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We can explore the spectacle of heathen conversion not only through a cultural forgery such as Psalmanazar’s but through the literary and philosophical fashioning of Eastern religions into consumable objects of moral pedagogy. “Virtue,” as we have seen, is an ever-shifting ground of competing ideologies. Morals are reinvented at the intersection of discursive and material encounters between East and West; and China, though positioned at the eastern endpoint of such an imagined moral geography, at the same time powerfully captured the contradictions of such constructions of the Orient’s religious exemplarity. As the Orientalist scholar Antoine Galland wrote, the eighteenth-century Orient encompassed “tous les peuples de l’Asie jusqu’à la Chine, mahométans ou païens et idolâtres.”1 Confucianism may have distinguished Chinese civilization from others, even while affiliating it with the ethnic philosophers of ancient Greece; but Buddhism and Taoism also tied China to India and other parts of a heathen Orient made up of “Mahometans or pagans and idolaters,” to borrow Galland’s phrase. This conflation of places and religions was nowhere more apparent, or popularized, than in the Oriental tale tradition, a European literary phenomenon that featured marvelous stories, far-flung regions of Asia, and idolatrous excess. The publication of the first volumes of Les Mille et une nuits (Thousand and One Nights) in 1704 and their appearance in English in 1706 as the Arabian Nights Entertainments launched the popularity of the Oriental tale in English print culture. The tales also introduced to the English public a diverse Arab world far more enchanting than the long-held perceptions of Islam’s religious and military threats to Western Christendom.2 Translated and adapted by Galland, the corpus of the Nights included a wide assortment of folktales derived from Arabic, as well as Persian , Indian, and Turkish sources.3 The stories’ fantastical journeys, sorcery, and schemes and misfortunes of humble folk as well as sultans evoked a spectrum of places, customs, and times that, while entertaining, nonetheless represented an c h a p t e r t h r e e Transmigration, Fabulous Pedagogy, and the Morals of the Orient Transmigration, Fabulous Pedagogy, and the Morals of the Orient 115 integrated cosmos of “Mahometan” idolatry that included but was not limited to Islam. Alternately denounced and romanticized for its assortment of beliefs in the supernatural, the Orient was imagined as a hethnic space of potential conversions , both religious and economic, and thus offered new didactic possibilities to English moralists of the early eighteenth century.4 They constructed a broader Orient with which China was affiliated, and “China” came to designate not only a specific geographic empire but also a shared set of ambivalences toward an early modern Orient defined by religious excess. Among the most controversial and satirized examples of Eastern religion was metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the souls. Identified both as a praiseworthy tenet of ancient Greek philosophy and as a vulgar, modern practice of Eastern civilizations, transmigration appeared to blend supernatural elements of Islamic “Mahometanism” with theories of spirit life and reincarnation linked to Egypt, India, and China, and with belief systems as different as Hinduism, Buddhism , Taoism, and Zoroastrianism. Often thought to have spread from the fifthcentury teachings of Pythagoras eastward to Asia, the doctrine of transmigration generally held that the soul was immortal and could be transferred from the human body, after death, into that of successive animals. By some accounts, one’s personal identity or consciousness would remain intact and eventually return to human form, enabling a person such as Pythagoras to tell of his multiple lives and legendary travels over thousands of years.5 The idea that the body’s animating force could travel between species and even between earthly and heavenly stations along the Great Chain of Being was deemed blasphemous by the defenders of a divinely ordered Cartesian cosmography as well as by those committed to the Aristotelian rationalism of classical antiquity. In early eighteenth-century discourse, the East is invariably cited as a source of both blame and inspiration for the hypothetical disruption of the human-animal hierarchy and the overactive imaginations that entertained such interspecies intimacy. For the fluidity implied by the transmigrations of old souls into new bodies also conjured possibilities of illicit forms of contact, whether erotic or even cannibalistic, between oneself and another whose identity might not match their outward appearance. Paradoxically, the vices of Eastern idolatry are reinterpreted as virtues by English fable writers who combine the principles of...

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