Transmigration of Souls
idea · 10 works · 11 mentions · 18 anchored passages
metempsychosis · transmigration of souls · a second birth · enter the brute herds · immortality and transmigration of the soul · imprisoned in natures · kinship of all things · metensomatosis · migration of souls · reciprocal coursing of souls
spoken of as
1 expressionTransmigration of the Soul2 mentions
Stromata (Greek) · Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (English)
" And that saying of Empedocles, "For ere now I have been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, and a mute fish in the sea," Euripides in the Chrysippus transcribes, "Nothing of the things that come to be dies, but being parted, one from another, it shows forth another form.
in the texts
De Anima
Doctrine that souls pass from the dead into the living and back again, extensively refuted.
The souls of single bodies, therefore, ought to have returned, as single, into single bodies.
Is it not the case that, because from the beginning the dead were from the living, therefore always from the living?
What now is that old saying in the memory of Plato about the reciprocal coursing of souls — that those departing hence go thither, and again come hither and live, and thence depart from life, and again out of the dead are made alive?
Timaeus
The doctrine that a soul's next embodiment (return to its star, rebirth as a woman, or rebirth as a beast) depends on the moral quality of its prior life.
and if not even then he makes an end of his vices, he shall be tossed about yet more grievously, and be passed over, after the manner of his own ways, into the shapes of beasts and wild things most like to them;
Stromata
The doctrine that souls pass through successive bodies, named as an Egyptian teaching and illustrated by Empedocles's verses.
" And that saying of Empedocles, "For ere now I have been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, and a mute fish in the sea," Euripides in the Chrysippus transcribes, "Nothing of the things that come to be dies, but being parted, one from another, it shows forth another form.
And we might find yet another testimony to the confirmation of the point, that the best of the philosophers, having appropriated the noblest doctrines from us, boast of them as their own — namely, that they have culled some things even from the other barbarians, things bearing upon each school, and most of all from the Egyptians:
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
The doctrine that the soul passes through a succession of forms after death according to conduct.
The Wheel mentioned in the above passage from Apastamba is a favourite image with these writers.
But these Hindu law-books have wrought up the ancient belief into a moral and theological philosophy of the greatest precision and amplitude.
It is hard not to smile at the grotesque particularity of detail with which such writers as Vishnu and Manu depict the transmigration of souls.
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
The Druidic doctrine reported by Caesar as central to Druid belief and possibly underlying the fasting sanction.
Cæsar states that the Druids believed in the immortality and transmigration of the soul, and considered it the key of their system.
De Rerum Natura
The doctrine of metempsychosis or transmigration of souls into animals, attributed to Ennius as a belief he expressed in his poetry.
Of Orcus, or by some divine decree
Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang,
Phaedo
The doctrine that impure or unphilosophical souls are reborn into animal or human bodies matching their former character.
And therefore those who care for their own souls, and do not live in service to the body, turn their backs upon all these men and do not walk in their ways, for they feel that they know not whither they are going.
And such a soul is weighed down by this and is dragged back into the visible world, through fear of the invisible and of the other world, and so, as they say, it flits about the monuments and the tombs, where shadowy shapes of souls have been seen, figures of those souls which were not set free in purity but retain something of the visible;
Phaedo.
Letters to Lucilius
The doctrine that souls pass between bodies after death rather than perishing
If these things are true, to have abstained from animals is innocence;
But Pythagoras said that there was a kinship of all things with all, and a commerce of souls passing into one shape and another.
When Sotion had set forth these things and filled them out with his arguments, "Do you not believe," he said, "that souls are assigned to one body after another, and that what we call death is a migration?
Apologeticum
The Pythagorean doctrine that souls pass between human and animal bodies, argued against in favor of bodily resurrection.
There would even be need, in many places, of leisure for the work, if we wished to sport in this matter — who might be seen reformed into what beast.
If by any law souls are made to pass back into bodies, why should they not return into the same substance, since this is what it means to be restored — to be that which one was?
Come now, if some philosopher affirm — as Laberius does, after the opinion of Pythagoras — that a man is made out of a mule, a snake out of a woman, and bend all the arguments of his eloquence to that opinion by the power of his rhetoric, will he not move assent and fix belief, so that men should abstain even from animals for that reason?
De Carnis Resurrectione
The philosophical doctrine that souls pass into new bodies after death, treated as an erring approximation of resurrection.
Yet it is enough that the philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles and the Platonists, no smaller, cries out to the contrary that the soul is immortal — indeed they go further and most nearly affirm that it may return into bodies, though not into the same ones, though not into human bodies only, so that Euphorbus is reckoned to pass into Pythagoras, and Homer into a peacock.