www.newadvent.org Open in urlscan Pro
2400:52e0:1e00::1080:1  Public Scan

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM

../utility/search.htm

<form id="searchbox_000299817191393086628:ifmbhlr-8x0" action="../utility/search.htm">
  <!-- Hidden Inputs -->
  <input type="hidden" name="safe" value="active">
  <input type="hidden" name="cx" value="000299817191393086628:ifmbhlr-8x0">
  <input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:9">
  <!-- Search Box -->
  <label for="searchQuery" id="searchQueryLabel">Search:</label>
  <input id="searchQuery" name="q" type="text" size="25" aria-labelledby="searchQueryLabel">
  <!-- Submit Button -->
  <label for="submitButton" id="submitButtonLabel" class="visually-hidden">Submit Search</label>
  <input id="submitButton" type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" aria-labelledby="submitButtonLabel">
</form>

Text Content

 

Search: Submit Search



 Home   Encyclopedia   Summa   Fathers   Bible   Library 

 A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z 


Home > Catholic Encyclopedia > M > Metempsychosis


METEMPSYCHOSIS

Please help support the mission of New Advent and get the full contents of this
website as an instant download. Includes the Catholic Encyclopedia, Church
Fathers, Summa, Bible and more — all for only $19.99...

(Greek meta empsychos, Latin metempsychosis: French metempsychose: German
seelenwanderung).

Metempsychosis, in other words the doctrine of the transmigration of souls,
teaches that the same soul inhabits in succession the bodies of different
beings, both men and animals. It was a tenet common to many systems of
philosophic thought and religious belief widely separated from each other both
geographically and historically. Although in modern times it is associated among
civilized races almost exclusively with the countries of Asia and particularly
with India, there is evidence that at one period or another it has flourished in
almost every part of the world; and it still prevails in various forms among
savage nations scattered over the globe. This universality seems to mark it as
one of those spontaneous or instinctive beliefs by which man's nature responds
to the deep and urgent problems of existence; whilst the numerous and richly
varied forms which it assumes in different systems, and the many-coloured
mythology in which it has clothed itself, show it to be capable of powerfully
appealing to the imagination, and of adapting itself with great versatility to
widely different types of mind. The explanation of this success seems to lie
partly in its being an expression of the fundamental belief in immortality,
partly in its comprehensiveness, binding together, as for the most part it seems
to do, all individual existences in one single, unbroken scheme; partly also in
the unrestrained liberty which it leaves to the mythologizing fancy.




HISTORY


EGYPT

Herodotus tells us in a well-known passage that "the Egyptians were the first to
assert the immortality of the soul, and that it passes on the death of the body
into another animal; and that when it has gone the round of all forms of life on
land, in water, and in air, then it once more enters a human body born for it;
and this cycle of the soul takes place in three thousand years" (ii. 123). That
the doctrine first originated with the Egyptians is unlikely. It almost
certainly passed from Egypt into Greece, but the same belief had sprung up
independently in many nations from a very early date. The accounts of Egyptian
metempsychosis vary considerably: indeed such a doctrine was bound to undergo
modifications according to changes in the national religion. In the "Book of the
Dead", it is connected with the notion of a judgment after death, transmigration
into infra-human forms being a punishment for sin. Certain animals were
recognized by the Egyptians as the abode of specially wicked persons and were on
this account, according to Plutarch, preferred for sacrificial purposes. In
Herodotus' account given above, this ethical note is absent, and transmigration
is a purely natural and necessary cosmic process. Plato's version mediates
between these two views. He represents the Egyptians as teaching that ordinary
mortals will, after a cycle of ten thousand years, return to the human form, but
that an adept in philosophy may hope to accomplish the process in three thousand
years. There was also a pantheistic form of Egyptian metempsychosis, the
individual being regarded as an emanation from a single universal principle to
which it was destined to return after having completed its "cycle of necessity".
There are traces of this doctrine of a cosmic cycle in the Fourth Eclogue of
Virgil. It has been thought that the custom of embalming the dead was connected
with this form of the doctrine, the object being to preserve the body intact for
the return of the soul. It is probable, indeed, that the belief in such a return
helped to confirm the practice, but it can hardly have provided the sole motive,
since we find that other animals were also frequently embalmed.


