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).
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Date: 2022-03-17 12:51 pm (UTC)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).