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Rebirth-A Philosophical Study
53
come. “I shall tell you a story not of Alcinous, but of valiant man, Er, son of Armenius, of the race of Pamphelia. Once upon a time he fell in battle. On the tenth day they took the dead who were now stinking but his body was found fresh.” On the twentieth day Er came to life as he was lying on the pyre and he told them what he had seen yonder. His soul journyed along with great company until they arrived at a certain ghostly place where there were two openings in the carth side by side, and opposite them and above two openings in the heaven. In the middle sat judges. These, when they had given their judgement, ordered the just to take the road to the right which led upward through heaven, first binding tablets on them in front signifying their judgements. The unjust were ordered to take the road to the left, which led downward. They also had tablets bound on their backs. They encamped in the Meadow. Each company passed seven days in the Meadow. On the eighth day they had to rise up and go their way. They arrived at a place where lots were shown. 'Let him whose lot falls first have first choice of a life to which he shall be bound by necessity.' Different patterns of life where laid on the ground and among them were lives of famous men, of unknown men and also of women.
"And when all the souls had chosen their lives they went into Lachasis in the order of their choosing. And she gave each the angel he had chosen to be a guard throughout his life and to accomplish his choice. The angel first led the soul towards clotho passing it under her hand and under the sweep of the whirling spindle, so ratifying the fate which the man had chosen in his turn. He touched the spindle, and then led the soul on to where Atropos was spinning, so that the threads might be made unalterable. Thence the man went without turning under the throne of Necessity, and after coming out on the other side he waited for others pass through. At last they encamped by the river of Forgetfullness whose water no pitcher may hoid. All had to drink a certain measure of this water. Then they went to sleep. And at once they were carried up from thence along different ways to their birth, shooting like stars."
After Plato's attempts to establish pre-existence and immortality of the soul, it persisted down to the later classical thinkers, Plotinus and NeoPlatonists. In the Hebrews, there are traces of it in Philo and it was definitely adopted in the Kabbala. The Sufi writers accept it. Jesus's disciples tell him of the rumours that he is John the Baptist or Elijah or Jeremiah. Julius Caesar finds the belief in rebirth among the ancestors of the British, for in his History of the Gallic Wars he writes that the Druids 'inculcate this as one of their leading tenets.' In the Middle Ages the tradition was continued by the numerous sects known as Cathari. At the Renaissance Bruno upheld it. In the seventeenth century Helmont adopted it. Swedenborg
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