Metempsychosis
idea · 4 works · 4 mentions · 6 anchored passages
al-tanāsukh · enter the brute herds · metempsychosis · metensomatosis · nafs mutanāsikhah · soul entering animals · tanāsukh · the doctrine of the metempsychosists · transmigration of souls · التناسخ
in the texts
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
Transmigration of souls between bodies, reported in six variants and refuted by arguments from double ensoulment, idleness, numerical mismatch and forgetting.
The first is impossible, as will appear later in [the proof] that metempsychosis (*tanāsukh*) is impossible (5).
On setting forth the opinions of the proponents of metempsychosis (*tanāsukh*)
On the refutation of all the opinions of the proponents (2) of metempsychosis (*tanāsukh*)
De Rerum Natura
The doctrine of metempsychosis or transmigration of souls into animals, attributed to Ennius as a belief he expressed in his poetry.
Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang,
Of Orcus, or by some divine decree
al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
The doctrine of transmigration, invoked here only through the punitive reading of animal suffering ascribed to its adherents.
The pains and aches deposited in the animals are not, as a party of the metempsychosists (al-tanāsukhiyyah) supposed, of the order of punishments for them;
De Anima
The doctrine that souls pass from one body (human or animal) into another, attacked at length as incoherent and morally void.
No opinion of this kind of madness, indeed, has to this day broken forth under a heretical name, refashioning human souls into beasts.
We say that the human soul can in no way be transferred into beasts, even if, according to the philosophers, it were reckoned from elemental substances.
But indeed their metempsychosis is the recall of a soul long since dead and repeated into another body.