If we except the belief of a future remuneration beyond this life for
suffering virtue, and retribution for successful crimes, there is no
system so simple, and so little repugnant to our understanding, as that
of the metempsychosis. The pains and the pleasures of this life are by
this system considered as the recompense or the punishment of our
actions in an anterior state: so that, says St. Foix, we cease to wonder
that, among men and animals, some enjoy an easy and agreeable life,
while others seem born only to suffer all kinds of miseries.
Preposterous as this system may appear, it has not wanted for advocates
in the present age, which indeed has revived every kind of fanciful
theory. Mercier, in _L'an deux mille quatre cents quarante_, seriously
maintains the present one.
If we seek for the origin of the opinion of the metempsychosis, or the
transmigration of souls into other bodies, we must plunge into the
remotest antiquity; and even then we shall find it impossible to fix the
epoch of its first author. The notion was long extant in Greece before
the time of Pythagoras. Herodotus assures us that the Egyptian priests
taught it; but he does not inform us of the time it began to spread. It
probably followed the opinion of the immortality of the soul. As soon as
the first philosophers had established this dogma, they thought they
could not maintain this immortality without a transmigration of souls.
The opinion of the metempsychosis spread in almost every region of the
earth; and it continues, even to the present time, in all its force
amongst those nations who have not yet embraced Christianity. The people
of Arracan, Peru, Siam, Camboya, Tonquin, Cochin-China, Japan, Java, and
Ceylon still entertain that fancy, which also forms the chief article of
the Chinese religion. The Druids believed in transmigration. The bardic
triads of the Welsh are full of this belief; and a Welsh antiquary
insists, that by an emigration which formerly took place, it was
conveyed to the Bramins of India from Wales! The Welsh bards tell us
that the souls of men transmigrate into the bodies of those animals
whose habits and characters they most resemble, till after a circuit of
such penitential miseries, they are purified for the celestial presence;
for man may be converted into a pig or a wolf, till at length he assumes
the inoffensiveness of the dove.
My learned friend Sharon Turner has explained, in his "Vindication of
the ancient British Poems," p. 231, the Welsh system of the
metempsychosis. Their bards mention three circles of existence. The
circle of the all-enclosing circle holds nothing alive or dead, but God.
The second circle, that of felicity, is that which men are to pervade
after they have passed through their terrestrial changes. The circle of
evil is that in which human nature passes through those varying stages
of existence which it must undergo before it is qualified to inhabit the
circle of felicity.
The progression of man through the circle of evil is marked by three
infelicities: Necessity, oblivion, and deaths. The deaths which follow
our changes are so many escapes from their power. Man is a free agent,
and has the liberty of choosing; his sufferings and changes cannot be
foreseen. By his misconduct he may happen to fall retrograde into the
lowest state from which he had emerged. If his conduct in any one state,
instead of improving his being, had made it worse, he fell back into a
worse condition, to commence again his purifying revolutions. Humanity
was the limit of the degraded transmigrations. All the changes above
humanity produced felicity. Humanity is the scene of the contest; and
after man has traversed every state of animated existence, and can
remember all that he has passed through, that consummation follows which
he attains in the circle of felicity. It is on this system of
transmigration that Taliessin, the Welsh bard, who wrote in the sixth
century, gives a recital of his pretended transmigrations. He tells how
he had been a serpent, a wild ass, a buck, or a crane, &c.; and this
kind of reminiscence of his former state, this recovery of memory, was a
proof of the mortal's advances to the happier circle. For to forget what
we have been was one of the curses of the circle of evil. Taliessin,
therefore, adds Mr. Turner, as profusely boasts of his recovered
reminiscence as any modern sectary can do of his state of grace and
election.
In all these wild reveries there seems to be a moral fable in the
notion, that the clearer a man recollects what a _brute_ he has been, it
is a certain proof that he is in an improved state!
According to the authentic Clavigero, in his history of Mexico, we find
the Pythagorean transmigration carried on in the West, and not less
fancifully than in the countries of the East. The people of Tlascala
believe that the souls of persons of rank went after their death to
inhabit the bodies of _beautiful and sweet singing birds_, and those of
the _nobler quadrupeds_; while the souls of inferior persons were
supposed to pass into _weasels_, _beetles_, and such other _meaner
animals_.
There is something not a little ludicrous in the description Plutarch
gives at the close of his treatise on "the delay of heavenly justice."
Thespesius saw at length the souls of those who were condemned to return
to life, and whom they violently forced to take the forms of all kinds
of animals. The labourers charged with this transformation forged with
their instruments certain parts; others, a new form; and made some
totally disappear; that these souls might be rendered proper for another
kind of life and other habits. Among these he perceived the soul of
Nero, which had already suffered long torments, and which stuck to the
body by nails red from the fire. The workmen seized on him to make a
viper of, under which form he was now to live, after having devoured the
breast that had carried him.--But in this Plutarch only copies the fine
reveries of Plato.