Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1865

This book, impatiently expected for some time, has just appeared at Mr. Didier & Co. store. All of those that know the author, his erudition and analytical and investigative mind, did not doubt that this serious issue of the plurality of the existences would be dealt with by him according to its importance. We are pleased to say that he did not fail in his undertaking. Nonetheless he did not do much to use his own reasoning to demonstrate this great law of humanity, although he dedicated himself to the subject. However wise he may be, he is humble, very humble even and that rarely is the corollary of knowledge. He says that his personal opinion would not be relevant and would weigh little on the scale and that is why he bases the work more on other people’s opinion than on his own. He wanted to demonstrate that the principle had not been foreseen by the greatest geniuses of all times; that it is found in every religion, sometimes clear and categorically formulated, but frequently disguised by allegory that implicitly is the source of a number of dogmas. He proves by authentic documents that the theory of the immortality and progression of the souls was part of secret teachings, only reserved to the initiated in the mysteries. That could have utility in those remote times, as he demonstrates, by hiding from the masses certain truths that they were not mature enough to understand, and that would have confused instead of enlightened them. His work is then rich in citations from the sacred books of the Hindus, Persians, Jewish, Christians, Greek Philosophers, the Neo-Platonic, the doctrines of the Druids, to modern writers such as Charles Bonnet, Ballanche, Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Jean Reynaud, Henri Martin, etc. and by conclusion and final expression the Spiritist books.

In that vast horizon the revises every opinion and the diverse theories about the origin and destinies of the soul. He gives a large space to the doctrine of animal metempsychosis, treating it in a new way. He demonstrates that the plurality of human existences preceded it and that the transmigration into the bodies of animals is just a derivation of that and not the principle. It was the belief reserved to the masses, incapable of understanding the high abstract truth, and as a brake to the passions. The incarnation in animals was a punishment, a kind of visual and present hell that was supposed to impress more than the fear of a spiritual punishment. Here is what Timaeus of Locri, that Cicero affirmed to have been the teacher of Plato, says about it: “If someone is vicious and violates the laws of the state it is necessary that the person be punished by the laws and censorships; the person must then be spanked by the fear of hell, by the anxiety of the continuous penalties, punishments and the horrors and inevitable punishments that are reserved to the unfortunate criminals down below Earth.”

“I praise a lot the Ionic poet (Homer) for having turned men religious, for old and useful fables, because like we heal the bodies with stinky medication if they do not respond to more pleasant one, we also repeal the souls for their false speeches if they are not led by the truthful ones. It is for the same reason that one must establish transient penalties based on the belief in the transmigration of the souls, so that the souls of shy men take, after death, the bodies of women exposed to scorn and injuries; the souls of the murderers to the bodies of wild animals to receive punishment there; the souls of sinners to the bodies of pigs and wild boars; the souls of inconstant and frivolous to the bodies of flying birds; the souls of the lazy, idle, ignorant and mad ones to the bodies of sea creatures. All these things are judged by the goddess Nemesis in the second period, that is, in the circle of the second region around Earth, with the demons, avengers of crimes that are the earthly Inquisitors of human action and to whom the conductor God of everything assigned with the administration of the world full of gods, men and other animals that were produced according to the excellent image of the eternal form.”

It follows from that and from several other documents that the majority of the philosophers openly professed animal metempsychosis as a means because they did not believe it themselves and that they had a secret and more rational doctrine about future life. That seems also to have been Pythagoras’ feelings; as it is known he was not the author of the idea of metempsychosis but he was only its spreader in Greece after having found it among the Indians. As a matter of fact incarnation in animals was only a temporary punishment of a few thousands of years, more or less according to the culpability, a kind of prison from which the soul would enter humanity. Animal incarnation, therefore, was not an absolute condition but it was connected, as one can see, to human reincarnation. It was a kind of scarecrow to the simple ones, much more than an article of faith to the old philosophers. Hence, as people say to children: “if you are bad the bad wolf will devour you”, in Antiquity they said to the criminals: “you will become a wolf”.

The doctrine of the plurality of the existence, coming out of fables and from the times of ignorance, today evidently tends to take part in modern philosophy, abstraction made of Spiritism, because serious thinkers find in that idea the only possible solution to the greatest moral problems of human life. Mr. Pezzani’s work then comes just in time to cast the historical light upon that important question. It will spare laborious and difficult researches, many times impossible to a lot of people. The author did not write the book from Spiritism’s point of view that is only used as an accessory and as a teaching. He wrote it from a philosophical point of view in order to open to him doors that would have been closed given the label of a new belief. It is the complement of the Plurality of Inhabited Worlds by Mr. Flammarion that on his side vulgarized one of the great principles of our Doctrine without talking about that.

We shall return to Mr. Pezzani’s work, making several citations to that.