Legend
Ancient Opinions Upon Psychic Bodies
It must be confessed that modern Spiritualism falls very short of the ideas formerly suggested by the sublime designation which it has assumed. Chiefly intent upon recognising and putting forward the phenomenal proofs of a future existence, it concerns itself little with speculations on the distinction between matter and spirit, and rather prides itself on having demolished materialism without the aid of metaphysics. Perhaps a Platonist might say that the recognition of a future existence is consistent with a very practical and even dogmatic materialism, but it is rather to be feared that such a materialism as this would not greatly disturb the spiritual or intellectual repose of our modern phenomenalists. † Given the consciousness with its sensibilities safely housed in the psychic body which demonstratively survives the physical carcase, and we are like men saved from shipwreck, who are for the moment thankful and content, not giving thought whether they are landed on a hospitable shore, or on a barren rock, or on an island of cannibals. It is not, of course, intended that this “hand to mouth” immortality is sufficient for the many thoughtful minds whose activity gives life and progress to the movement, but that it affords the relief which most people feel when in an age of doubt they make the discovery that they are undoubtedly to live again. To the question, “How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?” modern Spiritualism, with its empirical methods, is not adequate to reply. Yet long before Paul suggested it, it had attention of the most celebrated schools of philosophy, whose speculations on the subject, however little they may seem to be verified, ought not to be without interest to us, who, after all, are still in the infancy of a Spiritualist revival.
It would not be necessary to premise, but for the frequency with which the phrase occurs, that “the spiritual body” is a contradiction in terms. The office of body is to relate spirit to an objective world. By Platonic writers it is usually termed okhema— “vehicle.” It is the medium of action, and also of sensibility. In this philosophy the conception of soul was not simply, as with us, the immaterial subject of consciousness. How warily the interpreter has to tread here, every one knows who has dipped, even superficially, into the controversies among Platonists themselves. All admit the distinction between the rational and the irrational part or principle—the latter including, first, the sensibility, and secondly, the plastic, or that power which in obedience to its sympathies enables the soul to attach itself to, and to organise into a suitable body those substances of the universe to which it is most congruous. It is more difficult to determine whether Plato or his principal followers recognised in the rational soul or nous a distinct and separable entity—that which is some- times discriminated as “the spirit.” Dr. Henry More, no mean authority, repudiates this interpretation. “There can be nothing more monstrous,” he says, “than to make two souls in man, the one sensitive, the other rational, really distinct from one another, and to give the name of astral spirit to the former; when there is in man no astral spirit beside the plastic of the soul itself, which is always inseparable from that which is rational. Nor upon any other account can it be called astral, but as it is liable to that corporeal temperament which proceeds from the stars, or rather from any material causes in general, as not being yet sufficiently united with the divine body—that vehicle of divine virtue or power.” So he maintains that the Kabalistic three souls—Nephesh, Ruach, Neschamah—originate in a misunderstanding of the true Platonic doctrine, which is that of a threefold “vital congruity.” These correspond to the three degrees of bodily existence, or to the three “vehicles”—the terrestrial, the aerial, and the ethereal. The latter is the augoeides—the luciform vehicle of the purified soul whose irrational part has been brought under complete subjection to the rational. The aerial is that in which the great majority of mankind find themselves at the dissolution of the terrestrial body, and in which the incomplete process of purification has to be undergone during long ages of preparation for the soul’s return to its primitive, ethereal state. For it must be remembered that the pre-existence of souls is a distinguishing tenet of this philosophy as of the Kabala. The soul has “sunk into matter.” From its highest original state the revolt of its irrational nature has awakened and developed successively its “vital congruities” with the regions below, passing, by means of its “plastic,” first into the aerial, and afterwards into the terrestrial condition. Each of these regions teems also with an appropriate population which never passes, like the human soul, from one to the other—“gods,” “demons,” and animals. ‡ As to duration, “the shortest of all is that of the terrestrial vehicle. In the aerial, the soul may inhabit, as they define, many ages, and in the ethereal, for ever.”
Speaking of the second body, Henry More says “the soul’s astral vehicle is of that tenuity that itself can as easily pass the smallest pores of the body as the light does glass, or the lightning the scabbard of a sword without tearing or scorching of it.” And again, “I shall make bold to assert that the soul may live in an aerial vehicle as well as in the ethereal, and that there are very few that arrive to that high happiness as to acquire a celestial vehicle immediately upon their quitting the terrestrial one; that heavenly chariot necessarily carrying us in triumph to the greatest happiness the soul of man is capable of, which would arrive to all men indifferently, good o£ bad, if the parting with this earthly body would suddenly mount us into the heavenly. When by a just Nemesis the souls of men that are not heroically virtuous will find themselves restrained within the compass of this caliginous air, as both Reason itself suggests, and the Platonists have unanimously determined.” Thus also the most thoroughgoing, and probably the most deeply versed in the <... continues on page 10-252 >
* Extracted from The Theosophist (Bombay).
† “I am afraid,” says Thomas Taylor, in his introduction to the Phædo, “there are scarcely any at the present day who know that it is one thing for the soul to be separated from the body, and another for the body to be separated from the soul, and that the former is by no means a necessary consequence of the latter.”
‡ The allusion here is to those beings of the several kingdoms of the elements which we theosophists, following after the Kabalists, have called the “elementals.” They never become men.— Ed. Theosophist.
Editor's notes
- ↑ Ancient Opinions Upon Psychic Bodies by Massey C. C., London Spiritualist, No. 388, January 30, 1880, pp. 51-3
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 388, January 30, 1880, pp. 51-3