One who has stolen fruit or blossoms becomes an ape.
One who has stolen a woman becomes a bear.
One who has stolen a vehicle becomes a camel.
One who has stolen cattle becomes a vulture.
He who has taken by force any property belonging to another or eaten food not first presented to the gods, inevitably enters the body of some beast.
Women who have committed similar thefts, receive the same ignominious punishment: they become females to those male animals.
Then having undergone the torments inflicted in the hells and having passed through the animal bodies the sinners are born as human beings with marks indicating their crime.
These transformations came about by the insistent wickedness of human thoughts and deeds. Eliphas Levi discusses the magic power of the spoken word in bringing changes of shape to pass. "In the opinion of the vulgar," he says,[180] "transformations and metamorphosis have ever been the very essence of magic.... Magic really changes the nature of things, or rather modifies their appearances at pleasure, according to the strength of the operator's will and the fascination of aspiring adepts. Speech creates forms, and when a person reputed infallible gives anything a name, he really transforms the object into the substance which is signified by the name that he gives it....
"The life of creatures is a progressive transformation, having forms which may be determined and renewed, preserved longer, or else destroyed sooner. If the motion of metempsychosis were true, might we not say that debauch, represented by Circe, changes men really and materially into swine, for the chastisement of vices would on this hypothesis be a lapse into those animal forms which correspond to them? Now metempsychosis, which has been frequently misunderstood, has a perfectly true side. Animal forms communicate their sympathetic imprints to the astral body of man and are soon reflected on his features, according to the force of his habits. A man of intelligent and passive mildness assumes the ways and inert physiognomy of a sheep; in somnambulism, however, it is no longer a person of sheep-like appearance but a sheep itself that is seen, as the ecstatic and learned Swedenborg experienced times out of number. Thus we can really change men into animals—it is all a question of will-power."