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 them 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 for 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.

The 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, one 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 Diogenes 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 validity 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 mortal, 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 his 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 different 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 and 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 been 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 diverted 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 knowledge, 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 is 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. His 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 dispute. 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.”

VII. REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.

Out from the heart of nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old. EMERSON.

The more diligently the student works this mine (the Bible), the richer and more abundant he finds the ore; new light continually beams from this source of heavenly knowledge to direct and illustrate the work of God and the ways of men.—SIR WALTER SCOTT.

The divine oracles are not so silent in this matter as is imagined. But truly I have so tender a sense of the sacred authority of that holy volume that I dare not be so bold with it as to force it to speak what I think it intends not. Wherefore I would not willingly urge Scripture as a proof of anything, but what I am sure by the whole tenor of it is therein contained. Would I take the liberty to fetch in everything for a Scripture evidence that with a little industry a man might make serviceable to his design, I doubt not but I should be able to fill my margent with quotations which should be as much to purpose as have been cited in general Catechisms and Confessions of Faith.... And yet I must needs say that there is very fair probability for Pre-existence in the written word of God, as there is in that which is engraved upon our rational natures.—GLANVIL, in _Lux Orientalis_.

VII. REINCARNATION IN THE BIBLE.

The vitality of the doctrine of Reincarnation does not in the least depend upon a scriptural endorsement of it, but the fact that it is surprisingly conspicuous here is certainly interesting and confirmatory. Every candid Christian student must acknowledge that the revelation of truth is no more confined to the central book of Christendom than sunshine is limited to the Orient. There must be great principles of philosophy, like that of evolution, outside of the Bible; and yet the most skeptical thinker has to concede that this volume is the richest treasury of wisdom,—the best of which is still unlearned.

Although most Christians are unaware of it, reincarnation is strongly present in the Bible, chiefly in the form of preëxistence. It is not inculcated as a doctrine essential to redemption. Neither is immortality. But it is taken for granted, cropping out here and there as a fundamental rock. Some scholars consider it an unimportant oriental speculation which is accidentally entangled into the texture. But the uniform strength and beauty of its hold seem to rank it with the other essential threads of the warp upon which is woven the noblest fabric of religious thought.

A sufficient evidence of the Biblical support of pre-existence, and of the consequent wide-spread belief in it among the Jews, is found in Solomon’s long reference to it among his Proverbs. The wise king wrote of himself: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way before the works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no foundations abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: when he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the foundations of the deep: when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; rejoicing in the habitable part of the earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.”[34] This passage disposes of the theory of Delitzsch that preëxistence in the Bible means simply an existence in the foreknowledge of the creator. Such a mere foreknowledge would not place him previous to the parts of creation which preceded his earthly appearance. And the last two clauses clearly express a prior physical life. The prophets, too, are assured of their pre-natal antiquity. Jeremiah hears Jehovah tell him, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.”[35]

Skipping passages of disputed interpretation in Job and the Psalms which suggest this idea, there is good evidence for it all through the Old Testament, which is universally conceded by commentators, and was always claimed by the Jewish rabbis. The translators have distinguished the revealed form of Deity, as successively recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, by the word LORD, in capitals, separating this use of the word from other forms, as the preëxistent Christ. “The angel of the Lord” and “the angel of Jehovah” are other expressions for the same manifestation of the Highest, which modern theology regards as the second person of the Trinity. Wherever God is said to have appeared as man, to Abraham at Mamre, to Jacob at Peniel, to Joshua at Gilgal, to the three captives in the Babylonian furnace as “a fourth, like to the Son of God,” etc., Christian scholarship has maintained this to be the same person who afterward became the son of Mary. The Jews also consider these various appearances to be their promised Christ. After the captivity they held the same view concerning all persons. The apocryphal “Wisdom of Solomon” teaches unmistakably the preëxistence of human souls in Platonic form, although it probably is older than Philo, as when it says (ix. 15), “I was an ingenuous child, and received a good soul; nay, more, being good, I came into a body undefiled;” and “the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things.” Glimpses of it appear also in “Ecclesiasticus.”

The assertion of Josephus that this idea was common among the Pharisees is proven in the Gospels, where members of the Sanhedrin cast the retort at Jesus, “Thou wast altogether born in sins.”[36] The prevalence of this feeling in the judgments of daily life is seen in the question put to Jesus by his disciples, “Which did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”[37] referring to the two contending popular theories, that of Moses, who taught that the sins of the fathers would descend on the children to the third and fourth generation, and that of reincarnation, subsequently adopted, by which a man’s discomforts resulted from his former misconduct. Jesus’ reply, “Neither,” is no denial of the truth of reincarnation, for in other passages he definitely affirms it of himself, but merely an indication that he thought this truth had better not be given those listeners then, just as he withheld other verities until the ripe time for utterance. This very expression of preëxistence used by the disciples he employs toward the man whom he healed at Bethesda’s pool after thirty-eight years of paralysis: “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.”[38] Repeatedly he confirms the popular impression that John the Baptist was a reincarnation of Elijah. To the throng around him he said: “Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist.” “If ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.”[39] That John the Baptist denied his former personality as Elijah is not strange, for no one remembers distinctly his earlier life. Often Jesus refers to his descent from heaven, as when he says, “I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me;”[40] and what he means by heaven is shown by his words to Nicodemus, “No man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man _which is in heaven_.”[41] The inference is that the heaven in which he formerly lived was similar to the heaven of that moment, namely earth. Again, Jesus asked his disciples, “Whom say men that I am?” And his disciples state the popular thought in answering, “Some say Elijah, others Jeremiah, and others one of the old prophets.” “But whom say ye that I am?” Peter, the spokesman, replies, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of God,” and so expresses another phase of the same prevailing idea, for the Christ was also an Old Testament personage. And Jesus approves this response. After Herod had decapitated John the Baptist, the appearance of Jesus, also preaching and baptizing, roused in him the apprehension that the prophet he killed had come again in a second life.

Preëxistence, the premise necessarily leading to reincarnation, is the keynote of the most spiritual of the Gospels. The initial sentence sounds it, the body of the book often repeats it, and the final climax is strengthened by it. From the proem, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God,” all through the story occur frequent allusions to it: “The word was made flesh” (John i. 14); “I am the living bread which came down from Heaven” (vi. 51); “Ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before” (vi. 62); “Before Abraham was, I am” (viii. 58); and finally, “Glorify thou me with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (xvii. 5); “For thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world” (xvii. 24). It is always phrased in such a form as might be asserted by any one, though the speaker says it only of himself.

What the fourth Gospel dwells upon so fondly, and what is echoed in other New Testament books,—as in Philippians ii. 7, “He took on him the form of a servant,” in 2 Cor. viii. 9, “Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor,” and in 1 John i. 2, “That eternal Life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us,”—is a thought not limited to the Christ. Precisely the same occurs in the mention of the prophet-baptizer John: “There was a man sent from God” (John i. 6). The obvious sense of this verse to the Christians nearest its publication appears in the comments upon it by Origen, who says that it implies the existence of John the Baptist’s soul previous to his terrestrial body, and hints at the universal belief in preëxistence by adding, “And if the _Catholic opinion_ hold good concerning the soul, as not propagated with the body, but existing previously and for various reasons clothed in flesh and blood, this expression, ‘sent from God,’ will no longer seem extraordinary as applied to John.” No words could more exactly suit the aspirations of an oriental believer in reincarnation than these in the Apocalypse: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, _and he shall go no more out_” (Rev. iii. 12).

More important than any separate quotations is the general tone of the Scriptures, which points directly toward reincarnation. They represent the earthly life as a pilgrimage to the heavenly country of spiritual union with God. It is our conceit and ignorance alone which deems a single earthly life sufficient to accomplish that purpose. They teach the sinful nature of all men and their responsibility for their sin, which certainly demands previous lives for the acquisition of that condition, as shown well by Chevalier Ramsay. (See pages 83–87.) St. Paul’s idea of the Fall and of God are precisely those of Philo and Origen. The Bible also treats Paradise as the ancient abode of man and his future home, which requires a series of reincarnations as the connecting chain.

VIII. REINCARNATION IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.

Our soul having lost its heavenly mansion came down into the earthly body as a strange place.—PHILO.

The soul leaving the body becomes that power which it has most developed. Let us fly, then, from here below, and rise to the intellectual world, that we may not fall into a purely sensible life, by allowing ourselves to follow sensible images; or into a vegetative life, by abandoning ourselves to the pleasures of physical love and gluttony: let us rise, I say, to the intellectual world, to intelligence, to God himself.—PLOTINUS.

The order of things is regulated by the providential government of the whole world; some powers falling down from a loftier position, others gradually sinking to earth: some falling voluntarily, others being cast down against their will: some undertaking of their own accord the service of stretching out the hand to those who fall, others being compelled to persevere for a long time in the duty which they have undertaken.—JEROME.

All that flesh doth cover Souls by source sublime Are but slaves sold over To the master Time, To work out their ransom For the ancient crime.

