NO other doctrine has exerted so extensive, controlling, and permanent an influence upon mankind as that of the metempsychosis, the notion that when the soul leaves the body it is born anew in another body, its rank, character, circ.u.mstances, and experience in each successive existence depending on its qualities, deeds, and attainments in its preceding lives. Such a theory, well matured, bore unresisted sway through the great Eastern world, long before Moses slept in his little ark of bulrushes on the sh.o.r.e of the Egyptian river; Alexander the Great gazed with amazement on the self immolation by fire to which it inspired the Gymnosophists; Casar found its tenets propagated among the Gauls beyond the Rubicon; and at this hour it reigns despotic, as the learned and travelled Professor of Sanscrit at Oxford tells us, "without any sign of decrepitude or decay, over the Burman, Chinese, Tartar, Tibetan, and Indian nations, including at least six hundred and fifty millions of mankind."1 There is abundant evidence to prove that this scheme of thought prevailed at a very early period among the Egyptians, all cla.s.ses and sects of the Hindus, the Persian disciples of the Magi, and the Druids, and, in a later age, among the Greeks and Romans as represented by Musaus, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Macrobius, Ovid, and many others. It was generally adopted by the Jews from the time of the Babylonian captivity. Traces of it have been discovered among the ancient Scythians, the African tribes, some of the Pacific Islanders, and various aboriginal nations both of North and of South America.
Charlevoix says some tribes of Canadian Indians believed in a transmigration of souls; but, with a curious mixture of fancy and reflection, they limited it to the souls of little children, who, being balked of this life in its beginning, they thought would try it again. Their bodies, accordingly, were buried at the sides of roads, that their spirits might pa.s.s into pregnant women travelling by. A belief in the metempsychosis limited in the same way to the souls of children also prevailed among the Mexicans.2 The Maricopas, by the Gila, believe when they die they shall transmigrate into birds, beasts, and reptiles, and shall return to the banks of the Colorado, whence they were driven by the Yumas.
They will live there in caves and woods, as wolves, rats, and snakes; so will their enemies the Yumas; and they will fight together.3 On the western border of the United States, only three or four years ago, two Indians having been sentenced to be hung for murder, the chiefs of their tribe came in and begged that they might be shot or burned instead, as they looked upon hanging with the utmost horror, believing that the spirit of a person who is thus strangled to death goes into the next world in a foul manner, and that it a.s.sumes a beastly form. The Sandwich Islanders sometimes threw their dead into the sea to be devoured by sharks, supposing their souls would animate these monsters and cause them
1 Wilson, Two Lectures on the Religious Opinions of the Hindus, p.
64.
2 Kingsborough, Antiquities of Mexico, vol. viii. p. 220.
3 Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations in Texas, New Mexico, &c., ch. x.x.x.
to spare the living whom accident should throw within their reach.4 Similar superst.i.tions, but more elaborately developed, are rife among many tribes of African negroes.5 It was inculcated in the early Christian centuries by the Gnostics and the Manichaans; also by Origen and several other influential Fathers. In the Middle Ages the sect of the Cathari, the Bogomiles, the famous scholastics Scotus Erigena and Bonaventura, as well as numerous less distinguished authors, advocated it. And in modern times it has been earnestly received by Lessing and Fourier, and is not without its open defenders to day, as we can attest from our own knowledge, even in the prosaic and enlightened circles of European and American society.
There have been two methods of explaining the origin of the dogma of transmigration. First, it has been regarded as a retribution, the sequel to sin in a pre existent state:
"All that flesh doth cover, Souls of source sublime, Are but slaves sold over To the Master Time To work out their ransom For the ancient crime."
With the ancient Egyptians the doctrine was developed in connection with the conception of a revolt and battle among the G.o.ds in some dim and disastrous epoch of the past eternity, when the defeated deities were thrust out of heaven and shut up in fleshly prison bodies. So man is a fallen spirit, heaven his fatherland, this life a penance, sometimes necessarily repeated in order to be effectual.6 The pre existence of the soul, whether taught by Pythagoras, sung by Empedocles, dreamed by Fludd, or contended for by Beecher, is the princ.i.p.al foundation of the belief in the metempsychosis. But, secondly, the transmigration of souls has been considered as the means of their progressive ascent. The soul begins its conscious course at the bottom of the scale of being, and, gradually rising through birth after birth, climbs along a discriminated series of improvements in endless aspiration. Here the scientific adaptation and moral intent are thought to lead only upwards, insect travelling to man, man soaring to G.o.d; but by sin the natural order and working of means are inverted, and the series of births lead downward, until expiation and merit restore the primal adjustment and direction.
