Pagan Origin of Partialist Doctrines

by John Claudius Pitrat

ARTICLE I.

Metempsychosis, or Transmigration of the Souls.

The rulers of nations, and the authors of the initiations, had a profound knowledge of the human nature, and of the genius of the people. From the fact that an ox, unaware of his strength, yields to the leading hand of a child, so they knew that would they let the masses ignore their power, they could easily control them, mould their opinions, habits, and morals. Also aware of the terror that death impressed upon their minds, and knowing that it is an infirmity of man's nature, when uncultivated by philosophy, to fear more a distant and indefinite, but unavoidable misery beyond the grave, than the most excruciating tortures on earth, they found in those prejudices of the people a sure means to lead and rule them. Therefore they endeavored to make them believe that those who would transgress the laws, or would commit some other crimes, should be punished by the gods immortal in the future life.

They had to invent the nature of that punishment, and as there were many degrees of wickedness, they had to admit, also, various degrees in the punishment. To more easily and more surely make the people believe their invention, they thought it was wise to make the punishment, and its degrees, coincide with the then universally established religion, which was but one, though there were many systems of theology. That religion was the one we have examined in the first chapter of this work, and which consisted in the belief that nature was an uncreated but animated being, whose vast body comprised the earth, the sun, the planets, and the stars, to which one great soul impressed motion and life; and that those principal parts, or members, of the body of the universe were animated by emanations or irradiations of the great soul of the universe, or nature.

This pantheistic doctrine was materialist; for it supposed that the great soul of the universe was the purest substance of the fire ether, and thereby man's soul was of the same nature. It was the belief even of the famous philosopher Pythagoras, and of his disciples. All animals, according to Servius, the commentator of Virgil, draw their flesh from the earth, their humors from water, their breath from the air, and their soul from the breath of the Deity. Thus the bees have a small portion of the Deity. Our soul is like a drop of water which is not annihilated, whether it evaporates in the air, or condenses and falls again in rain, or rolls into the sea to add its littleness to the massy waters. When we die our life melts, reenters into the great soul of the universe, and the remains of our body mix again with the elements of the air.

Virgil believed that our death is not annihilation, but that it is a separation of two sorts of matters, the one thereof remains here below, and the other reunites to the sacred fire of the stars, as soon as the matter of which our soul is composed has reacquired all the purity of the subtle matter, from which it had emanated, auræ simplicis ignem. Nothing, Servius says, is lost in the great whole, and in the pure fire which constitutes the substance of the soul. Virgil says of the souls: igneus est ollis vigor, et cœlestis origo; that they are formed of the active fire that shines in the heaven, and that they return thither when they are separated from the body by death.

The same doctrine we find in the dream of Scipio: "It is from there," he says, speaking of the regions of the fixed stars, "that the souls descended, thereto they shall return; they were emanated from those eternal fires we name stars. What ye call death is but a return to true life; the body is but a prison, in which the soul is momentarily chained. Death breaks her ties, and restores her to liberty, and to her true state of existence."

From this pantheistic doctrine, it followed that man's soul is immortal though material.

Upon this sort of immortality of our soul, the rulers built a system of punishment, called Metempsychosis, or transmigration of the souls. This system was so much the better adapted to the then received religion, that all the souls being simply different emanations from the same fire ether, the consequence was that all the souls were homogeneous, and differed only in appearance, and by the nature of the bodies to which the fire-principle, which composed their substance, united. Virgil said that the souls of all animals are an emanation of the fire ether, and that the difference of their operations on earth is to be ascribed only to the difference of vases, or organized bodies, which receive this substance; or, according to the words of Servius, the lesser or greater perfection of their operations is in ratio of the nature of the bodies.

The Indians, among whom, even in our days, the system of Metempsychosis prevails, think that man's soul is absolutely of the same nature as that of other animals. They say that man is superior to them, not in his soul but in his body, whose organization is more perfect and more apt to receive the action of the great Being, viz., of the universe, than theirs are. They ground their opinion on the example of children and of old men, whose organs being too weak yet, or having been weakened, do not permit their senses to have the same activity which is displayed in a mature age.

