"Transmigration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at the reflection for ever, I should not have recognized either my form or visage. I thought my soul had undergone a real transmigration, and not carried to its new body a particle of the original one. What appeared the most singular was, that I did not seem even to myself at all a ridiculous or outre figure; so admirably had the skill of Mr. Jonson been employed. I overwhelmed him with encomiums, which he took au pied de la lettre. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... flourishing situation. My Lord Rockingham and my nephew Lord Orford have made a match of five hundred pounds, between five turkeys and five geese, to run from Norwich to London. Don't you believe in the transmigration of souls? And are not you convinced that this race is between Marquis Sardanapalus and Earl Heliogabalus? And don't you pity the poor Asiatics and Italians who comforted themselves on their resurrection with being ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... four years to a day before I was born. The account we received of his life and character from some old people at Ecton, I remember, struck you as something extraordinary, from its similarity to what you knew of mine. "Had he died on the same day," you said, "one might have supposed a transmigration." ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... of Egypt Its great antiquity Its essential features Complexity of Egyptian polytheism Egyptian deities The worship of the sun The priestly caste of Egypt Power of the priests Future rewards and punishments Morals of the Egyptians Functions of the priests Egyptian ritual of worship Transmigration of souls Animal worship Effect of Egyptian polytheism on the Jews Assyrian deities Phoenician deities Worship of the sun Oblations and sacrifices Idolatry the sequence of polytheism Religion of the Persians Character of the early ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... old man that," he continued. "It is a pity he should be a priest of so absurd a faith. Do you know anything about Buddhism? The Buddhists believe in the transmigration of souls (the doctrine of the metempsychosis, as it is called). In that respect they are like the followers of Brahma. It is doubtful, indeed, which is the older faith of the two—whether Brahminism is a corruption of Buddhism, or whether Buddhism is an attempt to restore Brahminism ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... believe in all sorts of supernatural things-in the doctrine of transmigration, second-sight, and every other ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... Many Indians believe in the transmigration of souls, and some of them profess to remember previous states ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... may hope to win you yet. When a judge, and a Republican at that, finds it hard to vindicate his party's doings, and finds statistics overwhelmingly against his party's policy on moral questions, he will look for better things in better places. At this period of his political transmigration I believe a man is more to be pitied for misplaced confidence than blamed for tardy understanding. No, father, not a statistic to-night, unless you compel me to bring them out ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... archon] I. 7, belong to the number of the angels. This is a genuinely Greek idea. The doctrine of the preexistence of human souls was probably set forth by Clement in the Hypotyposes. The theory of the transmigration of souls was probably found there also (Phot. Biblioth. 109). In the Adumbrat., which has been preserved to us, the former doctrine is, however, contested and is not found in the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... being merged in the Supreme, not to be confounded with Pari-nirwana or absolute annihilation. In the former also, dying gives birth to a new being, the embodiment of karma (deeds), good and evil, done in the countless ages of transmigration. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... hurrying nimbly along, with a speed that betokened a wholesome remembrance of a good many hard thrashings in the past and a reasonable dread of similar ones in the future. If I held the doctrine of transmigration, I should be firmly persuaded that the souls of parish beadles, drunken captains, and other petty tyrants, shifted quarters into the bodies of Jamaica negroes' donkeys. One patriotic black woman, whose donkey was rather refractory, relieved her mind by exclaiming, in a tone of infinite ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... seen anybody who could instruct him in them. 'Those who fear death, presuppose that they know it.... Perhaps death may be an indifferent thing; perhaps a desirable one. However, one may believe that, if it be a transmigration from one place to another, it will be an amelioration ... and free us from having any more to do with wicked and corrupt judges. If it be a consummation (aneantissement) [31] of our being, it is also an amelioration to enter into a long and ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... But with us the transmigration is not veiled in darkness and mystery as with you. We can watch the transformation; we can see the spirit emerge from its old casement more ethereal than ourselves, but still visible; and we ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... certain scene in the Caves of Kor yonder, when the living looked upon the dead, and dead and living were the same? And do you remember what Ayesha swore, that she would come again—yes, to this world; and how could that be except by re-birth, or, what is the same thing, by the transmigration of the spirit?" ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... of one of its ancient inhabitants, yet wandering upon this earth, may through transmigration have become in part your own, and you, in reverie at odd hours and in company with it, live again a few scenes of ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... know to this day how I stood the shock of that announcement, or how I managed to listen while Wilhelmina tried to explain the transmigration theory, but it was all Chinese to me. I only knew that I was a blood relation of a cat, and the thought nearly ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... speakers: of Curtis, whose diction is chaste as the snows of his own New England, while his zeal for justice is as fervid as her July sun; of Depew, who, as I listen to him, makes me believe that the doctrine of transmigration is true, and that in a former day his soul occupied the body of one of the Puritan fathers, and that for some lapse he was compelled to spend a period of time in the body of a Hollander [laughter]; of Beaman,[9] one of the lights of your bar; of Evarts, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... distresses of the State, and fattened on the miseries of the people. Then all the deceitful visions of equality and the rights of man end; and the wronged and plundered State can regain a real liberty only by passing through "great varieties of untried being," purified in its transmigration by fire and blood. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the souls of the righteous, or those who had lived what they called "the contemplative life," would be permitted to enter immediately after death. But, for the souls of sinners, they invented a system of expiatory punishments which, known as the Metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, taught that they would be compelled to successively animate the bodies of beasts, birds, fishes, etc., for a thousand years before being permitted to ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... From a Man Dying on a Cross Lagniappe Hail Mary! The Death of Columbine Pierrot Laughs The Transmigration of ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... and all his other opinions from Asia and Egypt. The transmigration of the soul and the vegetable diet are derived from India. I ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Chinese is Buddhism (which was imported from India), though ancestor worship is still universal. Women are the principal worshipers, yet the Chinese believe that women have no souls. The belief in transmigration of souls is implicit, and this is used to keep woman in a most degraded condition. If a woman is obedient to her husband and his relatives, and is the mother of sons, she may hope to return to this ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... they believe in ten Avators, or incarnation of the Deity, nine of which have taken place for the punishment of tyrants, or removing some great natural calamity; and the tenth is to take place at the dissolution of the universe. Several of the Avators inculcate the transmigration of souls, and the ninth of them, which forbids the sacrifices of animals, gave rise to the religion of Gauda ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... takes the place of burial. The ashes are collected and are preserved in a tomb. To die in Benares, and to have a temple for a tomb, is the surest passport to happiness in a future state, since the transmigration of souls into higher or lower forms is an essential ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... hereditary gentry and all other persons as then drawn in France was the distinction between the heavens above and the earth beneath; the distance between was considered simply immeasurable and impassable except by the transmigration of souls. We cannot understand the extent of it in our day. No aristocrat is now so blind, no plebeian so humble, as to sincerely believe the doctrine. But in that age France was steeped in it. High refinement of manners had grown to really differentiate the ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... the after life of the soul. This belief is as much a PART of any man, ever born in any location, as his hands and his feet. Whether he believes his soul enters a cat and works back to man again after long transmigration, or goes to a Happy Hunting Ground as our Indians, makes no difference with the fact that he enters this world with belief in after life of some kind. We see material evidence in increase that man is not defeated in his desire to ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Fellows appear among us every Day in the critical Juncture of their Transmigration, just when they have so much of the Man left as to be known by their Names, and enough of the Devil taken up to settle their Characters? This Easiness of the Devil's access to these People, and the great Convenience it is to him in his general Business, is ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... unconsciousness of any suffering he might inflict that left mere cruelty far behind. If I were making an automaton king, I would model my machine on the lines of Hammerfeldt. He had no belief in a future life, but would sometimes trifle whimsically with the theory of a transmigration of souls; he traced all beliefs in immortality to the longing of those who were unfortunate here (and who did not think himself so?) for a recompense (a revenge he called it) hereafter, and declared ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... consideration of Totemism as found in the Old Testament. Totemism is a kind of worship rendered to animals and vegetables considered as allied and related to man. The worship of animals and plants is found as a survival in all ancient societies and is the origin of the belief in the transmigration of souls. Totemism seems to have been as widespread as the animism from which it is derived, and has been closely intertwined in the development of religious beliefs. Totemism in a modified form is found in the Old Testament where animals ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... this Gulfe Impassable, impervious, let us try Adventrous work, yet to thy power and mine Not unagreeable, to found a path Over this Maine from Hell to that new World Where Satan now prevailes, a Monument Of merit high to all th' infernal Host, Easing thir passage hence, for intercourse, 260 Or transmigration, as thir lot shall lead. Nor can I miss the way, so strongly drawn By this new felt attraction and instinct. Whom thus the meager Shadow answerd soon. Goe whither Fate and inclination strong Leads thee, I shall not lag behinde, nor erre The way, thou leading, such a sent I draw Of carnage, prey innumerable, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... in the persecution of Lord Cobham. He died February 20th, 1414, lingering for a few days after a paralytic stroke, as stated in the story. His age was 61. The mantle of this cleverest man of his day—clever for evil—descended, a hundred years later, upon Stephen Gardiner. Any believer in transmigration could feel no doubt that the soul of the one ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... certain convocation of politic wolves or bears, busy in rendering us and our horses invisible; for, after all, they have the true receipt of fern seed, and you can walk about, after having suffered transmigration into their substance, without its ever being suspected that you were either an officer of engineers or ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... My transmigration was disappointing as an experience. It was nothing more than going to sleep and dreaming about circles—orange circles, yellow circles, with a thousand others of graduated shades between, and so on through ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... mentioned. The idea of transmigration and reincarnation is here used as a possible solution for the extreme difficulties which beset the question of the apparently fortuitous brevity of some human lives. I do not, of course, propound it as literally and precisely as it is here set down—it ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... long ago a member for a rural constituency, who had always professed the most democratic sentiments, suddenly astonished his constituents by taking a peerage. During the election caused by his transmigration, one of his former supporters said at a public meeting, "Mr. —— says as how he's going to the House of Lords to leaven it. I tell you, you can't no more leaven the House of Lords by putting Mr. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... above all the philosophic lawgivers of antiquity for their care in impressing the doctrine of the soul's immortality on the minds of their people, as an operative and leading principle. This doctrine was inculcated on the scheme of Transmigration, which some imagine them to have derived from Pythagoras. But it is by no means necessary to resort to any particular teacher for an opinion which owes its birth to the weak struggles of unenlightened reason, and to mistakes natural ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... meditating subject has to be ascertained no less than the nature of the object of meditation and of the mode of meditation. The question then arises whether the meditating Self is to be viewed as the knowing, doing, and enjoying Self, subject to transmigration; or as that Self which Prajpati describes (Ch. Up. VIII, 1), viz. a Self free from all sin and imperfection.—Some hold the former view, on the ground that the meditating Self is within a body. For as long ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... After the introduction and triumph of Christianity in Britain, for several centuries the two systems of thought and ritual mutually influenced each other, corrupting and corrupted.4 A striking example in point is this. The notion of a punitive and remedial transmigration belonged to Druidism. Now, Taliesin, a famous Welsh bard of the sixth century, locates this purifying metempsychosis in the Hell of Christianity, whence the soul gradually rises again to felicity, the way for it having been opened by Christ! Cautiously eliminating the Christian admixtures, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that woman's mummy is in existence? I should like to find it. I've an idea she left some hieroglyphic message for me on her mummy-case, and doesn't propose to let me rest easy until I find and translate it. Now, if I believed in transmigration of souls—do you see any mark of Antony about me? Say, though, just imagine the spirit of Marcus Antonius in a rubber apron, making an analysis of oleomargarine! But here we are; good-bye," and he left me without awaiting any reply. He seemed ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... and Luxury combined. He was, if I may put it so, A Saurian Abednigo. He loved to climb with nimble ease The branches of the Gas-log Trees Where oft on chilly winter nights He rose to dizzy Fahrenheits. Believers in Soul Transmigration See in him the Re-incarnation Of those Sad Plagues of summer, who Ask, "Is it hot ...
— The Mythological Zoo • Oliver Herford
... Zachy to knit wool, now sat beneath the parental roof again; and at night, when the brother and sister were asleep in the garret, each one of them would wake the other when they heard Black Marianne down stairs, running to and fro and muttering to herself. But Damie's transmigration to Black Marianne's was the cause of new trouble. Damie was exceedingly discontented at having been compelled to learn a miserable trade that was fit only for a cripple. He wanted to be a mason, and although Amrei was very much opposed to it, for she predicted that he would not ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... They (the Chepewyans) have some faint notion of transmigration of the soul; so that if a child be born with teeth, they instantly imagine, from its premature appearance, that it bears a resemblance to some person who had lived to an advanced age, and that he has assumed a renovated life, with ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... of it; that every one of them may meet on the opposite side, and cross one another exactly in a point; and that it may do the like also with all the Rays that, coming from a lateral point, fall upon any other Hemisphere; for if so, there were to be hoped a perfection of Dioptricks, and a transmigration into heaven, even whil'st we remain here upon earth in the flesh, and a descending or penetrating into the center and innermost recesses of the earth, and all earthly bodies; nay, it would open not onely a cranney, but ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... statement, questioned other Bacchantes about these things, and heard the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul confirmed. Hence, during many a solitary ride, while the cart rolled slowly along, she pondered over the thought that Juliane's soul had lived again in foolish Julie. How? Why? She did not rack her brains on those points. What had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... stairs. A pink door stopped him at last. It might have hid mysterious and questionable things, but it said laconically 'Push,' and he courageously pushed... He was in a kind of boudoir thickly populated with tables and chairs. The swift transmigration from the blatant street to a drawing-room had a startling effect on him: it caused him to whip off his hat as though his hat had been red hot. Except for two tall elegant creatures who stood together at the other end of ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... And yet—the lady in this case was to all appearances soundly and securely asleep; the mouse, on the other hand, seemed to be trying to crowd a Wanderjahr into a few strenuous minutes. If there is any truth in the theory of transmigration, this particular mouse must certainly have been in a former state a member of the Alpine Club. Sometimes in its eagerness it lost its footing and slipped for half an inch or so; and then, in fright, or more probably temper, it bit. Theodoric was goaded into the most ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... tells us that the Druids taught the doctrine of transmigration of souls, and that their course of education included astronomy, geography, physics, and theology. The attributes of their chief God corresponded, in his view, with those of the Roman Mercury. Of the ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... Had