VIII. REINCARNATION IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.

The first centuries of Christianity found reincarnation still the prevailing creed, as in all the previous ages, but with various shades of interpretation. What these different phases of the same central thought were may be gathered from Jerome’s catalogue, after the strife between Eastern and Western ideas had been working for some centuries and the present tendency of Europe had asserted itself. Jerome writes: “As to the origin of the soul, I remember the question of the whole church: whether it be fallen from heaven, as Pythagoras and the Platonists and Origen believe; or be of the proper substance of God, as the Stoics, Manichæans and Priscillian heretics of Spain believe; or whether they are kept in a repository formerly built by God, as some ecclesiastics foolishly believe; or whether they are daily made by God and sent into bodies according to that which is written in the Gospel: ‘My Father worketh hitherto and I work;’ or whether by traduction, as Tertullian, Apollinarius, and the greater part of the Westerns believe, _i. e._, that as body from body so the soul is derived from the soul, subsisting by the same condition with animals.”

In the form of Gnosticism it so strongly pervaded the early church that the fourth Gospel was specially directed against it; but this Gospel according to John attacked it only by advocating a broader rendering of the same faith. We have seen that Origen refers to preëxistence as the general opinion. Clemens Alexandrinus (Origen’s master) taught it as a divine tradition authorized by St. Paul himself in Romans v. 12, 14, 19. Ruffinus in his letter to Anastasius says that “This opinion was common among the primitive fathers.” Later, Jerome relates that the doctrine of transmigration was taught as an esoteric one communicated to only a select few. But Nemesius emphatically declared that all the Greeks who believed in immortality believed also in metempsychosis. Delitzsch says, “It had its advocates as well in the synagogues as in the church.”

The Gnostics and Manichæans received it, with much else, from Zoroastrian predecessors. The Neo-Platonists derived it chiefly from a blending of Plato and the Orient. The Church Fathers drew it not only from these sources, but from the Jews and the pioneers of Christianity. Several of them condemn the Persian and Platonic philosophies and yet hold to reincarnation in other guises. Aside from all authority, the doctrine seems to have been rooted among the inaugurators of our era in its adaptation to their mental needs, as the best explanation of the ways of God and the nature of men.

I. The Gnostics were a school of eclectics which became conspicuous amid the chaotic vortex of all religions in Alexandria, during the first century. They sought to furnish the young Christian church with a philosophic creed, and ranked themselves as the only initiates into a mystical system of Christian truth which was too exalted for the masses. Their thought was an elaborate structure of Greek ideas built upon Parsee Dualism, maintaining that the world was created by some fallen spirit or principle, and that the spirits of men were enticed from a preëxistent higher stage by the Creator into the slavery of material bodies. The evils and sins of life belong only to the degraded prison-house of the spirit. The world is only an object of contempt. Virtue consists in severest asceticism. To combat their theory that Jesus was one of a vast number of beings between man and God, the fourth Gospel was written. They spread widely through the first and second centuries in many branches of belief. But most of their strength was absorbed into Manichæism, which was a more logical union of Persian with Christian and Greek ideas. In this simple faith the world is a creation not of a fallen spirit, but of the primary evil principle, while the spirit of man is the creation of God, and the conflict between flesh and spirit is that between the powers of light and darkness. The Gnostic and Manichæan notions of preëxistence perpetuated themselves in many of the medieval sects, especially the Bogomiles, Paulicians, and Priscillians. Seven adherents of the Priscillian heresy were put to death in Spain A. D. 385, as the first instance of the death penalty visited by a Christian magistrate for erroneous belief. The Italian Cathari were another sect holding this form of reincarnation, against whom the Albigensian Crusade of the elder De Montfort was sent, and the inquisition devised by St. Dominic. Still they thrived in secret and possessed a disguised hierarchy which long survived their violent persecution. Similar sects descended from them still exist among the Russian dissenters.

II. Contemporary with the Alexandrian Gnostics arose the philosophical school of the Neo-Platonists which gathered into one the doctrines of Pythagoras, Plato, and Buddhism,[42] and constructed a theology which might make headway against Christianity by satisfying in a rational way the longings which the new religion addressed. They too disclosed the reality and nearness of a spiritual world, a reconciliation with God, and the pathway for returning to Him. The distinguishing principle of Neo-Platonism is _emanation_, which took the place of creation. From the eternal Intelligence proceeds the multiplicity of souls which comprise the intelligible world, and of which the worldsoul is the highest and all-embracing source. They insisted upon the distinct individuality of each soul, and earnestly combated the charge of Pantheism. Souls who have descended into the delusion of matter did so from pride and a desire of false independence. They now forget their former estate and the Father whom they have deserted. The mission of men, in the dying words of Plotinus, is “to bring the divine within them into harmony with that which is divine in the universe.” The Neo-Platonists fought Gnosticism as fiercely as Christianity. Plotinus, by far the best of their writers, as well as the oldest whose works are preserved, devotes a whole book of his Enneads to the refutation of the doctrines of Valentinus, the brightest of the Gnostics. Contrary to the latter’s thought, that men are fallen into the miry pit of matter which is wholly bad, Plotinus claims that the world of matter, although the least divine part of the universe because remotest from the One, is still good and the best place for man’s development. From its former life he insists the soul has not fallen and cannot, but has descended into the lower stage of existence through innate weakness of intellect in order to be prepared for a higher exaltation.

The most important of this group of thinkers were Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, and Porphyry in the third century, Jamblichus in the fourth, Hierocles and Proclus in the fifth, and Damascius in the sixth. It flourished with energy for over three hundred years, and as its ideas were largely appropriated by Christian theologians and philosophers, beginning with Origen, it has never ceased to be felt through Christendom. Giordano Bruno, the martyr of the Italian reformation, popularized it, and handed it over to later philosophers. The philosophy of Emerson is substantially a revival of Plotinus. Coleridge is also strongly influenced by him.

As Plotinus is in some respects the most interesting of all the older writers, and taught reincarnation in a form thoroughly rational and supremely helpful, meeting Western needs in this regard more directly than any other philosopher, we quote at some length from his scarce essay on “The Descent of the Soul.”

“When any particular soul acts in discord from the One, flying from the whole and apostasizing from thence by a certain disagreement, no longer beholding an intelligible nature, from its partial blindness, in this case it becomes deserted and solitary, impotent and distracted with care; for it now directs its mental eye to a part, and by a separation from that which is universal, attaches itself as a slave to one particular nature. It thus degenerates from the whole and governs particulars with anxiety and fatigue, assiduously cultivating externals and becoming not only present with body, but profoundly entering into its dark abodes. Hence, too, by such conduct the wings of the soul are said to suffer a defluxion and she becomes fettered with the bonds of body, after deserting the safe and innoxious habit of governing a better nature which flourishes with universal soul. The soul, therefore, falling from on high, suffers captivity, is loaded with fetters, and employs the energies of sense; because in this case her intellectual longing is impeded from the first. She is reported also to be buried and to be concealed in a cave; but when she converts herself to intelligence she then breaks her fetters and ascends on high, receiving first of all from reminiscence the ability of contemplating real beings; at the same time possessing something supereminent and ever abiding in the intelligible world. Souls therefore are necessarily of an amphibious nature, and alternately experience a superior and inferior condition of being; such as are able to enjoy a more intimate converse with Intellect abiding for a longer period in the higher world, and such to whom the contrary happens, either through nature or fortune, continuing longer connected with these inferior concerns.”...

“Thus, the soul, though of divine origin, and proceeding from the regions on high, becomes merged in the dark receptacle of the body, and being naturally a posterior god, it descends hither through a certain voluntary inclination, for the sake of power and of adorning inferior concerns. By this means it receives a knowledge of its latent powers, and exhibits a variety of operations peculiar to its nature, which by perpetually abiding in an incorporeal habit, and never proceeding into energy, would have been bestowed in vain. Besides the soul would have been ignorant of what she possessed, her powers always remaining dormant and concealed: since energy everywhere exhibits capacity, which would otherwise be entirely occult and obscure, and without existence, because not endued with one substantial and true. But now indeed every one admires the intellectual powers of the soul, through the variety of her external effects.”...

“Through an abundance of desire the soul becomes profoundly merged into matter, and no longer totally abides with the universal soul. Yet our souls are able alternately to rise from hence carrying back with them an experience of what they have known and suffered in their fallen state; from whence they will learn how blessed it is to abide in the intelligible world, and by a comparison, as it were, of contraries, will more plainly perceive the excellence of a superior state. For the experience of evil produces a clearer knowledge of good. This is accomplished in our souls according to the circulations of time, in which a conversion takes place from subordinate to more exalted natures.