GREECE

Greece, as already stated, probably borrowed the theory of transmigration from
Egypt. According to tradition, it had been taught by Musaeus and Orpheus, and it
was an element of the Orphic and other mystic doctrines. Pindar represents it in
this relation (cf. 2nd Ol. Ode). The introduction of metempsychosis as a
philosophical doctrine is due to Pythagoras, who, we are told, gave himself out
as identical with the Trojan hero Euphorbos, and added copious details of his
subsequent soul-wanderings. Vegetarianism and a general regard for animals was
the practical Pythagorean deduction from the doctrine. Plato's metempsychosis
was learnt from the Pythagoreans. He gave the doctrine a philosophic standing
such as it never before possessed; for Plato exhibits the most elaborate attempt
in the history of philosophy to find in the facts of actual experience
justification for the theory of the pre-existence of the soul. In particular,
sundry arguments adopted later on to prove immortality were employed by him to
establish pre-existence. Such were the proofs from universal cognitions and the
natural attraction of the soul towards the One, the Permanent, and the
Beautiful. Plato ascribes to these arguments a retrospective as well as a
prospective force. He seeks to show that learning is but a form of reminiscence,
and love but the desire for reunion with a once-possessed good. Man is a fallen
spirit, "full of forgetfulness". His sole hope is, by means of education and
philosophy, to recover his memory of himself and of truth, and thus free himself
from the chains of irrationality that bind him. Thus only can he hasten his
return to his "true fatherland" and his perfect assimilation to the Divine.
Neglect of this will lead to further and perhaps permanent degradation in the
world beyond. The wise man will have an advantageous transmigration because he
has practised prudence, and the choice of his next life will be put into his own
hands. The vicious, ignorant, and passion-blinded man will, for the contrary
reason, find himself bound to a wretched existence in some lower form. Plato's
scheme of metempsychosis is conspicuous for the scope it allows to human
freedom. The transmigration of the individual soul is no mere episode of a
universal world-movement, predestined and unchangeable. Its course is really
influenced by character, and character in turn is determined by conduct. A main
object of his theory was to guarantee personal continuity of the soul's life,
the point in which most other systems of transmigration fail. Besides Plato and
Pythagoras, the chief professors of this doctrine among the Greeks were
Empedocles, Timaeus of Locri, and the Neoplatonists, none of whom call for
detailed notice. Apollonius of Tyana also taught it.




INDIA

The doctrine of transmigration is not found in the oldest of the sacred books of
India, viz., the Rig-Veda; but in the later works it appears as an uncontested
dogma, and as such it has been received by the two great religions of India.

(1) Brahmanism

In Brahmanism, we find the doctrine of world-cycles, of annihilations and
restorations destined to recur at enormous intervals of time; and of this
general movement the fortunes of the soul are but an incident. At the same time,
transmigrations are determined by moral worth. Every act has its award in some
future life. By irreversible law, evil deeds beget unhappiness, sooner or later;
these, indeed, are nothing else but the slowly-ripened fruit of conduct, which
every man must eat. Thus they explain the anomalies of experience presented in
the misfortunes of the good and the prosperity of the wicked: each is "eating
the fruit of his past actions", actions done perhaps in some far-remote
existence. Such a belief may tend to patience and resignation in present
suffering, but it has a distinctly unpleasant effect upon the Brahmanical
out-look on the future. A pious Brahman cannot assure himself of happiness in
his next incarnation; there may be the penalty of great unknown sin still to be
faced. Beatitude is union with Brahma and emancipation from the series of
births, but no degree of actual holiness can guarantee this, since one is always
exposed to the danger of being thrown back either by sin past or sin to come,
the fruit of which will have to be eaten, and so on, we might be tempted to
imagine, ad infinitum. Hence a great fear of re-incarnation prevails.

(2) Buddhism

Brahminism is bound up with caste, and is therefore strongly aristocratic,
insisting much on innate superiorities. Buddhism, on the contrary, cuts through
caste-divisions and asserts the paramount importance of "works", of individual
effort, though always with a background of fatalism which the denial of a
personal Providence entails. According to the Buddhist doctrine, the ambition to
rise to the summit of existence must infallibly be fulfilled; and the mission of
Gautama was to teach the way to its attainment, i.e., to Buddhaship and Nirvana.
It is only through a long series of existences that this consummation can be
reached. Gautama himself had as many as five hundred and fifty transmigrations
in various forms of life.

