Part 12 (1/2)

The loftiest and most suggestive of Egyptian palingenetic symbols is unquestionably that of the egg. The deceased is ”resplendent in the egg in the land of mysteries.” In Kircher's _Oedipus Egyptiacus_[118] we have an egg--the Ego freed from its vehicles--floating over the mummy; this is the symbol of hope and the promise of a new birth to the soul, after gestation in the egg of immortality.[119]

The ”winged globe,” so widely known in Egypt, is egg-shaped, and has the same meaning; its wings indicate its divine nature and prevent it from being confused with the physical germ. ”Easter eggs” which are offered in spring, at the rebirth of Nature, commemorate this ancient symbol of eternal Life in its successive phases of disincarnation and rebirth.

CHALDaeA.

It is said that the Magi taught the immortality of the soul and its reincarnations, but that they considerably limited the number of these latter, in the belief that purification was effected after a restricted number of existences on the soul returning to its heavenly abode.

Unfortunately we know nothing definite on this special point in Chaldaean teaching, for some of the most important sources of information were destroyed when the library of Persepolis was burnt by the Macedonian vandal, Alexander the Great, whilst Eusebius--whom Bunsen criticises so harshly[120]--made such great alterations in the ma.n.u.scripts of Berosus, that we have nothing to proceed upon beyond a few disfigured fragments.[121] And yet Chaldaeism comprises a great ma.s.s of teachings; he whom we know as ”the divine Zoroaster” had been preceded by twelve others, and esoteric doctrine was as well known in Chaldaea as in Egypt.

The descendants of the Chaldaeans--Fire-wors.h.i.+ppers, Mazdeans, Magi, Pa.r.s.ees--according to the names they received at different periods--have preserved the main points of palingenetic instruction up to the present, and, from time to time, have set them forth in the most charming style of Oriental poetry. Book 4 of the great Persian poem, _Masnavi i Ma'navi_, deals with evolution and its corollary, reincarnation, stating that there is one way of remembering past existences, and that is by attaining to spiritual illumination, which is the crown of human evolution and brings the soul to the threshold of divinity.

”If your purified soul succeeds in escaping from the sea of ignorance, it will see, with eyes now opened, 'the beginning' and 'the end.' Man first appeared in the order of inorganic things; next, he pa.s.sed therefrom into that of plants, for years he lived as one of the plants, remembering naught of his inorganic state, so different from this, and when he pa.s.sed from the vegetable to the animal state he had no remembrance of his state as a plant.... Again the great Creator, as you know, drew man out of the animal into the human state. Thus man pa.s.sed from one order of nature to another, till he became wise and intelligent and strong as he is now. Of his first soul he has now no remembrance, and he will be again changed from his present soul. In order to escape from his present soul, full of l.u.s.ts, he must rise to a thousand higher degrees of intelligence.

”Though man fell asleep and forgot his previous states, yet G.o.d will not leave him in this self-forgetfulness; and then he will laugh at his own former state, saying: 'What mattered my experiences when asleep, when I had forgotten the real state of things, and knew not that the grief and ills I experienced were the effect of sleep and illusion and fancy?'”

These lines are concise, but they sum up the whole of evolution, and render it unnecessary to quote at greater length from Chaldaean tradition on this point. Still, those who desire other pa.s.sages relating to the same doctrine may find them in the ”Desatir.”[122]

THE CELTS.

Sacerdotal India--and perhaps also Atlantis--in early times sent pioneers into the West to spread religious teachings amongst their energetic inhabitants; those who settled in Gaul and the British Isles were the Druids. ”I am a serpent, a druid,” they said. This sentence proves that they were priests, and also the Atlantaean or Indian origin of their doctrines; for the serpent was the symbol of initiation in the sacred mysteries of India, as also on the continent of Atlantis.

We know little of their teaching, which was entirely oral, though it covered so much ground that, according to Caesar, not less than thirty years of study were needed to become a druid. The Roman conquest dispersed them by degrees; then it was that their disciples, the bards, committed to writing more or less imperfect and mutilated fragments of the teachings of their masters. Their ”triads”[123] are undoubtedly akin to Hindu teachings; Evolution results from the manifestation of the Absolute, it culminates in man, who possesses a maximum of individualisation, and terminates in the personal, conscious union of the beings thus created with the ineffable All.

The Absolute is ”Ceugant”; manifestation, or the Universe, is ”Abred”; the divine state of freed souls is in ”Gwynvyd”; these are in the three circles.[124]

In ”Ceugant” there is only the Unknowable, the rootless Root. Souls are born and develop in ”Abred,” pa.s.sing into the different kingdoms; ”Amwn” is the state through which beings pa.s.s only once, which means that the ”I,” when once gained, continues for ever. ”Gwynvyd” is the world of perfect and liberated souls, eternal Heaven, great Nirvana.

During this long pilgrimage, the Monad--the divine fragment in a state of incarnation--undergoes an endless number of rebirths, in myriads of bodies.

”I have been a viper in the lake,” said Taliesin, the bard[125]; ”a spotted adder on the mountain, a star, a priest. This was long, long ago; since then, I have slept in a hundred worlds, revolved in a hundred circles.”

It was their faith in rebirth that gave the Gauls their indomitable courage and extraordinary contempt of death:

”One of their princ.i.p.al teachings,” said Caesar,[126] ”is that the soul does not die, but pa.s.ses at death into another body--and this they regard as very favourable for the encouragement of valour and for inculcating scorn of death.”

Up to a few years ago, belief in the return of the soul to earth was still prevalent in those parts of Brittany in which civilisation had not yet exercised its sceptical, materialising influence; there even existed druids--probably degenerate ones--in Great Britain and France; in the Saone-et-Loire district, they seem to have been called the ”Adepts of the White Religion”[127]; both in them and in their ancestors, belief in rebirth remained unshakable.

ANCIENT GREECE (_Magna Graecia_).

In Greece, the doctrine of Rebirths is met with in the Orphic tradition, continued by Pythagoras and Plato. Up to the present time, this tradition has probably found its best interpreter in Mr. G. R.

S. Mead, an eminent theosophist and a scholar of the first rank. We recommend our readers to study his _Orpheus_, if they desire a detailed account of this tradition.

Its origins are lost in antiquity, only a few obscure shreds remaining; Pherecydes, however,[128] when speaking of the immortality of the soul, refers to the doctrine of Rebirths; it is also presented very clearly by both Pythagoras and Plato.

According to the Pythagorean teaching, the human soul emanates from the Soul of the World, thus affirming, at the outset, the divine nature of the former. It teaches subsequently that this soul a.s.sumes successive bodies until it has fully evolved and completed the ”Cycle of Necessity.”[129]

Pythagoras, according to Diogenes of Laertius,[130] was the first in Greece to teach the doctrine of the return of souls to earth. He gave his disciples various details of his past lives; he appears to have been the initiate Oethalides, in the times of the Argonauts; then, almost immediately afterwards, Euphorbus, who was slain by Menelaus at the siege of Troy; again he was Hermotimus of Clazomenae, who, in the temple of Juno at Argos,[131] recognised the s.h.i.+eld he was carrying when his body was slain as Euphorbus, and which Menelaus had given as an offering to the G.o.ddess[132]; at a later date he was Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and, finally, Pythagoras.

In all likelihood this genealogy is not correct in every detail, it comes to us from the disciples of the sage of Samos, who were not very trustworthy in their reports.