The idea of a metempsychosis, or soul wandering, as the Germans call it, has been broached in various forms widely differing in the extent of their application. Among the Jews the writings of Philo, the Talmud, and other doc.u.ments, are full of it. They seem, for the most part, to have confined the mortal residence of souls to human bodies. They say that G.o.d created all souls on the first day, the only day in which he made aught out of nothing; and they imply, in their doctrine of the revolution of souls, that these are born over and over, and will continue wandering thus until the Messiah comes and the resurrection occurs. The
4 Jarves, Hist. Sandwich Islands, p. 82.
5 Wilson, Western Africa, p. 210.
6 Dr. Roth, Agyptische Glaubenslehre.
Rabbins distinguish two kinds of metempsychosis; namely, "Gilgul,"
which is a series of single transmigrations, each lasting till death; and "Ibbur," which is where one soul occupies several bodies, changing its residence at pleasure, or where several souls occupy one body.7 The latter kind is ill.u.s.trated by examples of demoniacal possession in the New Testament. The demons were supposed to be the souls of deceased wicked men. Sometimes they are represented as solitary and flitting from one victim to another; sometimes they swarm together in the same person, as seven were at once cast out of Mary Magdalene.
More frequently, however, the range of the soul"s travels in its repeated births has been so extended as to include all animal bodies, beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects. In this extent the doctrine was held by the Pythagoreans and Platonists, and in fact by a majority of its believers. Shakspeare"s wit is not without historical warrant when he makes the clown say to Malvolio, "Thou shalt fear to kill a woodc.o.c.k, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam." Many the Manichaans, for instance taught that human souls transmigrated not only through the lowest animal bodies but even through all forms of vegetable life. Souls inhabit ears of corn, figs, shrubs. "Whoso plucks the fruit or the leaves from trees, or pulls up plants or herbs, is guilty of homicide," say they; "for in each case he expels a soul from its body." 8 And some have even gone so far as to believe that the soul, by a course of ignorance, cruelty, and uncleanness pursued through many lives, will at length arrive at an inanimate body, and be doomed to exist for unutterable ages as a stone or as a particle of dust. The adherents of this hypothesis regard the whole world as a deposition of materialized souls. At every step they tread on hosts of degraded souls, destined yet, though now by sin sunk thus low, to find their way back as redeemed and blessed spirits to the bosom of the G.o.dhead.
Upon the whole, the metempsychosis may be understood, as to its inmost meaning and its final issue, to be either a Development, a Revolution, or a Retribution, a Divine system of development eternally leading creatures in a graduated ascension from the base towards the apex of the creation, a perpetual cycle in the order of nature fixedly recurring by the necessities of a physical fate unalterable, unavoidable, eternal, a scheme of punishment and reward exactly fitted to the exigencies of every case, presided over by a moral Nemesis, and issuing at last in the emanc.i.p.ation of every purified soul into infinite bliss, when, by the upward gravitation of spirit, they shall all have been strained through the successively finer growing filters of the worlds, from the coa.r.s.e grained foundation of matter to the lower sh.o.r.e of the Divine essence.
In seeking to account for the extent and the tenacious grasp of this antique and stupendous belief, in looking about for the various suggestions or confirmations of such a dogma, we would call attention to several considerations, each claiming some degree of importance. First, among the earliest notions of a reflecting man is that of the separate existence of the soul after the dissolution of the body. He instinctively distinguishes the
7 Basnage, Hist. Jews, lib. iv. cap. x.x.x.: Schroder, Judenthum, buch ii. kap. iii. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum. th. ii. kap.
i.
8 Augustine, De Morlb. Manicha., lib. ii. cap. xvii.: De Hares..
cap. xlvi.: Contra Faustum, lib. xvi. cap. xxviii.
thinking substance he is from the material vestment he wears.
Conscious of an unchanged personal ident.i.ty beneath the changes and decays everywhere visible around him, he naturally imagines that "As billows on the undulating main, That swelling fall and falling swell again, So on the tide of time inconstant roll The dying body and the deathless soul."
