Chapter XIII: Part IV: Platonic Poets (3)

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
chapter v.), as to call this lowest phase of the philosophy the real
belief of those who shaped it.

And yet there is a sense in which the most intelligent orientals
adhere to this, and in which western science endorses it,—namely in
the axiomatic truth that human atoms and emanations traverse the
entire round of lower natures. When the Laws of Manu speak of the
transmigration of men through all animal stages, these eastern
authorities say that they mean not souls, but men’s physical selves.
When the Laws assert that “a Brahman killer enters the body of a dog,
bear, ass, etc.,” they do not mean that the murderer of a priest
becomes a dog, bear, ass, etc. The inner meaning of the Law is that he
who kills and extinguishes the Brahman or divine nature, condemns his
soul to lower human circumstances, and the downward affinity of his
passions carries every particle of his body by magnetic relations into
more degraded ranks of existence. The Brahmans have distorted the
inward purpose of this Law in their own interest by insisting upon its
outward meaning. So the various accounts of the descent of human into
animal or vegetative nature, whether given by Hindu, Pythagorean,
Platonist, Egyptian, Norse, or Barbarian, are actual facts as far as
the migration of the composing atoms and emanations of the outer
individual are concerned. For these atoms obey the directing impulses
of degrading passion or ascending principle. The imponderable force of
these atomic changes is proven by the psychometric evidence of
sensitives, who perceive the various unexpressed moods of a person by
the kinds of lambent particles flowing from him, and trace the
permanent course of these particles after they have lodged on objects
widely separated from him. The tell-tale characteristics of these
scattered atoms remain a long while as stamped by their source, and
guide them to what is most congenial. This scientific fact, confirmed
by many experiments,[52] but generally ignored, shaped the old atomic
hypotheses in which Pythagoras, Epicurus, Zeno, and all the old
philosophers down to Plato found delight, and Plato himself simply
spiritualized it into a more enduring form.

The attitude of the dominant disciples of reincarnation upon this
point may be gathered from the following statement of a Brahman to the
writer: “The whole question of re-births rests upon the right
understanding of what it is that is born again. Obviously not the
body, nor is it the ego, which is the same whether in a man or in a
worm. The ego is colorless of all attributes of which we have any
knowledge in practice. The only thing that can be said to be re-born
is the character of a being, through spiritual blindness confounded
with the ego, in the same way as light is commonly confounded with the
objects illuminated and said to be red, blue, or any other color. The
essential characteristic of humanity cannot possibly exist in an
animal form, for otherwise it cannot be essential to humanity.
Whenever in a human being the ego is identified in the above manner
with what is essentially human, birth in an animal form is as certain
as any relative truth can be not to take place.”

“Atoms enter into organic combinations according to their affinities,
and when released from one individual system they retain a tendency to
be attracted by other systems, not necessarily human, with similar
characteristics. The assimilation of atoms by organisms takes place in
accordance with the law of affinities. It may be hastily contended
that the relation between the mental characteristics of an individual
and the atoms of his body ceases when the atoms no longer constitute
the body. But the fact that certain atoms are drawn into a man’s body
shows that there was some affinity between the atoms and the body
before they were so drawn together. Consequently there is no reason to
suppose that the affinity ceases at parting. And it is well known that
psychometers can detect the antecedent life history of any substance
by being brought into contact with it. It must be insisted that the
true human ego in no sense migrates from a human body to an animal
body, although those principles which lie below the plane of
self-consciousness may do so. And in this sense alone is
transmigration accepted by Esoteric Science.”

XIII.
WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?

When we die, we shall find that we have not lost our dreams; but
that we have only lost our sleep.—RICHTER.

Life is a kind of sleep. Old men sleep longest. They never begin to
wake but when they are to die.—DE LA BRUYERE.

There is no death: what seems so is transition.
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life Elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.
LONGFELLOW.

We can hardly do otherwise than assume that the future being must be
so involved in our present constitution as to be therein
discernible.

ISAAC TAYLOR.

When I leave this rabble rout and defilement of the world, I leave
it as an inn, and not as a place of abode. For nature has given us
our bodies as an inn, and not to dwell in.—CATO.

He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but
he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life
everlasting.

ST. PAUL.

But all lost things are in the angels’ keeping, Love.
No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love.
The years of heaven will all earth’s little pain make good.
Together there we can begin again in babyhood.
HELEN HUNT.

