"Metempsychosis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there seem to be reasonable room for doubt that poetry, aside from the drama, gains by seclusion and solitude. Much of Bayard Taylor's verse has a delicious flavor of poetry. He could write dreamily, as witness "The Metempsychosis of the Pine" and "Hylas," or he brings us into an Arab's tent as fellow-guest with him; but he belonged too much to the world. Traveler, newspaper correspondent, translator, ambassador, he was all these, and his varied exploits and attrition of the crowded world hindered the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... were lessons to be gathered from Tom Armstrongs's prompt acceptance of such alibi evidence, touching myself, as would have merely tended to unfathomable speculations on metempsychosis in an ether-poised Hamlet-mind. Tom, though crushing for a couple of ounces, was one of your practical, decided, cocksure men; guided by unweighed, unanalysed phenomena, and governed by conviction alone—the latter being based simply, though solidly, upon itself. These men are ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... power over and priority to matter. So far as its students devote their attention to other than such comprehension of its postulates as is necessary to become healers, they are Buddhistic in thought and expression, and some even accept a modified theory of metempsychosis known as reincarnation. Still they reject the philosophy of Spiritualism respecting spirit life, and appear to be all at sea as regards the immediate future of the individual. In their utterances on this they are more Buddhist than Christian, as in other respects. They doubt or deny individual ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... only intelligible theory of immortality that was possible. The idea that the same soul successively animated infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, and maturity, was, he argued, but a modification of the curious East Indian dream of metempsychosis, according to which every soul is supposed to ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... Geographicus of Schultens and Tavernier, Voyages, p. i. p. 308, 309. The Ayoubites descended from the tribe of the Rawadiaei, one of the noblest; but as they were infected with the heresy of the Metempsychosis, the orthodox sultans insinuated that their descent was only on the mother's side, and that their ancestor was a stranger who ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior of Hungary, a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis. Of the doctrines themselves—that is, of their falsity, or of their probability—I say nothing. I assert, however, that much of our incredulity—as La Bruyere says of all our unhappiness—"vient de ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Beltraffio, hard brilliancy of light and colour; Cesare da Sesto, somewhat of effeminate sweetness; and thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend themselves again in what is Lionardo's own. It is surely not without significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover of all things double-natured ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... {102} consecrated in a later age to the Christian, by the number of religious houses erected on its shores, through a yet earlier stage of its existence performed the laborious task of carving out the vale of Grantham, and so adding to the varied beauty of our county; then, by a kind of metempsychosis of the river spirit, it was absorbed in the body of the larger Trent; the two, like “John Anderson, my Joe,” and his contented spouse, “climbed the hill together,” to the Lincoln Gap, and hand in hand wended their seaward way, to help each other, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... or rather one of the causes of their abstinence from meat, was the absolute respect they had for animal life in general. We have seen that they admitted metempsychosis. According to their belief, the body of an ox or an ass might be the dwelling place of a human soul. To kill these animals, therefore, was a crime equivalent to murder. "For that reason," says Bernard Gui, "they never kill an animal or a bird; for they believe that ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... of his infatuation was not disclosed till the night before he left us. Again we were in session at the Cafe des Souris, and the talk had turned upon metempsychosis. Blake, for a wonder, pricked up his ears and appeared to listen, at the same time watching his chance to take the floor. Half-a-dozen men had their say first, ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... of sorcery was that of lycanthropy, as it was called, a prejudice derived, it seems, in part from the Pythagorean metempsychosis. A few cases will illustrate the nature of this stupendous transformation. That it is mostly found to take place in France and in the southern districts, the country of wolves, that still make their ravages there, is a fact easily ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... Intelligence of which it is the offspring, to the very god, and become one with him—absorbed into him, as the rain-drop fallen from a cloud rises again and is reunited to its parent vapor. Then—for there may be a metempsychosis—your songful spirit might revive to inform a nightingale, then . ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the temple than the temple itself. Throughout the whole of our interview he evidently laboured under great fear, and was continually looking behind and around him, seemingly in dread of being overheard, which brought to my mind an expression of a friend of mine, that if there be any truth in metempsychosis, the soul of Count Ofalia must have originally belonged to a mouse. We parted in kindness, and I went away, wondering by what strange chance this poor man had become prime minister of ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... in the streets, coming home at irregular hours, dreading the silence and orderliness of his apartment, and the critical scrutiny of Flint. His real life was spent in a world so remote from this familiar setting that he sometimes had the mysterious sense of a living metempsychosis, a furtive passage from one identity to another—yet the other ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... birth is but a sleep. The idea of pre-existence was a favorite one of the ancient philosophers. The doctrine of metempsychosis, a form of the same idea, was held by the ancient Egyptians and is still maintained by ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... The doctrine of metempsychosis, 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 ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... topics have filled our Crystal Palace with his advanced wisdom for fifteen years. There is Birch the sculptor, author of the "Godiva" and "The Last Call," exhibited here, and well appreciated by me as another Durham,—really a metempsychosis of character. Among literary ladies here I may mention as my friends Madame Zerffi, Miss Mary Hooper, and Miss Ellen Barlee,—all noted in their several departments, the first as an eloquent lecturer like her husband, the second known by her domestic essays, and the third for religious ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... were foully to miscarry in the advantage of humanity, to play away an uniterable life, and to have lived in vain. Forget not the capital end, and frustrate not the opportunity of once living. Dream not of any kind of metempsychosis or transanimation, but into thine own body, and that after a long time; and then also unto wail or bliss, according to thy first and fundamental life. Upon a curricle in this world depends a long course of the next, and upon a narrow scene here an endless expansion ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... (see the list in Jacobs's 'The Fables of Bidpai,' London, 1888, lxviii.). This is probably true of the whole little collection of beast fables in the One Hundred and Forty-sixth Night; for such fables are based upon the different reincarnations of the Buddha and the doctrine of metempsychosis. The story of Jali'ad and the Vizier Shammas is distinctly reported to have been translated from the Persian into Arabic. Even Greek sources have not been left untouched, if the picture of the cannibal in the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor be really a reflex of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... said Miss Phillips, who in her Derbyshire retreat had never heard anything of pantheism, or of this doctrine of metempsychosis as being entertained by sane Englishmen. "If you have such notions, I do not wonder at your flying to anything; for my part, I have never ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... leave no doubt as to my indebtedness. I have also found Dr. Oldenberg's Buddha (Ed. 2, 1890) very helpful. The origin of the theory of transmigration stated in the above extract is an unsolved problem. That it differs widely from the Egyptian metempsychosis is clear. In fact, since men usually people the other world with phantoms of this, the Egyptian doctrine would seem to presuppose the Indian ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... In the horrible occasionally is the sublime. To Gotama it was merely absurd. He blew on it. Abruptly, the categories of the infinite, the infant gods, shapes divine and demoniac, the entire phantasmagoria of metempsychosis, seemed really absorbed and Brahm himself ablated. For a moment the skies, sterilized by a breath, seemingly were vacant. Actually they were never more peopled. Behind the pall, tossed on an antique faith, new gods were crouching and waiting. Buddhistic atheism had resulted ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... "Euphorbus." This is an allusion to the doctrine of metempsychosis taught by the ancient philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, according to which when a man died his soul remained in the shades below suffering any punishment which the man had deserved, till after a certain lapse of time all ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... for sentiment of every kind he has a profound abhorrence. His view of himself is, I suppose, of a brilliant and capable man who holds his own and makes himself felt. The only result on the mind, from contemplating him, is that one revels in the possibility of metempsychosis and pictures him as being born again to some dreary and thankless occupation, a scavenger or a sewer-cleaner, or, better still, penned in the body of some absurd and inefficient animal, a slug or a jelly-fish, where he might learn to be ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Pythagoras. He was the same man, if we may credit the story, who afterwards migrated to Italy and became the founder of the famous Crotonian School of Philosophy; the man who developed the religion of the Orphic mysteries; who conceived the idea of the music of the spheres; who promulgated the doctrine of metempsychosis; who first, perhaps, of all men clearly conceived the notion that this world on which we live is a ball which moves in space and which may be ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... individual character, owing to the confusing effect of her likeness to a woman whom he had valued too late. He could not help seeing in her all that he knew of another, and veiling in her all that did not harmonize with his sense of metempsychosis. