Metempsychosis.
The idea of metempsychosis, the thought that at death the soul of a human being may pass into another mortal body or into a lower stage, into an animal or even a plant, has been used considerably in English fiction. This Oriental belief has its basis in antiquity, in animistic ideas in primitive culture. One of the earliest appearances of the theme in English fiction is that middle-eighteenth-century story of Dr. John Hawkesworth’s,[168] an account of a soul that has not behaved itself seemly, so descends in the spiritual scale till it ends by being a flea. The German Hoffmann used the theme repeatedly, and Poe, who was to a certain extent influenced by his supernaturalism, employs it in several stories. In A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, the young man named Bedlo experiences, in dreams of extraordinary vividness, the life of battle, of confusion, ending in death, in a tropical city. He sees himself die, struck on the temple by a poisoned arrow. He is recognized by an elderly man as the exact counterpart of a Mr. Oldeb who perished in the manner dreamed of in a battle in Benares. Mr. Bedlo, while wandering in the mountains of Virginia, contracts a cold and fever, for the cure of which leeches are applied, but by mistake a poisonous sangsue is substituted for the leech, and the patient dies of a wound on the temple, similar to that caused by a poisoned arrow. Poe’s concept in other stories is not that of the conventionally easy passage of the soul into the body of a new-born babe that wouldn’t be expected to put up much of a fight, but he makes the psychic feature the central horror, saying in that connection that man is on the brink of tremendous psychical discoveries. In Morella the theme is used with telling power, where the wife, once greatly loved but now loathed, on her deathbed tells her husband that her child will live after her. The daughter grows up into supernatural likeness of her mother, but remains nameless, since her father, for a reason he cannot analyze, hesitates to give her any name. But at last, as she stands before the altar to be christened, some force outside the father causes him to call her Morella.
What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and overspread them with the hues of death, as, starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from earth to heaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded, “I am here”!
The young girl is found to be dead and the father says: “With my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed, with a long and bitter laugh, as I found no traces of the first in the charnel where I laid the second Morella.”
An obvious imitation of Poe’s story is found in Bram Stoker’s novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars, where the soul of an Egyptian princess enters into the body of a baby born to one of the explorers who rifle her tomb. The child grows into the perfect duplicate of the princess, even showing on her wrists the marks of violence that cut off the mummy’s hand. The Egyptian’s familiar, a mummified cat, comes to life to revenge itself upon the archæologists who have disturbed the tomb. When by magic incantations and scientific experiments combined, the collectors try to revivify the mummy, the body mysteriously disappears, and the young girl is found dead, leading us to suppose that the reanimated princess has stolen the girl’s life for her own.
In Ligeia, another of Poe’s morbid studies of metempsychosis, the theme is clearly announced, as quoted from Joseph Glanville: “Man doth not yield himself to the angels nor unto death utterly save only through the weakness of his own feeble will.” The worshipped Ligeia dies, and in an hour of madness her husband marries the Lady Rowena. The bride soon sickens and as the husband watches alone by her bed at midnight, he sees drops of ruby liquid fall from some mysterious source, into the wine he is offering her. When the Lady Rowena presently dies, the husband, again alone with her, sees the corpse undergo an awful transformation. It is reanimated, but the body that lives is not that of Rowena, but of Ligeia, who has come back to life again by exerting her deathless will over the physical being of her rival. The climax with which the story closes has perhaps no parallel in fiction. As for the ruby drops, are we to think of them as an elixir of life for the dead Ligeia struggling back to being, or as poison to slay the living Rowena?
Ligeia’s story is reflected, or at least shows an evident influence, in The Second Wife, by Mary Heaton Vorse. Here again the dead wife comes to oust her supplanter, but in this instance the interloper does not die, but without dying merely becomes the person and the personality of the first wife. The change is gradual but incontrovertible, felt by the woman herself before it is complete, and noticed by the husband and the mother-in-law. Here the human will, indestructible by death, asserts itself over mortal flesh and effects a transfer of personality. But where did the second wife’s soul go, pray,—the “she o’ the she” as Patience Worth would say?
A similar transfer of soul, effected while both persons are living but caused by the malignance of an evil dead spirit, is found in Blackwood’s The Terror of the Twins. A father, who resents the fact that instead of a single heir twins are born to him, swears in his madness before he dies, that before their majority he will bring it to pass that there shall be only one. By the help of powers from the Pit he filches from the younger his vitality, his strength of mind and soul and body, his personality, and gives this access of power to the elder. The younger dies a hopeless idiot and the elder lives on with a double dower of being. Ambrose Bierce carries this idea to a climax of horror,[169] when he makes an evil spirit take possession of a dead mother’s body and slay her son, who recognizes his loved mother’s face, knows that it is her eyes that glare fiend-like at him, her hands that are strangling him,—yet cannot know that it is a hideous fiend in her corpse.
