“Through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour, which shall seize
Each vital spirit.”
ROMEO AND JULIET.
ASTR. You have granted me more than you desire, dear Evelyn. If life be
_restored_, it had never _deserted_ the body, and yet the mind _had_
deserted it.
The mind and body, then, are both independent of each other. From this
truth, a metaphysical question of deep and wondrous interest arises. _In
what condition does the mind exist, during so long a period,
uninfluencing and uninfluenced by the power of perception?_ I remember
searching for some elucidation of this mystery among those ghost-stories
of the Hebrews, founded on the “purgatorie of souls” in Stehelin’s
“Traditions of the Jews,” but I rose from my reading unenlightened.
IDA. And ever will, Astrophel. Profane curiosity must fail in such a
study; adoration alone can sanctify this mystic question, on which
theologians and philosophers, even those devoutly confident in the
sublime truths of immortality, have so essentially differed.
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.
By time, or force, or sickness, dispossess’d,
And lodges, where it lights, in bird or beast;
Or hunts without, till ready limbs it find,
And actuates those according to their kind.
From tenement to tenement is toss’d,
The soul is still the same, the figure only lost.”
This is from Dryden’s translation of Chaucer.
And Burton’s record is as follows:
“The Pythagoreans defend _Metempsychosis_ and _Palingenesia_, that souls
go from one body to another, _epotâ prius Lethes nudâ_, as men into
wolves, beares, dogs, hogs, as they were inclined in their lives, or
participated in conditions:
‘_——inque ferinas_
_Possumus ire domus pecudumque in corpora condi._’
“Lucian’s cock was first _Euphorbus_, a captaine:
‘_Ille ego (nam memini) Trojani tempore belli_
_Panthoides Euphorbus eram._’”