To one thus meditating, and desiring, as he surely would, to perceive or devise some explanation of the soul"s posthumous fortunes, the idea could hardly fail to occur that the destiny of the soul might be to undergo a renewed birth, or a series of births in new bodies. Such a conception, appearing in a rude state of culture, before the lines between science, religion, and poetry had been sharply drawn, recommending itself alike by its simplicity and by its adaptedness to gratify curiosity and speculation in the formation of a thousand quaint and engaging hypotheses, would seem plausible, would be highly attractive, would very easily secure acceptance as a true doctrine.
Secondly, the strange resemblances and sympathies between men and animals would often powerfully suggest to a contemplative observer the doctrine of the transmigration of souls.9 Looking over those volumes of singular caricatures wherein certain artists have made all the most distinctive physiognomies of men and beasts mutually to approximate and mingle, one cannot avoid the fancy that the bodies of brutes are the masks of degraded men. Notice an ox reclining in the shade of a tree, patiently ruminating as if sadly conscious of many things and helplessly bound in some obscure penance, a mute world of dreamy experiences, a sombre mystery: how easy to imagine him an enchanted and transformed man! See how certain animals are allied in their prominent traits to humanity, the stricken deer, weeping big, piteous tears, the fawning affection and n.o.ble fidelity of the dog, the architectural skill of the beaver, the wise aspect of the owl, the sweet plaint of the nightingale, the shrieks of some fierce beasts, and the howls of others startlingly like the cries of children and the moans of pain, the sparkling orbs and tortuous stealthiness of the snake; and the hints at metempsychosis are obvious. Standing face to face with a tiger, an anaconda, a wild cat, a monkey, a gazelle, a parrot, a dove, we alternately shudder with horror and yearn with sympathy, now expecting to see the latent devils throw off their disguise and start forth in their own demoniac figures, now waiting for the metamorphosing charm to be reversed, and for the enchanted children of humanity to stand erect, restored to their former shapes. Pervading all the grades and forms of distinct animal life there seems to be a rudimentary unity. The fundamental elements and primordial germs of consciousness, intellect, will, pa.s.sion, appear the same, and the different cla.s.ses of being seem capable of pa.s.sing into one another by improvement or deterioration.
Spontaneously, then, might a primitive observer, unhampered by prejudices, think that the soul of man on leaving its present body would find or construct another according to its chief intrinsic qualities and
9 Scholz, Beweis, da.s.s es eine Seelenwanderung bei den Thieren giebt.
forces, whether those were a leonine magnanimity of courage, a vulpine subtlety of cunning, or a pavonine strut of vanity. The spirit, freed from its fallen cell, "Fills with fresh energy another form, And towers an elephant, or glides a worm, Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon, Or wails, a screech owl, to the deaf, cold moon, Or haunts the brakes where serpents hiss and glare, Or hums, a glittering insect, in the air."
The hypothesis is equally forced on our thoughts by regarding the human attributes of some brutes and the brutal attributes of some men. Thus Gratiano, enraged at the obstinate malignity of Shylock, cries to the hyena hearted Jew, "Thou almost mak"st me waver in my faith, To hold opinion, with Pythagoras, That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit Govern"d a wolf, who, hang"d for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay"st in thine unhallow"d dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolfish, b.l.o.o.d.y, starved, and ravenous."