“Indeed, if it were proper to speak clearly what appears to me to be the truth, contrary to the opinions of others, the whole of our soul also does not enter into the body, but something belonging to it always abides in the intelligible, and something different from this in the sensible world: and that which abides in the sensible world, if it conquers, or rather if it is vanquished and disturbed, does not permit us to perceive that which the supreme part of the soul contemplates; for that which is understood then arrives at our nature when it descends within the limits of sensible inspection. For every soul possesses something which inclines downwards to body, and something which tends upwards toward intellect; and the soul, indeed, which is universal and of the universe, by its part which is inclined towards body, governs the whole without labor and fatigue, transcending that which it governs.

“But souls which are particular and of a part are too much occupied by sense, and by a perception of many things happening contrary to nature are surrounded by a multitude of foreign concerns. It is likewise subject to a variety of affections, and is ensnared by the allurements of pleasure. But the superior part of the soul is never influenced by fraudulent delights, and lives a life always uniform and divine.”

III. Many of the orthodox Church Fathers welcomed reincarnation as a ready explanation of the fall of man and the mystery of life, and distinctly preached it as the only means of reconciling the existence of suffering with a merciful God. It was an essential part of the church philosophy for many centuries in the rank and file of Christian thought, being stamped with the authority of the leading thinkers of Christendom, and then gradually was frowned upon as the Western influences predominated, until it became heresy and at length survived only in a few scattered sects.

Justin Martyr expressly speaks of the soul inhabiting more than once the human body, and denies that on taking a second time the embodied form it can remember previous experiences. Afterwards, he says, souls which have become unworthy to see God in human guise, are joined to the bodies of wild beasts. Thus he openly defends the grosser phase of metempsychosis.

Clemens Alexandrinus is declared by a contemporary to have written “wonderful stories about metempsychosis and many worlds before Adam.”

Arnobius, also, is known to have frankly avowed this doctrine.

Noblest of all the church advocates of this opinion was Origen. He regarded the earthly history of the human race as one epoch in an historical series of changeful decay and restoration, extending backward and forward into æons; and our temporal human body as the place of purification for our spirits exiled from a happier existence on account of sin. He taught that souls were all originally created by God _minds_ of the same kind and condition, that is of the same essence as the infinite Mind, and that they exercised their freedom of will, some wisely and well, others with abuse in different degrees, producing the divergences now apparent in mankind. From that old experience some souls have retained more than others of the pristine condition. The lapsed souls God clothed with bodies and sent into this world, both to expiate their temerity and to prepare themselves for a better future. The variety of their offenses caused the diversity of their terrestrial conditions. In these bodies, each enjoys that lot which most exactly suited his previous habits. On these the whole earthly circumstances of man, internal and external, even his whole life from birth, depend. In this way alone he thought the justice of God could be defended. But when men keep themselves free from contagion in bodily existence and restrain the turbulent movements of sense and imagination, being gradually purified from the body they ascend on high and are at last changed into _minds_, of which the earthly souls are corruptions. In his own words, “Here is the cause of the diversing among rational creatures, not in the will or decision of the creature, but in the freedom of individual liberty. For God justly disposing of his creatures according to their desert united the diversities of minds in one congruous world, that he might, as it were, adorn his mansion (in which ought to be not only vases of gold and silver, but of wood also and clay, and some to honor and some to dishonor) with these diverse vases, minds, or souls. To these causes the world owes its diversity, while Divine Providence disposes each according to his tendency, mind, and disposition.”

“If from unknown reasons the soul be already not exactly worthy of being born in an irrational body, nor yet exactly in one purely rational, it is furnished with a monstrous body, so that reason cannot be fully developed by one thus born, the nature of the body being fashioned either of a higher or lower body according to the scope of the reason.”

“I think this is a question how it happens that the human mind is influenced now by the good now by the evil. The causes of this I suspect to be more ancient than this corporeal birth.”

“If our course be not marked out according to our works before this life, how is it true that it is not unjust in God that the elder should serve the younger and be hated, before he had done things deserving of servitude and of hatred.”

“By the fall and by the cooling from a life of the Spirit came that which is now the soul, which is also capable of a return to her original condition, of which I think the prophet speaks in this: ‘Return unto thy rest, O my soul.’ So that the whole is this—how the mind becomes a soul and how the soul rectified becomes a mind.”

Concerning preëxistence in the Bible, Origen writes, in his “De Principiis”: “The Holy Scriptures have called the creation of the world by a new and peculiar name, terming it καταβολή, which has been very improperly translated into Latin by ‘constitutio’; for in Greek καταβολή; signifies rather ‘dejicere,’ _i. e._, to cast downwards,—a word which has been improperly translated into Latin by the phrase ‘constitutio mundi,’ as where the Saviour says, ‘And there will be tribulation in those days, such as was not since the beginning of the world;’[43] in which passage καταβολή is rendered by beginning (constitutio). The Apostle also has employed the language, saying, ‘Who hath chosen us before the foundation of the world;’[44] and this foundation he calls καταβολή, to be understood in the same sense as before. It seems worth while, then, to inquire what is meant by this new term; and I am, indeed, of the opinion that as the end and consummation of the saints will be in those (ages) which are not seen, and are eternal, we must conclude that rational creatures had also a similar beginning. And if they had a beginning such as the end for which they hope, they existed undoubtedly from the very beginning in those (ages) which are not seen, and are eternal. And if this is so, then there has been a descent from a higher to a lower condition, on the part not only of those souls who have deserved the change by the variety of their movements, but also on that of those who, in order to serve the whole world, were brought down from those higher and invisible spheres to these lower and visible ones, although against their will. From this it follows that by the use of the word καταβολή, a descent from a higher to a lower condition, shared by all in common, would seem to be pointed out. The hope of freedom is entertained by the whole of creation—of being liberated from the corruption of slavery—when the sons of God, who either fell away or were scattered abroad, shall be gathered into one, and when they shall have fulfilled their duties in this world.”

Many contemporaneous and subsequent writers censured Origen for this opinion, but his doctrine was maintained by a large number of strong followers and independent thinkers.

Even in Jerome and Augustine certain passages indicate that they held this theory in part. In his Epistle to Avitus, Jerome agrees with Origen as to the interpretation of the passage above mentioned by Origen, “Who hath chosen us before the foundation of the world.” He says “a divine habitation, and a true rest above, I think, is to be understood, where rational creatures dwelt, and where, before their descent to a lower position, and removal from invisible to visible (worlds), and fall to earth, and need of gross bodies, they enjoyed a former blessedness. Whence God the Creator made for them bodies suitable to their humble position, and created this visible world and sent into the world ministers for their salvation.”

The Latin Fathers Nemesius, Synesius, and Hilarius boldly defend preëxistence, though taking exception to Origen’s form of it. Of Synesius, most familiar to English readers as the convent patriarch in “Hypatia,” it is known that when the citizens of Ptolemais invited him to their bishopric, he declined that dignity for the reason that he cherished certain opinions which they might not approve, as after mature reflection they had struck deep roots in his mind. Foremost among these he mentioned the doctrine of preëxistence. Vestiges of this belief are discerned in his writings; for example, in the Greek hymn paraphrased as follows:—

Eternal Mind, thy seedling spark Through this thin vase of clay Athwart the waves of chaos dark Emits a timorous ray!

This mind-enfolding soul is sown Incarnate germ in earth. In pity, blessed Lord, then own What claims in Thee its birth.

Far forth from Thee, Thou central fire, To earth’s sad bondage cast, Let not the trembling spark expire, Absorb Thine own at last.

Another of this group, Prudentius, entertained nearly the same idea as that of Origen concerning the soul’s descent from higher seats to earth, as appears in one of his hymns:—

O Saviour, bid my soul, thy trembling spouse, Return at last to Thee believing. Bind, bind anew those all unearthly vows She broke on high and wandered grieving.

Although Origen’s teaching was condemned by the Council of Constantinople in 551, it permanently colored the stream of Christian theology, not only in many scholastics and medieval heterodoxies, but through all the later course of religious thought, in many isolated individuals and groups.

IX. REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY.

A man may travel from one end of the kingdom to the other without money, feeding and lodging as well as the people.

A MISSIONARY IN BURMAH.

Buddhism has not deceived, and it has not persecuted. In this respect it can teach Christians a lesson. The unconditioned command, “Thou shalt not kill,” which applies to all living creatures, has had great influence in softening the manners of the Monguls. This command is connected with the doctrine of transmigration of souls, which is one of the essential doctrines of this system as well as of Brahmanism. Buddhism also inculcates a positive humanity consisting of good actions.—JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

He lived musing the woes of man, The ways of fate, the doctrines of the books, The secrets of the silence whence all come, The secrets of the gloom whereto all go, The life that lies between like that arch flung From cloud to cloud across the sky, which hath Mists for its masonry and vapory piers. THE LIGHT OF ASIA.

IX. REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY.

The religious philosophy of the Orient, like everything else there, remains now substantially the same as in the earliest times. History cannot say when Brahmanism did not flourish among the multitudes of India. Buddhism, the later Protestant phase of the old faith, which abolished its abuses of priesthood and caste and spread its reformation broadcast through Asia, did not alter the original teaching of re-birth, but rather confirmed and popularized the truth that has lain at the heart of India from remotest ages. Reincarnation is the sap-root of eastern religion and permeates the Veda scriptures.

