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Reincarnation and the Fae

I wanted to get to Aristotle today, but I realized that we need to talk a bit more about the doctrine of reincarnation among the Neoplatonists and others.

In Book 13 Homer's Odyssey, we read of the transportation of Odysseus to his homeland of Ithaca by the Phaecians:

Now when that brightest of stars rose which ever comes to herald the light of early Dawn, even then the seafaring ship drew near to the island. There is in the land of Ithaca a certain harbor of Phorcys, the old man of the sea, and at its mouth two projecting headlands sheer to seaward, but sloping down on the side toward the harbor. These keep back the great waves raised by heavy winds without, but within the benched ships lie unmoored when they have reached the point of anchorage. At the head of the harbor is a long-leafed olive tree, and near it a pleasant, shadowy cave sacred to the nymphs that are called Naiads. Therein are mixing bowls and jars of stone, and there too the bees store honey. And in the cave are long looms of stone, at which the nymphs weave webs of purple dye, a wonder to behold; and therein are also ever-flowing springs. Two doors there are to the cave, one toward the North Wind, by which men go down, but that toward the South Wind is sacred, nor do men enter thereby; it is the way of the immortals. Here they rowed in, knowing the place of old; and the ship ran full half her length on the shore in her swift course, at such pace was she driven by the arms of the rowers. Then they stepped forth from the benched ship upon the land, and first they lifted Odysseus out of the hollow ship, with the linen sheet and bright rug as they were, and laid him down on the sand, still overpowered by sleep.

In the time of Plotinus and Porphry, the tale of Odysseus's return to Ithaca was seen as an allegory of the soul's return to the Intelligible. Porphyry wrote a long treatise on this one small episode from Homer; it is worth reading in its entirety, but for our purposes here its main interest lies in his discussion of the nymphs or naiads, those spirits to whom the cave is sacred. Porphry tells us:

We peculiarly call the Naiades, and the powers that preside over waters, Nymphs; and this term also, is commonly applied to all souls descending into generation. For the ancients thought that these souls are incumbent on water which is inspired by divinity, as Numenius says, who adds, that |16 on this account, a prophet asserts, that the Spirit of God moved on the waters. The Egyptians likewise, on this account, represent all daemons and also the sun, and, in short, all the planets (note 6), not standing on anything solid, but on a sailing vessel; for souls descending into generation fly to moisture. Hence also, Heraclitus says, that moisture appears delightful and not deadly to souls; but the lapse into generation is delightful to them. And in another place (speaking of unembodied souls), he says, "We live their death, and we die their life."

That is all to say: The nymphs are a class of nature spirit, one particularly concerned with streams and pools. There are, for the ancient Greeks as well as all other animistic peoples, other sorts of nature spirits; some dwell in caves or valleys, others in trees, others in winds, others in fire. But the peculiar thing about these naiads is that at least some of them are in fact human souls out of incarnation.

This points to another part of the old doctrine of reincarnation, which is worth discussing before we go on. We have already seen, in Virgil as well as Plato, that the idea is not, as many think, that reincarnation is a quick process: First you die, then you wake up in another body. No, there is a long sojourn in the spirit world between one incarnation and the next. (There is one exception to this idea, which we will come to in time.) The question, of course, is precisely what we're doing during that long sojourn. Porphyry tells us-- and note well, he is quoting Hesiod, who stands with Homer at the beginning of Greek civilization: We live as nature spirits, which are literally those beings which animate the natural world. When it is time to return to incarnation, we die to the spirit world, and return to this material world:

We live their death, and we die their life.

It is nearly certain that this exact doctrine prevailed among the ancient Celts.The way that we can know this is from the ambiguous nature of the Fae or fairies, those strange beings found in Celtic folklore from Ireland to Brittany and all areas in between. In some tales they appears as nature spirits, just like elementals or whathaveyou; but in others, they are very clearly identified with the Dead. In Brittany in particular, the emphasis is on the latter aspect of the fairies. The Bretons have some tales about mischevious nonhuman spirits called corrigans, but most of their fairy lore is concerned with the Dead, in whom are seen the exact same powers that the other Celtic people associate with the Fae. (The very best discussion of this, by the way, remains The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, by Evans-Wentz.)

Notice, too, that many of the sources have us involved in material incarnation only once in a thousand years. If that is the case, then it hardly seems correct to see our real nature as "human"-- human incarnation, it seems, is a test, or perhaps a punishment, meeted out to some but not all among the nature spirits who shape the material world.

Now-- this isn't a necessary consequence of the doctrine of reincarnation as such. Recent research has indicated that people who remember past lives often only experienced a short time between death and re-incarnation; sometimes only a few years. Moreover the Druze people of Lebanon, who believe in reincarnation, report that they are reborn immediately after death. But it is a possible consequence-- one I personally find very interesting indeed.