[Discussion] On the Gods and the World, Ch. XX

[sdi]

Good morning and happy Wednesday! Let us pick the puzzle-box back up on this, the penultimate chapter:

XX. On Transmigration of Souls, and how Souls are said to migrate into brute beasts.

If the transmigration of a soul takes place into a rational being, it simply becomes the soul of that body. But if the soul migrates into a brute beast, it follows the body outside, as a guardian spirit follows a man.* For there could never be a rational soul in an irrational being.

The transmigration of souls can be proved from the congenital afflictions of persons. For why are some born blind, others paralytic, others with some sickness in the soul itself? Again, it is the natural duty of Souls to do their work in the body; are we to suppose that when once they leave the body they spend all eternity in idleness?

Again, if the souls did not again enter into bodies, they must either be infinite in number or God must constantly be making new ones. But there is nothing infinite in the world; for in a finite whole there cannot be an infinite part. Neither can others be made; for everything in which something new goes on being created, must be imperfect. And the World, being made by a perfect author, ought naturally to be perfect.

* Thomas Taylor notes, "This beautiful doctrine, which seems to have originated from Syrianus and Proclus, was universally adopted by all the succeeding Platonists."

Comments

[sdi]

If the transmigration of a soul takes place into a rational being, it simply becomes the soul of that body. But if the soul migrates into a brute beast, it follows the body outside, as a guardian spirit follows a man. For there could never be a rational soul in an irrational being.

Thomas Taylor's approval notwithstanding, I'm not sure I understand what the relevance of this is. (Why should the spatial location of a spiritual body matter at all, let alone enough to raise the point in such a short work?) Does anybody know why Sallustius emphasizes it?

[causticus]

I think the relevance here was the perceived need to dispel the then (and errant) -popular superstition that humans can literally reincarnate as animals. BTW, I'm not so sure this particular situation is about the spatial location so many as it is a human soul on the consciousness level being compelled to shadow the life of an animal for a short duration.

Anyway on the broader topic, I think this confirms out understanding today that the development of souls is indeed evolutionary. Once a soul attains the human level (and sufficiently acclimates to it), there is no "going back" to animal incarnation, save for the type of example above; where as a temporary punishment the errant human soul might passively follow around and view the life of an animal that might correspond to the bestial qualities the erring human has embraced in their failed life. Those popular Eastern doctrines which assert that the rebirth process is totally random and thus humans can be reborn as plants, snakes, bugs, ect., are unscientific (we're talking about esoteric science here) and illogical, and probably came about as shocking scare stories meant for children and stupid people, like the "eternal damnation" narrative in Christianity.

[boccaderlupo]

That's a thought-provoking observation...I don't know enough about Eastern concepts of reincarnation (or even the various takes within the Western tradition) to have much to say.

Might be interesting to weigh this against the idea of metempsychosis put forward in Timaeus...

[sdi]

Ah! Thanks, I hadn't considered Sallustius was trying to say that "humans can't reincarnate as animals." Plato himself discusses human souls reincarnating in animals—at least in The Republic, at the end in the Myth of Er—and I was assuming that the Neoplatonists followed him. (I guess that's what Taylor's note means.)

The Eastern "random" rebirth doctrine you mention is new to me! I was only familiar with the (Hindu?) notion of soul evolution, which looks like it got absorbed into Western occultism through Theosophy.

For my own part, I'm not convinced of the "evolutionary" nature of souls. I get the sense that souls are more-or-less eternal and unchanging, and the only way in which they can change is to voluntarily incarnate in order to "color" the soul such that, when disincarnate again, it can operate in a different "mode." There's just one problem: if a soul has karmic ties to the world, you can't leave! So descending into incarnation tends to follow an arc-like trajectory, where a soul first spends some number of lives getting tangled up in the world and then some further number of lives getting untangled from it again. The reason we incarnate as humans is because it has the adaptations appropriate to our kind of souls: I myself would tend to assume that incarnating as an animal is possible, but human souls don't tend to do it since it doesn't further the purpose of either creating or resolving human karma. (They might if they need a rest, I suppose: being human is excruciating.) I think this belief might be peculiar to myself: I haven't seen anyone discuss it (though I have been searching and would be interested if anyone knows of anything similar).