While it is claimed by the West that the religion of Sakya Muni is below that of Jesus, as inspiring an exalted selfishness in distinction to the generous sacrifice taught by Christianity; while it is true that the best Buddhists lead a passive, submissive life which made them easy spoil for conquering races and has not accomplished any result in civilization since the first ancient subjugation; while Buddhism with its mortification and self-centred goodness is even more distasteful to the western race than the meditative dreamy asceticism of Brahmanism: it is equally certain that these eastern religions are far more really lived by their followers than Christianity is with us; it must be admitted that a spiritual selfishness, which is so thoroughly practiced as to bear all the fruits of generous love, is preferable to a noble sacrifice, which is so largely precept as to appear to the naked eye a civilized barbarism; and it is worth considering whether Christendom may not gain as much by learning the secret of Eastern superiority to materialism, as the Orient is gaining by the infusion of Western activity. Travelers agree that in many parts of inner China, Thibet, Central India, and Ceylon the daily life of Buddhism is so like the realization of Christianity, as to give strong support to the theory of the Indian origin of our religion. There is a practical demonstration of what reincarnation will do for a race, and a hint of the grander result which would accrue from grafting that principle into the real life of the stronger Saxon, Teutonic, and Celtic stock. Knowing the indestructibility of the soul, the evanescence of the body, and the permanence of spiritual traits as formed by thought, word, and deed, the whole energy of life is focused upon purity of self and charity to others. To love one’s enemies, to abstain from even defensive warfare, to govern the soul, to obey one’s superiors, to venerate age, to provide food and shelter, to tolerate all differences of opinion and religion, are guiding maxims of actual life. They are as vitally and generally translated into flesh and blood as in primitive Christianity or in Count Tolstoi’s flock. Honesty, modesty, and simplicity prevail in these sections. Women are held in the same esteem as in the ancient Sanskrit epoch, and children are treated more beautifully than in many Christian homes. A lady traveler, known to the writer, who witnessed this, said that if her lot were that of a friendless woman, she knew no place on earth where she would labor and dwell more happily than in Ceylon. As the peasantry receive reincarnation in the simplest and extremest form of human re-births in animal bodies, every living creature is regarded by them as a possible relative. Gentleness to the animal creation abounds as nowhere else in the world. It is a sin to kill any beast. It is a virtue to offer one’s life for a distressed animal, as the popular tradition holds that Buddha did in one life by throwing himself to a famished tigress. Death is no object of dread, but a welcome benefactor, transferring them forward in their progress to the goal of rest. To die for any good purpose, as under the sacred Brahman car of Juggernaut, or in some one’s behalf, is the common aspiration; so much so that it is difficult for the missionaries to gain any feeling for the death on the cross, as they think any one would easily suffer that.

The Brahmans have for ages studied the problems of ontology and the soul’s future, by severest introspection and acutest thought, to build their system, which is a vast elaboration of religious metaphysics, upon a theistic basis. Reincarnation is the cornerstone of this structure. Many of the higher Brahmans are believed to have penetrated the veils concealing past existences. It is related, for instance, that when Apollonius of Tyana visited India, the Brahman Iarchus told him that “the truth concerning the soul is as Pythagoras taught you and as we taught the Egyptians,” and mentioned that he (Apollonius) in a previous incarnation was an Egyptian steersman, and had refused the inducements offered him by pirates to guide his vessel into their hands. The common people of India are sure that certain of the Brahmans and Buddhists are still able to verify by their finer senses the reality of reincarnation. And many educated natives and resident foreigners in India have witnessed evidences of this keen power of insight associated with other extraordinary qualities which compelled them to believe in it.

Brahmanism and Buddhism are practically agreed upon the philosophy of reincarnation, as the great Buddhist revolt against priestcraft only emphasized this doctrine. Every branch of these systems aims at the means of winning escape from the necessity of repeated births. The ardent and final desire of all is expressed by the words of the sage Bharata:—

“And may the purple self-existent god (Siva), Whose vital energy pervades all space, From future transmigrations save my soul.”

There are, however, great differences in these two faiths as to the means and the result. Both contend that all forms are the penance of nature. They regard personal existence as an empty delusion and the exemption from it as true salvation. The Brahman seeks Nirvana, which is absorption in Brahm, as the reality at the heart of things; the Buddhist considers this also unreal, and finds no reality but in the silence and peace attained beyond Nirvana. In the Brahman’s paradise, one is so free from desire that no need remains for perpetuating his individual existence. But after that comes Pan-Nirvana, which is utter inaction and disappearance, a condition so difficult for a Western mind to comprehend that it persists in falsely calling it and Nirvana alike—annihilation. The Buddhist’s one duty of life and the means of attaining his goal is mortification, the extinction of affection and desire. But the Brahman’s work is contemplation, illumination, communion with Brahm, religious study, and asceticism. The creed of Buddhism is universal; that of Brahmanism is exclusive. The Buddhist saint may come from any class, for the _raison d’être_ of his faith is the abolition of caste. But only the wearer of the sacred Brahman thread can aspire to direct union with Brahm; the lower castes must undergo painful fakir penances until they attain the Brahman estate.

Northern Buddhism has been defined as almost identical with Gnosticism. It has spun a dense fabric of legend and speculation about this central thought of the soul’s gradual evolution from the natural to the spiritual. The Hindus believe that human souls emanated from the Supreme Being, and became gradually immersed in matter, forgetting their divine origin, and straying in bewildered condition back to him through many lives, after a protracted round of births in partial reparation. Having become contaminated with sin, we must work out our release through earthly lives in the delusive arena of sense until the reality of spiritual existence is attained. So long as the soul is not pure enough for re-mergence into Brahm, we must be born again repeatedly, and the degree of our impurity determines what these births shall be. So closely is the account of the soul’s misdeeds kept that it may pass through thousands of years in one or another of the heavens in reward for good deeds, and yet be obliged later to descend to earth for certain ancient sins. The Laws of Manu give a standard by which the moral consequences of various human actions are measured with great detail.[45] A more general doctrine is based on the assumption of three Cosmic qualities—goodness, passion, and darkness—in the human soul. On this ground Manu and other writers built an intricate theory, providing that souls of the first quality become deities, those of the second, men, and those of the third, beasts.

The Hindu conception of reincarnation embraces all existence—gods, men, animals, plants, minerals. It is believed that everything migrates, from Buddha down to inert matter. Hardy tells us that Buddha himself was born an ascetic eighty-three times, a monarch fifty-eight times, as the soul of a tree forty-three times, and many other times as ape, deer, lion, snipe, chicken, eagle, serpent, pig, frog, etc., amounting to four hundred times in all. A Chinese authority represents Buddha as saying, “The number of my births and deaths can only be compared to those of all the plants in the universe.” Birth is the gate which opens into every state, and merit determines into which it shall open. Earth and human life are an intermediary stage, resulting from many previous places and forms and introducing many more. There are multitudes of inhabited worlds upon which the same person is successively born according to his attractions. To the earthly life he may return again and again, dropping the memory of past experiences, and carrying, like an embryonic germ, the concisest summary of former lives into each coming one. Every act bears upon the resultant which shall steer the soul into its next habitation, not only on earth, but in the more exalted or debased regions of “Heaven” and “Hell.” Thus “the chain of the law” binds all existences, and the only escape is by the final absorption into Brahm.

While the Hindus generally hold that the same soul appears at different births, the heretical Southern Buddhists teach that the succession of existences is a succession of souls, bred from one another, like the sprouting of new generations from plants and animals, and like the new light kindled from an old lamp, the result, but not the identity of the former. Another curious aspect of these Indian speculations is the view of certain Northern Buddhists, who divide eternity into gigantic cycles which shall at length bring around again a precise repetition of earlier events. This is similar to the grand periodic year of the Stoics and of the Epicurean Atomists, and to the continual metempsychosis of Pythagoras, which provided that the identical Plato would again and again, at certain tremendous intervals staggering any one but a Greek or Hindu metaphysician, appear at the same Academy and deliver the same lectures, etc.

Zoroastrians and Sufi Mohamedans, with their usual antipathy to Indian thought, limit their conceptions of reincarnation to a few repeated lives on earth, which some of the Persian and Arabian mystics stretch out to a larger number, but soon disappearing either back into the original source or into darker scenes.

X. EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.

Here shalt thou pluck from the most ancient shells The whitest pearls of wisdom’s treasury. EDWIN ARNOLD.

Young and enterprising is the West, Old and meditative is the East. Turn, O youth! with intellectual zest Where the sage invites thee to his feast.

Eastward roll the orbs of heaven, Westward tend the thoughts of men. Let the poet, nature-driven, Wander eastward now and then. MILNES.

X. EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.

All Eastern poetry finds a favorite theme in metempsychosis, and the literature of India is thoroughly saturated with it. The fervent passion, the subtle thought, the luxuriant imagery which permeate Asiatic life are centred upon this common philosophy. But the best portion of this enormous wealth of fantasy is withheld from us, simply because of its revelry in this very thought which is generally unattractive to the West. What oriental poetry enters our language is chiefly erotic or epic, and the most characteristic of all is left for the few educated natives to enjoy. We can therefore only select a few representative gems from this unworked mine, illustrating the Muses of India, Persia, and Arabia. Among the ancient Sanskrit epics are discovered beautiful renderings of the thought of many births. The delicacy and tenderness of Persian poetry furnish charming expressions of the Zoroastrian aspirations for release from earthly bondages to reascend homeward. The Arabian mysticism of the Sufis directs their intense subjectivity into ecstatic phrasings of the same idea.

In the wonderful ancient Sanskrit drama “Sakoontala” by Kalidésa, translated by Monier Williams, occur these passages:—

This peerless maid is like a fragrant flower Whose perfumed breath has never been diffused. A gem of priceless water, just released Pure and unblemished from its glittering bed. Or rather is she like the mellowed fruit Of virtuous actions in some former birth Now brought to full perfection.

That song has filled me with a most peculiar sweetness. I seem to yearn after some long forgotten love. Not seldom in our happy hours of ease When thought is still, the sight of some fair form, Or mournful fall of music breathing low Will stir strange fancies thrilling all the soul With a mysterious sadness and a sense Of vague yet earnest longing. Can it be That the dim memory of events long passed, Or friendships formed in other states of being Flits like a passing shadow o’er the spirit?

The Sanskrit “Katha Upanishad,” in Edwin Arnold’s rendering as “The Secret of Death,” contains a full explanation of the Eastern doctrine.

For his noble sacrifice Yama (Death) grants to Nachikêtas the privilege of asking three boons. After naming and receiving the first two Nachikêtas says:—

“Thou dost give peace—is that peace nothingness? Some say that after death the soul still lives, Personal, conscious; some say, nay, it ends: Fain would I know which of these twain be true, By the enlightened. Be my third boon this.” Then Yama answered, “This was asked of old, Even by the gods! This is a subtle thing, Not to be told, hard to be understood: Ask me some other boon: I may not grant.”

Nachikêtas insists upon this, and will not accept the wealths, powers, and pleasures which Death offers as a substitute.

Then Yama yielded, granting the great boon, And spake: “Know, first of all, that what is Good And what is Pleasant—these be separate! By many ways, in diverse instances Pleasure and Good lay hold upon each man! Blessed is he who, choosing high, lets go Pleasure for Good. The Pleasure-seekers lose Life’s end, so lived. The Pleasant and the Good Solicit men: the sage, distinguishing By understanding, followeth the Good, Being more excellent. The foolish man Cleaveth to Pleasure, seeking still to have, To keep, enjoy. The foolish ones who live In ignorance, holding themselves as wise And well instructed, tread the round of change With erring steps, deluded, like the blind Led by the blind. The necessary road Which brings to life unchanging is not seen By such: wealth dazzles heedless hearts: deceived With shows of sense, they deem their world is real And the unseen is naught; so, constantly, Fall they beneath my stroke. To reach to Being Beyond all seeming Being, to know true life— This is not gained by many; seeing that few So much as hear of it, and of those few The more part understandeth not. “The uttermost true soul is ill-perceived By him who, unenlightened, sayeth: I Am I: thou, thou; and the life divided: He That knoweth life undifferenced, declares The spirit, what it is, One with the All. And this is Truth. But nowise shall the truth Be compassed, if thou speak of small and great. “Excellent youth! the knowledge thou didst crave Comes not with speech: words are the false world’s signs. By insight surely comes it if one hears. Lo! thou hast loved the Truth, and striven for it. I would that others, Nachikêtas, strove! “Only the wise who patiently do sever Their thought from shows and fix it upon truths, See HIM, the Perfect and Unspeakable, Hard to be seen, retreating, ever hid Deeper and deeper in the uttermost; Whose house was never entered, who abides Now and before and always; and so seeing Are freed from griefs and pleasures.” “Make it known to me,” he saith, “Who is HE? what? whom thou hast knowledge of.” Then Yama spake: “The answer whereunto all vedas lead; The answer whereunto as penance strives; The answer whereunto those strive that live As seekers after God—hear this from me. Who knoweth the word Om (which meaneth God) With all its purports; what his heart would have His heart possesseth. This of spoken speech Is wisest, deepest, best, supremest. He That speaketh it, and wotteth what he speaks Is worshiped in the place of Brahm, with Brahm! Also, the soul which knoweth thus itself It is not born. It doth not die. It sprang From none, and it begetteth none. Unmade, Immortal, changeless, primal. I can break The body, but that soul I cannot harm.” “If he that slayeth thinks ‘I slay’; if he Whom he doth slay thinks ‘I am slain,’ then both Know not aright. That which was life in each Cannot be slain nor slay. The untouched soul, Greater than all the worlds (because the worlds By it subsist); smaller than subtleties Of things minutest; last of ultimates, Sits in the hollow heart of all that lives! Whoso hath laid aside desire and fear, His senses mastered and his spirit still, Sees in the quiet light of verity Eternal, safe, majestical—his soul: Resting it ranges everywhere: asleep It roams the world, unsleeping: who, save I, Know that divinest spirit as it is, Glad beyond joy, existing outside life? Beholding it in bodies bodiless, Amid impermanency permanent, Embracing all things, yet in the midst of all The mind enlightened casts its grief away: It is not to be known by knowledge: man Wotteth it not by wisdom: learning vast Halts short of it: only by soul itself Is soul perceived—when the Soul wills it so There shines no light save its own light to show Itself unto itself: none compasseth Its joy who is not wholly ceased from sin, Who dwells not self-controlled, self-centred, calm, Lord of himself. It is not gotten else. Brahm hath it not to give. “The man unwise, unmindful, evil-lived Comes not to that fixed place of peace; he falls Back to the region of sense life again. The wise and mindful one, heart purified, Attaineth to the changeless Place, wherefrom Never again shall births renew for him. Then hath he freedom over all worlds And, if it wills the region of the Past, The fathers and the mothers of the Past Come to receive it; and that soul is glad: And if it wills the regions of the Homes, The Brothers and the Sisters of the Homes Come to receive it; and that soul is glad: And if it wills the region of the Friends, The well-beloved come to welcome it With love undying; and that soul is glad. And if it wills a world of grace and peace Where garlands are and perfumes and delights Of delicate meats and drinks, music and song, Lo! fragrances and blossoms and delights Of dainty banquets and the streams of song Come to it; and that soul is glad. Whoso once perceiveth HIM that is Without a name, Unseen, Impalpable, Bodiless, Timeless, such an one is saved, Death hath not power upon him.”

Although not an Asiatic poem in the ordinary sense, we do not hesitate to place in this cluster Edwin Arnold’s “Light of Asia.” After the festival scene in which the prince distributed prizes to the maiden victors in the sports, and his love had centred upon Yasôdhara, the last of the contestants, follow these lines:—

Long after, when enlightenment was full, Lord Buddha, being prayed why thus his heart Took fire at first glance of the Sâkya girl, Answered: “We were not strangers as to us And all it seemed; in ages long gone by A hunter’s son, playing with forest girls By Yamun’s springs, where Nandadevi stands Sate umpire while they raced beneath the firs Like hares at eve that run their playful rings; One with flower-like stars crowned he, one with long plumes, Plucked from the pheasant and the jungle cock, One with fir apples; but who ran the last Came first for him, and unto her the boy Gave a tame fawn and his heart’s love beside. And in the wood they lived many glad years, And in the wood they undivided died. Lo! as hid seed shoots after rainless years, So good and evil, pains and pleasures, hates And loves, and all dead deeds come forth again Bearing bright leaves or dark, sweet fruit or sour. Thus was I he and she Yasôdhara; And while the wheel of birth and death turns round That which hath been must be between us two.”

In other passages of the same poem Buddha tells how his athletic triumph over the suitors for Yasôdhara, in which she wore a black and gold veil, was but a new version of an ancient forest battle, when as a tiger he conquered all the rival claimants for the black and gold-striped tigress Yasôdhara; how ages before in time of famine, when he was a Brahman, he compassionately threw himself to a starving tigress; and how his final salvation of Yasôdhara by the enlightened doctrine repeated a transaction centuries old, when he was a pearl merchant and sacrificed the priceless gem containing all his fortune to rescue this same wife Yasôdhara from hunger.

* * * * *

A typical expression of the Zoroastrian phase of reincarnation is found in this poem:—

FROM THE PERSIAN.

BY ARCHBISHOP R. C. TRENCH.

Happy are you, starry brethren, who from heaven do not roam, In the eternal Father’s mansion from the first have dwelt at home.

Round the Father’s throne forever standing in his countenance, Sunning you, you see the seven circling heavens around you dance.

Me he has cast out to exile in a distant land to learn How I should love Him the Father, how for that true country yearn.

