Belief in the transmigration of human souls into animals in the Solomon Islands.
In the Solomon Islands a man at the point of death would gather the members of his family about him and inform them of the particular sort of creature, say a bird or a butterfly, into which he proposed to transmigrate. Henceforth the family would regard that species of animal as sacred and would neither kill nor injure it. If they fell in with a creature of the kind, it might be a [pg 297] bird or a butterfly, they would say, “That is papa,” and offer him a coco-nut.[892] In these islands sharks are very often supposed to be ghosts, for dying people frequently announce their intention of being sharks when they have put off their human shape. After that, if any shark remarkable for its size or colour is seen to haunt a certain shore or rock, it is taken to be somebody's ghost, and the name of the deceased is given to it. For example, at Ulawa a dreaded man-eating shark received the name of a dead man and was propitiated with offerings of porpoise teeth. At Saa, certain food, for example coco-nuts from particular trees, is reserved to feed such a ghost-shark, but men of whom it is positively known that after death they will be in sharks are allowed by anticipation to partake of the shark-food in the sacred place. Other men will sometimes join themselves to their company, and speaking with the voice of a shark-ghost will say, “Give me to eat of that food.” If such a man happens to be really possessed of supernatural power, he will in due time become a shark-ghost himself; but it is perfectly possible that he may fail. In Savo not very long ago a certain man had a shark that he used to feed and to which he offered sacrifice. He swam out to it with food, called it by name, and it came to him. Of course it was not a common shark, but a ghost, the knowledge of which had been handed down to him from his ancestors. Alligators also may lodge the souls of dead Solomon Islanders. In the island of Florida a story was told of an alligator that used to come up out of the sea and make itself quite at home in the village in which the man whose ghost it was had lived. It went by the name of the deceased, and though there was one man in particular who had special connexion with it and was said to own it, the animal was on friendly terms with everybody in the place and would even let children ride on its back. But the village where this happened has not yet been identified.[893] In the same island the appearance of anything wonderful is taken as proof of a ghostly presence and stamps the place as sacred. For example, a man planted some coco-nut palms [pg 298] and almond trees in the bush and died not long afterwards. After his death there appeared among the trees a great rarity in the shape of a white cuscus. The animal was accordingly assumed to be the ghost of the departed planter and went by his name. The place became sacred, and no one would gather the fruits of the trees there, until two young men, who had been trained in the principles of Christianity, boldly invaded the sanctuary and appropriated the almonds and coco-nuts.[894] It must not be supposed, however, that the choice of transmigration open to a Solomon Islander is restricted to the animal kingdom; he is free after death to become a vegetable, if he feels so disposed. When a mission-school was established in the island of Ulawa it was observed with surprise that the natives would not eat bananas and had ceased to plant the tree. Enquiry elicited the origin of the restriction, which was recent and well remembered. A man of great influence, dying not long before, had forbidden the eating of bananas after his death, saying that he would be in the banana. The older natives would still mention his name and say, “We cannot eat So-and-so.”[895]
The doctrine of the transmigration of human souls into animals in ancient India. The doctrine of transmigration in Buddhism.