atomic transmigration attempted to draw the shells back into the Time sphere to which they really belonged? Sutter was a logical man, and even as this thought came his mind rejected it. It must be Travail. He had taken a sample shell from the basket and even now perhaps was dickering with the officials of the Federal ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... every day. She would hang about for hours outside the cellar door for the purpose of sneaking in on the first opportunity and lapping up the drippings from the beer-cask. I do not mention this habit of hers in praise of the species, but merely to show how almost human some of them are. If the transmigration of souls is a fact, this animal was certainly qualifying most rapidly for a Christian, for her vanity was only second to her love of drink. Whenever she caught a particularly big rat, she would bring it up into the room where we were all sitting, lay the corpse down in the ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... the action of the mixed multitude [at whose door the charge of making the calf is laid], while the women were unwilling to surrender their golden ornaments for idolatrous purposes. Therefore they rule over their husbands." One might also quote the bearing of the mystical theory of transmigration on the predestination of bridal pairs. In the Talmud, on the other hand, the virtues of a man's wife are sometimes said to be in proportion to the husband's own; or in other words, his own righteousness is the cause of his acquiring ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... him;" and, immediately offered up a short prayer, in which they all joined willingly. On telling a Ghadamsee I ate some Thob, he said, "Ah, that's forbidden; the Thob was formerly a human being, before it had its present shape. Don't you see its hands are still human?" The notion of the transmigration of souls lingers in these parts, but it is a doctrine not generally received. I observed this man afterwards fattening his sheep with date-stones, broken into small pieces. Almost every family, however ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the soul, passing from one abode to another, and leaving its first body for a new one, ever changing its appearance and its dwelling, guided by the Creator's beams, from transmigration to transmigration, from metamorphosis to metamorphosis, pursues the palingenesic course of ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... of which was nothing at all. His life was not here; it was at home. He got the feeling that this business in which he was caught up was a business apart altogether from his own individual life,—a kind of trance in which his own life was held temporarily in abeyance, a kind of transmigration in which he occupied another and a very strange identity: from whose most strange personality, often so amazingly occupied, he looked wonderingly upon the identity that was his own, waiting ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... of the Godhead, metempsychosis, or the doctrine and the transmigration of soul —not into the bodies of animals, as it obtained and still obtains in the East, but into those of other human beings—the eternal duration of existing substances, material and spiritual, consequently the immortality of the human soul, were the chief dogmas of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... unpedigreed dogs drop up of afternoons for a stein and a chat. Even by gaslight the diversions are melancholy i' the mouth—drink and rag-time, and an occasional surprise when the waiter swabs the suds from under your sticky glass. There is an answer. Transmigration! The soul of Sir Walter Raleigh has traveled from beneath his slashed doublet to a kindred home under Rooney's visible plaid waistcoat. Rooney's is twenty years ahead of the times. Rooney has removed the embargo. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... dedicated their sepulchral monuments—AEternali somno![136] If the full light of revelation had not yet broken on them, it can hardly be denied that they had some glimpses and a dawn of the life to come, from the many allegorical inventions which describe the transmigration of the soul. A butterfly on the extremity of an extinguished lamp, held up by the messenger of the gods intently gazing above, implied a dedication of that soul; Love, with a melancholy air, his legs crossed, leaning on an inverted torch, the flame thus naturally extinguishing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... things being on one level has thus introduced vegetables into the dominion of myth. As far as possessing souls is concerned, Mr. Tylor has proved that plants are as well equipped as men or beasts or minerals.(1) In India the doctrine of transmigration widely and clearly recognises the idea of trees or smaller plants being animated by human souls. In the well-known ancient Egyptian story of "The Two Brothers,"(2) the life of the younger is practically merged in that of the acacia ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... Buddha—the one eternal and universal soul—the principle and end of all things, and of whom all things are the partial and temporary manifestations. All animated beings are divided into classes, that have each of them in their power the means of sanctification, so as to obtain, after death, transmigration into a higher class, until, at last, they enjoy plenitude of being by absorption into the eternal soul of Buddha. This doctrine, simple enough when explained by the superior class of Buddhists, is overlaid with superstitions ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... to the Indians," said Pownal, in a low tone, "whenever I hear them spoken of. It appears to me, sometimes," continued he, smiling, "as if I were a sort of relation. Were I a believer in the transmigration of souls, I should think I had been, in some ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... and their examples are renewed in every successive age. Thus, within these walls, the valor of WASHINGTON attracts the regard of CONDE; his modesty is applauded by TURENNE; his philosophy draws him to the bosom of CATINAT. A people who admit the ancient dogma of a transmigration of souls will often confess that the soul of Catinat dwells in the ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... others signified hearty approval of his remarks: "We are all delighted. It is a hospital, and very different from building a church. I-seng (doctor), you have made many cures in our families. Of course you don't remember us, but even after the transmigration to either dog or hog we will remember you. You may be sure you are welcomed, only we are not good enough to be your neighbours." After the doctor had left, her chair-bearers told her that the people really meant what they said; for they had heard ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... mentioning the circumstance to my father, he informed me, to my astonishment and delight, that if the head of the mongrel Fiddle had been placed on the Stradivari, date 1710, from the Goding collection, it was now, as the effect of recent transmigration, on ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... in the sole company of animals and flowers. What sociologists call the consciousness of kind is as vital to man as the consciousness of self; and to pine for adoption into an alien kind is vain on this side transmigration. ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... if you are anything like as anxious to get into our old attic as we were. That is not likely. To us it meant romance, even a kind of sorcery—a bodily transmigration into the ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Zenadikah (way of the covetous) are directly opposed to the last on the subject of transmigration; and they believe that God is in all places, and performs all things. They likewise maintain that the whole visible universe is only a manifestation of the Supreme Being; the soul itself being a portion of the Divine essence. Therefore, they consider, ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... discourse concerning Hades, wherein the souls of all men are confined until a proper season, which God hath determined, when he will make a resurrection of all men from the dead, not procuring a transmigration of souls from one body to another, but raising again those very bodies, which you Greeks, seeing to be dissolved, do not believe [their resurrection]. But learn not to disbelieve it; for while you believe that the soul is created, and yet is made immortal by God, according to the doctrine ...
— An Extract out of Josephus's Discourse to The Greeks Concerning Hades • Flavius Josephus
... looking up a quotation for Felix in Southey's Doctor, lit on his quaint theory of the human soul having previously migrated through successive stages of vegetable and animal life, and still retaining something characteristic from each transmigration. Her brothers were a good deal tickled with the idea; and Lance exclaimed, 'I know who must have been rhubarb, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who were perhaps more nearly touched in the affairs of daily life than he was, consoled themselves with the old country proverb, 'Ah, well, we shall live till we die, if the pigs don't eat us, and then we shall go acorning'—a clear survival of the belief in transmigration, for he who is eaten by a pig becomes a pig, and goeth forth ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... of historic ideas is one of their most striking features. The explanations offered for it have been various. The ancient doctrines of an exact repetition of events in the cycles of nature, and of the transmigration of souls, drew much support from it; and the modern modification of the latter theory as set forth by Wordsworth and Lessing, are distinctly derived from the same source. Rightly elucidated, the philosophical historian will find in it an invaluable clue to ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... Shan-si; on the Great Kiang; at Chinangli; at Sinju Matu; Kinsay; Fu-chau; Zayton; Java; Malaiur; Cail; Coilum; Melibar; Tana; Cambaet; Kesmacoran; Socotra. —— of India with Hormuz, with Egypt by Aden; with Esher; with Dofar; with Calatu. Trades in Manzi, alleged to be hereditary. Tramontaine. Transmigration. Traps for fur animals. Travancore, Rajas of. Treasure of Maabar kings. Trebizond, Emperors of, and their tails. Trebuchets. Trees, of the Sun and Moon, superstitions about; by the highways; camphor; producing wine; producing flour (sago). Tregetoures. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... song had ended here, But both their Genii straight appear, Joy and amazement her did strike: Two twins she never saw so like. 'Twas taught by wise Pythagoras, One soul might through more bodies pass. Seeing such transmigration there, She thought it not a fable here. 70 Such a resemblance of all parts, Life, death, age, fortune, nature, arts; Then lights her torch at theirs, to tell, And show the world this parallel: Fix'd and contemplative their looks, Still turning over Nature's ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after. So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries. To foreigners it proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance upon a man whom you have not met ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... divine, as hereafter shall follow; Which soul, fast and loose, sir, came first from Apollo, And was breath'd into Aethalides; Mercurius his son, Where it had the gift to remember all that ever was done. From thence it fled forth, and made quick transmigration To goldy-lock'd Euphorbus, who was killed in good fashion, At the siege of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta. Hermotimus was next (I find it in my charta) To whom it did pass, where no sooner it was missing But with one Pyrrhus of Delos it learn'd to go a fishing; ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... of the Countess, and was, of course, in great request among the faded beaux and dowagers of the day, who were easily persuaded of their own restored loveliness. The transmutation of baser metals into gold usually terminated in the transmigration of all the gold his victims had into the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... Egypt that Pythagoras owed his favourite doctrine of the Metempsychosis or transmigration of souls.(340) The Egyptians believed, that at the death of men their souls transmigrated into other human bodies; and that, if they had been vicious, they were imprisoned in the bodies of unclean or ill-conditioned beasts, to expiate in them their past transgressions; and that after a ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... in Book III., lines 462-489. Dean Merivale remarks (chapter li.) on this passage, that in the despair of another life which pervaded Paganism at the time, the Roman was exasperated at the Druids' assertion of the transmigration of souls. But the passage seems also to betray a lingering suspicion that the doctrine may in some shape be true, however horrible were the rites and sacrifices. The reality of a future life was a part ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... is a disposition in certain minds to associate lycanthropy with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. A brief examination of the latter will, however, suffice to show there is very ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... goes