The characteristic feature in Buddhistic metempsychosis is the doctrine of
Karma, which is a subtle substitute for the conception of personal continuity.
According to this view it is not the concrete individuality of the soul that
survives, and migrates into a new life, but only the karma, or action, i.e., the
sum of the man's deeds, his merits, the ethical resultant of his previous life,
its total value, stripped of its former individuation, which is regarded as
accidental. As the karma is greater or less, so will the next transmigration be
a promotion or a degradation. At times the degradation may be so extreme that
karma is embodied in an inanimate form, as in the case of Gautama's disciple
who, for negligence in his master's service, was reduced after death to the form
of a broomstick.


LATER JEWISH TEACHING

The notion of soul-wandering is familiar to the Jewish Rabbins. They distinguish
two kinds of transmigrations,

 * Gilgul Neshameth, in which the soul was tied down to a life-tenancy of a
   single body:
 * Ibbur, in which souls may inhabit bodies by temporary possession without
   passing through birth and death.

Josephus tells us that transmigration was a doctrine of the Pharisees, who
taught that the righteous should be allowed to return to life, while the wicked
were to be doomed to eternal imprisonment. It was their gloomy conception of
Sheol, like the gloomy Greek conception of Hades, that forced them to this shift
for a compensation to virtue. On the other hand, some of the Talmudists invoke
endless transmigration as a penalty for crime. The descriptions of the soul's
journeys over land and sea are elaborated with a wealth of imagination,
frequently verging on the grotesque. The retributive purpose was rigorously
maintained. "If a man hath committed one sin more than his good works, he is
condemned to transformation into some shape of lower life." Not only so, but if
his guilt had been extreme, he might be doomed to an inanimate existence. The
following is a sample of what awaits the "guiltiest of the guilty". "The dark
tormentors rush after them with goads and whips of fire; their chase is
ceaseless; they hunt them from the plain to the mountain, from the mountain to
the river, from the river to the ocean, from the ocean round the circle of the
earth. Thus, the tormented fly in terror, and the tormentors follow in vengeance
until the time decreed is done. Then the doomed sink into dust and ashes.
Another beginning of existence, the commencement of a second trial, awaits them.
They become clay, they take the nature of the stone and the mineral; they are
water, fire, air; they roll in the thunder; they float in the cloud; they rush
in the whirlwind. They change again; they enter into the shapes of the vegetable
tribes; they live in the shrub, the flower, the tree. Ages on ages pass. Another
change comes. They enter into the shape of the beast, the bird, the fish, the
insect. . . . Then at last they are suffered to enter into the rank of human
beings once more." After still further probations in various grades of human
life, the soul will at length come to inhabit a child of Israel. If in this
state it should fall again, it is lost eternally.

How far these and such like descriptions were really believed, how far they were
conscious fable, is difficult to determine. That there was a fairly widespread
belief in the doctrine of pre-existence in some form, seems likely enough.


CHRISTIAN AGES

St. Jerome tells us that metempsychosis was a secret doctrine of certain
sectaries in his day, but it was too evidently opposed to the Catholic doctrine
of Redemption ever to obtain a settled footing. It was held, however, in a
Platonic form by the Gnostics, and was so taught by Origen in his great work,
Peri archon. Bodily existence, according to Origen, is a penal and unnatural
condition, a punishment for sin committed in a previous state of bliss, the
grossness of the sin being the measure of the fall. Another effect of that sin
is inequality; all were created equal. He speaks only of rational creatures,
viz., men and demons, the two classes of the fallen. He does not seem to have
considered it necessary to extend his theory to include lower forms of life.
Punishment for sin done in the body is not vindictive or eternal, but temporal
and remedial. Indeed, Origen's theory excludes both eternal punishment and
eternal bliss; for the soul which has been restored at last to union with God
will again infallibly decline from its high state through satiety of the good,
and be again relegated to material existence; and so on through endless cycles
of apostasy, banishment, and return (see ORIGEN). The Manichæans combine
metempsychosis with belief in eternal punishment. After death, the sinner is
thrust into the place of punishment till partially cleansed. He is then
reclaimed to the light and given another trial in this world. If after ten such
experiments he is still unfit for bliss he is condemned forever. The Manichaean
system of metempsychosis was extremely consistent and thorough-going; St.
Augustine in his "De Moribus Manichaeorum" ridicules the absurd observances to
which it gave rise. For traces of the doctrine in the Middle Ages see articles
on the Albigensians and the Cathari. These sects inherited many of the cardinal
doctrines of Manichaeanism, and may be considered, in fact, as Neo-Manichaeans.



