The Philosophy of Mystery

by Walter Cooper Dendy

Like Astrophel, Paley inquires where is the soul during suspended vitality? and Priestly, where when the body was created? Hume, with the subtlety of a sceptic, asks how can the soul long be the same, seeing that, like the body, its particles are constantly changing? While Glanville thinks himself a wondrous wight, as he prates of its “essential spissitude, a something that is more subtle than body, contracting itself into a less ubi.”

Were this sublime secret fathomable by the deepest intellect, then would be unfolded things above, which are ordained to be ever mysteries to creatures on earth; such as the future existence of the spirit, and the nature of Paradise.

Although revelation has given us glimpses, enough to satisfy humble devotion, what mind can decide on the exact nature and changes of its own future state? The negative answer is at once returned by the variety of these learned opinions:—That the soul is, immediately after death, submitted to its reward or punishment;—That its state after death is one of half happiness or misery, until it be again joined to its body on the resurrection; and then it shall enjoy or suffer the extremes of felicity or torment;—That the soul rests in quiet unconsciousness until the day of judgment;—And lastly, that souls are purified by purgatory and comparative suffering, and then are admitted into the realms of perpetual enjoyment.

Astr. Is it not strange that in this notion of purgatory, with slight variations, pagans, and Romanists, and Egyptians, and Brahmins, so nearly accord? In the creed of the Brahmins, there is something of sublimity, whatever may be their error, and Ida will not chide, if I repeat the essence of their creed, which Robertson has gathered from the “Baghvat Geeta.”

“Every intelligent nature, particularly the souls of men, they conceived to be portions separated from this great spirit; to which, after fulfilling their destiny on earth, and attaining a proper degree of purity, they would be again reunited. In order to efface the stains with which a soul, during its residence on earth, has been defiled by the indulgence of sensual and corrupt appetites, they taught that it must pass, in a long succession of transmigrations, through the bodies of different animals, until, by what it suffers and what it leaves in the various forms of its existence, it shall be so thoroughly refined from all pollution, as to be rendered meet for being absorbed into the divine essence, and returns, like a drop, into that unbounded ocean from which it originally issued.”

Aristotle, in taking up this notion of transmigration in his book “De Animâ,” says that “the soul was always joined to a body, sometimes to one, sometimes to another.” And from this idea were taken the stories of Fadlallah and the Dervis, in the “Spectator,” of the “Transmigrations of Indus,” and the beautiful fable of “Psyche,” or the soul, which when a body died, could not live alone on earth, and so crept into another. Herodotus, in the second book of his history, has some allusions to the Egyptian creed; and, indeed, the fear of this transmigration was the origin of mummies among the Copts. Their belief that the soul (the immortality of which they very early, if not the first, decided,) could not leave the body when entire, induced them to preserve that body as long as possible; and the mummy unrollers and hieroglyphic readers must commit sad sacrilege, by exposing their sacred dust to the decomposition of air.

When the body was dissolved, however, the soul entered that of some animal that instant born; and profane commentators have, on this creed, presumed to explain the sacred story of the “banishment and savage life of Nebuchadnezzar.” At the end of 30,000 years, it again entered that of a man; and it is likely that their object in embalming was, to have the soul re-enter the same body from choice and habit.

Simonides, four hundred years after the siege of Troy, ungallantly reversed this doctrine, deciding that “the souls of women were formed of the principles and elements of brutes.” The Pythagorean system was, if not more courteous, at least more just.

“Thus all things are but altered, nothing dies;

And here and there th’ embodied spirit flies.