The theme of metempsychosis is found tangled up with various other motives in fiction, the use of the elixir of life, hypnotism, dream-supernaturalism, witchcraft and so forth. Rider Haggard has given a curious combination of metempsychosis, and the supernatural continuance of life by means of the elixir, in She and its sequel, Ayesha. The wonderful woman, the dread She-who-must-be-obeyed who keeps her youth and beauty by means of bathing in the magic fluid, recognizes in various stages of her existence the lover whom she has known thousands of years before. Not having the advantage of the Turkish bath or patent medicine, he dies periodically and has to be born all over again in some other century. This is agitating to the lady, so she determines to inoculate him with immortality so that they can reign together without those troublesome interruptions of mortality. But the impatient lover insists on kissing her, which proves too much for him, since her divinity is fatal to mere mankind, so he dies again.
The close relation between metempsychosis and hypnotism is shown in various stories. Several cases of troublesome atavistic personality or reincarnation are cured by psychotherapy. Theodora, a young woman in a novel by Frances Fenwick Williams, bearing that title-name, realizes herself to be the reincarnation of a remote ancestress, an Orientalist, a witch, who has terrorized the country with her sorceries. She is cured of her mental hauntings by means of hypnotism. Another novel by the same author,[170] gives also the reincarnation of a witch character in modern life, with a cure effected by psycho-analysis. The young woman discovers herself to be the heiress of a curse, which is removed only after study of pre-natal influences and investigations concerning the subconscious self.
As is seen by these examples, the relation between witchcraft and metempsychosis is very close, since in recent fiction the witch characters have unusual powers of returning to life in some other form. In Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries, we have witch-metempsychosis on a large scale, the population of a whole village being but the reanimations of long-dead witches and wizards who once lived there. I know of no other case of mob-metempsychosis in English fiction, but the instances where several are reincarnated at once are numerous. Algernon Blackwood’s recent novel, Jules Le Vallon, is based on a story of collective reincarnation, the chief characters in the dramatic action realizing that they have lived and been associated with each other before, and feeling that they must expiate a sin of a previous existence. Another recent novel by Blackwood, The Wave, has for its theme the reincarnation of the principal characters, realized by them. Blackwood has been much drawn to psychic subjects in general and metempsychosis in particular, for it enters into many of his stories. In Old Clothes he gives us an instance of a child who knows herself to be the reborn personality of some one else and suffers poignantly in reliving the experiences of that long-dead ancestress, while those around her are recognized as the companions of her life of the far past, though they are unaware of it. The fatuous remark of lovers in fiction, that they feel that they have lived and loved each other in a previous existence, is a literary bromide now, but has its basis in a recurrence in fiction. Antonio Fogazzaro’s novel, The Woman, is a good example in Italian,—for the woman feels that she and her lover are reincarnations of long-dead selves who have suffered tragic experiences together, which morbid idea culminates in tragic madness.
The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem, by A. T. Quiller-Couch, is a striking story of dual reincarnation. A young Jew in England and a half-witted girl, a farmer’s daughter, recognize in each other and in themselves, the personalities of a young Jew led to the lions for becoming a Christian, and a Roman princess who loved him. They recall their successive lives wherein they have known and loved each other, to be separated by cruel destiny each time, but at last they die a tragic death together. The character of the man here is given additional interest for us in that he is said to be a reincarnation of Cartapholus, Pilate’s porter, who struck Jesus, bidding Him go faster, and who is immortalized as the Wandering Jew. Here he lives successive lives rather than a continuous existence. Somewhat similar to this is another combination of hypnotism and metempsychosis in The Witch of Prague, by F. Marion Crawford, where Uorna makes Israel Kafka go through the physical and psychical tortures of Simon Abeles, a young Jew killed by his people for becoming a Christian. By hypnotism the young man is made to pass through the experiences of a dead youth of whom he has never heard, and to die his death anew.
