2 Kingsborough, Antiquities of Mexico, vol. viii. p. 220.
3 Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations in Texas, New Mexico, &c., ch. xxx.
to spare the living whom accident should throw within their reach.4 Similar superstitions, but more elaborately developed, are rife among many tribes of African negroes.5 It was inculcated in the early Christian centuries by the Gnostics and the Manichaans; also by Origen and several other influential Fathers. In the Middle Ages the sect of the Cathari, the Bogomiles, the famous scholastics Scotus Erigena and Bonaventura, as well as numerous less distinguished authors, advocated it. And in modern times it has been earnestly received by Lessing and Fourier, and is not without its open defenders to day, as we can attest from our own knowledge, even in the prosaic and enlightened circles of European and American society.
There have been two methods of explaining the origin of the dogma of transmigration. First, it has been regarded as a retribution, the sequel to sin in a pre existent state:
"All that flesh doth cover,
Souls of source sublime,
Are but slaves sold over
To the Master Time
To work out their ransom
For the ancient crime."
With the ancient Egyptians the doctrine was developed in connection with the conception of a revolt and battle among the gods in some dim and disastrous epoch of the past eternity, when the defeated deities were thrust out of heaven and shut up in fleshly prison bodies. So man is a fallen spirit, heaven his fatherland, this life a penance, sometimes necessarily repeated in order to be effectual.6 The pre existence of the soul, whether taught by Pythagoras, sung by Empedocles, dreamed by Fludd, or contended for by Beecher, is the principal foundation of the belief in the metempsychosis. But, secondly, the transmigration of souls has been considered as the means of their progressive ascent. The soul begins its conscious course at the bottom of the scale of being, and, gradually rising through birth after birth, climbs along a discriminated series of improvements in endless aspiration. Here the scientific adaptation and moral intent are thought to lead only upwards, insect travelling to man, man soaring to God; but by sin the natural order and working of means are inverted, and the series of births lead downward, until expiation and merit restore the primal adjustment and direction.
The idea of a metempsychosis, or soul wandering, as the Germans call it, has been broached in various forms widely differing in the extent of their application. Among the Jews the writings of Philo, the Talmud, and other documents, are full of it. They seem, for the most part, to have confined the mortal residence of souls to human bodies. They say that God created all souls on the first day, the only day in which he made aught out of nothing; and they imply, in their doctrine of the revolution of souls, that these are born over and over, and will continue wandering thus until the Messiah comes and the resurrection occurs. The
4 Jarves, Hist. Sandwich Islands, p. 82.
5 Wilson, Western Africa, p. 210.
6 Dr. Roth, Agyptische Glaubenslehre.