It is infinitely probable that this doctrine of reincarnation in the bodies of animals was in Greece a foreign importation. Herodotus thought that it came from Egypt,[[439]] but it does not seem to have existed in that country in ancient times in the form of a regular succession of transmigrations. On the other hand, Greek metempsychosis shows a resemblance, striking even in details, to one of the fundamental conceptions of the religious thought of India, that of samsâra, which was accepted as a dogma there long before the birth of Buddhism. The most probable opinion is that this idea made its way across the Persian Empire and thus reached the Orphics and Pythagoreans. It is, however, not unlikely that, like Babylonian astrology, Hindu eschatology was propagated as far as Egypt at a comparatively recent date, that is, about the sixth century B. C., and that the information given by the father of history may be at least partly correct, Egypt having served as an intermediary between India and Greece.
We have not, however, to discuss here this problem of the origins of metempsychosis, nor to follow the development of the doctrine in ancient Greek philosophy. In the period with which we are concerned, it had already long been traditional in the Pythagorean and Platonic schools, it was not only a philosophical theory but also a tenet admitted by several religions. We can leave unanswered the questions of whether, as the ancients affirm, the Druids believed in it, being in this particular disciples of Pythagoras, and of whether the Etruscans were persuaded to it by the teaching of the philosopher of Croton. It is, however, certain that transmigration was in the East an article of widely held belief. We find it accepted by the mysteries of Mithras and by Manicheism, and it survives to our own day in Syria among the sects of the Druses,[[440]] the Yezidis and the Nosaïris.[[441]]
What was its form in the Roman period, and how was it brought into harmony with traditional or acquired ideas as to the future life?
The descent of the soul from heaven to earth is a fall; the body is a grave in which this soul is buried, a prison in which it is captive. These old Pythagorean doctrines were unceasingly renewed and repeated down to the end of antiquity. But the Orphic idea that this degradation was the chastisement for an original sin, the consequence of a crime committed by the Titans, who were the authors of our race, and that this hereditary taint of guilt had to be atoned for by their descendants, was either entirely forgotten or else, at the least, hardly regarded. The equally ancient conception that a bitter and cruel necessity constrained souls to incarnate themselves, was, on the contrary, emphasised in consequence of the spread of astrological fatalism. Their alternate descent and ascent was conceived as governed by a cosmic law, like the progress and regress of the planets.[[442]] The cycle of eternal generation (κύκλος γενέσεως) which is eternal, like the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, causes mind to circulate through matter which it animates.
This transmigration could be conceived in various ways. A first theory, in which the influence of Stoic pantheism can be recognised, lays stress on the identity of individual souls with the universal soul, of which they are particles. One single divine principle awakens life in all nature. It passes from being to being, quickening their various forms, and that which is said to be death is no more than a migration. The number of the souls that people the earth is determined from the beginning; they change their dwellings but not their essence. Hardly has the human soul left one body before it enters another. This continuous travelling causes it to go through all the degrees of the animal hierarchy. It will pass, successively, into a bird, a quadruped, a fish, a reptile, and then return to man. This is why it is impious to devour the flesh of our “lower brothers” and why the sage must practise vegetarianism. Some thinkers, however, drawing logical conclusions from the admitted premises, asserted that the life of the vegetable kingdom derived from the same migration as that of the animal kingdom and that the soul of man could enclose itself in plants. It was to this teaching that Seneca alluded when he gave the name of Apocolocyntosis, “Transformation to a Pumpkin,” to his satire on the apotheosis of the emperor Claudius.