There is a close relation between dreams and metempsychosis, as is seen in certain stories. Kipling’s charming prose idyll, The Brushwood Boy, may be called a piece of dream-metempsychosis, for the youth and girl when they first meet in real life recognize in each other the companions of their childhood and adolescent dream-life, and complete their dual memories. They have dreamed the same dreams even to minute details of conversation, and familiar names. Du Maurier combines the two motives very skillfully in his novels, for it is in successive dreams that the Martian reveals herself to Barty Joscelyn telling him of her life on another planet, and inspiring him to write—or writing for him—books of genius, before she takes up earthly life in one of his children. She tells him that she will come to him no more in dreams, but that she will live in the child that is to be born. And in dual dreams Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of Towers live over again their childhood life together, are able to find at will their golden yesterdays, and know in happy reality the joys of the past, while the present keeps them cruelly apart. They are able to call back to shadowy life their common ancestors, to see and hear the joys, the work, the griefs they knew so long ago. They plumb their sub-consciousness, dream over again their sub-dreams, until they at last not only see these long-dead men and women, but become them.
We could each be Gatienne for a space (though not both of us together) and when we resumed our own personality again we carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again—strange phenomenon if the reader will but think of it, and constituting the germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.
Not only does Peter live in the past, but he has the power to transport these dead ancestors of his to his present and let them share in his life, so that Gatienne, a French woman dead for generations, lives over again in an English prison as Peter Ibbetson, or travels as Mary Towers, seeing things she never had dreamed of in her own life.
H. G. Wells in A Dream of Armageddon gives a curious story of the dream-future. A man in consecutive visions sees himself killed. He then dreams that he is another man, living in a different part of the world, far in the future, till he sees himself die in his second personality. He describes his experiences as given in “a dream so accurate that afterwards you remember little details you had forgotten.” He suffers tortures of love and grief, so that his dream-life of the future is infinitely more real to him than his actual existence of his own time. What was the real “him o’ him,” to quote Patience Worth, the man of the dream-future, or the business man of the present telling the story to his friend?
A different version of metempsychosis is shown in The Immortal Gymnasts, by Marie Cher, for here the beloved trio, Pantaloon, Harlequin and Columbine are embodied as human beings and come to live among men. Harlequin has the power of magic vision which enables him to see into the minds and hearts of mortals by means of “cloud-currents.” This question of—shall we say transmigration?—of fictive characters into actual life is found in various stories, such as Kipling’s The Last of the Stories, John Kendrick Bangs’ The Rebellious Heroine, and others. It illustrates the fantastic use to which every serious theme is sooner or later put. There is no motif in supernatural literature that is not parodied in some form or other, if only by suggestion.
The symbolic treatment of metempsychosis is strongly evident in recent fiction, as the theme lends itself particularly well to the allegoric and symbolic style. Barry Pain’s Exchange shows aspects of transmigration different from the conventional treatment, for he describes the soul of the old man as giving up its right to peace that it might purchase ease for a soul he loved. He passes into the body of a captive bird beating its hopeless wings against the bars and tortured with pain and thirst, as a mark of the witch woman’s wrath, while the soul of the young girl goes into the body of a snow-white lamb that lives a day then is set free. As she passes by, in the state of a freed soul, she sees the piteous bird, and says to herself, “I am glad I was never a bird.”
Algernon Blackwood, in The Return, gives a peculiar story of metempsychosis, where the selfish materialist finds himself suddenly reinforced with a new personality from without. His eyes are opened miraculously to the magic and beauty of the world, and he knows beyond doubt that his friend, the artist, who promised to come to him when he died, has died and that his soul has become a part of his own being. The most impressive example of this sudden merging of two natures, two souls into one, is found in Granville Barker’s Souls on Fifth. Here a man suddenly acquires, or recognizes, the power to see the souls that linger earth-bound around him, and comes to have a strange sympathy with that of a woman, whom he calls the “Little Soul.” When he speaks of going away, after a time, she begs him not to leave her since she is very lonely in this wilderness of unbodied souls. She asks that if he will not take her into his soul, he carry her to some wide prairie, and there in the unspaced expanse leave her,—but instead he gives a reluctant consent for her to enter into his life. He presses the little symbolic figure to his heart, then feels a new sense of being, of personality, and knows that her soul has become forever a part of his.
Lord Dunsany, who lends a strange, new beauty to every supernatural theme he touches, has a little prose-poem of symbolic metempsychosis, called Usury, where Yohu, one of the evil spirits, lures the shadows to work for him by giving them gleaming lives to polish.
And ever Yohu lures more shadows and sends them to brighten his Lives, sending the old Lives out again to make them brighter still; and sometimes he gives to a shadow a Life that was once a king’s and sendeth him with it down to the earth to play the part of a beggar, or sometimes he sendeth a beggar’s Life to play the part of a king. What careth Yohu?