The soul, in the exercise of her operations, being necessarily in submission to the body which she animates; and all souls flowing from the immense reservoir called universal soul, it follows that the portion of the fire ether which animates a man, might as well animate an ox, a lion, an eagle, a whale, or any other beast. Fate caused that she would animate a man, and such a man; but when the soul will be disengaged from this first body, and will return to her source, she will be able to pass into the body of another animal; and her activity will be lesser or greater, in ratio of the organization of the new body into which she will pass.

All the great work of nature being reduced to successive organizations and destructions, in which the same matter is ten thousand times used under ten thousand forms, the subtle matter of the soul, carried in that current, brings life to all the moulds which open to receive her. Thus the same water flown from a same reservoir, enters the various pipes which are opened, rolls on and empties either as a fountain, or as a cascade, according to the forms of the orifices of the pipes; then it congregates, evaporates, and forms clouds which brings it back down to the earth, to experience again an infinity of modifications. It is the same of the fluid of the soul spread in the various canals of the animal organization, flowing from the bright mass of which the ethereal substance is composed; thence being carried to the earth by the generating force distributed among the animals, continually ascending and descending in the universe, and circulating within new bodies diversely organized.

Such was the basis of Metempsychosis, which became one of the most powerful political engines in the hands of the ancient rulers, legislators and mystagogues. Pythagoras brought this doctrine from the Orient to Greece, and to Italy. This philosopher, and Empedocles after him, taught that the souls of the criminals, when death separated them from the bodies they animated, passed into the bodies of beasts in order to suffer, under those divers forms the punishment of their wickedness, until they might recover, by expiation, their native purity. So this transmigration of the souls was a punishment of the gods. The Stoicians held this doctrine; and the emperor Marcus-Aurelius, in the ninth book of his Works, said: "The spiritus, or breath, which animates us, passes from one body into another."

To give the reader a general idea of what was the belief of the ancients, and of their philosophers, in regard to Metempsychosis, we take from the tenth and last book of the Republic of Plato the following lengthy but instructive extract:—

"It is not the narration of Alcinoüs (namely, a false story, such as the one of Ulysse to the Pheacians,) that I will tell you; but that of a noble man, of Her, the Armenian, a native of Pamphily. He had been killed in a battle; but when, ten days after, the dead bodies were taken away for inhumation, his, instead of being in putrefaction like the others, was found natural and entire. It was carried to his house, and, on the twelfth day, when laid on the wood-pile, he came again to life; and he related to the assistants what he had seen in the other world.

"'As soon,' he says, 'as my soul left my body, I arrived, in company with a great number of souls, at a mysterious place, where were seen two openings near each other, and two others corresponding in the sky. Between these two regions were judges sitting: when they had pronounced their sentence they ordered the righteous to take the right hand side route through one of the openings of the sky, after having previously placed on their breast a mark containing the judgment rendered in their favor; also they ordered the wicked to take the left hand side route through one of the openings of the earth, carrying on their back a mark containing all their evil actions. When I was presented to the judges, they decided that I should return to the earth to inform men of what was done in the other world; and they bade me listen and observe all I was to witness.

"'First I saw the souls of those who had been judged, the ones ascending to the heavens, and the others descending below the earth through the two corresponding openings. Withal I saw, through the other opening of the earth, many souls coming out, covered with filthiness and dust; and also, through the other opening in the sky, I saw souls pure and spotless descending: they seemed to return from a long voyage, and to stop with pleasure in the meadow, as if in a place of reunion. Those who knew each other mutually inquired what they had seen in the heaven, and in the earth. The ones related their adventures with groans and tears, caused by the recollection of the sufferings they had endured, or seen others endure, during their voyage below the earth, whose duration was of a thousand years. The others, who returned from the heaven, related the rapturous pleasures they had enjoyed, and the marvellous things they had seen.'

