TdM Wheel of Fortune and metempsychosis?
I posed this as a question earlier, before I noticed that the simian surmounting Chosson's 1672 Wheel of Fortune was clutching a book <of Thoth?> and now throwing a few observations into oncoming traffic to see if it might provoke a comment or two...
"The baboon of Thoth (also called Isdes) became an assistant in the judgment hall in the underworld"
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/baboons.htm
"It had always been accepted among European scholars prior to Young and Champollion that the ancient Egyptians did hold a belief in the General Doctrine of Reimbodiment, under one of its forms of metempsychosal Reincarnation and this belief was very largely based upon the statement of the great Greek philosopher and historian Herodotus ...."
http://www.wintersteel.com/ETBp2.html
Herodotus Bk. II, Sec. 123:: "... the Egyptians were the first to teach that the human soul is immortal, and at the death of the body enters into some other living thing then coming to birth; and after passing through all creatures, of land, sea, and air (which cycle it completes in three thousand years) it enters once more into a human body at birth. Some of the Greeks, early and late, have used this doctrine as if it were their own..."
"The general claim is that Pherekydes, a writer of both mythological and theological works, was the first to teach that the soul was immortal. Further, that he wrote about Aithalides <a son of Hermes> and his periodical reincarnations. It may be that he recognised Aithalides in Pythagoras and sowed the seeds of the latter’s anamnesis and doctrine of metempsychosis. (Gorman.1979.p.25)."
http://pages.britishlibrary.net/simon.mahony/ma-pyth.html
Plato: Phaedrus | Guide to Sections 227 A - 234 C
" Socrates's understanding of what is "true" is based on his theory of the ideal Forms on which all things in the phenomenal world are modeled. Knowledge of these "true" Forms lies within the human soul, which in metempsychosis has passed through the realm of the Forms. The process of anamnesis allows human beings to "recollect" their vision of these forms."
http://maven.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/plato/guide1.html
"Aeneas wond'ring stood, then ask'd the cause
Which to the stream the crowding people draws.
Then thus the sire: "The souls that throng the flood
Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow'd:
In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.
Long has my soul desir'd this time and place,
To set before your sight your glorious race,
That this presaging joy may fire your mind
To seek the shores by destiny design'd."-
"O father, can it be, that souls sublime
Return to visit our terrestrial clime,
And that the gen'rous mind, releas'd by death,
Can covet lazy limbs and mortal breath?"
-Virgil: The Aeneid Book VI
Translated by John Dryden
"Catharism ... believed in metempsychosis, circulation of souls between birds, mammals and men."
http://www.florilegium.org/files/RELIGION/heretics-msg.html
<metempsychosis> "The concept was elucidated in an influential mystical work called the Bahir (Illumination) (one of the most ancient books of Jewish mysticism) around 1150 CE."
"Lastly, the one major issue that our two groups have most in common is that of the transmigration of souls, although the details vary to some degree. The Cathars regarded the higher souls as those of fallen angels that must continue to wander until they attain the body of a Cathar Perfecti did. Similarly, when a student engaged himself to a Kabalistic school, one of the first things taught to the novice was that he probably would not complete his work in the present lifetime (assuming that the present lifetime was the first one to partake of this spiritual path). In fact, the idea of transmigration of souls can be traced back among both traditions to a much older time frame. The earliest Christian Gnostic embraced this idea, as did the Jewish mystics of the same period."
http://www.orderofthegrail.org/cathars_and_the_kabala.htm
"Concerning the concept of reincarnation in the CH <Corpus Hermeticum>, <Gilles> Quispel derives it from Hellenic thought, since it is unknown in ancient Egyptian and pre-Christian Jewish sources (171-75).[h] However, Quispel does note that the ancient Jewish Gnostics of Alexandria believed in reincarnation. Thus the first documented appearance of the reincarnation belief in Judaism reaches back to the ancient period, and not merely to the medieval Kabbalah (188-89)"
http://www.angelfire.com/moon/drsinner/hermeticreview.html
Walter Scott's translation of Poimandres. (Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, 1:517.) Book 1, § 24 states that "At the dissolution of your material body, you first yield up the body itself to be changed," and it will be absorbed by nature. The rest of the individual's components return to "their own sources, becoming parts of the universe, and entering into fresh combinations to do other work." After this, the real or inner man "mounts upward through the structure of the heavens," leaving off in each of the seven zones certain energies and related substances. The first zone is that of the Moon; the second, the planet Mercury; the third, Venus; fourth, the Sun; fifth, Mars; sixth, Jupiter; and seventh, Saturn. "Having been stripped of all that was wrought upon him" in his previous descent into incarnation on Earth, he ascends to the highest sphere, "being now possessed of his own proper power." Finally, he enters into divinity. "This is the Good; this is the consummation, for those who have got gnosis." (According to Scott, gnosis in this context means not only knowledge of divinity but also the relationship between man's real self and the godhead.)