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... Homo Darwinienesis by Homo Sapiens, doubtless it would ex hypothesi be common to mankind. Yet to me Africa is the old home of the Beast-fable, because Egypt was the inventor of the alphabet, the cradle of letters, the preacher of animism and metempsychosis, and, generally, the source ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... hawed, he kicked, all the while glancing at the sons of Jerusalem, and braying louder and more discordant every moment. I could not understand the mule's idiosyncrasies. Possibly, I thought, the doctrine of the metempsychosis may be true, and this brute, in the early stages of its development, once have been in love. He has a fit on him now, I fancied—he is once more possessed of a petticoat. Why not? If love converts men into asses, ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... I came, as to a new world, so completely had I been separated from it during the two last years. It was as if one of the spirits in the metempsychosis imagined by Fourier, had returned to the brilliant sphere from which death had driven him in temporary exile. I was at first enchanted, intoxicated. The mental activity which had seemed so intense in the sluggish province, needed ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... it has been interpreted by modern scholars (see pp. 107-113), and he is followed by Mr. T. Rice Holmes in his study of Caesar's Conquest of Gaul, pp. 532-536. The Druidic cult of belief in immortality, metempsychosis, ritual of the grove, augury, human sacrifice, is all set out and discussed. These are the continental Druidic beliefs and practices, and they may be compared with the Druidic Irish beliefs and practices ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... from some remote ancestor. Before she was eleven years old her mother had listened with some wonder and more apprehension to the eager forecast of what this child intended to do when she became a woman, and already shrank from a vision of Celia on a public platform, or the leader of some metempsychosis club. Through her affections only was the child manageable, but in opposition to her spirit her mother was practically powerless. Indeed, this little sprout of the New Age always spoke of her to Philip and to the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... referred. We had long known her as a writer of picturesque and vigorous prose, as one of the most successful sketchers of New England character, abounding in humor and pathos; but we had never conceived her as a writer of verse. The readers of the "Atlantic" remember too well her "Maya, the Princess," "Metempsychosis," and "The Sphinx's Children," to need reminding that she has qualities of fancy as remarkable as her faculty for observing real life. Miss Terry seems in this volume to have sought refuge from the real in the ideal, from the jar and bustle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... excellent flute player—and the tinkle of the Viscount's guitar came in very harmoniously. By the time refreshments were introduced, Charles Selby too was in his glory. He had already nearly convulsed the Orientalist by a theory which he said he had formed, of a gradual metempsychosis, or, at all events, perceptible amalgamation, of the yellow Qui Hi to the darker Hindoo; which said theory he supported by the most ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... his way to the formation of a new creed, which should combine all that was best in the religious systems which he was acquainted with, and omit what was superfluous or objectionable. He adopted the Dualism of the Zoroastrians, the metempsychosis of India, the angelism and demonism of the Talmud, and the Trinitarianism of the Gospel of Christ. Christ himself he identified with Mithra, and gave Him his dwelling in the sun. He assumed to be the Paraclete promised by Christ, who should guide men into all truth, and claimed ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us—the doctrine namely of metempsychosis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... here and there standing by himself, in all the prickly pride of an immortal aloe, some one big pot monopolizes all the cast of earth, domineering over the conservatory as Brutus's colossal Caesar, or his metempsychosis in ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... way of acquiring and retaining facts which are practical. There are many things which we can afford to forget, which yet it was well to learn. Your mental condition is not the same as if you had never known what you now try in vain to recall. There is a perpetual metempsychosis of thought, and the knowledge of to-day finds a soil in the forgotten facts of yesterday. You cannot see anything in the new season of the guano you placed last year about the roots of your climbing plants, but it is blushing and breathing ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... great a strife Had been, who from his death should draw their life! Who should, by one rich draught, become whate'er Seneca, Cato, Numa, Caesar, were,— 70 Learn'd, virtuous, pious, great; and have by this An universal metempsychosis! Must all these aged sires in one funeral Expire? all die in one so young, so small? Who, had he lived his life out, his great fame Had swoln 'bove any Greek or Roman name. But hasty Winter, with one blast, hath brought The hopes of Autumn, Summer, Spring, to nought. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... incessant pain; Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd! O, no end is limited to damned souls! Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? Or why is this immortal that thou hast? Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true, This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd Unto some brutish beast![174] all beasts are happy, For, when they die, Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements; But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell. Curs'd be ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... man, the doctrine of Pythagoras was that known by the name of the Metempsychosis,—that the soul after death rested a certain time till it was purified, and had acquired a forgetfulness of what had previously happened to it; and then reanimated some other body. The ethics of the Pythagoreans ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... A very short word for a very long process, and untranslatable by any English equivalent. It means the whole system of the laws of metempsychosis, running in a long chain forward into the future, and back into ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... the last stronghold of independent Gallic life. It was a mixture of northern myth and oriental dreams of metempsychosis, coarse, mystical, and cruel. The Roman paganism which was superimposed by the conquering race was the mere shell of a once vital religion. Educated men had long ceased to believe in the gods and divinities of Greece, and it is said that the Roman augurs, while giving ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the "voracious wolves"—thus were the orthodox believers designated. The human soul was created before the body. (A "divine mother," questioned as to her age in a court of law, declared that though her body was only seventy years old, her soul had lived through nearly as many centuries.) Metempsychosis was one of their beliefs. Souls change their habitations, and work upwards to supreme perfection. That of a Christ on earth becomes an angel after death; that of an imperfect man requires repeated incarnations. The ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... pure, good-tempered, ethical Philistinism prevents his really entering the evasive souls of Shelley or Keats or Heine. With Wordsworth or Byron he is more at home. But he misses many subtleties, even in their simple temperaments. He is no Proteus, no Wizard of critical metempsychosis. For all his airy wit, he is "a plain, blunt man, who loves his friend." In fact, when one compares him, as a sheer illuminator of psychological twilights, to Walter Pater, one realizes at once how easily a quite great man may "render himself stupid" by sprinkling himself with the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... then utterly despise the religion of Egypt, in spite of the absurdities mingled with it,—the multiplicity of gods and the doctrine of metempsychosis,—since it included a distinct recognition of a future state of rewards and punishments "according to the deeds done in the body." On this belief rested the power of the priests, who were supposed to intercede with the deities, and who ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... successive bodies. There is no reason to suppose that Pythagoras displayed any particular originality in this part of his teaching. It all depends on the doctrine of transmigration or rebirth (παλιγγενεσια {palingenesia}), which is often incorrectly designated by the late and inaccurate term 'metempsychosis'. There is no doubt that Pythagoras taught this, and also the rule of abstinence from animal flesh which is its natural corollary, but such ideas had been well known in many parts of Greece before his time. The real difficulty is to see the connexion between all this ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of a metempsychosis, but not in any degree systematic, nor considered as an article of religious faith. Popular stories prevail amongst them of such a particular man being changed into a tiger or other beast. They seem to think ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when — There she blows! —the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again. Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage — and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope! ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... The doctrine of Metempsychosis or Re-incarnation has its roots deeply imbedded in the soil of all religions—that is, in the Inner Teachings or Esoteric phase of all religious systems. And this is true of the Inner Teachings of the Christian Church as well as of the other systems. The Christian ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... perfectly normal aspect. They explain so many things so well as even to look rational; and quite rational some assuredly are when measured by the scientific thought of the nineteenth century. But to judge them fairly, it is first necessary to sweep the mind clear of all Western ideas of metempsychosis. For there is no resemblance between the old Occidental conceptions of soul—the Pythagorean or the Platonic, for example—and the Buddhist conception; and it is precisely because of this unlikeness that the Japanese beliefs prove themselves reasonable. The ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... evolution, revolution; diversion; break. transformation, transfiguration; metamorphosis; transmutation; deoxidization[Chem]; transubstantiation; mutagenesis[Genet], transanimation[obs3], transmigration, metempsychosis|; avatar; alterative. conversion &c. (gradual change) 144; revolution &c. (sudden or radical change) 146 inversion &c. (reversal) 218; displacement &c. 185; transference &c. 270. changeableness &c. 149; tergiversation &c. (change of mind) 607. V. change, alter, vary, wax ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... shadows, or else they would pass into a succession of other bodies, of animals or men. From the nakedness and desolation of unclothed spirit, and the possibility which this notion held out of some close contact with a holy and just judge, the soul shrank back to the hope of the metempsychosis, and hoped rather to dwell in the body of a brute, than be utterly unclothed and mingle with spirits. This is the delusion cherished by the people of India and many other lands to this day. How unsatisfactory to the dying sinner this uncertainty. "Tell me," ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... is enough to prove that the religions of which it formed a central doctrine believed in the survival of the Soul after Death; but one may quote as an example a passage from the Ordinances of Manu, following on a disquisition on metempsychosis, and answering the question of deliverance ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... Measuring. Meat. Medicine (folk). Melted butter. Member of society (child). Memnon. Memory. "Men-women." Mercury. Mere-patrie (la). "Merry Month" (May). Messages. Messenger-bird. Messerin. Metamorphoses. Metempsychosis. [Greek: Maetris]. Metropolis. Midas. Midnight. Midsummer. Milk. "Milk and Honey." Milk-tree. Milky Way. Mimicry. Mind-goddess. Minds (children's). (parents'). Minerva. Miniatures. "Ministering Children's League." Miracles. Mishosha. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... portcullis of the strong threaded web of the field spider, who sits like a porter in king's livery of black and gold at his gate. Then you have a peep into the winding maelstroem-funnel of another of the spider family. Poe must have suffered metempsychosis into the body of a blue-bottle, when he wrote his "Descent into the Maelstroem"; for such an insect, hanging midway down that treacherous, sticky descent, and seeing Death creeping up from the bottom to grasp him, might have a clear idea of what was undergone by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... be remarked that all systems of religion which held the doctrine of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, should be considered as believing in a middle state of purgation, since they maintained the necessity of the soul's further purification, after death, before it was permitted to enter ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... and gently wiping from his lips the beads of water freshly clinging there as to the valve of a coral-shell upon a reef, he turned upon the cosmopolitan, and, in a manner the most cool, self-possessed, and matter-of-fact possible, said: "I hold to the metempsychosis; and whoever I may be now, I feel that I was once the stoic Arrian, and have inklings of having been equally puzzled by a word in the current language of that former time, very probably answering ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... could hear it; but only in his heart and intellect, and after he had discovered the truthful doctrine of the metempsychosis, or ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... as a religion, was a mass of confusion, wherein the instinctive notions of the human race concerning the origin and destiny of the world and of mankind were mingled with the oriental dreams of metempsychosis—that pretended transmigration, at successive periods, of immortal souls into divers creatures. This confusion was worse confounded by traditions borrowed from the mythologies of the East and the North, by shadowy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... Andy began to drink. He has the artistic metempsychosis which is half drunk when sober and looks ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... psychogony, based on the idea of metempsychosis borrowed from the Orient, gives itself up to numerical vagaries. Assuming for every soul a periodical rebirth, he assigns it first a period of "ascending subversion," the first phase of which lasts five thousand years, the second thirty-six thousand; then comes a period ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... "That is metempsychosis," interrupted Sonia, with a reminiscence of her early lessons. "The Egyptians believed that our souls had once inhabited the bodies of animals, and would return to ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... adoring an elephant. Even Buddha, to whom they undoubtedly offer pious homage, they do not style "God" but on the contrary maintain that, though an emanation from a "sublimated ethereal being," he is by no means a deity. According to their philosophy of metempsychosis, however, each successive Buddha, in passing through a series of transmigrations, must necessarily have occupied in turn the forms of white animals of a certain class,—particularly the swan, the stork, the white sparrow, the dove, the monkey, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... gazing where a bird reposes, Rocked on the wavelets, drifting with the tide, I lose myself in strange metempsychosis And float a sea-fowl at ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Osirian—that is, the happy dead—ploughed, sowed, reaped, and threshed, as on earth—a singular want of fancy. Retributive pains, by fire and steel, are also supposed to have been detected among the paintings. At the same time they held and taught to the Greeks the doctrine of metempsychosis. It is difficult to reconcile with either of these notions their belief that the spirit dwelt in the body so long as the body could be rescued from decay, and the reason which they give for bestowing such prodigality of labor on their sepulchres—that ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... that his spirit is immortal, and that it will be rewarded hereafter in heaven or punished in hell, both of which places are beneath the earth, hell being the land of volcanoes; but he has no theory as to a resurrection of the body or metempsychosis. He preserves a tradition about a flood which seems to be the counterpart of the Biblical deluge, and about an earthquake which lasted a hundred days, produced the three volcanoes of Yezo and created the island by bridging the waters ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the heart in the Ancient Egyptian religion. Immortality of the soul according to that religion. Symbolism of the scarab in their doctrine of such immortality. No thing in this universe absolutely destroyed, only changed. The idea of metempsychosis in Ancient Egypt. Elevated ideas as to the deity. Hymn to Ammon-Ra cited. Quotations as to Egyptian philosophy, evolution of the universe and kosmogony. Of Khepra and of Tum or Atmu. Egyptian psychology and ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... Buddhism is the humanitarian's, and also the skeptic's, solution of the problem of the universe. Its three great distinguishing characteristics are atheism, metempsychosis and absence of caste. It was in its origin pure democracy. As against despotic priesthood and oppressive hierarchy, it was congregational. Theoretically it is so yet, though far from being so practically. It is certainly sacerdotal and