The doctrine of the reincarnation of human souls in the bodies either of men or of animals, which meets us as an article of faith in so many savage tribes, has a special interest for the historian of thought, because it has been adopted more or less explicitly and employed, not merely as a philosophical theory, but as a means of enforcing moral lessons, by thinkers, teachers, and lawgivers among various civilised peoples, notably in ancient India and Greece. Thus in the most famous of old Indian law-books, The Laws of Manu, the penalties to be endured by evil-doers in future births are described with a precision which leaves [pg 299] nothing to be desired: the degradation of the birth is exactly proportioned to the degree of moral guilt of the transgressor. For example, if a man has the temerity to censure his teacher, even though the censure is richly deserved, that rash man in his next birth will be an ass; but if he defames his teacher falsely, he will be a dog; and if he is so lost to all sense of propriety as to live at the expense of his teacher, he will be a worm.[896] A faithless wife in her next transmigration will be born a jackal.[897] A Brahman who misappropriates money which he has received for a sacrifice will hereafter be either a vulture or a crow for the period of one hundred years.[898] Men who delight in doing hurt will be born as carnivorous animals, and those who eat forbidden food will be degraded into worms. As for thieves, their lot is a hard one, and it is harder in proportion to the value of the article stolen. A man who steals gems will be born a goldsmith; a man who steals grain will be born a rat; a man who steals honey will be born a stinging insect; and a man who steals clarified butter will be born an ichneumon. The penalty for stealing silk is to become a partridge, for stealing linen a frog, for stealing vegetables a peacock, for stealing cooked food a porcupine, for stealing uncooked food a hedgehog, and for stealing molasses a flying-fox. And so on for the various degrees of moral turpitude throughout the entire range of the animal kingdom.[899] Buddha himself, who gave an immense extension to the doctrine of transmigration by incorporating it in his religious or rather philosophical system, is traditionally said to have undergone many animal births of various sorts before he attained to his supreme dignity. Thus it is reported that he was once a hare, once a dog, twice a pig, twice a frog, four times a serpent, six times a snipe, ten times a lion, eleven times a deer, and eighteen times a monkey; to say nothing of having been once a devil-dancer, twice a thief, eighty-three times an ascetic, and so on.[900]
The doctrine of the transmigration of souls taught in ancient Greece by Pythagoras and Empedocles.
In ancient Greece also the theory of the transmigration of souls found favour with the early philosophers Pythagoras and Empedocles, both of whom, if we may trust tradition, appealed to their own personal experience in support of the doctrine. According to ancient writers, Pythagoras affirmed that he had been Euphorbus the Trojan in one of his former lives, and in proof of the assertion he identified the shield of Euphorbus among the Trojan spoils at Mycenae.[901] He would seem to have held that human souls can transmigrate into animals or even into plants;[902] and we may suppose that the possibility of such transmigrations was at least one of the reasons he alleged for enjoining the strictest of his disciples neither to kill nor to eat animals and to abstain from certain vegetables, such as beans and mallows.[903] Certainly at a later time these principles were maintained and these precepts inculcated by Empedocles, who outdid the reminiscences of his predecessor by asserting that he himself in former lives had been a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, and a fish.[904] Hence he denounced as a crime the practice of killing and eating animals, since according to him a man could never know but that in slaughtering and eating an animal he might be murdering and devouring one of his dead kinsfolk, it might be his father or mother, his son or daughter.[905] Thus from the doctrine of transmigration Empedocles logically drew the same practical conclusion as the savage, who abstains, for example, from killing and eating crocodiles or pigs because he believes the souls of his departed relations to be embodied in crocodiles or pigs: the only important difference between the savage and the [pg 301] philosopher in this respect is that, whereas the savage venerates and spares only animals of one particular species on the ground of their possible affinity to himself, the philosopher on his own shewing was bound to abstain from all animals whatever, since according to him the spirits of his deceased relatives might be lurking in creatures of any species. Hence while a faith in transmigration imposes but few restrictions on the diet of a savage, since it leaves him free to partake of the flesh of every sort of animals but one, the creed of Empedocles logically cut him off from a flesh diet altogether and compelled him to live on vegetables alone; indeed, if he had been rigidly logical, he must have denied himself the use of vegetables also and perished of hunger, since on his theory vegetables as well as animals may house the souls of the dead.[906] However, like a wise man he sacrificed logic to life, and contented himself with forbidding his disciples the use of a few vegetables, such as beans and laurels,[907] while he suffered them to browse freely on all the rest.
The doctrine of transmigration used by Pythagoras and Empedocles mainly to inculcate certain ethical precepts. The pessimism of Empedocles unlike the ordinary Greek view of life; its similarity to Buddhism.
