American Metempsychosis: Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Metempsychosis, transmigration of the soul, or the passage of soul from one body to another (broadly speaking, [a] either from human to human body; [b] from human to other animal or plant body or, again, [c] through a serial succession of different kinds of bodies metamorphically as in the case of Proteus in Homer’s Odyssey Book 4, or [d] through a vertical succession of different qualitative bodies, e.g., physical, pneumatic, lunar, solar, astral, etc. in descent into the cosmos or in ascent up through the cosmos and beyond (as in Porphyry, Sentences 29) is the belief that the soul (or principle of animation of a body) undergoes a series of rebirths, perhaps, but not always, with the aim of escaping the wheel of rebirth and subjection to the cycle of opposites and/or as a result of some primal mistake, fall, or decision. This complex view is found in the Eastern traditions of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, particularly in the Bhagavad Gītā, The Vedas, The Upanishads, and the Dhammapada, and also in the Western world, starting, as far back, according to what later testimonies report, as Pherecydes, Pythagoras (c. 582–507 BCE), and the devotees of Orpheus (known as Orphics), then later in Empedocles (490–430 BCE), Plato (427–347 BCE), Plotinus (204–270 CE), Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, etc. From these later thinkers (e.g., Plotinus to Proclus), collectively known as Neoplatonic thinkers, who were in fact the inheritors and developers of the entire ancient thought-heritage, this view was transmitted, first, into Jewish, Arabic, and Christian thought (transmigration of the soul is to be found, for instance, in Origen of Alexandria and in his later Christian followers) and later into the broader complex heritage of Hermetic, Neopythagorean , and Neoplatonic thinkers who helped in some measure to develop the modern world (among them: Ficino, Giordano Bruno, Pico della Mirandella in the Italian Renaissance; Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton in the development of physical science; Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling in German Idealism; Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley in English Romanticism) and to transmit this mosaic to the New World (on this see Carl Huffman, “Pythagoreanism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 29, 178 / notes 2006, last modified June 14, 2010, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/ pythagoreanism/; and, more generally, Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968]; Paolo Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science, Trans. Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen [Malden, England: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001]). The term metempsychosis occurs in Alexander of Aphrodisias (De An. 17, 18), Porphyry (De Abst. 4.16), Proclus (in Rempublicam 2.340), and is related to the cognate terms metemsomatosis/metemsomatesthai, “transmigration ” and “to be put into another body,” which can be found in Plotinus, Enneads I, 1, 12; II, 9, 6; IV, 3, 9. The English terms “reincarnation” and “transmigration” come from the Latin. The Greek or Latinized Greek word “metamorphosis,” the changing of forms or biological development from one form to another, is not synonymous with metempsychosis, though Ovid’s placing of Pythagoras’s speech prominently at the conclusion of his Metamorphoses, Bk. XV, explicitly presents Pythagoras’s philosophy of metempsychosis as a perennial philosophy of cyclical return in the midst of Heraclitean flux and, therefore, again implicitly as a prototype of metamorphosis itself. On reincarnation generally, see the Encyclopedia of Religion, Macmillan, vol. 11 or 12, and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 8, under “reincarnation.” Generally, on Pythagoras, see Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras, trans. Thomas Taylor (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, Ltd., 1986); and Christoph Riedweg, Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence, trans. Steven Rendall (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); on Plato, Aristotle, and Neoplatonism, R.T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 2d ed. (London: Duckworth, 1995); Kevin Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Guide to Neoplatonism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004) (see conclusion, chapter 5.2 for the story of the “afterlife” from Plotinus to the contemporary period). For the Orphics and Pherecydes, see G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 37–72; for testimonies on Pythagoras (and the Egyptians), ibid., 222–24; and for Empedocles, Diels-Kranz, fragments B 112, 115, 117, 118, 121, 127, 127, 146, 147. 2. Mark Vernon, “Reincarnation in Jewish Mysticism and Gnosticism,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24.1 (2005): 174. For another example of how Jacob’s dream was being interpreted according to Philo’s Jewish Mysticism as well...