[causticus]

It really depends on what we mean by Soul. Every religion/tradition/philosophy has different teachings about the Soul. But what we can see in common between these teachings as that a being has multiple souls or at least soul-parts which together comprise the whole being; Platonism has three IIRC: Appetite Soul (Epithumia), Passion Soul (Thumos), and the Intellect (Nous). Other traditions have even more detailed schemae along these lines. The reconstructed (perhaps, spuriously) Norse/Germanic theory has at least 12 soul-parts! I think the ancient Egyptians had at least 5 or 6.

To posit a hypothetical common ground, I'm going to proceed here where Sallust and Dion Fortune are in broad agreement. So for example, we can say the highest part of the Soul (what Gnostics termed "the Divine Spark" and what Hindus call the Atman) is indeed eternal and unchanging. But the part(s) which incarnate in the material and psychic worlds are in state of disconnection or disharmony with its higher principles; and thus the purpose of incarnation is to journey toward that eventual reunion. If the lower components indeed begin as the animating principles for simple organisms, these components will gradually "evolve" over countless eons and come to animate more and more complex organisms as a part of this development/unfolding process. Eventually the soul-matrix evolves to an advanced enough level to incarnate into a complex, sentient, semi-rational creature like a human.

The reason we incarnate as humans is because it has the adaptations appropriate to our kind of souls: I myself would tend to assume that incarnating as an animal is possible, but human souls don't tend to do it since it doesn't further the purpose of either creating or resolving human karma.

Yes, precisely, sans the literal animal incarnation bit. Once a few human incarnations are under its belt, the only purpose for the Soul is to gain more experience in human incarnation until everything on the human level has been learned and mastered; and thus, fully incarnating again as an animal would serve no purpose from both an evolutionary and karmic perspective. The pseudo-incarnation Sallust refers to above (and Dion Fortune goes into in more detail in one of her books) isn't a true bodily incarnation, but rather that of a human soul in astral form being subjected to following around an animal for some time (presumably by way of some sort of astral tether), perhaps as a peculiar short-term punishment for whatever transgression has occurred. This might be in fact what Plato and Plotinus are referring to, though I suspect that they were both working with imported rebirth doctrines, as we remember that rebirth and karma were once upon a time alien doctrines to the Hellenes; pre-Socratic (pre-Pythagorean, really) Greeks didn't believe in any sort of detailed afterlife or rebirth narrative for souls; their afterlife was a simplistic understanding akin to the Hebrew Sheol.

The Eastern "random" rebirth doctrine you mention is new to me! I was only familiar with the (Hindu?) notion of soul evolution, which looks like it got absorbed into Western occultism through Theosophy.

What I'm referring to here are popular Eastern teachings (from various Dharmic religions) which assert that humans can reincarnate as simple creatures way below the human level. Of course, the more advanced teachings tend to avoid validating that superstition. I would consider the possibility of a human reincarnating as a spider or snake to be an invocation of "randomness" due to the utterly illogical nature of such an assertion. On that last part, I believe it was the Theosophists who were the first to advance a fully-fleshed out theory of Soul Evolution. They cobbled this together from various sources, both East and West, but it simply makes a whole ton of intuitive sense as a big-picture explanation, IMHO.

Sorry that this ended up going on for miles. Though I think we can both agree that this is a matter most worthy of detailed investigation!

[sdi]

Regarding the soul and it's evolution, you're speaking with a much more sophistication than I possess! I'll have to come back to this once I've studied a great deal more.


pre-Socratic (pre-Pythagorean, really) Greeks didn't believe in any sort of detailed afterlife or rebirth narrative for souls

As a minor point of clarification, I'd go with pre-Pythagorean: Empedocles, at least, is a pre-Socratic that has a well-defined position on reincarnation. (He is one of a very few that I have studied with care, though.)