So far as we can gather the real opinions of Pythagoras and Empedocles from the traditional history of the one and the miserably mutilated writings of the other, they seem both, like Buddha, with whom they had much in common, to have used the old savage doctrine of the transmigration of souls mainly as a handle by which to impress on the minds of their followers the necessity of leading an innocent, pure, and even ascetic life in this world as the only means of ensuring a blissful or at all events an untroubled eternity in a world to come.[908] At least this is fairly certain for Empedocles, whose views are comparatively well known to us through the fragments of his philosophical writings. From these utterances of his, the genuineness of which seems to be beyond suspicion, we gather that the psychology of Empedocles was a curious blend of savagery and mysticism. He regarded the incarnation of the human soul in a body of any sort as a punishment for sin, a degradation, a fall from heaven, an [pg 302] exile from God, a banishment from a world of bliss to a world of woe.[909] He describes the earth as a cavern,[910] a joyless land, where men wander in darkness, a prey to murder and revenge, to swarms of foul fiends, to wasting sickness and decay.[911] He speaks with pity and contempt of the life of mortals as a wretched and miserable existence, begotten of strife and sighs and prolonged as a punishment for their sins through a series of transmigrations, until, by the exercise of virtue, they have been born again as prophets, poets, physicians, and princes, and so return at last to communion with the gods to live thenceforth free from pain and sorrow, immortal, incorruptible, divine.[912] This view of human destiny, this passionate scorn poured on the present world, this ecstatic aspiration after a blissful eternity, the reward of virtue in a world to come, are very alien from the cheerful serenity, the calm rationalism of the ordinary Greek attitude towards existence on earth.[913] In his profound conviction of the manifold sufferings inseparable from mortality, in his longing to put off the burden of the body or what he calls “the garment of flesh,”[914] in his tenderness for the lower animals and his strong sense of kinship with them, Empedocles resembled Buddha, whose whole cast of thought, however, was tinged with a still deeper shade of melancholy, a more hopeless outlook on the future. Yet so close in some respects is the similarity between the two that we might incline to suppose a direct influence of Buddhism on Empedocles, were it not that the dates of the two great thinkers, so far as they can be ascertained, appear to exclude the supposition.[915]
Analogy of the physical speculations of Empedocles to those of Herbert Spencer.
But if on its ethical side the teaching of Empedocles may almost be described as Buddhism relieved of its deepest shadows, on its scientific side it curiously anticipated some speculations which have deeply stirred the European mind in our own and our fathers' days. For to his savage psychology and religious mysticism Empedocles superadded a comprehensive and grandiose theory of the material universe, which presents a close analogy to that of Herbert Spencer. The scientific doctrine of the conservation of energy or, as he preferred to call it, the persistence of force, which Spencer made the corner-stone of his system, has its counterpart in the Empedoclean doctrine of the conservation or indestructibility of matter, the sum of which, according to him, remains always constant, never undergoing either increase or diminution.[916] Hence all the changes that take place in the physical world, according to Empedocles, resolve themselves into the integration and disintegration of matter, the composition and decomposition of bodies, brought about by the two antagonistic forces of attraction and repulsion, which in mythical language he called love and hate. And just as all particular things are evolved by the force of attraction and dissolved by the force of repulsion, a state of concentration or aggregation in the individual perpetually alternating with a state of diffusion or segregation, so it is also with the material universe as a whole. It, too, alternately contracts and expands according as the forces of attraction and repulsion alternately prevail. For it was the opinion of Empedocles that a long, perhaps immeasurable, period of time, during which the force of attraction prevails over the force of repulsion, is succeeded by an equally long period in which the force of repulsion prevails over the force of attraction, each period lasting till, the predominant force being spent, its action is first arrested and then reversed by the opposite force; so that the material universe performs a [pg 304] periodic and rhythmic movement of alternate contraction and expansion, which never ceases except at the moments when, the two opposite forces exactly balancing each other, all things come to rest and equilibrium for a time, only however to return, with the backward sweep of the cosmic pendulum, to their former state either of consolidation or of dispersion. Thus under the influence of attraction and repulsion matter is constantly oscillating to and fro: at the end of a period of contraction it is gathered up in a solid globe: at the end of a period of expansion it is diffused throughout space in a state of tenuity which nowadays we might describe as gaseous. And this gigantic see-saw motion of the universe as a whole has gone on and will go on for ever and ever.[917]