aristocratic ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Latinist, is one of the best draftsmen in Russia, is well acquainted with physics, botany, geography, and history, and to crown all, has probably the most beautiful voice that ever mortal was gifted with. A admirable Chrishna again by metempsychosis; the religion of the family, with whom I am very intimate, is the Romish. I now and then attend the service of the Armenian Church, for the purpose of perfecting myself in the language, and have formed many acquaintances amongst the congregation: there are several ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... story (tantt Kadi, tantt bandit), pp. 20-26 by my friend Yacoub Artin Pasha in the Bulletin before quoted, series ii. No. 4 of 1883. The sharpers' trick is common in Eastern folk-lore, and the idea that underlies is always metempsychosis or metamorphosis. So, in the Kalilah wa Dimnah (new Syriac), the three rogues persuade the ascetic that he is leading a dog ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... compared with the stupendous change which is literally wrought. It is true, the soul may remain the same, but a new body is actually given to it by the interposition of vestiary talent: and this is what we have always believed to be the genuine meaning of the metempsychosis of Pythagoras. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... Buddhists make much of the doctrine of metempsychosis, but in the undoubted sayings and Sutras or sermons of Buddha I find no mention of it except in this way as the last hope of those who persist through life in evil, while the good after death reach the other shore, or Nirvana, where there is no more ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... him through no act of his own. It was as if the original Barbox had stretched himself down upon the office floor, and had thither caused to be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him. The discovery—aided in its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the deceit of the only friend he had ever made: who eloped from him to be married together—the discovery, so followed up, completed what his earliest rearing had begun. ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous! A few drops of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical metempsychosis. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... be just as like as each other too, and would for that reason be of such infinite usefulness. They would not be like the old Ideals. Times are changed; they were one thing, we have to be another—their enemies are not ours. There is a moral metempsychosis in the change of era, and probably no lineament of form or feature remains identical; yet surely not because less is demanded of us—not less, but more—more, as we are again and again told on Sundays from the pulpits; if the preachers would but ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the primeval essence, is the supreme good. The sufferings of the present are the penalty of sins committed in a pre-existent state. If they are not purged away, the soul is condemned to be embodied again and again,—it may be, in some repulsive animal. This process of metempsychosis might be repeated far into the indefinite future. With the doctrine of Brahma and of transmigration was connected the feeling that all life is sacred. The Brahman spared even trees and plants from destruction. Pollution ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... positive truth: for all this mass of flesh which we be- hold, came in at our mouths: this frame we look upon, hath been upon our trenchers; in brief, we have devoured ourselves. I cannot believe the wisdom of Pythagoras did ever positively, and in a literal sense, affirm his metempsychosis, or impossible transmigration of the souls of men into beasts. Of all metamorphoses or transmigrations, I believe only one, that is of Lot's wife; for that of Nabuchodonosor proceeded not so far. In all others I conceive there is no further ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... saying of Rumi concerning music prompted the composition of the poem, p. 54 (on which see Boxberger, op. cit. p. 241), and on p. 62 the great mystic is made to give a short statement of his peculiar Sufistic doctrine of metempsychosis.[162] In "Alexanders Vermaechtnis," p. 61, we have the well-known legend of how the dying hero gives orders to leave one of his hands hanging out of the coffin to show the world that of all his possessions nothing accompanies him ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... the Christian dog Change place in mad metempsychosis; The Muezzin climbs the synagogue, The Rabbi ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... recommence the same useless work. The idea, however, has now grown aware of its strength. Among the humble-bees it goes no further than we have stated, but, faithful to its habits and pursuing its usual routine, it will immediately undergo a sort of unwearying metempsychosis, and re-incarnate itself, trembling with its last triumph, rendered all-powerful now and nearly perfect, in another group, the last but one of the race, that which immediately precedes our domestic bee wherein it attains its crown; the group of the ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... is like the secret of singing in perfect tune, or of playing the violin as Joachim can play upon it. In literature, as in music, there is at times a certain indescribable tone of absolute reality which carries the reader away and for the moment absorbs him into the mind of the writer. Some metempsychosis takes place. It is no longer a man or a woman turning the pages of a book, it is a human being suddenly absorbed by the book itself, living the very life which it records, breathing the spirit and soul of the writer. Such books are events, ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... free from sorrow. Certainly he can have no congeniality of feeling with the sprightly Bobolink. Perhaps, with the rest of his species, he represents only the fragment of a superior race, which, according to the metempsychosis, have fallen from their original importance, and this melancholy note is but the partial utterance of sorrow that still lingers in their breasts after the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... have expounded many impieties based upon my natural light.'