The Metaphysics of Reincarnation, Part 2

[readoldthings]

Today I want to continue the discussion of reincarnation by continuing to set the stage, as it were. For in ancient times, just as today, there were some who advocated the doctrine, others who rejected it, and both did so with a great deal of certainty and a fair bit of heat. Today we're going to set the board.



Apollonius and the Pythagoreans

Apollonius of Tyana was a wandering sage and miracle worker of the first century. The exact dates of his life are unknown; he may have lived contemporaneously with Jesus of Nazareth, or he may have been born somewhat after the latter's death. The most extensive account of his life from ancient times is The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Flavius Philostratus, which details Apollonius's various journeys to India, Ethiopia, and across the Roman Empire in search of wisdom. At the end, Apollonius is brought to trial in Rome and sentenced to death, at which point he miraculously disappears, reappearing regularly to his followers. For this reason, many contemporary atheists have brought out Apollonius as an argument against Christianity. The reasoning appears to be that if Jesus performed miracles and appeared to his followers after death, and if Apollonius performed miracles and appeared to his followers after death, then no one ever performed miracles or appeared to their followers after their death. On a similar note, I have, as usual, a cat laying next to my keyboard as I'm writing this. She is a small callico. However, out of the corner of my eye I've just spotted another cat, a large, male orange tabby. Should he also attempt to sit next to me while I write, I will naturally be forced to conclude that there is no such thing as a cat.

But I'm afraid the parallels between Apollonius and other First Century miracle workers aren't important here; the reason that I want to talk about him is that reincarnation was central to his life and teachings. In this, like Plato, he was a follower of Pythagoras. In fact, Apollonius was a central figure in the First Century revival of Pythagoreanism. Flavius opens his biography of Apollonius by teaching us about Pythagoras's doctrine of reincarnation:

The votaries of Pythagoras of Samos have this story to tell of him, that he was not an Ionian at all, but that, once on a time in Troy, he had been Euphorbus, and that he had come to life after death, but had died as the songs of Homer relate.

The capacity to remember one's previous lives, then, along with the willingness to abstain from wine or animal flesh, and the rejection of animal sacrifice as a whole, become the central themes of Apollonius's biography. Indeed, in the interpretation of Apollonius, the ancient command of Apollo to "Know Thyself" becomes " "Remember your previous incarnations!" The discussion of previous lives occurs over and over as Apollonius visits wise men around the ancient world, and is especially important during his sojourns with the Brahmans of India-- whom Apollonius regards as the wisest of men-- and the sages of Ethiopia (who are presented as runners-up to the Hindus.)

Nor was Pythagoras alone among the ancients in the teaching of reincarnation, though that would also be a point in favor of the doctrine. Flavius then immediatley quotes a line from Empedocles on the same subject:

For erewhile, I already became both girl and boy.

Empedocles lived about fifty years before Plato, and it was he who, appearently first conceived of the famous image of the material world as a kind of cave or underground prison.

Mysteries and Barbarians

Reincarnation, then, was a central doctrine for one of the major strains of Greek and later philosophers, the strain which includes Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato, as well as later figures like Apollonius, Apuleius, Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus.

As we have seen, it was taught by the sages of other lands, outside the Graeco-Roman world, but it was also well-known outside the rarefied world of yogis and philosophers. Roman sources regularly mention that it was believed in by the Celts, where it is sometimes referred to as "the doctrine of Pythagoras." In his Decline and Fall, Gibbon relates the fact that certain of the Northern tribes were unusually fierce in battle, owing to their belief in reincarnation:

The first exploits of Trajan were against the Dacians... To the strength and fierceness of barbarians they added a contempt for life, which was derived from a warm persuasion of the immortality and transmigration of the soul.

Moreover, the doctrine of reincarnation appears to have been a central part of the initiation of the Mystery schools. The source for this is Virgil, the sixth book of whose Aeneid is believed to be as faithful as possible an account of the initiations of the Mysteries. Having descended into the Underworld, Aeneas has an encounter with the spirits of the Dead which is very similar to the account give in the Phaedo:

Why, when life leaves them at the final hour,

still all of the evil, all the plagues of the flesh, alas,

have not completely vanished, and many things, long hardened

deep within, must of necessity be ingrained, in strange ways.

So they are scourged by torments, and pay the price

for former sins: some are hung, stretched out,

to the hollow winds, the taint of wickedness is cleansed

for others in vast gulfs, or burned away with fire:

each spirit suffers its own: then we are sent

through wide Elysium, and we few stay in the joyous fields,

for a length of days, till the cycle of time,

complete, removes the hardened stain, and leaves

pure ethereal thought, and the brightness of natural air.

All these others the god calls in a great crowd to the river Lethe,

after they have turned the wheel for a thousand years,

so that, truly forgetting, they can revisit the vault above,

and begin with a desire to return to the flesh.’

Half the Board Set

And so we have established that the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, was well known in the ancient pagan world, both among philosophers and initiates in the mysteries, and among ordinary warriors in places like Gallia and Germania. It's very important to make this point clearly before we go on, for the following reason: There are some writers who attempt to deny that this doctrine was ever taught or believed in in ancient times. These include some otherwise reputable commentators, like Marsilio Ficino, and they also include some far more dubious characters, like Renee Guenon.

(By the way, as I'm typing these words, another cat has jumped onto my desk. It isn't the orange tabby but a small, gray female without a tail. Be it then established, there is no such thing as a cat!)

Now, Ficino had his reasons for downplaying reincarnation. He was trying to get Plato's works and his ideas back into circulation at a time when charges of heresy still very much included the possibility of execution in a variety of very painful ways. In his lifetime he saw his friend Pico della Mirandolla's work condemned by the pope as "in part heretical, in part the flower of heresy" and banned. Guenon, on the other hand, had a rather worse excuse. He was annoyed that reincarnation was being taught by the Theosophical Society, and he appears to have been even more annoyed that the Theosophical Society had put together a syncretic system of spiritual wisdom before he had gotten around to it. And so he claimed that reincarnation had, in fact, never been taught or believed in by anyone before Madame Blavatsky showed up and started preaching it in the 19th century. This was nonsense and it remains nonsense, but you ought to be aware of it, because you will still to this day find people insisting upon it in various corners of the occult internet.

And that's all for today.

So far we have one side established, the board set with half the pieces. Tomorrow (or in our next post) we're going to establish who, besides the hapless Renee Guenon, has objected to the doctrine of reincarnation, and on what grounds they have done so. We will start with Aristotle.