"It would be too long, my dear Glaucon, to relate the whole discourse of Her on this subject. It might be summed up in saying that the souls were punished ten times for each injustice they had committed while on earth; that the duration of each punishment was of one hundred years, natural length of man's life, in order that the punishment be ever tenfold for each crime. Thus those who had contaminated themselves with murder; who had betrayed States and armies, and reduced them to servitude; or who had committed similar crimes, were punished tenfold for each one of those crimes. Whereas those who had done good to their fellow men, who had been holy and virtuous, received in the same proportion the reward of their good deeds. In regard to children who die immediately, or a short time after they are born, Her gave details which it is useless to relate. According to his narration there were great recompenses for those who had honored the gods, and had respected their parents; and also there were extraordinary tortures for the parricides, and for impious men.

"'I was present,' said he, 'when a soul asked another where was the great Ardiee. This Ardiee had tyrannized over a city of Pamphily a thousand years before; he had killed his father, who was an old man, and he was guilty, it was said, of many other atrocious crimes. He does not come, the soul answered, and he will never come here. We all have witnessed, in relation to him, the most dreadful spectacle. When we were about leaving the subterraneous abyss after our pains ended, we saw Ardiee, and a great number of others, the most of whom had been tyrants like himself; there were also others, who, though in a private condition, had been great criminals.

"'When those souls were about going out, the opening was closed; and whenever one of those wretched souls, whose crimes were irremissible, tried to get out of the abyss, she howled. Thereupon hideous and firelike beings came. They violently wrested away several of those criminals; then they seized Ardiee and others, tied their feet, their hands and their heads; and after throwing them on the ground and torturing them with lashes, they dragged them through bleeding thorns, telling the shadows which they met on their route the reason why they treated so those souls, and adding that they were going to throw them into the Tartarus. Those souls added, that of the various fears they had on the route none was so horrible as that of hearing that howl; and that it had been an inexpressible pleasure for them not to have heard it when they were released from the abyss.

"'Behold what took place in regard to the judgments, tortures, and rewards. After each one of those souls had spent seven days in the meadow they left on the eighth, and arrived, after a march of four days, at a designated spot, wherefrom was seen a light crossing the heaven and the earth, as straight as a column, and similar to the rainbow, but brighter and purer. They reached this light in one day's march. There they saw that the extremities of the heaven meet at the middle of this light, which united them fast, and which embraced all the circumference of the heaven, in nearly the same manner as the beams which girdle the sides of galleys, and which bear their frame. At the extremities the spindle of Necessity hung, and determined the revolutions of the celestial spheres.'"

Here Her describes the spindle. This description we omit, for it does not relate to our subject.

Her continues:—

"'Near the spindle, and at equal distances, sat on thrones the three Parques, daughters of Necessity, Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, dressed in white, and their heads crowned with a bandelet. They united their chant to that of the Sirenes; Lachesis sung the past, Clotho the present, and Atropos the future. Clotho, now and then, touched the spindle with her right hand, and made it revolve externally. Atropos, with her left hand, impressed motion to each one of the interior whirls, and Lachesis, with both hands, touched now the spindle, and then the interior whirls. When the souls arrived they appeared before Lachesis. First a Hierophant assigned a rank to each one; then taking from the lap of Lachesis the fates and the various conditions of human life, he mounted on a high stand, and spake thus:—

"'This is what the virgin Lachesis, daughter of Necessity, says: Voyaging souls you are to commence another career, and return into a mortal body. The genius will not choose for you: each one of you shall choose hers. The first one that fate will designate shall choose first, and her choice shall be irrevocable. Virtue has no master; she clings to him who honors her, and flies from him who despises her. The error of the choice shall fall on you. God is innocent.

"'Thereupon the Hierophant casting the fates, each soul picked up the one that fell before her, except myself who had been forbidden it. Each one knew then in which rank she had to choose. Then the same Hierophant placed before them callings of all kinds, whose number was greater than that of the souls who were to choose; for all the conditions of men and beasts were assembled therein. There were tyrannies, the ones were to last till death; and the others were to be suddenly interrupted, and were to end by exile, poverty and indigence. Also there were seen conditions of illustrious men, the ones for beauty, for strength, for fame in the combats; and the others by their nobleness, and the great qualities of their ancestors; there were seen also obscure conditions. There were destinies of women of the same variety. But there was no regulation for the rank of the souls, because each one was necessarily to change of nature according to her choice. Besides, wealth, poverty, and diseases, were found in all conditions: here without any mixture, there in a just proportion of advantages and disadvantages.'

"But this is evidently, my dear Glaucon, the redoubtable trial for mankind.... The Hierophant added: he who chooses the last, provided he be judicious, and then be consistent in his conduct, may hope to be blessed in life. Therefore let him who is to have the first choice, be not presumptuous; and let him who has the last choice, despair not. When the Hierophant had thus spoken, he to whom the first fate had been devolved, hastily advanced, and took, without any deliberation, the greatest tyranny; but when he had considered it, and seen that his destiny was to eat his own children, and to commit other enormous crimes, he lamented; and, forgetting the recommendation of the Hierophant, charged upon the fortune and the gods, with the wretchedness of his fate. This soul was one of those who came from heaven; she had previously lived in a well governed state, and had been virtuous more from temper and habit, than from philosophy.

"On the contrary, the souls who had sojourned in the subterranean region, and who had both the experience of their own sufferings, and the knowledge of the misfortunes of others, were cautious in their choice. This experience on one side, and that inexperience on the other, together with the fate which decided the rank for the choice, were the cause that the most of the souls exchanged a good condition for a bad one, and a bad one for a good one. He also said, that it was a strange spectacle to see in what manner each soul made her choice, nothing was more extraordinary, nor more pitiful; the most of them were guided in their choice by the habits they had contracted in their previous life. He had seen the soul of Orpheus choosing the condition of a swan, from hatred to women who had killed him, and from whom he did not wish to receive birth. He saw the soul of Thamyris choosing the condition of nightingale; likewise he saw a swan and several other birds choosing the human condition.

"Another soul had chosen the condition of a lion; it was that of Ajax, son of Telamon, who, remembering the offense she had received in the judgments rendered about the arms of Achilles, refused to take again a human body. Then came the soul of Agamemnon, who, from antipathy against mankind on account of her past sufferings, chose the condition of an eagle. The soul of Atalante, desirous of the athletic honors, chose to be a champion. The soul of Epee, son of Panope, preferred the condition of a woman skillful in handiworks. The soul of the buffoon Thersite came one of the last, and entered the body of a monkey. There were, Her added, souls of animals which exchanged their condition against ours, and human souls which passed into bodies of beasts. The souls indistinctly passed from the bodies of animals into human bodies, and from human bodies into bodies of animals; those of the righteous into species of a higher order.

"When all the souls had chosen their new condition of existence, according to the rank determined by fate, they came to Lachesis in the same order. She gave to each one the genius of her choice, and this genius was to be her guardian during her mortal life, and was to aid her in the accomplishment of her destiny. This genius first led her to Clotho, who, with her hand, and with a revolution of the spindle confirmed the chosen destiny. When the soul had touched the spindle, the genius took her to Atropos, who rolled the thread in her fingers, to render irrevocable what had been already spun by Clotho. After that, the soul proceeded to the throne of Necessity, under which the soul and her genius, or demon, passed together. When all had passed, they went to the plain of the Lethe river, where they were oppressed by an intense heat; for there was in this plain, neither tree nor shrub. The evening came and they spent the night near the river Ameles, whose water can be contained in no vessel. Every soul was obliged to drink some of its water. They fell asleep; but at about midnight the thunder roared, and all the souls suddenly waking up were dispersed, like shooting stars, towards the various places where they were to commence their new life.

"As to Her, he had been forbidden to drink of the water of the Lethe river; nevertheless, he knew not in what manner his soul had returned into his body, but having opened his eyes in the morning, he had seen that he was laying on a wood-pile.

"This tradition, my dear Glaucon, has been handed down to us; and if we believe it, it is very apt to save us; we will safely cross the Lethe river, and we will preserve our soul free from stain."

