Pagan Origin of Partialist Doctrines

by John Claudius Pitrat

"As to Her, he had been forbidden to drink of the water of the Lethe river; nevertheless, he knew not in what manner his soul had returned into his body, but having opened his eyes in the morning, he had seen that he was laying on a wood-pile.

"This tradition, my dear Glaucon, has been handed down to us; and if we believe it, it is very apt to save us; we will safely cross the Lethe river, and we will preserve our soul free from stain."

The reader has undoubtedly remarked the last sentence of this extract, which proves the antiquity of the doctrine of the transmigration of the souls. Burnet wrote, that it was so ancient and so universally spread in Egypt, Persia, India, and other countries of the Orient, that it seemed it had descended from heaven, and been believed by the first inhabitants of the earth. Herodote found it established in Egypt in the remotest ages. It was the basis of the theology of the Indians, and the subject of the celebrated Metamorphosis and incarnations of their legends. Metempsychosis has been immemorially believed in Japan, where the people, even in our days, according to Kœmpsfer, abstain from meat, and live exclusively upon fruits and vegetables. In Siam, where the Talapoins or monks hold it as a sacred dogma; in China by the Tao-See; also among the Kalbouls and the Mongols, and among the Thibetans, who admit that the souls pass even into the plants, into the trees, and even into the roots. However, the Thibetans believe that it is only by uniting to human bodies, that the souls can, after successive changes, be restored to their former purity.

The aim of the doctrine of Metempsychosis was to accustom man to detach himself from the gross matter, to which he is tied here below, and to excite in him the desire of promptly returning there, wherefrom he had formerly descended. The rulers of the people frightened them with the pictures of humiliating transformations of their souls, as the Catholic priests and the Partialist preachers do among us, with their teaching of an endless hell. The people, amazed and terrified, for the masses were ignorant, believed all those politico-religious fables. They firmly believed that the souls of the wicked passed into vile bodies; that they were punished with cruel and loathesome diseases; that those who did not reform after a certain number of transmigrations were delivered up to the Furies and to the evil spirits (or devils) to be tortured; and that, after that, they were sent again to the earth, as in a new school, and were obliged to run a new race. Thus we see that the whole system of Metempsychosis rested on the false supposition, that it was necessary, in order to govern the people here below, to frighten them with absurd and visionary tales of atrocious tortures beyond the grave, which were the more terrifying for the very reason of their absurdity and atrociousness.

Timee of Locre, one of the disciples of Socrates, wrote, that among the various means of governing those who are not able to reach the truth of the principles, on which nature has established justice and morals, Metempsychosis is an efficacious one. He said: "Let them be taught those dogmas which inform us that the souls of effeminate and pusillanimous men transmigrate into female bodies; those of murderers into bodies of wild beasts; those of licentious men into bodies of wild boars and hogs; those of fickle and inconstant men into bodies of birds; those of idle, ignorant and silly men into bodies of fishes. The just Nemesis regulates those pains in the future life conjointly with the gods of the earth, avengers of the crimes they have witnessed. The supreme God has entrusted them with the government of this inferior world. Let them be frightened, even, by the religious terrors conveyed to the soul by those discourses which describe the vengeance of the celestial gods, and the unavoidable torments reserved to the criminals in the Tartarus; and also by the other fictions which Homer has found in the ancient sacred opinions. Sometimes the body is cured by poisonous substances; so the souls can be ruled by fables when they cannot be governed by truth."

This philosopher plainly gives us his secret, which has been, and still is, the secret of all legislators and priests. True, the belief of these fables has restrained many from vice and crime; nevertheless we firmly believe that men ought to be led to justice by the bright light of the truth, and not by the dismal light of error, and of superstition: the one elevates man, but the other keeps him in an eternal infancy and ignorance. How sad it is to see, even now-a-days, in free and enlightened America, priests, and Protestant ministers themselves, keeping down in intellectual, moral and religious bondage, millions of Christians, who, from fear of endless curse, kiss the very chains which heavily they drag through life; who believe that God will endlessly roast men—his children—in an undying fire! More surely, and more easily, could those purely minded, but unfortunate Christians, be guided to love God, if they knew that he is not worse than a tiger; that, on the contrary, he is truly good and loving; more virtuous they would be if they were taught that virtue is the source, and the only true source, of happiness. Truer fraternity would reign in our communities, if priests and pretended Protestants, who tyrannize over the souls of their misled victims, and, like the Pharisees of old, lay upon their shoulders a burden they would not be willing to touch with their own fingers—yea, they lay upon their mind and heart the leaden weight of the dogma of endless misery, which they, at least the leaders of the leaders, reject—truer fraternity would exist, we say, for there would not be in our communities, a class of Christians, believing that they are the elect of God for righteousness and eternal bliss, while all the others shall be endlessly damned. Hence their indifference, or rather aversion for them; hence a spirit of Pharisaism: hence a spirit of religious aristocracy, which unfortunately ramifies into a social aristocracy!

ARTICLE II.

Tartarus.

When legislators, priests and philosophers had invented the doctrine of Metempsychosis, the mystagogues and the poets took hold of it, and endeavored to spread it among the people, in consecrating it, the ones in their chants, and the others in the celebration of their mysteries. They clothed it with the charms of poetry, and presented it with magical illusions. All united to deceive the people, under the specious pretext of bettering and governing them with a surer hand. The widest field was opened to fictions; and the genius of the poets, as well as the cunning of the priests, were inexhaustible in portraying the bliss of the righteous hereafter, and the horror of the horrible prisons wherein crime was to be punished.