[559] Görres: “Mystique,” lib. iii., p. 63.
[560] The ancients called “the soul” the spirits of bad people; the soul was the larva and lemure. Good human spirits became gods.
[561] Porphyry: “De Sacrificiis.” Chapter on the true Cultus.
[562] “Mysteries of the Egyptians.”
[563] Second century, A.D. “Du Dieu de Socrate,” Apul. class., pp. 143-145.
[564] “Eastern Monachism,” p. 9.
[565] “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” iv. 385.
[566] Hardy: “Manual of Buddhism;” Dunlap: “The World’s Religions.”
[567] Lemprière (“Classical Dictionary,” art. “Pythagoras”) says that “there is great reason to suspect the truth of the whole narrative of Pythagoras’ journey into India,” and concludes by saying that this philosopher had never seen either Gymnosophists or their country. If this be so, how account for the doctrine of the metempsychosis of Pythagoras, which is far more that of the Hindu in its details than the Egyptian? But, above all, how account for the fact that the name Monas, applied by him to the First Cause, is the identical appellation given to that Being in the Sanscrit tongue? In 1792-7, when Lemprière’s “Dictionary” appeared, the Sanscrit was, we may say, utterly unknown; Dr. Haug’s translation of the “Aitareya Brahmana” (“Rig-Vedas”), in which this word occurs, was published only about twenty years ago, and until that valuable addition to the literature of archaic ages was completed, and the precise age of the “Aitareya” now fixed by Haug at 2000-2400 B.C.—was a mystery, it might be suggested, as in the case of Christian symbols, that the Hindus borrowed it from Pythagoras. But now, unless philology can show it to be a “coincidence,” and that the word Monas is not the same in its minutest definitions, we have a right to assert that Pythagoras was in India, and that it was the Gymnosophists who instructed him in his metaphysical theology. The fact alone that “Sanscrit, as compared with Greek and Latin, is an elder sister,” as Max Müller shows, is not sufficient to account for the perfect identity of the Sanscrit and Greek words Monas, in their most metaphysical, abstruse sense. The Sanscrit word Deva (god) has become the Latin deus, and points to a common source; but we see in the Zoroastrian “Zend-Avesta” the same word, meaning diametrically the opposite, and becoming daêva, or evil spirit, from which comes the word devil.
[568] Haug: “Aitareya Brahmanam.”