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Updated: August 21, 2024
But when one begins to feel within himself the awakening consciousness of a "something in the past," not to speak of the flashes of memory, and feeling of former acquaintance with the subject, then, and then only, does he begin to believe. Many people have had "peculiar experiences" that are accountable only upon the hypothesis of Metempsychosis.
These latter had their uses. In transformations elsewhere effected, the sacred bull may have become a golden calf, the golden hawk a sacred dove. In Egypt they were otherwise serviceable. The worship of them, of other birds and beasts, of insects and vipers as well, ecclesiastically indorsed, hid the myth of metempsychosis. Of that the people knew nothing. When they died they ceased to be.
The wide-spread superstitions concerning werewolves and swan-maidens, and the hardly less general belief in metempsychosis, show that primitive culture has not arrived at the distinction attained by modern philosophy between the immortal man and the soulless brute. Still more direct evidence is furnished by sundry savage customs.
It will not surprise careful observers to see the Church once more accepting the doctrine of Rebirth and reinstating the doctrine of Pre-existence returning to two of its original truths, long since discarded by order of the Councils. Prof. Bowen has said: "It seems to me that a firm and well-grounded faith in the doctrine of Christian Metempsychosis might help to regenerate the world.
The German entomologists denominated the group Sackträger, the Singhalese call them Dara-kattea or "billets of firewood," and regard the inmates as human beings, who, as a punishment for stealing wood in some former state of existence, have been condemned to undergo a metempsychosis under the form of these insects.
It seems to me that something which interests me, which is indeed personal to me, passed here before I was born. Truly, if I believed in metempsychosis I might imagine I had been a monk in anterior existences; a bad monk then," he said, smiling at his reflections, "since I should have been obliged to be reincarnate and to return to a cloister to expiate my sins."
But the doctrines of metempsychosis and Karma are also admitted as obvious propositions, and though the fortunes and struggles of the embodied soul are described in materialistic terms, happiness is never placed in material well-being but in liberation from the material universe.
The love and death of Dido, the passionate victim of an unrequited love, give occasion to the poet to sing the victories of his countrymen over their Carthaginian rivals; the Pythagorean metempsychosis, which he adopts in the description of Elysium, affords an opportunity to exalt the heroes of Rome; and the wars of Aeneas allow him to describe the localities and the manners of ancient Latium with such truthfulness as to give to his verses the authority of historical quotations.
The ideas of heaven and hell did not exist among the primitive Japanese, nor any notion of metempsychosis. The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth a late borrowing was totally inconsistent with the archaic Japanese beliefs, and required an elaborate metaphysical system to support it.
It is surely not without significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover of all things double-natured and twin-souled. Two painters of the Lombard school, Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, demand separate notice.
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