[108] In another place he uses the antithesis, 'speaking like a Christian and according to theology'—'speaking after the manner of philosophy.'[109] The same antithesis is employed to justify his doctrine of metempsychosis: 'Speaking as a Catholic, souls do not pass from one body into another, but go to paradise or purgatory or hell; yet, following philosophical reasonings, I have argued that, the soul being inexistent without ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... spirals through her tea. Bette remind her of the word: metempsychosis. An example would be ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... looking, though that he did not know, where never man had been permitted to look with full knowledge since Time began. Above all he was absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold to me for five pounds; and he would retain that ignorance, for bank-clerks do not understand metempsychosis, and a sound commercial education does not include Greek. He would supply me—here I capered among the dumb gods of Egypt and laughed in their battered faces—with material to make my tale sure—so sure that the world would hail it as an impudent and vamped ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... in the Pythagorean theory of metempsychosis, and considered that his soul had animated the body of a ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... to have entered a house, but since birth to have been roaming the air, in rain and sun, or visiting the trees and the grass. I not only disbelieve utterly, but intensely dislike, the doctrine of metempsychosis, which, if I understand it aright, seems the negation of the creative impulse, an apotheosis of staleness—nothing quite new in the world, never anything quite new—not even the soul of a baby; and so I am not prepared to entertain the whim that a bird was one of his remote incarnations; ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... and the same master has lodged us together in this palace for his service, and that they, as well as we, are of his family, it has reason to enjoin us some affection and regard to them. Pythagoras borrowed the metempsychosis from the Egyptians; but it has since been received by several nations, and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... supposed that he withdrew from the sight of men for the purpose of more fervent prayer and more holy meditation; others, that he visited his home, or some other distant country. The more superstitious believed that he had, by a kind of metempsychosis, taken a new shape, which, by some magical or supernatural power, he could assume and put off at pleasure. This opinion was perhaps the most prevalent, as it gained a colour with these simple people, from the chemical and astronomical instruments he possessed. In these he evidently took ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... youngster. No, people don't sleep at a moment like this. Only I am consoling myself. Needs must, eh?... And then I am thinking of what is to come after.... Exactly. I have a little theory of my own about that. You wouldn't think it, to look at me, but I believe in metempsychosis, in the transmigration of souls. It would take too long to explain, however.... I say, boy ... suppose we shook hands before we part? You won't? Then good-bye. Good health and a long ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... to flow. 'Tis now not Grief but Joy we know; From her smiling face the roses Tell the glad metempsychosis. ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... took its later corruptions. The Vedic religion has no idols, it has no dark descriptions of hell, the caste system on which later Brahmanism was based is absent from it, it has no demons to be guarded against, and no bad deities. The doctrine of metempsychosis is not found here, except perhaps in germ. The immolation of the widow on the funeral pile of her husband is not sanctioned by the Vedas, and of ancestor-worship only a few traces are found. All these, it may be held, are later ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... a series of negations, at least in the way of theology. But his spirit, after the departure of his body from the earth,[52] became incarnate in the body of some successor—and so on ad infinitum. This connects Buddhism with the doctrine of metempsychosis; a doctrine which the incarnations ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... supplements the doctrines of the Old Testament. For instance, it is a disputed point whether the immortality of the soul is taught in the Hebrew canon, but in the Kabbalah it is taken for granted, and a complete and consistent psychology is propounded, in which is included the Oriental theory of metempsychosis. This account of the human soul, as distinct from the human body, treats of the origin and eternal destiny of man's immortal part. On the other hand God and Nature, and the connection between the Creator and the creation, are most exactly treated of in detail. God is the En-Soph, ...
— Hebrew Literature