to Paradise without physical dissolution. I have questioned many Chinese concerning these fox-women, but have never been able to get any very definite information. One Chinaman, however, assured me that his brother had actually seen the transmigration from fox to woman take place. The man's name I have forgotten, but I will call him Ching Kang. Well, Ching Kang was one day threading his way through a lovely valley of the Tapa-ling mountains, when he came upon a silver (i.e. white) fox crouching on the bank of a stream in such a ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... referred to the dangers of the climb, but also to a mysterious menace of tupapaus, or ghosts. I had seen a canoe with the head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration. The chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake Vaihiria had been the progenitor of all the people of the valley. A vahine of another clan had been overcome by the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... cold and paralysing like a dagger. And with every advancing minute of the night I became broader awake, more tense, fairly sweating with nervousness. One night—good God, was it only last week? ... it seems ages ago, another existence ... a state cut off from this by the wonder of a transmigration, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... her innocent eyes demurely to his face. "You are so kind. I am deeply interested just now In the Japanese conception of the transmigration of souls." ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... which men of the greatest genius would not have been so solicitous about, and would not have guarded from any injury by such severe laws, but from a firm persuasion that death was not so entire a destruction as wholly to abolish and destroy everything, but rather a kind of transmigration, as it were, and change of life, which was, in the case of illustrious men and women, usually a guide to heaven, while in that of others it was still confined to the earth, but in such a manner as still to exist. From this, and the sentiments of ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the enormous follies of folk-lore, let us take the case of the transmigration of stories, and the alleged unity of their source. Story after story the scientific mythologists have cut out of its place in history, and pinned side by side with similar stories in their museum of fables. ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... you that there is in the Veda no trace of metempsychosis or that transmigration of souls from human to animal bodies which is generally supposed to be a distinguishing feature of Indian religion. Instead of this, we find what is really the sine qua non of all real religion, a belief in immortality, and in personal immortality. Without a belief in personal ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... this same necessity, the real necessity of forming to ourselves a concrete representation of what this other life may be, must in great part be referred the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those of spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed in some more or less new form. And it is merely ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... tend obscurely from a Slavonic source. The vices with their adepti were reproached by the Church, gave to most of the languages of Europe a revolting word, modified from the name 'Bulgarian.' The origin of the earlier Bohemian Hussite sects, with their strange devil-worship and doctrine of transmigration, was manifestly Oriental. At a later date the very name of the mystic Jacob Boehme—Jacob the Bohemian—indicates some secret alliance with Slavonian associations; and if the connection of the name with strange Oriental speculations be obscure, that of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Meaning the "small vehicle, or conveyance." There are in Buddhism the triyana, or "three different means of salvation, i.e. of conveyance across the samsara, or sea of transmigration, to the shores of nirvana. Afterwards the term was used to designate the different phases of development through which the Buddhist dogma passed, known as the mahayana, hinayana, and madhyamayana." "The hinayana is the simplest vehicle ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... Brahma or Brahm. Brahma is Godhead or Deity: Brahm[a], is a Deity, a divine person who has emanated from the Godhead, Brahma. Br[a]hmas or theists, believers in Brahma, are a religious body that originated in Bengal in the nineteenth century. Repudiating caste, idolatry, and transmigration, they are necessarily cut off from Hinduism. The body is called the Br[a]hma Sam[a]j, that is, the Theistic Association. Enough for the present; in their respective places these distinctions can be more ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... intolerable heat pervading the entire chamber this idol contrived to preserve its outlines and to glow without pulverising. A ceremony of an impressive nature occurred in this apartment; a wild cat, which strayed in through an open window, was regarded as the appearance of a soul in transmigration, and, in spite of its piteous protests, was passed through the fire ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... became Euphorbus, who slew Patroclus at the siege of Troy. He then appeared as Hermotimus, then Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and finally Pythagoras. He said that a period of time was interposed between each transmigration, during which he visited the seat of departed souls; and he professed to relate a part of the wonders he had seen. [64] He is said to have eaten sparingly and in secret, and in all respects to have given himself out for a being ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... or transmigration of souls—a doctrine to which the foregoing considerations are for the most part easy corollaries—crops up no matter in what direction we allow our thoughts to wander. And we meet instances of transmigration of body as well as of soul. I do not mean that both body and soul have transmigrated ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... technical term for this transmigration, used by Pythagoreans and others, is [Greek: metangismos], the pouring of water from one vessel ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls,—a good way to continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural successions they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of beings, and, enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make accumulation of glory unto their last durations. ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... freedom has to bondage. Laying hold of that which was ready to his hand, if so be he might mould and purify it, Buddha was a liberator and reformer in respect to what had gone before. Let us take, for example, the doctrine of metempsychosis, or, as it is commonly called, the "transmigration of souls." No doubt, there is a great deal connected with this doctrine in the Buddhist books that cannot but appear to us puerile and shocking; but still, we do not well, we do not justly, if, as do so many, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... singular adaptation of another person's senses, which is a common phenomenon of the simple forms of mesmerism. If it is credible that a person in a mesmeric sleep can taste the sourness of the vinegar on another person's palate, I am ready to go the whole length of the transmigration of senses. But after all, except from hearing so much, I am as ignorant as you are, in my own experience. One of my sisters was thrown into a sort of swoon, and could not open her eyelids, though she heard what passed, once or twice or thrice; and she might have been ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... on to the Greeks. Its origin was in the words of Satan in Eden, "Ye shall not surely die." The pagans had their nether world of spirits, or their transmigration of souls with its ceaseless round from body to body, and the Roman Catholics their purgatory with its purifying fires. From these sources and not from the Word of God, the traditional view has come into modern Christendom, representing ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... to the city of Crotona, and teaches the principles of his philosophy. His reputation draws Numa Pompilius to hear his discourses; on which he expounds his principles, and, more especially, enlarges on the transmigration of the soul, and the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... converted into milk by the pectoral glands. Secondly, because from the analogy of all organic life, whatever has composed a part of a vegetable or animal may again after its chemical solution become a part of another vegetable or animal, such is the general transmigration of matter. And thirdly, because the great use of lime in agriculture on almost all kinds of soil and situation cannot be satisfactorily explained from its chemical properties alone. Though these may also in certain soils and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the mortal life. When I heard of the Persian's Realm of Light, his Paradise across the bridge Chinevat, where only the good go, the thought haunted me; insomuch that in the day, as in the night, I brooded over the comparative ideas Eternal Transmigration and Eternal Life in Heaven. If, as my teacher taught, God was just, why was there no distinction between the good and the bad? At length it became clear to me, a certainty, a corollary of the law to which I reduced pure religion, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... astounding to recollect that not twelve hours ago she had kissed him and sent him on his journey. To him the gulf between then and now was so wide and blank that it might have been twelve weeks, or twelve months, or twelve years. It had been the night of the birth of a new creature, of the transmigration of a soul; it had no measurement in time, and threw all that preceded it into ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... completely altered. The old conditions of possession were dissolved. The existing bonds of society loosened. The old frontiers of states and lands passed away. As a whole city is turned into a ruinous heap by an earthquake, so the whole political system of previous times was overthrown by this massive transmigration. A new order of things had to be formed corresponding to the wholly altered ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... author of the Annals ascribes to Brutus the creation of the second class of nobility, which Brutus no more created than (as Famianus Strada observes,) "Pythagoras originated the idea of the transmigration of souls." The statement that "few were left of the families to which Romulus gave the title, the 'gentes majores,' or 'old clans,' and Lucius Brutus the 'gentes minores,' or 'young clans'":—"paucis jam reliquis familiarum, quas Romulus ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... was ever more terrible than that of the Druids. Besides the severe penalties, which it was in the power of the ecclesiastics to inflict in this world, they inculcated the eternal transmigration of souls; and thereby extended their authority as far as the fears of their timorous votaries. They practised their rites in dark groves or other secret recesses [g]; and in order to throw a greater mystery over their religion, they communicated their doctrines only ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... part of antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls—a good way to continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural successions, they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of beings, and enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make accumulation ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... Society believes in the Transmigration of Souls. As I am not a member myself I'm afraid that that is all I can tell you about it. It is a little difficult at first sight, perhaps, to see the connection between Transmigration and rubber tyres, but if you will have patience I think I can promise to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... midwife, who they pretend to say, from knowing the circumstances of the parents, strangle the child without the knowledge of the mother, telling her that the infant was still-born. Others have ascribed the practice to a belief in the metempsycosis, or transmigration of souls into other bodies, that the parents, seeing their children must be doomed to poverty, think it is better at once to let the soul escape in search of a more happy asylum, than to linger in one condemned to want and wretchedness. No degree of superstition, one would imagine, could ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... think it would. The sentiment which would dictate it to me is too abstruse; and besides, I think my wife is the proper person to receive the dedication of my life's work. At the same time, it is very odd - it really looks like the transmigration of souls - I feel that I must do something for Fergusson; Burns has been before me with the gravestone. It occurs to me you might take a walk down the Canongate and see in what condition the stone is. If it be at all uncared for, we might repair it, and ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... largely a blending of the Brahmanism of