Death is another life. We bow our heads
At going out, we think, and enter straight
Another chamber of the king’s,
Larger than this we leave and lovelier.
BAILEY.

The deep conviction of the indestructibleness of our nature through
death, which everyone carries at the bottom of his heart, depends
altogether upon the consciousness of the original and eternal nature
of our being.—SCHOPENHAUER.

XIII.
WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?

The latest developments of science agree with the occultists and poets
that there is no death, and that nothing is dead. What seems to be
extinction is only a change of existence. What appears to have no
vitality has only a lower order of the life principle. Everything is
pulsing with energy, stones and dirt as well as animals and trees. The
same force which animates the human body, the beasts, birds, and
reptiles in their brief periods, also vitalizes the oaks and vines in
a smaller degree with longer lives, and individualizes the mineral
world into crystals on a still lower plane but with lifetimes reckoned
by thousands of years. And below crystal-life, in the constituent
atoms of shapeless matter, is a tremendous thrill of undiminished
activity. Life, the occultists say, is the eternal uncreated energy.
The physicists grasp at the same thing in their Law of Continuity, and
modern science concedes that “energy has as much claim to be regarded
as an objective reality as matter itself.”[53] This life is the one
essential energy acting under protean forms. It always inheres in
every particle of matter, and makes no distinction between organic and
inorganic, except one of grade, the former containing life-energy
actively and the latter in dormant form. Because the scientist is
unable to awaken into activity the latent life of inorganic matter, he
insists, by the law of biogenesis, that life can only come from life.
But that only marks the limit of his knowledge. The world’s
development has bridged all the gaps now yawning between the different
kingdoms of nature, though nothing remains now to show how it was
done, and science has to confess its ignorance. There is nothing to
contradict and much to enforce the occult axiom that the same life
animates man, plant, and rock simply in different states of the one
indestructible force,—the Universal Soul,—making all nature what
Goethe terms “the living visible garment of God.”

It is impossible for a person to cease to exist. When the tenant of
the body moves out, the forces binding together the dwelling scatter
to the nearest uses awaiting them. The positivists would have it that
the individual soul also dissolves into an impersonal fund of being—a
sort of immediate chilling Nirvana, out-freezing any eastern
conception of remotest destiny. This melancholy result of western
materialism is boldly confronted by reincarnation with a proven
hypothesis, which illuminates the mystery of death and the future, and
shows the unimpeachable reality of immortality. Reincarnation
demonstrates that the personal ego, which permanently maintains its
identity amid the constant changes of the bodily casement and the
mental consciousness, must continue its individuality. In addition to
the evidences already adduced for the genuineness of this truth, there
stands the honest reliable testimony of spiritualism (a small core of
veritable fact around which is gathered an enormous concretion of
deceptions, mischievously intentional or pathetically unconscious),
and the actual experience of some orientals whose intense devotion to
pure invisible realities has pushed them into the perception of
ultra-mortal things.

It is the strong attachment to physical existence which makes death
the king of terrors. Those who have learned the lesson of life find
him the blessed angel who ushers them through the golden gates. There
shall at length come to every ascending soul the experience of those
whose departure from this life cannot be called death, as Jesus,
Elijah, or Enoch, who “walked with God and he was not, for God took
him.” They became so buoyed with spiritual forces that a slight touch
shifted the equipoise and translated them into the invisible. The
clarified spirit greets death with a welcome, and sings his praise as
did Paul Hamilton Hayne in his dying song:—

Sad mortal! couldst thou but know
What truly it means to die,
The wings of thy soul would glow,
And the hopes of thy heart beat high;
Thou wouldst turn from the Pyrrhonist schools,
And laugh their jargon to scorn,
As the babbling of midnight fools
Ere the morning of Truth be born:
But I, earth’s madness above,
In a kingdom of stormless breath,—
I gaze on the glory of love
In the unveiled face of Death.

I tell thee his face is fair
As the moon-bow’s amber rings,
And the gleam in his unbound hair
Like the flash of a thousand springs;
His smile is the fathomless beam
Of the star-shine’s sacred light,
When the summers of Southland dream
In the lap of the holy Night:
For I, earth’s blindness above,
In a kingdom of halcyon breath,—
I gaze on the marvel of love
In the unveiled face of Death.

When death severs the soul from its mortal shell, the ruling
tendencies of the soul carry it to its strongest affinities. If these
still dwell on earth, the soul hovers affectionately among the old
scenes and insensibly mingles with its heart-friends, ministering and
being ministered to, with no essential difference from the former
condition.[54] Many veritable experiences, apart from all possibility
of delusion, confirm this, although the darkness of matter blinds most
of us to the psychic life. At length, as shifting time unties the
bonds of earth, the soul moves on with its strongest allies to the
realms of its choice. There the soul lives out an era of its true
life, an expression of its deepest nature, as much more full and more
real than the late physical life, as the waking state exceeds the
dreaming. For the escape from material confinement allows the freest
activity, in which the dominant desires, unconsciously nourished in
the spirit, have the mastery. This liberty rouses the spirit from the
earthly lethargy into its permanent individuality. The startling bound
of the spirit into its own sphere must transfer the self-consciousness
from its terrestrial form to a far higher vividness; but, as the
wakefulness of day includes the somnambulence of night and knows
itself superior to that dumb life, so the burst of unconstrained
spiritual existence does not annul, but transcends the material phase.

The condition of the period intervening between death and birth, like
all other epochs, is framed by the individual. The inner character
makes a Paradise, a Purgatory, or an Inferno of any place. As Jesus
said he was in heaven while talking with his followers, as Dante found
all the material for hell in what his eyes witnessed, so in the
environments beyond death, where the subjective states of the soul are
supreme, the appearance of the universe and the feelings of self are
created, well or ill, by the central individual. There must be as many
heavens and hells as there are good and bad beings. All the attempts
to describe the future are inadequate and erroneous, and must
necessarily be so. Plato, in the last book of the Republic, quotes the
narrative of the Pamphylian Er, who had been killed in battle but came
to life again on his funeral pyre, and declared that he was returned
to earth to disclose the nature of the coming life. He found things
about as Plato’s allegory pictures them: the good and the wicked who
had just died being assigned their places in heaven or under the
earth. A number of souls whose thousand years of one or the other
experience had expired were made to cast lots for a choice out of a
large number of human and animal lives, and to drink of the River of
Indifference, and to traverse the Plain of Forgetfulness before
entering the world again. As with all the visions of after death, this
simply reflected the opinions of the Platonic thinker. St. John’s
Revelation paints the scene by colors obtained from his Jewish
training, on the canvas of his Patmos imprisonment. Bunyan’s
description shows a simple imagination saturated with the Apocalypse.
Protestant visionaries always discover a Protestant heaven and hell.
Catholic ecstatics always add purgatory. Swedenborg found the gardens
of heaven laid out in the Dutch fashion of his time. English
clairvoyants and mediums are properly orthodox and evangelical.
American spirits talk broad theology with ridiculous details. The
divergence in all these alleged liftings of the veil betrays their
subjectiveness.

It is impossible in the nature of things that one should permanently
leave the physical condition until the business of that existence is
accomplished in transferring the affections from material to spiritual
things. While the ruling attraction to a soul remains in this world,
all the forces of the universe conspire to continue the association of
the two in repeated lives. On the other hand, a person dominated by
spiritual proclivities finds infinite magnetisms drawing him away from
temporal surroundings to the inscrutable glories of the eternal. In
Swedenborg’s phrase, “a man’s loves make his home.” The residual
impulses coming from the momentums of past lives determine what and
when shall be the next embodiment. The time and manner of
reincarnation vary with each individual according to the impetus
engendered by his lives. Between these lives the spiritual effect of
the earth life is absorbed from the personal soul manifested on earth
into the immortal and unmanifested ego. This process may require days,
years, centuries, or millenniums, depending upon the intensity of the
mundane aspirations which draw the spirit to earth and hinder its
liberation into pure spiritual life. But as in dreams a whole life’s
history is sometimes condensed into a few seconds, time has no
existence to the disembodied spirit. Whether the interval be long or
short, the entire spiritual effect of the last life must be
assimilated and shaped into a form that will spring up in coming
lives. The instances of alternate consciousness indicate that some
such marked difference from the previous incarnation appears in each
earthly life, losing all remembrance of the previous chapter, and
working out the tendencies which embodied that particular life in a
career that will achieve redemption or condemnation.