Note 138 — INDEX. (continued 7)

Says Apuleius: “The soul is born in this world upon leaving the soul of the world (anima mundi) in which her existence precedes the one we all know (on earth). Thus, the Gods who consider her proceedings in all the phases of various existences and as a whole, punish her sometimes for sins committed during an anterior life. She dies when she separates herself from a body in which she crossed this life as in a frail bark. And this is, if I mistake not, the secret meaning of the tumulary inscription, so simple for the initiate: ”To the Gods manes who lived.“ But this kind of death does not annihilate the soul, it only transforms (one portion of it) it into a lemure. ”Lemures“ are the manes, or ghosts, which we know under the name tares. When they keep away and show us a beneficent protection, we honour in them the protecting divinities of the family hearth; but if their crimes sentence them to err, we call them larvæ. They become a plague for the wicked, and the vain terror of the good.” (“Du Dieu de Socrate” Apul. class, pp., 143-145.)