This eschatological doctrine had in reality nothing in common with morality. If an uninterrupted chain unites the existence of all species, if life propagates itself fatally from man to the lower beings, this necessity seems to exclude all hope of posthumous reward. In order to bring the need of a retribution in after life into agreement with the belief in the fatal circle of migrations, it was stated that the good entered the souls of peaceful and tame animals, the wicked those of wild beasts. This is why Alexander of Abonotichos predicted to a devotee that he would be in after life first a camel, then a horse, and end by being a great prophet like himself.[[443]] Hermes Trismegistus even claimed to know that the just became eagles among birds, lions among quadrupeds, dragons among reptiles, dolphins among fish.[[444]] But the lot even of these privileged souls might not seem very enviable. The moralists, therefore, relaxed the rigour of the system and exempted noble spirits from bestial degradation. All souls were no longer condemned to dwell in the bodies of animals, but only those whose low inclinations had assimilated them to brutes. They inhabited the species which best conformed to their instincts. Thus debauchees became hogs in another life; cowards and sluggards, fish; the light-minded and frivolous, birds.[[445]] The pagan theologians ingeniously and laboriously interpreted the story of Circe’s changing the companions of Ulysses into beasts as an allegory of metempsychosis. Circe became the circle of the reincarnations which were undergone by those who emptied the magic cup of pleasure, and whence the wise Ulysses escaped, thanks to Hermes, that is, to reason which instructed him.[[446]]
Transmigration thus became less an inevitable law of nature than a punishment of the guilty. But this punishment did not overtake only those who were reborn in animal shape. All physical defects and moral taints, which afflict man from his entry into the world, were the consequence of his crimes in an earlier life. The old Pythagoreans combined the doctrine of the metempsychosis with that of the pains reserved for the wicked in a hell beneath the earth. But we have seen how the belief in the tortures of Hades was combated until it yielded and was discredited.[[447]] Metempsychosis dared to do without these incredible subterranean tortures and thereby acquired a new importance. It supplied the means of maintaining the dogma of posthumous retribution without imposing a blind faith in the foolish fables of the poets: souls were held to pass immediately from one body to another without leaving the earth, rising or sinking in the scale of beings in accordance with their merits or demerits. Thus Hades becomes our corporeal life in which we expiate the faults of a previous life. The Furies are the passions which strike us with their whips and burn us with their torches.[[448]] The ingeniousness of the theologians found an explanation for each of the tortures described by the old mythology. Tantalus threatened by the rock is the man obsessed by the fear of heavenly wrath; Tityus, whose entrails are devoured by vultures, is the lover whose heart is gnawed by care; Sisyphus rolling his rock becomes the ambitious man who exhausts himself with vain efforts; the Danaïdes carrying water in a leaking vessel, which empties as it is filled, are the insatiable souls who give themselves up to pleasure and never have enough of enjoyment. Even the old precepts of the Pythagorean school were twisted from their ordinary meaning and became symbols of this eschatology. A popular tabu, admitted by the sect, was formulated in the sentence, “If thou leave thy dwelling, turn not round lest the Erinyes pursue thee.” The first meaning of this prohibition, which is known to the folk-lore of many places, is that to turn round as one leaves one’s house is to run the risk of being assailed by the spirits who haunt the threshold. But the doctors of Neo-Pythagorism did not thus understand the saying. For them, the dwelling was the body, the Erinyes the passions: when souls left the body they must not return thither or the passions would attach themselves to them and make them their victims.[[449]]
Here, however, we touch on another form of metempsychosis. The ancients make a distinction between the doctrine of reincarnation or “reincorporation” (translating exactly the Greek word μετενσωμάτωσις), and rebirth or palingenesis (παλιγγενεσία). This latter word is not here taken in the Stoic sense of the eternal return of things, a series of cosmic cycles in which the same phenomena are exactly reproduced.[[450]] It is used to designate a transmigration separated by intervals, a process which is not continuous. In the first kind of metempsychosis there is, properly speaking, no rebirth, for the soul does not leave the earth, but there unceasingly accomplishes its circular journey through the living world. On the contrary, according to the second theory, it does not immediately resume possession of a body. It remains disincarnate for a long period of years—for Virgil as for Plato the number is one thousand—and thus leads a double existence of which its passages to this world take up only the lesser part. It is not even fatally constrained to redescend to the earth: if it has kept itself free from all corporeal defilement, it will soar to heaven and dwell there for ever.
But if, during his sojourn on the earth, man has given himself up to the pleasures of the senses, his soul becomes attached to his body. At first it cannot separate itself from the corpse, around which it circles, plaintively regretting the joys it has lost. It desires again to enter the flesh which was the instrument of its voluptuousness; it seeks a dwelling which will allow it to continue the sensual habits which have become its second nature. And so, when the time is accomplished, it is seized with an irresistible love for the body in which it is to enclose itself again; a fascination, like a magic charm, draws it to this object of its desires, which is to cause its misery. The fatality driving it to incarnation and suffering is not here an inevitable law of the universe but an inner necessity, a destiny which it has made for itself. The cosmic Ananke has become psychic.