old with its supplanter, Buddhism. The abundant sacrifices which Brahmanism offered were entirely abolished in deference to Buddhistic sensibilities. The doctrine of transmigration, through Buddhism, received new emphasis; and kindness to all living creatures was extolled to a supreme virtue. As a climax to this attitude of conciliation Hinduism finally adopted the Buddha as the ninth incarnation of Vishnu. Thus, by the irony of history, ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, and both are loud, copious intolerant talkers. This argues that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we love a ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... just wrote day before yesterday he'd be here to-day. I haven't been very polite to Mr. Fielding, but he has no reason to expect me to be polite. I've told him I would never marry him and there wasn't the slightest use in coming here, but I might as well talk to the wind. If for him there's to be transmigration, he'll be a rubber ball next time. He's as persistent as John—that is, as John used to be. For nearly six months John has forgotten he ever wanted to marry me. I understand he and Lily Deford have become great friends. Mrs. Deford never loses an ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... succession, or alternation of life and death, had occurred to Heracleitus. The Eleatic Parmenides had stumbled upon the modern thesis, that 'thought and being are the same.' The Eastern belief in transmigration defined the sense of individuality; and some, like Empedocles, fancied that the blood which they had shed in another state of being was crying against them, and that for thirty thousand years they were to be 'fugitives and vagabonds upon the earth.' The desire ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... men, who dwelt beyond the Danube, and who, during the reign of Domitian, had insulted, with impunity, the Majesty of Rome. [14] To the strength and fierceness of barbarians they added a contempt for life, which was derived from a warm persuasion of the immortality and transmigration of the soul. [15] Decebalus, the Dacian king, approved himself a rival not unworthy of Trajan; nor did he despair of his own and the public fortune, till, by the confession of his enemies, he had exhausted every resource ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... ceremonious debt, or to ventilate old velvets, or to apricate and refresh old gouty systems and old traditions of feudal ostentation, which both alike suffered and grew smoke-dried under too rigorous a seclusion. By a great transmigration, festal assemblages had assumed their proper station, and had unfolded their capacities, as true auxiliaries to the same general functions of intellect—otherwise expressing themselves and feeding themselves through literature, through the fine arts, and ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... cultivated electric force within himself to such an extent that he was able to use it as a healing power. There seemed to me to be really nothing extraordinary in it. The only part of Cellini's narration I did not credit was the soul-transmigration he professed to have experienced; and I put that down to the over-excitement of his imagination at the time of his first interview with Heliobas. But I kept this thought to myself. In any case, I resolved to go to Paris. The great desire of my life was to be in perfect health, and ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... recent and far more alluring delights of his later life, were to be abandoned ere his being could return into its former existence, his dull faculties obstinately refused to lend themselves to a change that, in his case, would have been little short of that attributed to the transmigration of souls. ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... transmigration of souls as an explanation of human suffering. Cf. Origen in Ep. ad Rom., V: "I [Paul], he says, died [Rom. 7:9], for now sin began to be reckoned unto me. But Basilides, not noticing that these things ought to be understood of the natural law, according to impious and ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... Krishna insisted that it was unnecessary for him to lament, setting forth his reasons in what is known as the Bhagavat-gita, the divine song, in which he said it was no sin to slay a foe, since death is but a transmigration from one form to another. The soul can never cease to be; who then can destroy it? Therefore, when Arjuna slew his cousins he would merely remove their offensive bodies; their souls, unable to be destroyed, would seek other habitations. To further impress ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... from the south of China, probably." He seemed to be talking to himself. "There's a considerable sprinkling of the belief down there, I've heard. It's an uncanny business—this transmigration of souls—" ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... here is a creed of the first water. Who bids for this handsome article? What gentleman says Superhumanity? Harmony of the Universe! Transmigration of ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... creed much resembles that of the other Hindu reformers and founders of the Vaishnavite sects. The extreme tenderness for animal life is a characteristic of most of them, and would be fostered by the Hindu belief in the transmigration of souls. The prohibition of liquor is another common feature, to which Jhambaji added that of all kinds of drugs. His mind, like those of Kabir and Nanak, was probably influenced by the spectacle of the comparatively liberal creed of Islam, which had now taken root in northern ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the waters of Lethe. Some, however, there still are, so thoroughly corrupted, that they are not fit to be intrusted with human bodies, and these are made into brute animals, lions, tigers, cats, dogs, monkeys, etc. This is what the ancients called Metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls; a doctrine which is still held by the natives of India, who scruple to destroy the life even of the most insignificant animal, not knowing but it may be one of their relations ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... not possible that Jesus could have meant that John was the same individual as Elijah; nor could the people have so understood His words, since the false doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of spirits was repudiated by the Jews.[790] The seeming difficulty is removed when we consider that, as the name appears in the New Testament, "Elias" is used for "Elijah,"[791] with no attempt at distinction between Elijah ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage |
