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.