The loftiest and most suggestive of Egyptian palingenetic symbols is unquestionably that of the egg. The deceased is "resplendent in the egg in the land of mysteries." In Kircher"s _Oedipus Egyptiacus_[118] we have an egg--the Ego freed from its vehicles--floating over the mummy; this is the symbol of hope and the promise of a new birth to the soul, after gestation in the egg of immortality.[119]
The "winged globe," so widely known in Egypt, is egg-shaped, and has the same meaning; its wings indicate its divine nature and prevent it from being confused with the physical germ. "Easter eggs" which are offered in spring, at the rebirth of Nature, commemorate this ancient symbol of eternal Life in its successive phases of disincarnation and rebirth.
CHALDaeA.
It is said that the Magi taught the immortality of the soul and its reincarnations, but that they considerably limited the number of these latter, in the belief that purification was effected after a restricted number of existences on the soul returning to its heavenly abode.
Unfortunately we know nothing definite on this special point in Chaldaean teaching, for some of the most important sources of information were destroyed when the library of Persepolis was burnt by the Macedonian vandal, Alexander the Great, whilst Eusebius--whom Bunsen criticises so harshly[120]--made such great alterations in the ma.n.u.scripts of Berosus, that we have nothing to proceed upon beyond a few disfigured fragments.[121] And yet Chaldaeism comprises a great ma.s.s of teachings; he whom we know as "the divine Zoroaster" had been preceded by twelve others, and esoteric doctrine was as well known in Chaldaea as in Egypt.
The descendants of the Chaldaeans--Fire-worshippers, Mazdeans, Magi, Pa.r.s.ees--according to the names they received at different periods--have preserved the main points of palingenetic instruction up to the present, and, from time to time, have set them forth in the most charming style of Oriental poetry. Book 4 of the great Persian poem, _Masnavi i Ma"navi_, deals with evolution and its corollary, reincarnation, stating that there is one way of remembering past existences, and that is by attaining to spiritual illumination, which is the crown of human evolution and brings the soul to the threshold of divinity.
"If your purified soul succeeds in escaping from the sea of ignorance, it will see, with eyes now opened, "the beginning" and "the end." Man first appeared in the order of inorganic things; next, he pa.s.sed therefrom into that of plants, for years he lived as one of the plants, remembering naught of his inorganic state, so different from this, and when he pa.s.sed from the vegetable to the animal state he had no remembrance of his state as a plant.... Again the great Creator, as you know, drew man out of the animal into the human state. Thus man pa.s.sed from one order of nature to another, till he became wise and intelligent and strong as he is now. Of his first soul he has now no remembrance, and he will be again changed from his present soul. In order to escape from his present soul, full of l.u.s.ts, he must rise to a thousand higher degrees of intelligence.
"Though man fell asleep and forgot his previous states, yet G.o.d will not leave him in this self-forgetfulness; and then he will laugh at his own former state, saying: "What mattered my experiences when asleep, when I had forgotten the real state of things, and knew not that the grief and ills I experienced were the effect of sleep and illusion and fancy?""
These lines are concise, but they sum up the whole of evolution, and render it unnecessary to quote at greater length from Chaldaean tradition on this point. Still, those who desire other pa.s.sages relating to the same doctrine may find them in the "Desatir."[122]
THE CELTS.
Sacerdotal India--and perhaps also Atlantis--in early times sent pioneers into the West to spread religious teachings amongst their energetic inhabitants; those who settled in Gaul and the British Isles were the Druids. "I am a serpent, a druid," they said. This sentence proves that they were priests, and also the Atlantaean or Indian origin of their doctrines; for the serpent was the symbol of initiation in the sacred mysteries of India, as also on the continent of Atlantis.
We know little of their teaching, which was entirely oral, though it covered so much ground that, according to Caesar, not less than thirty years of study were needed to become a druid. The Roman conquest dispersed them by degrees; then it was that their disciples, the bards, committed to writing more or less imperfect and mutilated fragments of the teachings of their masters. Their "triads"[123] are undoubtedly akin to Hindu teachings; Evolution results from the manifestation of the Absolute, it culminates in man, who possesses a maximum of individualisation, and terminates in the personal, conscious union of the beings thus created with the ineffable All.