Thirdly, there is a figurative metempsychosis, which may sometimes the history of mythology abounds in examples of the same sort of thing have been turned from an abstract metaphor into a concrete belief, or from a fanciful supposition have hardened into a received fact. There is a poetic animation of objects whereby the imaginative person puts himself into other persons, into trees, clouds, whirlwinds, or what not, and works them for the time in ideal realization. The same result is put in speech sometimes as humorous play: for example, a celebrated English author says, "Nature meant me for a salamander, and that is the reason I have always been discontented as a man: I shall be a salamander in the next world!" Such imagery stated to a mind of a literal order solidifies into a meaning of prosaic fact. It is a common mode of speech to say of an enthusiastic disciple that the spirit of his master possesses him. A receptive student enters into the soul of Plato, or is full of Goethe. We say that Apelles lived again in t.i.tian. Augustine reappeared in Calvin, and Pelagius in Arminius, to fight over the old battle of election and freedom. Luther rose in Ronge. Take these figures literally, construct what they imply into a dogma, and the product is the transmigration of souls. The result thus arrived at finds effective support in the striking physical resemblance, spiritual likeness, and similarity of mission frequently seen between persons in one age and those in a former age. Columbus was the modern Jason sailing after the Golden Fleece of a New World. Glancing along the portrait gallery of some ancient family, one is sometimes startled to observe a face, extinct for several generations, suddenly confronting him again with all its features in some distant descendant. A peculiarity of conformation, a remarkable trait of character, suppressed for a century, all at once starts into vivid prominence in a remote branch of the lineage, and men say, pointing back to the ancestor, "He has revived once more." Seeing Elisha do the same things that his departed master had done before him, the people exclaimed, "The spirit of Elijah is upon him." Beholding in John the Baptist one going before him in the spirit of that expected prophet, Jesus said, "If ye are able to receive it, this is he." Some of the later Rabbins a.s.sert many entertaining things concerning the repeated births of the most distinguished personages in their national history. Abel was born again in Seth; Cain, in that Egyptian whom Moses slew; Abiram, in Ahithophel; and Adam, having already reappeared once in David, will live again in the Messiah.
The performance by an eminent man of some great labor which had been done in an earlier age in like manner by a kindred spirit evokes in the imagination an apparition of the return of the dead to repeat his old work.
Fourthly, there are certain familiar psychological experiences which serve to suggest and to support the theory of transmigration, and which are themselves in return explained by such a surmise.
Thinking upon some unwonted subject, often a dim impression arises in the mind, fastens upon us, and we cannot help feeling, that somewhere, long ago, we have had these reflections before. Learning a fact, meeting a face, for the first time, we are puzzled with an obscure a.s.surance that it is not the first time. Travelling in foreign lands, we are ever and anon haunted by a sense of familiarity with the views, urging us to conclude that surely we have more than once trodden those fields and gazed on those scenes; and from h.o.a.ry mountain, trickling rill, and vesper bell, meanwhile, mystic tones of strange memorial music seem to sigh, in remembered accents, through the soul"s plaintive echoing halls, ""Twas auld lang syne, my dear, "Twas auld lang syne."
Plato"s doctrine of reminiscence here finds its basis. We have lived before, perchance many times, and through the clouds of sense and imagination now and then float the veiled visions of things that were. Efforts of thought reveal the half effaced inscriptions and pictures on the tablets of memory. s.n.a.t.c.hes of dialogues once held are recalled, faint recollections of old friendships return, and fragments of landscapes beheld and deeds performed long ago pa.s.s in weird procession before the mind"s half opened eye. We know a professional gentleman of unimpeachable veracity, of distinguished talents and attainments, who is a firm believer in his own existence on the earth previously to his present life. He testifies that on innumerable occasions he has experienced remembrances of events and recognitions of places, accompanied by a flash of irresistible conviction that he had known them in a former state. Nearly every one has felt instances of this, more or less numerous and vivid. The doctrine at which such things hint that "Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness," but trailing vague traces and enigmas from a bygone history, "do we come" yields the secret of many a mood and dream, the spell of inexplicable hours, the key and clew to baffling labyrinths of mystery. The belief in the doctrine of the metempsychosis, among a fanciful people and in an unscientific age, need be no wonder to any cultivated man acquainted with the marvels of experience and aware that every one may say,
"Full oft my feelings make me start, Like footprints on some desert sh.o.r.e, As if the chambers of my heart Had heard their shadowy step before."
Fifthly, the theory of the transmigration of souls is marvellously adapted to explain the seeming chaos of moral inequality, injustice, and manifold evil presented in the world of human life.
No other conceivable view so admirably accounts for the heterogeneousness of our present existence, refutes the charge of a groundless favoritism urged against Providence, and completely justifies the ways of G.o.d to man. The loss of remembrance between the states is no valid objection to the theory; because such a loss is the necessary condition of a fresh and fair probation.
Besides, there is a parallel fact of deep significance in our unquestionable experience; "For is not our first year forgot? The haunts of memory echo not."