Advocates of metempsychosis have not been wanting in modern times, but there is
none who speaks with much conviction. The greatest name is Lessing, and his
critical mind seems to have been chiefly attracted to the doctrine by its
illustrious history, the neglect into which it had fallen, and the
inconclusiveness of the arguments used against it. It was also maintained by
Fourier in France and Soame Jenyns in England. Leibnitz and others have
maintained that all souls were created from the beginning of the world; but this
does not involve migrations.


SAVAGE RACES

It remains to touch very briefly on the abundant data furnished by modern
anthropological research. Belief in transmigration has been found, as stated
above, in every part of the globe and at every stage of culture. It must have
been almost universal at one time among the tribes of North America, and it has
been found also in Mexico, Brazil, and other parts of the American continent;
likewise among the aborigines of Australia and New Zealand, in the Sandwich
Islands and many parts of Africa. It often takes the form of a belief in the
return of long-departed ancestors, and thus provides a simple explanation of the
strange facts of heredity. On the birth of a child the parents eagerly examine
it for traces of its identity, which, when discovered, will determine the name
of the child and its place in their affections. Sometimes the mother is informed
beforehand in a dream which ancestor of the house is about to be born of her.
The belief in the soul as an independent reality is common among savage races.
The departed soul was thought to hover round the place of burial at least for a
time after death. Hence, e.g., among the Algonquins, if a speedy return was
desired, as in the case of little children, the body was buried by the wayside
that it might find a mother in some of the passers-by. A curious freak of
superstition is the belief of many of the dark races, e.g., in Australia, that
their fair-skinned brethren from Europe are re-incarnations of people of their
own race. Among the uneducated classes of India, as Sir A. Lyall tells us, the
notion that witches and sorcerers, living or dead, have the power of possessing
the bodies of animals still prevails. A similar idea prompted the Sandwich
Islanders to throw the bodies of their dead to the sharks in the hope of thus
rendering them less hostile to mankind.

In the face of a belief at first sight so far-fetched and yet at the same time
so widely diffused, we are led to anticipate some great general causes which
have worked together to produce it. A few such causes may be mentioned: (1) The
practically universal conviction that the soul is a real entity distinct from
the body and that it survives death; (2) connected with this, there is the
imperative moral demand for an equitable future retribution of rewards and
punishments in accordance with good or ill conduct here. The doctrine of
transmigration satisfies in some degree both these virtually instinctive faiths.
(3) As mentioned above, it offers a plausible explanation of the phenomena of
heredity. (4) It also provides an explanation of some features of the
infra-rational creation which seems to ape in so many points the good and evil
qualities of human nature. It appears a natural account of such phenomena to say
that these creatures, are, in fact, nothing else than embodiments of the human
characters which they typify. The world thus seems to become, through and
through, moral and human. Indeed, where the belief in a personal Providence is
unfamiliar or but feebly grasped, some form of metempsychosis, understood as a
kind of ethical evolutionary process, is almost a necessary makeshift.




SOURCES

HARDY, Manual of Buddhism (London, 1853); BEAUSOBRE, Histoire du Manicheisme
(Amsterdam, 1734 - 9); DUBOIS, People of India; BASNAGE, History of the Jews,
tr. TAYLOR (London, 1883); Traditions of the Rabbins (Quarterly Review, April,
1833); MAX MUELLER, Chips from a German Workshop (London, 1857); ALGER, Doctrine
of a Future Life (New York, 1866); STOCKL, History of Philosophy, tr. FINLAY
(Dublin, 1887); TYLOR, Primitive Culture (London, 1871); WILKINSON, Ancient
Egyptians (London, 1841); LYALL, Asiatic Studies (London, 1882); MACDONNELL, The
Ancient Indian Conception of the Soul in Journal of Theological Studies (1900).


ABOUT THIS PAGE

APA citation. Maher, M. (1911). Metempsychosis. In The Catholic Encyclopedia.
New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10234d.htm

MLA citation. Maher, Michael. "Metempsychosis." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol.
10. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911.
<http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10234d.htm>.

Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Kenneth M.
Caldwell. Dedicated to St. Andrew Kim Taegon.

Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. October 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D.,
Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.

Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address
is webmaster at newadvent.org. Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I
greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical
errors and inappropriate ads.

Copyright © 2023 by New Advent LLC. Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

CONTACT US | ADVERTISE WITH NEW ADVENT