Further on, in Book X, § 17 the Poimandres explains that the mind and soul can be conjoined only by means of an earth-body, because the mind by itself cannot do so, and an earthly body would not be able to endure "the presence of that mighty and immortal being, nor could so great a power submit to contact with a body defiled by passion. And so the mind takes to itself the soul for a wrap" (Scott translation).
http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/reincar/re-imo2.htm
The fourth treatise from the Corpus Hermeticum contains a discourse between Hermes and Tat, entitled: The mixing bowl or the monad, in Ficino's translation: Crater sive monas
"...Hermes mentions the doctrine of metempsychosis, as adhered to by the Pythagoreans, Platonists and some gnostic movements: 'Do you see how many bodies we must pass through, my child, how many troops of demons, (cosmic) connections and stellar circuits in order to hasten to the one and only?' Ficino interprets the bodies (soomata) as the heavenly bodies, and translates: corpora coelestia, which in this context puts the emphasis on the ascent of the soul through the spheres. This translation does not, incidentally, exclude the idea of metempsychosis; in principle the soul can return from the spheres."
http://www.ritmanlibrary.nl/c/p/pub/on_pub/pat/pat_pri_B1.html
Metempychosis is to be found in the Asculepius as well.
"In The Advancement, Bacon compliments James I of England and VI of Scotland on the centrality accorded to memory in his kingly intellect, and he identifies the Platonic model of recollection, anamnesis, as integral to the humanist goal of a quasi-divine expansion of human intelligence:
your Majesty were the best instance to make a man of Plato's opinion, that all knowledge is but remembrance, and that the mind of man by nature knoweth all things, and hath but her own native and original notions (which by the strangeness and darkness of this tabernacle of the body are sequestered) again revived and restored ....
The model of knowledge which is alluded to by Bacon in this passage was derived from diverse classical sources, including several Platonic texts, and most notably from Plato's Meno, a dialogue already known in the middle ages. In the Meno Socrates, having only just admitted the weakness of his short-term memory, expounds the significance of learning as anamnesis by relating it to the Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation:
Seeing then that the soul is immortal and has been born many times, and has beheld all things both in this world and in the nether realms, she has acquired knowledge of all and everything, so that it is no wonder that she should be able to recollect all that she knew before about virtue and other things. For as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things, there is no reason why we should not, by remembering but one single thing - an act which men call learning - discover everything else, if we have courage and faint not in the search; since, it would seem, research and learning are wholly recollection."
"<Giordano> Bruno observes that 'For as the divinity descends in a certain manner inasmuch as it communicates itself to nature, so there is an ascent made to the divinity through nature'; this ascent to divinity through nature, instead, as Christianity implicitly taught, of an ascent to god that was in many respects hostile or opposed to nature, was equated by Bruno with the secrets of the Egyptian religion, in which a pantheon of gods had been worshipped in the forms of beasts, plants and even stones. Here divinity was 'seen in things said to be most abject' (such as beasts) because 'everything ... has ... Divinity latent within itself'. It was visual images associated with divinity, such as those of the Egyptians gods in their diverse forms, which were central to Bruno's art of memory. And in his numerous memory treatises, all written between 1582 and 1591, Bruno's quasi-magical aim was to use numerous, carefully ordered and positioned images of 'things' as mnemonic devices so that, ultimately, the possessor of this system could transcend temporal limitations and 'reflect the whole universe of nature and of man in his mind'."
http://www.univ-paris3.fr/recherche/sites/edea/iris/Communications/Berry-AC-Forgetting.html
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) - "I have held and hold souls to be immortal.... Speaking as a Catholic, they do not pass from body to body, but go to paradise, purgatory or hell. But I have reasoned deeply, and, speaking as a philosopher, since the soul is not found without body and yet is not body, it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body."