The reader has undoubtedly remarked the last sentence of this extract, which proves the antiquity of the doctrine of the transmigration of the souls. Burnet wrote, that it was so ancient and so universally spread in Egypt, Persia, India, and other countries of the Orient, that it seemed it had descended from heaven, and been believed by the first inhabitants of the earth. Herodote found it established in Egypt in the remotest ages. It was the basis of the theology of the Indians, and the subject of the celebrated Metamorphosis and incarnations of their legends. Metempsychosis has been immemorially believed in Japan, where the people, even in our days, according to Kœmpsfer, abstain from meat, and live exclusively upon fruits and vegetables. In Siam, where the Talapoins or monks hold it as a sacred dogma; in China by the Tao-See; also among the Kalbouls and the Mongols, and among the Thibetans, who admit that the souls pass even into the plants, into the trees, and even into the roots. However, the Thibetans believe that it is only by uniting to human bodies, that the souls can, after successive changes, be restored to their former purity.

The aim of the doctrine of Metempsychosis was to accustom man to detach himself from the gross matter, to which he is tied here below, and to excite in him the desire of promptly returning there, wherefrom he had formerly descended. The rulers of the people frightened them with the pictures of humiliating transformations of their souls, as the Catholic priests and the Partialist preachers do among us, with their teaching of an endless hell. The people, amazed and terrified, for the masses were ignorant, believed all those politico-religious fables. They firmly believed that the souls of the wicked passed into vile bodies; that they were punished with cruel and loathesome diseases; that those who did not reform after a certain number of transmigrations were delivered up to the Furies and to the evil spirits (or devils) to be tortured; and that, after that, they were sent again to the earth, as in a new school, and were obliged to run a new race. Thus we see that the whole system of Metempsychosis rested on the false supposition, that it was necessary, in order to govern the people here below, to frighten them with absurd and visionary tales of atrocious tortures beyond the grave, which were the more terrifying for the very reason of their absurdity and atrociousness.

Timee of Locre, one of the disciples of Socrates, wrote, that among the various means of governing those who are not able to reach the truth of the principles, on which nature has established justice and morals, Metempsychosis is an efficacious one. He said: "Let them be taught those dogmas which inform us that the souls of effeminate and pusillanimous men transmigrate into female bodies; those of murderers into bodies of wild beasts; those of licentious men into bodies of wild boars and hogs; those of fickle and inconstant men into bodies of birds; those of idle, ignorant and silly men into bodies of fishes. The just Nemesis regulates those pains in the future life conjointly with the gods of the earth, avengers of the crimes they have witnessed. The supreme God has entrusted them with the government of this inferior world. Let them be frightened, even, by the religious terrors conveyed to the soul by those discourses which describe the vengeance of the celestial gods, and the unavoidable torments reserved to the criminals in the Tartarus; and also by the other fictions which Homer has found in the ancient sacred opinions. Sometimes the body is cured by poisonous substances; so the souls can be ruled by fables when they cannot be governed by truth."

This philosopher plainly gives us his secret, which has been, and still is, the secret of all legislators and priests. True, the belief of these fables has restrained many from vice and crime; nevertheless we firmly believe that men ought to be led to justice by the bright light of the truth, and not by the dismal light of error, and of superstition: the one elevates man, but the other keeps him in an eternal infancy and ignorance. How sad it is to see, even now-a-days, in free and enlightened America, priests, and Protestant ministers themselves, keeping down in intellectual, moral and religious bondage, millions of Christians, who, from fear of endless curse, kiss the very chains which heavily they drag through life; who believe that God will endlessly roast men—his children—in an undying fire! More surely, and more easily, could those purely minded, but unfortunate Christians, be guided to love God, if they knew that he is not worse than a tiger; that, on the contrary, he is truly good and loving; more virtuous they would be if they were taught that virtue is the source, and the only true source, of happiness. Truer fraternity would reign in our communities, if priests and pretended Protestants, who tyrannize over the souls of their misled victims, and, like the Pharisees of old, lay upon their shoulders a burden they would not be willing to touch with their own fingers—yea, they lay upon their mind and heart the leaden weight of the dogma of endless misery, which they, at least the leaders of the leaders, reject—truer fraternity would exist, we say, for there would not be in our communities, a class of Christians, believing that they are the elect of God for righteousness and eternal bliss, while all the others shall be endlessly damned. Hence their indifference, or rather aversion for them; hence a spirit of Pharisaism: hence a spirit of religious aristocracy, which unfortunately ramifies into a social aristocracy!