Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/95

Rh, for he expressed it while quite unaware of its similarity to the theory held esoterically by the Egyptian priests and exoterically recorded by Herodotus, who, apparently, became their pupil in the monastic college at Heliopolis. Judging from what Herodotus and others of the ancient Greeks, and Romans as well, have written touching thereon, we arrive at the following summary: ‘The human soul was believed to remain in the after-death state during a period of three thousand years. Its human-plane body of the moment of death disintegrating, the constituents went to form the bodies of animals and plants, transmigrating from one to another during the three thousand years. At the end of that period the soul gathers together the identical particles of matter which had thus been continually transmigrating and which had constituted its former earth-plane body of the moment of death, and from them rebuilds, through habit, as a bird its nest, a new body and is reborn in it as a human being. Cf. Herodotus, ii. 123; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, iii. 843–61. In common with ancient historians and philosophers, Herodotus (ii. 171) refuses to divulge, in a literal manner, the higher or esoteric teachings of the Mysteries of Antiquity:

‘On this lake [within the sacred precinct of the temple at Sais] the Egyptians perform by night the representation of his adventures [i.e. the symbolic adventures touching the birth, life, death, and regeneration of Osiris—‘whose name’, writes Herodotus, ‘I consider it impious to divulge’], which they call Mysteries. On these matters, however, though accurately acquainted with the particulars of them, I must [as an initiate] observe a discreet silence. So, too, with regard to the Mysteries of Demeter [celebrated at Eleusis, in Greece], which the Greeks term “The Thesmophoria”, I know them [as an initiate], but I shall not mention them, except so far as may be done without impiety [or done lawfully].’

It has now been proven by archaeological and other research that the Mysteries consisted of symbolic dramatic performances open only to initiates and neophytes fit for initiation, illustrating the universally diffused esoteric teachings concerning death and resurrection (i.e. rebirth); and that the doctrine of transmigration of the human soul into animal bodies—if depicted at all—was not intended to be taken (as it has been taken by the uninitiated) literally, but symbolically as in Plato’s Republic, detailed reference to which follows herein. (Cf. Herodotus, ii. 122.)

Herodotus in the last-mentioned passage gives a symbolic account of the descent into Hades and the return to the human world of King Rhampsinitus, in whose honour the priests of Egypt therefore instituted what was probably—when rationally interpreted—a rebirth festival. The most ancient recorded parallel now known exists in the Ṛig Veda (Maṇḍala x, Sūkta 135), wherein,