- his trial in Venice, 1592
"Jove, he tells us elsewhere, "is not to be taken as too legitimate or true a representative of the primal and universal origin," but himself exemplifies the principle of eternal change. Again Jove represents every one of us. "
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/bruno05.htm
"Jacob Boehme, the German Protestant mystic,... supported the concept of reincarnation on logical and other grounds."
http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/reincar/re-imo.htm
The Soul's Origin (5:369) Angelus Silesius
" A spark without its fire, a drop without its sea,
Without reincarnation what more, pray, wouldst thou be?"
- his most intimate friend at Ols was Abraham von Frankenberg, a personal disciple of Böhme, who had written a life of his master.
"Abraham von Franckenberg (1593-1652), who, using Patrizi's edition, frequently referred in his work to Hermes Trismegistus. (Cf Via veterum sapientum (from 1675, conclusion dated 1637); and Conclusiones de fundamento sapientiae, 1646)"
http://www.ritmanlibrary.nl/c/p/pub/on_pub/pat/pat_pri_B3.html
"...<Rene> Guenon, ... in his _Great Triad_<<La grande Triade, Paris, 1946, p.154 and 157>> in connection with the cosmic wheel and of a series of assimilated symbolic systems: "In certain works attached to the hermetic tradition, one finds mention of the ternary : Deus, Homo, Rota.... which concerns the Absconditorum Clavis, the key of things hidden, and the "Rota mundi" of the rosicrucians. "A little further the notion of the unchanging center is bourne out by the image of Chinese yin-yang and the expression of "Wheel within the wheel" by which, he tells us, G Postel describes the center of Eden. Some lines beforehand an allusion has the wheel of fortune brought back for us to the 10th card of the tarot. This new development indicates the transformation of Postel into a witness of the eternal tradition, the texts were circumvented by another way."
-Jean-Pierre LAURANT Ecole Practises High-Studies (V I section), Paris "Postel Vu Par Le XIXe Siecle Occultisant" in:_Guillaume Postel 1581-1981_ ed. Guy Tredaniel, 1985 <my trans.>
"Absconditorum clavis, which is his <Guillaume Postel's> most esoteric work, dates from the ... period <1546>, and it too foreshadows his prophecy. In it, he argues that God progressively reveals His truth, that it can be discerned by those who know where to look for it, and that the Church is on the verge of a new age."
"<Postel>believed in the transmigration of souls, the concept that souls can return in different bodies. <<This concept was found in Jewish Kabbalistic texts, such as the Sefer ha-Bahir, with which Postel was well acquainted...> Therefore, both Joan of Arc and Joanna were manifestations of Christ, who was hidden within their female bodies."
"Postel... the major premise of his work Absconditorum clavis was that God created humans to be perfect and gave them the means of attaining perfection through wisdom and understanding. He asserted that God revealed His truth progressively and that it could be discerned by those who knew where to look for it."
"Postel combined the Christian theology of the incarnation with the concept of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from one body to another. He was one of only a few Renaissance thinkers who maintained this belief. << Les tres merveilleuses victoires, 63ff. Secret provides a concise discussion of Postel's views of meternpsychosis in L'Esoterisme de Guy Le Fevre de la Boderie, 81-2.>> At one point, he denied that he believed in the transmigration of specific minds as did the Pythagoreans, but said that human souls were part of a vast composite: "I say therefore that all human life that ever was, is, and will be, within whatever particular man, is a part of the life of the only Mediator of life.<< "Apologie de G.P," BN.ms.f lat.3402, fol. 7. 'Je dis donc que toute la vie humaine qui onc fut, est, et sera dedens quelquonque home particulier qui soit, est une partie de la vie du seul Mediateur de vie.">> His source for this belief was Kabbalah; in Kabbalah, the soul exists in heaven before it is united with a body on earth.<<The idea of transmigration of souls in Kabbalistic thought was first introduced in the Sefer ha-Bahir. Bouwsma, Concordia Mundi, 43.>> Postel cited as evidence for metempsychosis the idea in the New Testament that John the Baptist was Elijah reborn. He interpreted his own mystical experience as the simultaneous appearance of two souls united in the same body, the male surrounded by the female. As noted, Postel believed Jesus had been present in both Joan of Arc and Joanna."