I lie here, a star of heaven, fallen upon this gloomy place, Scarce remembering what bright courses I was once allowed to trace.

Still in dreams it comes upon me, that I once on wings did soar; But or e’er my flight commences this my dream must all be o’er.

When the lark is climbing upward in the sunbeam, then I feel Even as though my spirit also hidden pinions could reveal.

I a rosebud to this lower soil of earth am fastly bound, And with heavenly dew besprinkled still am rooted to the ground.

Yet the life is struggling upward, stirring still with all their might, Yearning buds that cry to open to the warmth and heavenly light.

From its stalk released, my flower soars not yet a butterfly, But meanwhile my fragrant incense evermore I breathe on high.

By my Gardener to his garden I shall once transplanted be, There where I have been already written from eternity.

Oh, my brothers blooming yonder, unto Him the ancient—pray That the hour of my transplanting He will not for long delay.

Hafiz, the prince of Persian poets, figures the soul as the phœnix alighting on Tuba, the Tree of Life:—

My phœnix long ago secured His nest in the sky-vault’s cope; In the body’s cage immured He was weary of life’s hope.

Round and round this heap of ashes Now flies the bird amain, But in that odorous niche of heaven Nestles the bird again.

Once flies he upward he will perch On Tuba’s golden bough; His home is on that fruited arch Which cools the blest below.

If over this sad world of ours His wings my phœnix spread, How gracious falls on land and sea The soul-refreshing shade!

Either world inhabits he, Sees oft below him planets roll; His body is all of air compact, Of Allah’s love, his soul.

The following Sufi poem will illustrate the passionate phase of reincarnation which appears in the spiritual absorption of the Mohammedan mystics. It is not surprising that the intensity of their rapturous piety has drawn among their ranks of meditative devotees the most distinguished religionists, philosophers, and poets of the whole Persian and Arabian Orient:

THE SUCCESSFUL SEARCH.

I was ere a name had been named upon earth,— Ere one trace yet existed of aught that has birth,— When the locks of the Loved One streamed forth for a sign, And being was none save the Presence Divine! Ere the veil of the flesh for Messiah was wrought To the Godhead I bowed in prostration of thought. I measured intensely, I pondered with heed (But ah! fruitless my labor) the Cross and its creed. To the Pagod I rushed, and the Magian’s shrine, But my eye caught no glimpse of a glory divine: The reins of research to the Caaba I bent, Whither hopefully thronging the old and young went; Candasai and Herát searched I wistfully through, Nor above nor beneath came the Loved One to view! I toiled to the summit, wild, pathless and lone, Of the globe-girding Kâf, but the Phœnix had flown. The seventh earth I traversed, the seventh heaven explored, But in neither discerned I the Court of the Lord. I questioned the Pen and the Tablet of Fate, But they whispered not where He pavilions his state. My vision I strained, but my God-scanning eye No trace that to Godhead belongs could descry. But when I my glance turned within my own breast, Lo! the vainly sought Loved One, the Godhead confessed. In the whirl of its transport my spirit was tossed Till each atom of separate being I lost: And the bright sun of Tanniz a madder than me Or a wilder, hath never yet seen, nor shall see.

XI. ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.

Life’s thirst quenches itself With draughts which double thirst, but who is wise Tears from his soul this Trishna, feeds his sense No longer on false shows, files his mind To seek not, strive not, wrong not; bearing meek All ills which flow from foregone wrongfulness, And so constraining passions that they die. Thus grows he sinless: either never more Needing to find a body and a place, Or so informing what freer frame it takes In new existence that the new toils prove Lighter and lighter not to be at all, Thus “finishing the path”; free from earth’s cheats; Released from all the skandhas of the flesh; Broken from ties—from Upâdân—saved From whirling on the wheel; aroused and sane As is a man wakened from hateful dreams. Till aching craze to live ends, and life glides Lifeless—to nameless quiet, nameless joy, Blessed NIRVANA—sinless, stirless rest— That change which never changes. THE LIGHT OF ASIA.

XI. ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.

Throughout the East to-day, as in all past time, the higher priesthood controls a spiritual science which has been accumulated by long ages of severest study, and is concealed from the vulgar world. This is no mere elaboration of fanciful philosophy, as is much of eastern metaphysics, patiently spun from secluded speculation like the mediæval scholasticism of Europe. It is a purely rational development of psychology by the aid of scientific inquiry. Through protracted investigation and crucial tests repeatedly applied to actual experience and through retrospective and prophetic insight they have probed many of the secrets of the soul. The falsity of materialism and the all-commanding power of spirit are proven beyond a cavil. How the soul is independent of the physical body, sometimes leaving and returning to it, and moulding it to suit its needs; how all nature is but a vast family embodied in physical clothing and inextricably interlaced in living brotherhood, from lowest atom to sublimest archangel; how the gradual evolution of all races proceeds through revolving cycles in a constantly ascending order of things;—these and many other stupendous spiritual facts are to them familiarly known. These masters of human mystery hold themselves apart from the populace and seldom appear to any but their special disciples, but they are universally believed in by the natives of India, as the miraculous evidences of their penetration into nature’s heart have been seen of many. Moreover, ocular demonstration of the existence and phenomenal capacities of these Mahatmas has frequently been given to well-known officials and reputable foreigners, whose testimony is on record.

Although these highest adepts keep most of their discoveries secret, preferring to enlighten mankind indirectly and by a wholesome gradual uplifting, occasional expressions have been given of the occult philosophy derived from their funds of science, and from these we abridge what they are said to teach concerning reincarnation. Even in the books containing their doctrine, as “Man,” “Esoteric Buddhism,” “Light on the Path,” and “Through the Gates of Gold,”[46] we surmise that portions relating to specific details are more or less arbitrary and exoteric. Therefore we confine our attention to a synopsis of their central principles of the subject.

These masters tell us that man is composed of seven principles intricately interwoven so as to constitute a unit and yet capable of partial separation. This septenary division is only a finer analysis of the common triple distinctions, body, soul, and spirit, and runs through the entire universe. The development of man is in the order of these divisions, from body to spirit and from spirit to body, in a continual round of incarnations. The progress may be best illustrated by a seven-coiled spiral which sweeps with a wider curve at every ascent. The spiral is not a steady upward incline, but at one side sags down into materiality and at the other side rises into spirituality,—the material portion of each ring being the lowest side of its curve, but always higher than the corresponding previous descent. Furthermore, each ring of the spiral is itself a seven-fold spiral, and each of these again is a seven-fold spiral, and so on to an indefinite number of subdivisions.

The evolutionary process requires for its complete unfoldment a number of planets[47] corresponding to the seven principles. On each of these planets a long series of lives is necessary before one can advance to the next. After a full circuit is made the course must be repeated again on a higher plane, until many successive series of the planetary rotations, each involving hundreds of separate lives, has developed the individual into the perfect fullness of experience. Some of these planets are unknown to astronomy, being of too fine a materiality for our present perceptions, and on them man is very unlike his terrestrial appearance.

Since the first human souls began their career through these cycles they have moved along the entire planetary chain three times, and now, for the fourth time, we have reached the fourth planet—Earth. We are therefore, roughly speaking, about half developed, physically. During the previous series of earthly inhabitations we were exceedingly different from our present form, and during the later ones we shall enter upon still more marvelous stages. With each grand series (or round) a dimension is added to man’s conception of space. The fourth dimension will be a common fact of consciousness before we complete the present set of earthly lives. Before reaching the perfection attainable here at each round every soul must pass through many minor circuits. We are said to be in the middle of the fifth circuit (or race) of our fourth round, and the evolution of this fifth race began about a million years ago. Each race is subdivided, and each of these divisions again dissected, making the total number of lives allotted to each round very large. No human being can escape the earth’s attraction until these are accomplished, with only rare exceptions among those who by special merit have outstripped the others: for although all began alike, the contrasted uses of the universal opportunities have produced all the variations now existing in the human race. The geometrical progression of characteristics selected by each soul has resulted in vast divergences.

Long before the twilight of our birth into the present life we passed through an era of immense duration on this planet as spiritual beings, gradually descending into matter to enter the bodies which were developed up from the highest animal type for our reception. Our evolution therefore is a double one—on the spiritual side from ethereal races of infinite pedigree, and on the physical side from the lower animals.

In the first earthly circuit of the last great series (or round) we passed through seven ethereal sub-races. Each of these developed one astral sense, until the seventh sub-race had seven senses. What the sixth and seventh were we cannot imagine, but in time we shall know, as we are at present tracing over again that path more perfectly, and have reached only the fifth of the seven stages on this circuit. The first of these seven sub-races slowly acquired the sense of physical sight. All the other parts of the sensuous nature were in shadowy latency. They had no notion of distance, solidity, sound, or smell. Even colors were hidden from the earliest men, all being white at first. Each incarnation in this race developed more of the prismatic hues in their rainbow order, beginning with red. But the one sense of sight was so spiritual that it amounted to clairvoyancy. The second sub-race inherited sight and developed newly touch. Through the repeated lives in this rank the sense of feeling became wonderfully delicate and acute, possessing the psychometric quality and revealing the inner as well as the outer nature of the things to which it was applied. The third sub-race attained hearing, and its spiritual development of this sense was so keen that the most subtle sounds, as the budding leaf and the motion of the heavenly bodies, was clearly perceived. The fourth sub-race added smell to the other three senses, and the fifth entered into taste. The sixth and seventh unfolded the remaining senses, which are beyond our present ken.