[sdi]

More Theosophy: Gottfried de Purucker agrees with you when he writes (in the Studies in Occult Philosophy): "No human being ever incarnates as a beast [for] there is absolutely a mental-psychical barrier preventing a human mind from entering a beast psycho-vital apparatus. [...] On the other hand, when a sorcerer, or a man of continuously evil life, through many, many incarnations on a steady downward grade, grows less and less human until the rupture with the spiritual and human monad takes place, [such] an abandoned vehicle is attracted to beast-bodies and even to plant-bodies. [...] Yet this is not [...] the incarnation of a human being, because such a degenerated, disintegrated, semi-annihilated human quaternary is no longer really human. [...] Such cases of degenerate human quaternaries, while fairly numerous in actual fact, are nevertheless quite rare or infrequent when compared with the immense number of beings forming humanity."

It seems clear to me from Sallustius, you, and from the various authors discussing reincarnation that I'm missing some vital piece of information.

[causticus]

Ahh yes, I've read other Theosophical (and derivate of) accounts that argue essentially the same thing. I think Dion Fortune's take on this being a good example.

[sdi]

I've been continuing to research this. There is an extremely strong break in theology here between Plotinus and Porphyry on the one hand, and Iamblichus, Proclus, and Sallustius on the other. The former assert that the soul is always in the Intelligible, and does not—can not!—bend down to matter, and does not enter a body but rather connects to it by means of a proxy (a spirit) (Enneads I 1, Sentences IV), while the latter assert that the soul does indeed come down to be clothed in matter (On the Gods XX, Elements CCXI).

The question of whether one's soul can reincarnate in an animal body seems to me to be the least implication of this; a greater question is, can a man become a god? To Plotinus and Porphyry, he is a god already and cannot be otherwise (though he may pretend not to be for a while) (Enneads II 2, Sentences XXXII).

This is very different than the "evolutionary" standpoint! But there's always the old saw that "all models are wrong, but some are useful," and so I do not wish to begrudge anyone their beliefs, but merely to say that this seems to be a point of contention within Neoplatonism (let alone the broader universe of discourse).

[sdi]

I might note that, to the Hellenistic mind, the nature of time was that of an eternal changeless world, while to ours, it is one of eternal growth and progress and improvement. It might simply be that Plotinus' model made sense to a Roman while thinking in terms of evolution makes sense to an American.

One wonders if Reality itself is subjective. (...to who?)

[causticus]

"I might note that, to the Hellenistic mind, the nature of time was that of an eternal changeless world, while to ours, it is one of eternal growth and progress and improvement."

Yeah it seems like this is a matter of specific civilizational worldviews shaping cosmological doctrines. We could say there's really no right answers here, in the concrete sense.

[sdi]

I note that the prominent Neoplatonist Plethon follows Iamblichus, Proclus, and Sallustius, as a consequence of humans having rational souls (and animals not having rational souls).

[boccaderlupo]

Yes, that is an interesting point, and I don't know why it's so emphasized.

I find interesting his stress on the finite number of souls, which I think circles back to the beginning, with regard to the sense of limited/unlimited that is a preoccupation of the Neoplatonists.

[sdi]

The transmigration of souls can be proved from the congenital afflictions of persons. For why are some born blind, others paralytic, others with some sickness in the soul itself?

Speaking of Theosophy, I ran across this parallel quote from Blavatsky (in her 1889 Key to Theosophy): "If we have to believe in a divine principle at all, it must be in one which is as absolute harmony, logic, and justice, as it is absolute love, wisdom, and impartiality; and a God who would create every soul for the space of one brief span of life, regardless of the fact whether it has to animate the body of a wealthy, happy man, or that of a poor suffering wretch, hapless from birth to death though he has done nothing to deserve his cruel fate – would be rather a senseless fiend than a God."