-Yvonne Petry: Gender, Kabbalah and the Reformation- the Mystical Theology of Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), 2004.
"...the restitution of all things was to be accomplished by metempsychosis, which to Postel meant the indwelling of God's presence, the Shechinah or the feminine spirit of Christ.
<<An excellent example of Postel's belief in metempsychosis is revealed in his interpretation of Jacob who becomes another man. In the following passage one should also be aware of Postel's use of symbols: "Iaacob quandiu Jaacob est, extra uadit inter utrumque ad orientem, quoad lucretur quatuor uxores pro una Rachel. Rediens inde mutatur in uirum alterum, in occasu, in transitu torrentis Iaboc, id est Iordanis: et tunc fit Israel, quando praeualuit contra angelum et tollitur illi neruus rebellionis carnis de quo nullus uerus Israelita ab eo tempore uoluntarie comedit. Sicut itaque Christus Iesus, est dignitas et persona in eodem subiecto, sic pro duobus ponitur differentissimis in scriptura, Iaacob et Israel. Christus in suis honoribus et titulo contra usum mundi voluit ad hanc diem in se et suis conculcari, ut in nomine IESU proprio omne genu flectatur. Iaacob fratris supplantator, semel et iterum, fit exul in conquirenda familia. At Israel factus in terra sancta, agit composite familia: et domi praedilectum Biniamin, qui est instar filii et matris, generat." Absconditorum a constitutione mundi clavis (Basel, 1547), sigs. f4, f4v. One should be aware of a key word in the pasage cited, namely, the word composite. Composite nature is the basis of Postel's metaphysical system and his idea of restitution.>>"
"... Postel's imagery is alchemical . He speaks of the union of the sun and moon; of the true medicine which heals all; of his healing powers third in grade after Lull and Clenardus; of metempsychosis; of changing base metals into pure gold; of the mysterious egg which reproduces itself; of being snatched from the waves (de fluctibus) as the sign of the restitution of the Gallim under Noah; of the need to conceal secrets from the uninitiate; of the importance of Solomon's temple and the movement of light from East to West and back again. There are countless similarities between Postel's called-for restitution and the movement later known as Rosicrucianism."
-Marion Kuntz: Guillaume Postel- Prophet of the Restitution of All Things, 1981.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TarotL/files/postelkey.jpg
(membership required)
"At the Renaissance we find the <metempsychosis> doctrine in... the 17th century in the theosophist van Helmont. A modified form of it was adopted by Swedenborg."
http://www.e-paranoids.com/r/re/reincarnation.html
"...our Rota takes her beginning from that day when God spake Fiat <Let it Be> and shall end when he shall speak Pereat <it is finished>..."
-Fama Fraternitatis, 1614
"Were it not a precious thing, that you could so read in one only book, and withal by reading understand and remember, all that which in all other books (which heretofore have been, and are now, and hereafter shall come out) hath been, is, and shall be learned and found out of them?"
-Confessio Fraternitatis, 1615
"May Thoth who pacifies the gods judge me; may Khons defend me, even he who writes truly; may Re hear my plaint, even he who commands the solar bark; may Isdes defend me in the Holy Chamber, [because] the needy one is weighed down with [the burden] which he has lifted up from me; it is pleasant that the gods should ward off the secret (thoughts) of my body."
-Debate between a man tired of life and his soul <pBerlin 3024>
http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/texts/man_tired_of_life.htm
References to Isdes :
"I know the souls of the New Moon: they
are Osiris, Anubis, and Isdes(10)." (note 10, ie. Thoth.) - Faulkner.:Spell 155 of the Coffin texts
"O Isdes, give speech to N."
Budge's dictionary = "one of the company of Thoth."
-ibid, Spell 27 Coffin texts
Dispute between a Man and his Ba.
:"Isdes, the spiritualised intellect symbolized by a baboon, sits
atop the scales of judgment. ......Isdes, the intelligence of the heart, is
the baboon sacred to Toth. The man calls upon this baboon to lift the weight
from his heart and thus redress the balance in his favour."
Bika Reed.:.Rebel in the Soul - a sacred text of ancient Egypt, 1978
-John
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