Once admit the theory to be true, and all difficulties in regard to moral justice vanish. If a man be born blind, deaf, a cripple, a slave, an idiot, it is because in a previous life he abused his privileges and heaped on his soul a load of guilt which he is now expiating. If a sudden calamity overwhelm a good man with unmerited ruin and anguish, it is the penalty of some crime committed in a state of responsible being beyond the confines of his present memory. Does a surprising piece of good fortune accrue to any one, splendid riches, a commanding position, a peerless friendship? It is the reward of virtuous deeds done in an earlier life. Every flower blighted or diseased, every shrub gnarled, awry, and blasted, every brute ugly and maimed, every man deformed, wretched, or despised, is reaping in these hard conditions of being, as contrasted with the fate of the favored and perfect specimens of the kind, the fruit of sin in a foregone existence. When the Hindu looks on a man beautiful, learned, n.o.ble, fortunate, and happy, he exclaims, "How wise and good must this man have been in his former lives!" In his philosophy, or religion, the proof of the necessary consequences of virtue and vice is deduced from the metempsychosis, every particular of the outward man being a result of some corresponding quality of his soul, and every event of his experience depending as effect on his previous merit as cause.10 Thus the princ.i.p.al physical and moral phenomena of life are strikingly explained; and, as we gaze around the world, its material conditions and spiritual elements combine in one vast scheme of unrivalled order, and the total experience of humanity forms a magnificent picture of perfect poetic justice.
We may easily account for the rise and spread of a theory whose sole difficulty is a lack of positive proof, but whose applications are so consistent and fascinating alike to imagination and to conscience. Hierocles said, and distinguished philosophers both before and since have said, "Without the doctrine of metempsychosis it is not possible to justify the ways of Providence."
10 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 286.
Finally, this doctrine, having been suggested by the various foregoing considerations, and having been developed into a practical system of conceptions and motives by certain leading thinkers, was adopted by the princ.i.p.al philosophers and priesthoods of antiquity, and taught to the common people with authority. The popular beliefs of four thousand years ago depended for their prevalence, not so much on cogent arguments or intrinsic probability, as upon the sanctions thrown around them by renowned teachers, priests, and mystagogues. Now, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls was inculcated by the ancient teachers, not as a mere hypothesis resting on loose surmises, but as an unquestionable fact supported by the experimental knowledge of many individuals and by infallible revelation from G.o.d. The sacred books of the Hindus abound in detailed histories of transmigrations.
Kapila is said to have written out the Vedas from his remembrance of them in a former state of being.
The Vishnu Purana gives some very entertaining examples of the retention of memory through several successive lives.11 Pythagoras pretended to recollect his adventures in previous lives; and on one occasion, as we read in Ovid, going into the temple of Juno, he recognised the shield he had worn as Euphorbus at the siege of Troy.
Diogenes Laertius also relates of him, that one day meeting a man who was cruelly beating a dog, the Samian sage instantly detected in the piteous howls of the poor beast the cries of a dear friend of his long since deceased, and earnestly and successfully interceded for his rescue.
In the life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, numerous extraordinary instances are told of his recognitions of persons he had known in preceding lives. Such examples as these exactly met the weakest point in the metempsychosis theory, and must have had vast influence in fostering the common faith.
Plotinus said, "Body is the true river of Lethe; for souls plunged in it forget all." Pierre Leroux, an enthusiastic living defender of the idea of repeated births, attempts to reply to the objection drawn from the absence of memory; but his reply is an appeal rather to authority and fancy than to reason, and leaves the doubts unsolved.12 His supposition is that in each spirit life we remember all the bygone lives, both spiritual and earthly, but in each earth life we forget all that has gone before; just as, here, every night we lose in sleep all memory of the past, but recover it each day again as we awake. Throughout the East this general doctrine is no mere superst.i.tion of the ma.s.ses of ignorant people: it is the main principle of all Hindu metaphysics, the foundation of all their philosophy, and inwrought with the intellectual texture of their inspired books. It is upheld by the venerable authority of ages, by an intense general conviction of it, and by mult.i.tudes of subtle conceits and apparent arguments. It was also impressed upon the initiates in the old Mysteries, by being there dramatically shadowed forth through masks, and quaint symbolic ceremonies enacted at the time of initiation.13
This, then, is what we must say of the ancient and widely spread doctrine of transmigration. As a suggestion or theory naturally arising from empirical observation and confirmed by a variety of phenomena, it is plausible, attractive, and, in some stages of
11 Professor Wilson"s translation, p. 343.
12 De l"Humanite, livre v. chap. xlii.
13 Porphyry, De Abstinentis, lib. iv. sect. 16. Davies, Rites of the Druids.