In the second circuit (or race) the soul began once more with a single sense and passed through another course of sub-races, rehearsing the scale of the senses with a larger control of them, though less spiritual. But even in the third circuit the repeated unfoldments of the senses toward their physical destiny had still retained a large degree of spiritual quality, as the men themselves were still ethereal.

Our first terrestrial appearance in the present circuit (the fifth race) was in spiritual form, having only astral bodies. This primitive ethereal race occupied the earth long before it was geologically prepared for the historical human races. The development of the physical senses in their present form marks the stages of our reincarnation in the present race, which is called the descent into matter. Each turn in this circuit has carried forward the evolution of the senses in a fixed order, until now we have a firmer hold than ever before upon those five which indicate the extent of our progress in the present stage. Our repeated re-births have obscured the long vista of the ages through which we have traveled to this point, running through the seven-toned gamut over and over again, first in broad rough outline, then finishing the details more carefully at each iteration. Their early spiritual forms have gradually given way to the modern physical forms, but some persons still retain a portion of those old guises that once were universal, in certain peculiarly delicate senses known as second sight, psychometry, clairaudence, tasting through the fingers, and smelling like a hound. In our present era the sense of taste has become the last and most fully developed and the characteristic sense. At first the body did not require food; then becoming grosser it inhaled it with the air, and as the condition approached which now prevails, man became an eating animal and is grown to an epicure. When we shall have completed the full number of rounds on this earth we shall have not only the other two senses, but shall govern all seven in a triple form as physical, astral, and spiritual.

The most important fact in our evolution, and the cause of the present phase of existence, with its blinding encasements of matter and evil, is the growth of a personal will. This is the forbidden fruit of the Bible Paradise. It originated many cycles back and gradually flourished, until its impress was stamped upon all our fellow-creatures. At first starting as selfish desires, then urging motives for rivalry, it resulted in fierce contest between man and man. The concentration of the soul in selfish energy clouded the inner spiritual nature, destroyed the trace of ethereal descent, and buried us deep in the material world. But this “fall into matter” is really but a necessary curve of the spiral, and is the dawn of a brighter day such as humanity has never seen.

Death marks the origin of the turn which human evolution is at present describing. The earlier races had no sense of age and did not die. Like Enoch, they “walked with God” into the next period of their life. At present when a man dies his _ego_ holds the impetus of his earthly desires until they are purged away from that higher self, which then passes into a spiritual state, where all the psychic and spiritual forces it has generated during the earthly life are unfolded. It progresses on these planes until the dormant physical impulses assert themselves and curve the soul around to another incarnation, whose form is the resultant of the earlier lives.

The successive appearances of the soul upon one or many earths are a series of personalities which are the various masks assumed by one individuality, the numerous parts played by one actor. In each birth the personality differs from the prior and later existence, but the one line of individual continuity runs unbroken through all the countless forms; and as the soul enters into its highest development it gradually comprehends the whole course of forgotten paths which have led to the summit.

The time spent by each soul in physical life is only a small fraction of the whole period elapsing before the next incarnation. The larger part of the time is passed in the spiritual existence following death, in which the physical desires and spiritual qualities derived from the earthly life determine the condition of being, until the impetus of unconscious character brings the individual into another earthly life.

XII. TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.

All things are but altered, nothing dies, And here and there th’ unbodied spirit flies By time and force or sickness dispossessed And lodges where it lights in man or beast. PYTHAGORAS, in DRYDEN’S _Ovid_.

What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl? That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. What thinkest thou of his opinion? I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion. SHAKESPEARE.

Whoever leaves off being virtuous ceases to be human; and since he cannot attain to a divine nature he is turned into a beast.—BOETHIUS.

Be not under any brutal metempsychosis while thou livest and walkest about erectly under the form of man. Leave it not disputed at last how thou hast predominantly passed thy days.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

That which has saved India and Egypt through so many misfortunes and preserved their fertility is neither the Nile nor the Ganges; it is the respect for animal life by the mild and gentle heart of man.—MICHELET.

Oh! the beautiful time will, must come when the beast-loving Brahmin shall dwell in the cold north and make it warm, when man who now honors humanity shall also begin to spare and finally to protect the animated ascending and descending scale of living creatures.—RICHTER.

As many hairs as grow on the beast, so many similar deaths shall the man who slays that beast for his own satisfaction in this world pass through in the next from birth to birth.—LAWS OF MANU.

XII. TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.

The idea of reincarnation is so intimately connected and so generally identified with the notion that human souls sometimes descend into lower animals, that it is necessary for us to thoroughly understand the exoteric and gross nature of this grotesque phrasing of a solemn and beautiful truth.

All the philosophies and religions teaching reincarnation seem to teach also the wandering of human souls through brute forms. It was the common belief in Egypt and still is in Asia. All animals were sacred to the Egyptians as the masks of fallen gods, and therefore worshiped. The same reverence for all creatures still reigns in the East. The Hindu regards everything in the vast tropical jungle of illusion as a human soul in disguise. The Laws of Manu state: “For sinful acts mostly corporeal, a man shall assume after death a vegetable or mineral form; for such acts mostly verbal, the form of a bird or beast; for acts mostly mental, the lowest of human conditions.”

“A priest who has drunk spirituous liquors shall migrate into the form of a smaller or larger worm or insect, of a moth or some ravenous animal.

“If a man steal grain in the husk he shall be born a rat; if a yellow-mixed metal, a gander; if water, a plava or diver; if honey, a great stinging gnat; if milk, a crow; if expressed juice, a dog; if clarified butter, an ichneumon weasel.

“A Brahman killer enters the body of a dog, a bear, an ass, a tiger, or a serpent.”

Not only does this conception permeate the domains of Brahmanism and Buddhism; it prevailed in Persia before the time of Zoroaster as since. Pythagoras is said to have obtained it in Babylon from the Magi, and through him it scattered widely through Greece and Italy. More closely than with any other teacher, this false doctrine is associated with the sage of Crotona, who is said to have recognized the voice of a deceased friend in the howling of a beaten dog. Plato seems to endorse it also. Plotinus says: “Those who have exercised human faculties are born again men. Those who have used only their senses go into the bodies of brutes, and especially into those of ferocious beasts, if they have yielded to bursts of anger; so that even in this case, the difference between the bodies that they animate conforms to the difference of their propensities. Those who have sought only to gratify their lust and appetite pass into the bodies of lascivious and gluttonous animals. Finally, those who have degraded their senses by disuse are compelled to vegetate in the plants. Those who have loved music to excess and yet have lived pure lives, go into the bodies of melodious birds. Those who have ruled tyrannically become eagles. Those who have spoken lightly of heavenly things, keeping their eyes always turned toward heaven, are changed into birds which always fly toward the upper air. He who has acquired civic virtues becomes a man; if he has not these virtues he is transformed into a domestic animal, like the bee.”

Some of the church fathers also believed it. Proclus and Syrianus argued that the brute kept its own soul, but that the human soul which passed into the brute body was bound within the animal soul. Nearly all mythology contains this view of transmigration in some form. In the old Norse and German religions the soul is poetically represented as entering certain lower forms, as a rose, a pigeon, etc., for a short period before assuming the divine abode. The Druids of old Gaul also taught it. The Welsh bards tell us that the souls of men transmigrate into the bodies of those animals whose habits and characters they most resemble, till, after a circuit of such penitential miseries, they are purified for the celestial presence. They mention three circles of existence: the circle of the all-inclosing circle which holds nothing alive or dead but God; the second circle, that of felicity, in which men travel after they have meritoriously passed through their terrestrial changes; the circle of evil, in which human nature passes through the varying stages of existence which it must undergo before it is qualified to inhabit the circle of felicity, and this includes the three infelicities of necessity, oblivion, and death, with frequent trials of the lower animal lives.[48] “Sir Paul Rycant gives us an account of several well-disposed Mohammedans that purchase the freedom of any little bird they see confined to a cage, and think they merit as much by it as we should do here by ransoming any of our countrymen from their captivity at Algiers. The reason is because they consider every animal as a brother or sister in disguise, and therefore think themselves obliged to extend their charity to them, though under such mean circumstances. They tell you that the soul of a man, when he dies, immediately passes into the body of another man, or some brute which he resembled in his humor, or his fortune, when he was one of us.”[49] Pythagorean transmigration is apparent also in the natives of Mexico, who think that the souls of persons of rank after death inhabit the bodies of beautiful, sweet singing birds and the nobler quadrupeds, while the souls of inferior persons pass into weasels, beetles, and other low creatures. Among the negroes, the Sandwich Islanders, the Tasmanians, in short, among nearly all the world outside of Christendom, this faith rules unquestioned.

The lowest forms of this belief are found among the tribes of Africa and America, which think that the soul immediately after death must seek out a new tenement, and, if need be, enter the body of an animal. Some of the Africans assume that the soul will choose the body of a person of similar rank to its former one, and therefore bury the dead near the houses of their relatives, enabling the unbodied souls to occupy their new-born children. Sometimes holes are dug in the grave to facilitate the soul’s egress, and the house-doors are left open for its admission. The Druses hold firmly to the theory of transmigration. The folk-lore of all nations has various ways of telling how the soul of a man can inhabit an animal’s body, in stories of wehr-wolves, swan-maidens, mermaids, etc. In many parts of Europe the belief in the man-wolf still flourishes in connection with a crazy person, or a monomaniac, who is said to be transformed into the brute nature. Northern Europe receives this superstition as the man-bear. In India it is the man-tiger; in Abyssinia, the man-hyena; in South Africa, the man-lion; each country associating the depraved human nature, which sometimes runs riot as an epidemic mania, with the animal most dreaded.

But it is all a coarse symbol caricaturing the inner vital truth of reincarnation, and springing from the striking resemblance between men and animals, in feature and disposition, in voice and mien. The intelligence and kindness of the beasts approaching near to human character, and the brutality of some men, would seem to indicate that both races were closely enough related to exchange souls. As an English writer says: “A judicious critic or observant reader will scarce allow that more than four or five in the long catalogue of Roman emperors had any humanity; and although they might perhaps have a just claim to be styled Lords of the Earth, they had no right to the title of Man. There is an excellent dissertation in Erasmus on the princely qualities of the eagle and the lion; wherein that great author has demonstrated that emperors and kings are very justly represented by those animals, or that there must be a similarity in their souls, as all their actions are similar and correspondent.”[50] Emerson has a paragraph upon this in his essay on Demonology: “Animals have been called ‘the dreams of nature.’ Perhaps for a conception of their consciousness we may go to our own dreams. In a dream we have the instinctive obedience, the same torpidity of the highest power, the same unsurprised assent to the monstrous, as these metamorphosed men exhibit. Our thoughts in a stable or in a menagerie, on the other hand, may well remind us of our dreams. What comparison do these imprisoning forms awaken! You may catch the glance of a dog sometimes which lays a kind of claim to sympathy and brotherhood. What! somewhat of me down there? Does he know it? Can he, too, as I, go out of himself, see himself, perceive relations? We fear lest the poor brute should gain one dreadful glimpse of his condition. It was in this glance that Ovid got the hint of his metamorphoses; Calidasa, of his transmigration of souls. For these fables are our own thoughts carried out. What keeps these wild tales in circulation for thousands of years? What but the wild fact to which they suggest some approximation of theory? Nor is the fact quite solitary, for in varieties of our own species where organization seems to predominate over the genius of man, in Kalmuck or Malay or Flathead Indian, we are sometimes pained by the same feeling; and sometimes, too, the sharp-witted prosperous white man awakens it. In a mixed assembly we have chanced to see not only a glance of Abdiel, so grand and keen, but also in other faces the features of the mink, of the bull, of the rat, and the barn-door fowl. You think, could the man overlook his own condition, he could not be restrained from suicide.”

The remarkable mental cleverness of the highest animals, the cunning of the fox, the tiger’s fierceness, the serpent’s meanness, the dog’s fidelity, seem to be human traits in other forms, and the animal qualities are striking enough in many men for them to be fitly described as a fox, a hog, a snake, etc. The characteristics of animals are accurately termed in expressions first applied to mankind, and the community of disposition between the erect and the debased animal creation has furnished words for human qualities from the lower orders of life,—as leonine, canine, vulpine, etc. Briefly, “the rare humanity of some animals and the notorious animality of some men” first suggested the idea of interchanging their souls among the primitive peoples, and has nourished it ever since among the oldest portion of the race as a vulgar illustration of a vital reality.

As the fruits of this idea are beneficial, it was firmly held by the priests and philosophers as a moral fable, through which they popularly taught not only reincarnation, but respect for virtue and for life. It wrought a poetic love of nature in the masses such as has never been seen under any other influence—and which Christianity has strangely failed to establish. Lecky candidly says in his “European Morals”: “In the inculcation of humanity to animals on a wide scale the Mohammedans and the Brahmins have considerably surpassed the Christians.”

To the eastern mind life is a stream flowing through endless transformations, and everything containing it is divine, from the commonest onion to the crowned king; and as all living things are the possible casements of human souls, it is the height of impiety to abuse anything. The kindness of the Orient toward the brute creation is a beautiful comment upon the genuineness of this faith. The mercy due from man to his friends the lower animals is a noble bequest which has there been treasured for the world. As the wholesome lesson of transmigration, Asia has thoroughly learned that

He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small, For the dear Lord who loveth us He made and loveth all.

But the intelligent leaders of oriental thought were far from believing transmigration literally. The occult theory of the priests of Isis, like that of the Brahmans, Buddhists, and Chaldeans, never really held that human souls inhabit animals, or that animal souls occupy men, although many orientalists have not penetrated beyond this outer court of eastern doctrine. It was simply an allegorical gospel for the masses with a double purpose,—to picture the inner truth which acute thinkers would reach and which the crowds need not know, and to instill respect for all life. The Egyptian priesthood adopted three styles of teaching all doctrine. The vulgar religion of the populace was a crude shaping of the priestly thought. The priests of the outer temple received the half-veiled tenets of initiates. But only the hierophants of the inner temple, after final initiation, were allowed to know the pure truth. The same triple shaping of the central thought, adapted to the audience, was followed by Pythagoras, Plato, and all the great masters. Although the name of Pythagoras is synonymous with the idea of soul-wandering through animals, a careful perusal of the fragments of his writings, and of his disciples’ books, shows that he tremendously realized the fact that souls must always, by all the forces of the universe, find an adequate expression of their strongest nature, and that it would be as impossible for a gallon to be contained in a pint measure, as for a human spirit to inhabit an animal body. That the teaching of Pythagoras on this point was purely allegorical is proven by the abridgment of his philosophy given by his disciple Hierocles: “The man who has separated himself from a brutal life by the right use of reason, purified himself as much as is possible from excess of passions, and by this become a man from a wild beast, shall become a God from a man, as far as it is possible for a man to become a God.... We can only cure our tendency downwards by the power that leads upwards, by a ready submission to God, by a total conversion to the divine law. The end of the Pythagorean doctrine is to be all wings for the reception of divine good, that when the time of death comes we may leave behind us upon earth the mortal body, and be ready girt for our heavenly journey. Then we are restored to our primitive state. This is the most beautiful end.”

Hierocles also comments on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras: “If through a shameful ignorance of the immortality annexed to our soul, a man should persuade himself that his soul dies with his body, he expects what can never happen; in like manner he who expects that after his death he shall put on the body of a beast, and become an animal without reason, because of his vices, or a plant because of his dullness and stupidity,—such a man, I say, acting quite contrary to those who transform the essence of man into one of the superior beings, is infinitely deceived, and absolutely ignorant of the essential form of the soul, which can never change; for being and continuing always man, it is only said to become God or beast by virtue or vice, though it cannot be either the one or the other.”[51] The early Neo-Platonists of Alexandria limited the range of human metempsychosis to human bodies and denied that the souls of men ever passed downwards into brutal states. Even the apparent endorsement of that conceit by Plotinus, quoted above, was merely a simile. Porphyry, Jamblichus, and Hierocles forcibly emphasized this distinction. Wilkinson shows that the initiated priests taught that “dissolution is only the cause of reproduction. Nothing perishes which has once existed. Things which appear to be destroyed only change their natures and pass into another form.” But Ebers demonstrates that the inner circle of the temple held this truth in a form wholly above the system of embalming, animal worship, and transmigration ingeniously devised by them for the people. Like the ruling priestcraft in all times and countries, they considered it necessary to disguise their sacred secrets for the crowd. The symbols of reincarnation which everywhere have typified the same doctrine,—in Egyptian architecture by the flying globe, in Chinese pagodas and Indian temples by the intricate unfoldments of germinant designs ascending through successive stories to culminate in a gilded ball, in the Grecian friezes of religious processions, in the Druidical cromlechs and cairns of Wales and the circular stone heaps of Britain,—all expressed a threefold significance, telling the masses of their transition through all living conditions, reminding the common priesthood of an exalted series of transformations, and picturing for the initiates the hidden principles of immortal progress. For all alike these emblems reiterated, the solemn and vital reality of universal brotherhood throughout Nature; but the keenest students, who guided the bulk of religious thought, read in them simply the eternal law of cause and effect divinely ruling the soul through incessant changes. It would be as unjust to construe literally the poetic statements of the human soul wandering through animals, etc., by which metaphor the noblest leaders of western thought convey the idea of spiritual evolution (see