Metempsychosis

If metempsychosis be a true doctrine, her spirit must have once animated a steel-clad knight.

The adventure of the companions of Ulysses, changed into beasts by Circe, was much more ancient than the dogma of the metempsychosis, broached in Greece and Italy by Pythagoras.

Pythagoras borrowed Metempsychosis of the Ægyptians, but since, it hath been received of divers Nations, and especially of our Druides[…].

The Fates that are so careful to shut the doors of each successive life behind us had, in this case, been neglectful, and Charlie was looking, though that he did not know, where never man had been permitted to look with full knowledge since Time began. Above all he was absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold to me for five pounds; and he would retain that ignorance, for bank-clerks do not understand metempsychosis, and a sound commercial education does not include Greek.

Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for instance. What they called nymphs, for example.

To go along assuming that Victoria the girl tourist and Veronica the sewer rat were one and the same V. was not at all to bring up any metempsychosis: only to affirm that his quarry fitted in with The Big One, the century’s master cabal.

Hers was a metempsychosis of novelty, her mind a vapid thing until animated by the next absolute conviction.

Faiths and philosophies the world over have entertained prospects of some existence beyond the grave (perhaps in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls), and belief in ghosts, shades or the wandering spirits of lost souls has been ubiquitous. Any culture crediting supernatural powers is likely to entertain an afterlife of sorts. But this Christian identification of the self with a 'separate soul' which transcended the flesh was especially indebted to theosophies rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean.