Twelve [Great Gods] lead on as captains of their companies, each in the order to which he has been assigned. Now there are within heaven many and blessed views and ways of passage in which the race of the happy gods pass to and fro, each of them doing 204his own work, and whoever can and will follows, for envy stands aloof from the choir of the gods.

“But whenever they go to banquet and to feast, then they proceed all together up towards the lofty vault of heaven. Now the chariots of the gods, being well balanced and obedient to the rein, proceed easily, but the rest with difficulty. For the horse that partakes of evil slips downward, sinking and gravitating towards the earth, if he has not been properly broken in by the charioteer. Then it is that toil and extremest conflict press hard upon the soul. But those souls which are called immortal, when they reach the summit, go forth and stand upon the back [the convex] of the heaven, and as they stand the revolution [of the sphere] carries them around with it, and they behold the things which are outside of the heaven.

“Now the place which is above the heaven no earthly poet has ever praised as it deserves, nor ever will: but it is thus. For I must dare to tell the truth, especially when I am talking about Truth. The colorless, formless, and intangible Being which is Being, is visible only to the Reason (nous), which is the governor of the soul. Round about this [pure Being] is located the true sort of knowledge. Since then the intelligence of God—like that of every soul in so far as it is to receive what best befits it—is nourished on Reason and pure Knowledge, in beholding at last the Being it loves it, and in contemplating the Truth is nourished and gladdened, until the revolution [of the sphere] brings it round again to its starting-place. And in this circuit it beholds Righteousness itself, beholds Temperance itself, beholds Knowledge—not that which has origin, nor that which differs in the 205different things to which we ascribe existence, but Knowledge which has a real being in that which is Being indeed. And other equally real existences she beholds and is feasted upon, and then reëntering the heaven she returns homeward. And when she has come thither, the charioteer, staying his horses at their stall, fodders them with ambrosia, and waters them with nectar. And this is the life of the gods.

“But as to the other souls, that which best follows God and is most like Him lifts up the head of the charioteer to the place outside the heaven, and is carried around the revolution with Him, disturbed indeed by the horses, and beholding the things which have true being with difficulty. Another lifts up the head at times, at others draws it in because compelled by the horses, and therefore beholds some and not others; the rest one and all desire and follow that which is above, but not being able to reach it, they are carried around submerged beneath the heaven, they tread and fall upon each other, each trying to get precedence of the other. Noise, and rivalry, and sweat to the last degree ensue, whereupon many are maimed in their wings by the fault of their charioteers. And all of them, after long toil, depart uninitiated into the vision of Being, and when they have gone are fed on the food of opinion. Whence then that great desire of theirs to behold the plain of Truth? Is it not because the pasturage which befits what is best in the soul happens to grow in that meadow, and the growth of the wing by which the soul soars is nourished with this?

“And this is this law of Adrastea [or Nemesis, the inevitable Order]: whatsoever soul has shared with God, in beholding any of those things that are true 206and real, is unharmed until the next period, and if she is always able to do this, is always unhurt. But should it happen that she cannot follow on to know, and by any mischance grows heavy through being filled with forgetfulness and faultiness, and through that heaviness loses her feathers and falls to the earth, then the law is that this soul shall not take upon her the nature of any beast in the first generation [or birth], but the soul that has seen most shall come to the birth of a man who is to be a philosopher, or an artist, or of some musician and lover; and the second, [to the birth] of a lawful king, or warrior and ruler; the third, of a statesman, or of some financier, or man of affairs; the fourth, of a toil-loving gymnast, or of some one who is to be a physician; the fifth, the life of a soothsayer, or some hierophantic function; to the sixth, the life of a poet, or of some other sort of mimic, will be suitable; to the seventh, that of an artisan or a husbandman; to the eighth, that of a sophist or a demagogue; to the ninth, that of a tyrant. And whoever in any of these positions conducts himself rightly receives a better lot; but whoever behaves otherwise, a worse.

“No soul arrives at that place from whence it came for ten thousand years, except it be that one who is honestly a philosopher, or a lover who has a share of philosophy. These in the third period of a thousand years, if thrice successively they have chosen this manner of life, and have thus received their wings, depart thither in the three thousandth year. But the rest, when they have finished the first life assigned them, undergo a judgment. And after the judgment, some of them proceed to the prison-house under the earth and receive punishment; and the others, having 207been raised by the judgment to a place in the heaven, pass their time in a manner worthy of the life they lived in human form.

“And when, in the thousandth year, they come to a casting of lots and a choice of their second life, each chooses whichever she wishes. And thereupon a human soul comes to the life of a beast; and one that has been a man becomes from a beast a man again.

“But that soul which has never beheld the Truth will never come into this [human] form; the understanding of general truth collected from many perceptions into unity by rational thought is an essential of humanity. And this is the recollection of those things which our soul has once seen when accompanying God, and disdaining those things which we now speak of as being, and lifting up our heads to behold true Being. Wherefore it is just that the intelligence of the philosopher alone receives wings; for he is ever with all his might busied with the recollections of these things, occupation with which makes God what he is. And only the man who makes right use of such recollections, and thus continually attains initiation into perfect mysteries, becomes truly perfect; and for giving up human pursuits and becoming enwrapt in the divine, he is esteemed by the many as beside himself, for they fail to see that he is God-possessed.

... “As has been said, every human soul is by nature a beholder of Being, else she would not have entered into this form of life. But it is not easy for every soul to awaken those recollections which she brought from thence, or they may then have had but scant vision of what was there, or since they have fallen thence they may have had the mischance to be 208diverted by bad associations to that which is unjust, and to fall into forgetfulness of the holy things which they then beheld. A few are left, who retain enough of the recollection; but whenever they behold any resemblance of what is there, they are struck with astonishment, and are no longer masters of themselves; but they know not why they are thus affected, because they have no adequate perception. But there is no brilliancy in those earthly likenesses of justice and temperance, and whatever else is precious to the soul; for through obscure instruments, it is given with difficulty and to but few to draw near to those images and behold what manner of thing it is that they represent. But then it was permitted to behold Beauty in all its splendor, when along with the blessed chorus, we [philosophers] following Zeus, others some other of the gods, we shared in the beatific vision and contemplation, and were initiated into mysteries which it is just to call the most perfect of all, and whose rapturous feast we kept in innocence, and while still inexpert of those evils which were awaiting us in a time still future. And we beheld visions innocent and simple and peaceful and happy, as if spectators at the mysteries, in pure array, ourselves pure, and without a sign upon us of this which we now carry about with us and call a body, and are bound thereto like an oyster to his shell. Let us indulge in these memories, whereby we are led to speak the longer from desire of the things which we then saw.”^[33]

We penetrate into the inmost secret of Plato’s thought in the super-celestial plain, the dwelling-place of substantial ideas, the essential Truth, the absolute 209knowledge, in which the pure Being holds the supreme place which we assign to God, the Hindu to Brahm, and the Egyptian to Osiris, but which the polytheist could not ascribe to his gods. Plato, like the initiated priests of India and Egypt, to whom the highest deity was nameless, knew the objects of common worship were but exalted men, above whom was One whose nature was undisclosed to men, and of whom it was audacious childishness to assert human attributes. The Highest was the centre of those Realities dimly shadowed in earthly appearance, and Plato’s pictorial representation of his thought is only a parable cloaking the essential principle that during the eternal past we have strayed from the real Truth through repeated lives into the present.

Of Plato’s philosophy of preëxistence, Professor W. A. Butler says in his masterly lectures on Ancient Philosophy: “It is certain that with Plato the conviction was associated with a vast and pervading principle, which extended through every department of nature and thought. This principle was the priority of mind to body, both in order of dignity and in order of time; a principle which with him was not satisfied by the single admission of a divine preëxistence, but extended through every instance in which these natures could be compared. A very striking example of the manner in which he thus generalized the principle of priority of mind to body is to be found in the well-known passage in the tenth book of his ‘Laws,’ in which he proves the existence of divine energy. The argument employed really applies to every case of motion and equally proves that every separate corporeal system is but a mechanism moved by a spiritual essence anterior to itself. The universe 210is full of gods, and the human soul is, as it were, the god or demon of the human body.”

VI. The Jews had the best parallel of Plato’s Phædrus in the third chapter of Genesis, describing the fall of Adam and Eve. The theological comments upon that popular summary of the origin of sin have always groped after reincarnation, by making all Adam’s descendants responsible in him for that act. Many Jewish scholars undertook to fuse Greek philosophy with their national religion. The Septuagint translation, made in the third century before Christ, gives evidence of such a purpose in suppressing the strong anthropomorphic terms by which the Old Testament mentioned God. Aristobulus, a Jewish-Greek poet of the second century, writes of Hebrew ideas in Platonic phrases. Similar passages are found in Aristeas and in the second book of the Maccabees. Pythagoreanism was blended with Judaism in the beliefs and practices of the Jewish Therapeutæ of Egypt, and their brethren the Essenes of Palestine.

Of the Essenes, Josephus writes: “The opinion obtains among them that bodies indeed are corrupted, and the matter of them not permanent, but that souls continue exempt from death forever; and that emanating from the most subtle ether they are unfolded in bodies as prisons to which they are drawn by some natural spell. But when loosed from the bonds of flesh, as if released from a long captivity, they rejoice and are borne upward.”

The most prominent Jewish writer upon this subject is Philo of Alexandria, who lived in the time of Christ, and adapted a popular version of Platonic ideas to the religion of his own people. He turned the Hebrew stories into remarkably deft Platonic allegories. 211His theory of preëxistence and re-births is practically that of his master Plato, as is shown in this extract: “The company of disembodied souls is distributed in various orders. The law of some of them is to enter mortal bodies and after certain prescribed periods be again set free. But those possessed of a diviner structure are absolved from all local bonds of earth. Some of these souls choose confinement in mortal bodies because they are earthly and corporeally inclined. Others depart, being released again according to supernaturally determined times and seasons. Therefore, all such as are wise, like Moses, are living abroad from home. For the souls of such formerly chose this expatriation from heaven, and through curiosity and the desire of acquiring knowledge they came to dwell abroad in earthly nature, and while they dwell in the body they look down on things visible and mortal around them, and urge their way thitherward again whence they came originally: and call that heavenly region in which they live their citizenship, fatherland, but this earthly in which they live, foreign.” In choosing between the Mosaic and the Platonic account of the Fall, as to which best expressed the essential truth, although a Jew, he decided for Plato. He considers men as fallen spirits attracted by material desires and thus brought into the body’s prison, yet of kin to God and the ideal world. The philosophic life is the means of escape, with the aid of the divine Logos, or Spirit, to the blessed fellowship from which they have fallen. Regeneration is a purification from matter. Philo renounced the creed of his fathers in order to reform it, and his influence was profoundly felt for centuries.

The origin of the Jewish Cabala is involved in endless 212dispute. Jewish scholars claim that it is prehistoric. Although a portion of it is held to have been composed in the Middle Ages, it is certain that its teachings had been handed down by tradition from very early times, and that some parts come from the Jewish philosophers of Alexandria and others from the later Neo-Platonists and Gnostics. Preëxistence and reincarnation appear here, not in Philo’s speculative form of it, but in a much simpler and more matter-of-fact character,—affirming that human spirits are again and again born into the world, after long intervals, and in entire forgetfulness of their previous experiences. This is not a curse, as in Plato’s religions, but a blessing, being the process of purification by repeated probations. “All the souls,” says the Zohar, or Book of Light, “are subject to the trials of transmigration; and men do not know which are the ways of the Most High in their regard. They do not know how many transformations and mysterious trials they must undergo; how many souls and spirits come to this world without returning to the palace of the divine king. The souls must reënter the absolute substance whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this end they must develop all the perfections, the germ of which is planted in them; and if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must commence another, a third, and so forth, until they have acquired the condition which fits them for reunion with God.”

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