Pagan Origin of Partialist Doctrines

by John Claudius Pitrat

The rulers of nations, and the authors of the initiations, had a profound knowledge of the human nature, and of the genius of the people. From the fact that an ox, unaware of his strength, yields to the leading hand of a child, so they knew that would they let the masses ignore their power, they could easily control them, mould their opinions, habits, and morals. Also aware of the terror that death impressed upon their minds, and knowing that it is an infirmity of man's nature, when uncultivated by philosophy, to fear more a distant and indefinite, but unavoidable misery beyond the grave, than the most excruciating tortures on earth, they found in those prejudices of the people a sure means to lead and rule them. Therefore they endeavored to make them believe that those who would transgress the laws, or would commit some other crimes, should be punished by the gods immortal in the future life.

They had to invent the nature of that punishment, and as there were many degrees of wickedness, they had to admit, also, various degrees in the punishment. To more easily and more surely make the people believe their invention, they thought it was wise to make the punishment, and its degrees, coincide with the then universally established religion, which was but one, though there were many systems of theology. That religion was the one we have examined in the first chapter of this work, and which consisted in the belief that nature was an uncreated but animated being, whose vast body comprised the earth, the sun, the planets, and the stars, to which one great soul impressed motion and life; and that those principal parts, or members, of the body of the universe were animated by emanations or irradiations of the great soul of the universe, or nature.

This pantheistic doctrine was materialist; for it supposed that the great soul of the universe was the purest substance of the fire ether, and thereby man's soul was of the same nature. It was the belief even of the famous philosopher Pythagoras, and of his disciples. All animals, according to Servius, the commentator of Virgil, draw their flesh from the earth, their humors from water, their breath from the air, and their soul from the breath of the Deity. Thus the bees have a small portion of the Deity. Our soul is like a drop of water which is not annihilated, whether it evaporates in the air, or condenses and falls again in rain, or rolls into the sea to add its littleness to the massy waters. When we die our life melts, reenters into the great soul of the universe, and the remains of our body mix again with the elements of the air.

Virgil believed that our death is not annihilation, but that it is a separation of two sorts of matters, the one thereof remains here below, and the other reunites to the sacred fire of the stars, as soon as the matter of which our soul is composed has reacquired all the purity of the subtle matter, from which it had emanated, auræ simplicis ignem. Nothing, Servius says, is lost in the great whole, and in the pure fire which constitutes the substance of the soul. Virgil says of the souls: igneus est ollis vigor, et cœlestis origo; that they are formed of the active fire that shines in the heaven, and that they return thither when they are separated from the body by death.

The same doctrine we find in the dream of Scipio: "It is from there," he says, speaking of the regions of the fixed stars, "that the souls descended, thereto they shall return; they were emanated from those eternal fires we name stars. What ye call death is but a return to true life; the body is but a prison, in which the soul is momentarily chained. Death breaks her ties, and restores her to liberty, and to her true state of existence."

From this pantheistic doctrine, it followed that man's soul is immortal though material.

Upon this sort of immortality of our soul, the rulers built a system of punishment, called Metempsychosis, or transmigration of the souls. This system was so much the better adapted to the then received religion, that all the souls being simply different emanations from the same fire ether, the consequence was that all the souls were homogeneous, and differed only in appearance, and by the nature of the bodies to which the fire-principle, which composed their substance, united. Virgil said that the souls of all animals are an emanation of the fire ether, and that the difference of their operations on earth is to be ascribed only to the difference of vases, or organized bodies, which receive this substance; or, according to the words of Servius, the lesser or greater perfection of their operations is in ratio of the nature of the bodies.

The Indians, among whom, even in our days, the system of Metempsychosis prevails, think that man's soul is absolutely of the same nature as that of other animals. They say that man is superior to them, not in his soul but in his body, whose organization is more perfect and more apt to receive the action of the great Being, viz., of the universe, than theirs are. They ground their opinion on the example of children and of old men, whose organs being too weak yet, or having been weakened, do not permit their senses to have the same activity which is displayed in a mature age.