The Absolute is "Ceugant"; manifestation, or the Universe, is "Abred"; the divine state of freed souls is in "Gwynvyd"; these are in the three circles.[124]
In "Ceugant" there is only the Unknowable, the rootless Root. Souls are born and develop in "Abred," pa.s.sing into the different kingdoms; "Amwn" is the state through which beings pa.s.s only once, which means that the "I," when once gained, continues for ever. "Gwynvyd" is the world of perfect and liberated souls, eternal Heaven, great Nirvana.
During this long pilgrimage, the Monad--the divine fragment in a state of incarnation--undergoes an endless number of rebirths, in myriads of bodies.
"I have been a viper in the lake," said Taliesin, the bard[125]; "a spotted adder on the mountain, a star, a priest. This was long, long ago; since then, I have slept in a hundred worlds, revolved in a hundred circles."
It was their faith in rebirth that gave the Gauls their indomitable courage and extraordinary contempt of death:
"One of their princ.i.p.al teachings," said Caesar,[126] "is that the soul does not die, but pa.s.ses at death into another body--and this they regard as very favourable for the encouragement of valour and for inculcating scorn of death."
Up to a few years ago, belief in the return of the soul to earth was still prevalent in those parts of Brittany in which civilisation had not yet exercised its sceptical, materialising influence; there even existed druids--probably degenerate ones--in Great Britain and France; in the Saone-et-Loire district, they seem to have been called the "Adepts of the White Religion"[127]; both in them and in their ancestors, belief in rebirth remained unshakable.
ANCIENT GREECE (_Magna Graecia_).
In Greece, the doctrine of Rebirths is met with in the Orphic tradition, continued by Pythagoras and Plato. Up to the present time, this tradition has probably found its best interpreter in Mr. G. R.
S. Mead, an eminent theosophist and a scholar of the first rank. We recommend our readers to study his _Orpheus_, if they desire a detailed account of this tradition.
Its origins are lost in antiquity, only a few obscure shreds remaining; Pherecydes, however,[128] when speaking of the immortality of the soul, refers to the doctrine of Rebirths; it is also presented very clearly by both Pythagoras and Plato.
According to the Pythagorean teaching, the human soul emanates from the Soul of the World, thus affirming, at the outset, the divine nature of the former. It teaches subsequently that this soul a.s.sumes successive bodies until it has fully evolved and completed the "Cycle of Necessity."[129]
Pythagoras, according to Diogenes of Laertius,[130] was the first in Greece to teach the doctrine of the return of souls to earth. He gave his disciples various details of his past lives; he appears to have been the initiate Oethalides, in the times of the Argonauts; then, almost immediately afterwards, Euphorbus, who was slain by Menelaus at the siege of Troy; again he was Hermotimus of Clazomenae, who, in the temple of Juno at Argos,[131] recognised the shield he was carrying when his body was slain as Euphorbus, and which Menelaus had given as an offering to the G.o.ddess[132]; at a later date he was Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and, finally, Pythagoras.
In all likelihood this genealogy is not correct in every detail, it comes to us from the disciples of the sage of Samos, who were not very trustworthy in their reports.
Empedocles, one of the early disciples of Pythagoras, said that he inhabited a female body in his preceding existence. Saint Clement of Alexandria quotes a few lines of his, in which we find the philosopher of Agrigentum teaching the general evolution of forms.
"I, too, have been a boy, a maiden, a star, a bird, a mute fish in the depths of the sea."
Iarchas, the Brahman chieftain, said to the great Apollonius:
"In bygone ages thou wert Ganga, the famous monarch, and, at a later date, captain of an Egyptian vessel."[133]
The Emperor Julian said that he had been Alexander the Great.[134]
Proclus affirmed that he had been Nichomachus the Pythagorean.[135]
The works of Plato are full of the idea of rebirth, and if the scattered fragments of the teaching are gathered together and illumined with the torch of theosophy, a very satisfactory _ensemble_ will be the result.
Souls are older than bodies, he says in _Phaedo_; they are ever being born again from _Hades_ and returning to life on earth; each man has his daimon,[136] who follows him throughout his existences, and at death takes him to the lower world[137] for Judgment.[138] Many souls enter Acheron,[139] and, after a longer or shorter period, return to earth to be incarnated in new bodies. Unpardonable sins fling the soul into Tartarus.[140]
"Know that if you become worse you will go to the worse souls, or if better to the better, and in every succession of life and death you will do and suffer what like may fitly suffer at the hands of like...."[141]
According to Plato, the period between two incarnations is about a thousand years.[142] Man has reminiscences of his past lives that are more or less distinct; they are manifested rather by an intuitive impression than by a definite memory, but they form part of the individual,[143] and at times influence him strongly. "Innate ideas"
are only one aspect of memory, often it is impossible to explain them by heredity, education, or environment; they are attainments of the past, the store which the soul takes with it through its incarnations, which it adds to during each sojourn in heaven.
There can be no doubt that Plato would appear to have taught metempsychosis, _i.e._, the possibility of a human soul pa.s.sing into the body of an animal:
"Men who have followed after gluttony and wantonness and drunkenness, and have had no thought of avoiding them, would pa.s.s into a.s.ses and animals of that sort. And those who have chosen the portion of injustice and tyranny and violence will pa.s.s into wolves or hawks or kites, and there is no difficulty in a.s.signing to all of them places according to their several natures and propensities."[144]
Under the heading of _Neoplatonism_, we shall show that, beneath these coa.r.s.e symbols, Plato concealed truths which it was then necessary to keep profoundly secret; which, even nowadays, it is not permitted to reveal to all.
OLD TESTAMENT.
H. P. Blavatsky tells us that the _Old Testament_ is not a h.o.m.ogeneous composition; that _Genesis_ alone is of immense antiquity; that it is prior to the time when the Libra of the Zodiac was invented by the Greeks, for it has been noticed that the chapters containing the genealogies have been touched up so as to adapt them to the new zodiac, and this is the reason that the rabbis who compiled them twice repeated the names of Enoch and Lamech in the Cain list. The other parts seem to be of a comparatively recent date and to have been completed about 150 B.C.
The first part of the _Book of G.o.d_--as the Scriptures were then called--was written by Hilkiah, jointly with the prophetess Huldah; this disappeared at a later date, and Ezra had to begin a new one which was finished by Judas Maccabaeus. This was recopied some time after, with the object of changing the pointed letters into square ones, and in this way was quite disfigured. The Masoretes ended by mutilating it completely.
The result is that the text we now possess is one not more than nine hundred years old, bristling with premeditated omissions, interpolations, and perverted interpretations.[145]
By the side of this initial difficulty we find another, quite as important. Almost every page of the _Old Testament_ contains veiled meanings and allegories, as is frankly confessed by the rabbis themselves.
"We ought not to take literally that which is written in the story of the Creation, nor entertain the same ideas of it as are held by the vulgar. If it were otherwise, our ancient sages would not have taken so much pains to conceal the sense, and to keep before the eyes of the uninstructed the veil of allegory which conceals the truth it contains...."[146]
Does not Saint Paul, speaking of the hidden meaning of the Bible, say that Agar is Mount Sinai?[147] Origen and Saint Augustine are of the opinion that the _Old Testament_ must be regarded as symbolical, as otherwise it would be immoral; the Jewish law forbade anyone to read it who had not attained the age of thirty years; Fenelon would have liked it to be thrust away in the recesses of the most secret libraries; the Cardinal de Noailles says that Origen, so full of zeal on behalf of the Holy Scriptures, would not allow anyone to read the _Old Testament_, unless he were firmly anch.o.r.ed in the practice of a virtuous life; he affirms too that Saint Basilius, in a letter to Chilon, the monk, stated that the reading of it often had a harmful influence; for the same reasons, the _Index expurgatorius_ forbids the publication of the Bible in the vulgar tongue, and orders that no one be allowed to read it without the written permission of his confessor.[148]
A third difficulty arises from the fact that the Old Testament--its dead "letter" and its commandments, at all events--is no longer suitable to our own race. It was intended for a nation that was composed of young souls, at a low stage of evolution, for whom nothing more than the rudiments of instruction were necessary, and on whom stern rules of morality, suitable for advanced souls, ought not to be imposed. This is why divorce,[149] polygamy,[150] slavery,[151] retaliation, _lex talionis_,[152] the blood of sacrifice[153] are inst.i.tuted; it is the reason G.o.d is represented as a being to be dreaded, punishing those who do not obey him, wicked, jealous, bloodthirsty.[154] Bossuet understood all this when he said that the primitive Hebrew race was not sufficiently advanced to have the immortality of the soul taught to it.
This, too, is the only explanation we can find for the sensual materialism of _Ecclesiastes_.[155]
Consequently one need not be astonished to find that the Old Testament nowhere deals--directly, at all events--with the doctrine of Rebirth.