... alone knew how extreme the danger had been. "She meant to scare her,—that's all," they said. But Myrtle tore the eagle's feathers from her hair, and stripped off her colored beads, and threw off her painted robe. The metempsychosis was far too real for her to let her wear the semblance of the savage from whom, as she believed, had come the lawless impulse at the thought of which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... Not only primitive man, but those also who are often far advanced in mental development, attribute souls to animals, and find it difficult to believe otherwise—as witness the totemistic systems followed by theories of metempsychosis. And Darwinism, far from destroying these old ideas, has simply furnished a scientific basis ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... expect to convert you. You have your metempsychosis, and your theories of progressive incarnation, and your monads, and your spirits of the stars and flowers. I have not forgotten a certain talk of ours over Falk Von Muller's Recollections of Goethe, and how you materialists ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of such hoary antiquity that they are lost in the mists that brooded over the face of the deep. It is only the application that is new. Even that has always been understood by certain great souls. Pythagoras is said to have taught the Greeks to believe in metempsychosis for the purpose of making them kinder to lesser forms of life; like many beauty worshipers they were frankly inhuman, and it took heroic measures to create even a glimmering perception of the unity of life which is the ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... now read these long words as they are here presented, without a division of the syllables, as follows: valetudinarian, indefatigability, hypochondriacal, metempsychosis, ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... some strange way to be dominated by the shade of Cleopatra. Now, if I believed in metempsychosis, I should think you were Mark Antony brought down to date. There, with that present sober air of yours, you'd pass anywhere for such an anachronism. But to be serious, and to give you advice which is positively bilious with gravity, I should say, investigate this thing fully; make a study of this ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... forcibly without appearing to be dogmatic. I hate to have my intellectual toes trod upon. He spoke about the nature of the soul, and sketched out the views of Aristotle and Plato upon the subject in a masterly manner. He seems to have a leaning for metempsychosis and the doctrines of Pythagoras. In discussing them we touched upon modern spiritualism, and I made some joking allusion to the impostures of Slade, upon which, to my surprise, he warned me most impressively against confusing the innocent with the guilty, and argued that it would be as logical to ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... metempsychosis, deals solely with the passing of the soul after death into another mortal form. Lycanthropy confines itself to the metamorphosis of physical man to animal form only during man's ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... wonders of dreams, the anxiety as to the fate of the soul after the destruction of the body, give rise, along with the presentiment of another life, to the first idea of God. Death teaches eternity and proves irrefragably the existence of a power superior to that of man. The belief in metempsychosis, in the migration of the soul, in other spheres, in reward and punishment according to the works done by men in the flesh, arose among nations in accordance with the degree of civilisation which they had attained. Among the least civilised these doctrines exist in a state of confusion, remain vague, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... death born into some higher caste, and thus he advances towards the longed-for end. The evil man, however, is born into a lower caste, or perhaps his soul enters some unclean animal. This doctrine of re-birth is known as the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis). ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... the Gypsies, to whom I have stated this circumstance, have accounted for it on the supposition that the soul which at present animates my body has at some former period tenanted that of one of their people; for many among them are believers in metempsychosis, and, like the followers of Bouddha, imagine that their souls, by passing through an infinite number of bodies, attain at length sufficient purity to be admitted to a state of perfect rest and quietude, which is the only idea of heaven ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... an old silk gown takes on quite a new value and becomes invested with absorbing interest. Spots and tarnish disappear in the metempsychosis, or serve for scattered variation, and if the weaver chooses to still further embellish it with a monogram or design in cross stitch embroidery, she has acquired a piece of drapery which might be a valuable inheritance to ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... none; they never attend mass, nor confess themselves, and never employ the names of God, Christ and the Virgin, but in imprecation and blasphemy. From what I learnt from them it appeared that their ancestors had some belief in metempsychosis, but they themselves laughed at the idea, and were decidedly of opinion that the soul perished when the body ceased to breathe; and the argument which they used was rational enough, so far as it impugned metempsychosis: 'We have been wicked and miserable enough in ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... admitted to most frequent intercourse with him. He was the favourite animal of superstition, and a few tales of him are still current. These, however, are not of much interest or variety, the leading ideas in them being these: That the great seal is a human soul, or a fallen angel in metempsychosis, and that to him who is remarkable for hostility to the phocal race some fatal retribution will ensue. I can easily conceive the feeling of awe with which a fisherman would be impressed when, in the sombre magnificence ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Little Emily's hand under the lap-robe and asked her if all Kentuckians were believers in metempsychosis. "Colonel Littlejourneys is making fun of you, General," said Little Emily; "the Colonel is talking about the man, ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard |
