Metempsychosis

Reincarnation is not confined to animal forms. The stories of trees that grow up from the graves of lovers, such as Tristram and Iseult, and twine themselves together are familiar in Europe; and the human soul also reappears in a flower growing on the grave. In the case of flowers springing from drops of blood, as from that of Ajax, the soul is possibly regarded as located actually in the blood itself. In further Asia and elsewhere the soul goes into the crops, and by preserving the corpse, which is smoke-dried, funeral ceremonies are accommodated to the agri cultural year, so as to afford the crop the full benefit of the soul matter from those who have died recently; and in the case of the Karens of Burma a specific theory is evolved of a cycle of life on these lines. (See HEAD-HUNTING.) The Lushei theory that the soul takes the form of dew and is reincarnated in the body on which it descends, may be a version of the Karen theory.

The idea of transmigration has been influenced and inevitably confused by ideas as to the external soul, generally associated with magicians, where the vital principle depends on a soul kept in an animal in the forest, or in an egg below the sea, etc., which has to be secured before the magician can be killed, by ideas as to totemism and lycanthropy (qq.v.), and beliefs in the rein carnation of the soul in predatory forms such as tigers (India and Sumatra), sharks (Melanesia), or alligators (Africa), have perhaps arisen in connection with those ideas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Stallybrass,

Grimm's Teutonic Mythology (1888) ; Sir J. G. Frazer, The Belief in Immortality (192o-23). (J. H. H.) Metempsychosis is also important to philosophic thought. Apparently, Greece did not borrow the doctrine from Egypt or India but used savage ideas for religious and philosophic purposes. The Orphic religion, which held it, first appeared in Thrace upon the semi-barbarous north-eastern frontier. Orpheus, its legendary founder, is said to have taught that "soul and body are united by a compact unequally binding on either ; the soul is divine, immortal and aspires to freedom, while the body holds it in fetters as a prisoner. Death dissolves this compact, but only to re-imprison the liberated soul after a short time : for the wheel of birth revolves inexorably. Thus the soul continues its journey, alternating between a separate unrestrained existence and fresh reincarnation, round the wide circle of necessity, as the com panion of many bodies of men and animals. To these unfor tunate prisoners Orpheus proclaims the message of liberation, that they stand in need of the grace of redeeming gods and of Dionysus in particular, and calls them to turn to God by ascetic piety of life and self-purification: the purer their lives the higher will be their next reincarnation, until the soul has completed the spiral ascent of destiny to live for ever as God from whom it comes." Such teaching appeared in Greece about the 6th century B.C., organized itself into mysteries at Eleusis and elsewhere, and produced a copious literature.

The earliest Greek thinker with whom metempsychosis is con nected is Pherecydes ; but Pythagoras, who is said to have been his pupil, is its first famous philosophic exponent. Pythagoras

probably made his reputation by bringing Orphic doctrine from North-eastern Hellas to Magna Graecia.

The importance of metempsychosis is due to Plato. In the eschatological myth which closes the Republic he tells the story how Er, the son of Armenius, miraculously returned to life on the twelfth day after death and recounted the secrets of the other world. There are theories to the same effect in other dialogues, the Phaedrus, Meno, Phaedo, Timaeus and Laws. In Plato's view the number of souls was fixed ; birth therefore is never the creation of a soul, but only a transmigration from one body to another. Plato's acceptance of the doctrine is characteristic of his sym pathy with popular beliefs and desire to incorporate them in a purified form into his system. Aristotle, a far less emotional and sympathetic mind, has a doctrine of immortality totally incon sistent with it. In later Greek literature the doctrine appears from time to time; it is mentioned in a fragment of Menander (the Inspired Woman) and satirized by Lucian (Gallus § 18 seq.). In Roman literature it is found as early as Ennius, who in his Calabrian home must have been familiar with the Greek teachings which had descended to his times from the cities of Magna Graecia. In a lost passage of his Annals, a Roman history in verse, Ennius told how he had seen Homer in a dream, who had assured him that the same soul which had animated both the poets had once belonged to a peacock. Persius in one of his satires (vi. 9) laughs at Ennius for this : it is referred to also by Lucretius (i. 124) and by Horace (E gist. II. i. 52). Virgil works the idea into his account of the Underworld in the sixth book of the Aeneid (vv. 724 sqq.). It persists in antiquity down to the latest classic thinkers, Plotinus and the other Neoplatonists.

Attempts have been made with little success to find metem psychosis in early Jewish literature. But there are traces of it in Philo, and it is definitely adopted in the Kabbala. Within the Christian Church it was held during the first centuries by isolated Gnostic sects, and by the Manichaeans in the 4th and 5th cen turies, but was invariably repudiated by orthodox theologians. In the middle ages these traditions were continued by the numerous sects known collectively as Cathari. At the Renaissance we find the doctrine in Giordano Bruno, and in the 17th century in the theosophist van Helmont. A modified form of it was adopted by Swedenborg. During the classical period of German literature metempsychosis attracted much attention : Goethe played with the idea, and it was taken up more seriously by Lessing, who borrowed it from Charles Bonnet, and by Herder. It has been mentioned with respect by Hume and by Schopenhauer. Modern theosophy, which draws its inspiration from India, has taken metempsychosis as a cardinal tenet ; it is, says a recent theo sophical writer, "the master-key to modern problems," and among them to the problem of heredity. (H. ST.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-A. Bertholet, The Transmigration of Souls (trans. from the German by H. J. Chaytor) ; E. Rohde, Psyche.