Psalms 90:3~4
[King Solomon:] The Lord possessed me in the beginnig of His way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him: and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him; rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.
Book of Proverbs 8:22~31
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Alexandrian Philosopher
The air is ful of souls; those who are nearest to earth descending to be tied to mortal bodies return to other bodies, desiring to live in them.
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De Somniis
The company of disembodied souls is distributed in various orders. The law of then is to enter mortal bodies and after certain prescribed periods be again set free. But those possessed of a diviner structure are absolved from all local bonds of earth. Some of these souls choose confinement in mortal bodies because they are earthly and corporeally inclined. . . .
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The Zohar
Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai ( AD 80 )
All souls are subject to the trials of transmigration; and men do not know the designs of the Most High with regard to them: they know not how they are being at all times judged, both before coming into this world and when they leave it. They do not know how many transformations and mysterious trial they must undergo; how many souls and spirits come to this world without returning to the palace of the divine king.
The souls must reenter the absolute substance whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this end they must develop all the perfections, the germ of which is planted in them; and if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must commence another, a third, and so forth, until they have acquired the condition which fits them for reunion with God.
Vol. II fol. 99 et seq.
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Then death, so call'd, is but old matter dress'd
In some new figure, and a varied vest:
Thus all things are but alter'd, nothing dies;
And here and there the unbodied spirit flies...
From tenement to tenement though toss'd,
The soul is still the same, the figure only lost:
And, as the soften'd wax new seals receives,
This face assumes, and that impression leaves;
Now call'd by one, now by another name,
The form is only changed, the wax is still the same.
So death, so call'd by one, now another name,
To seek her fortune in some other place.
Metamorphoses
trans. John Dryden
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Frances Cornford ( 1886- )
I laid down upon the shore
And dreamed a little space;
I heard the great waves break and roar;
The sun was on my face. . . .
And so my dream began.
How all of this had been before:
How ages far away
I lay on some forgotten shore
As here I lie to-day. . . .
I have forgotten whence I came,
Or what my home might be,
Or by what strange and savage name
I called that thundering sea.
I only know the sun shone down
As still it shines to-day,
And in my fingers long and brown
The little pebbles lay.
from "Pre-existence"
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A.E. Waite ( 1857-1942 )
'Tis scarecly true that souls come naked down
to take abode up in this earthly town,
Or naked pass-all that they wear denied:
We enter slip-shod and with clothes awry,
And we take with us much that by and by
May prove no easy task to put aside.
Collected Poems
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William Ernest Henley ( 1849-1903 )
Or ever the knightly years were gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was a King in Babylon
And you were a Christian Slave
I saw, I took, I cast you by,
I bent and broke your pride. . . .
And a myriad suns have set and shone
Since then upon the grave
Decreed by the King of Babylon
To her that had been his Slave.
The pride I trampled is now my scathe,
For it tramples me again.
The old resentment lasts like death,
For you love, yet you refrain.
I break my heart on your hard unfaith,
And I break my heart in vain. . . .
To W.A.
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John Maesfield ( 1878- )
I held that when a person dies
His soul returns again to earth;
Arrayed in some new flesh-disguise,
Another mother gives him birth.
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain
The old soul takes the road again.
Such was my belief and trust
This hand, this hand that holds the pen,
Had many hundred times to dust
And turned, as dust, to dust again;
These eyes of mind have blinked and shone
In Thebes, in Troy, in Babylon. . . .
I know that my lives to be
My sorry heart will ache and burn,
Ans worship unavailingly
the woman whom I used to spurn,
And to shake to see another have
The love I spurned, the love she gave.
And I shall know, in angry words,
In gibes, and mocks, and many a tear,
A carrion flock of homing-birds,
The gibes and scorns I uttered here.
The brave word that I failed to speak
Will brand me dastard on the cheek.
And as I wander on the roads
I shall be helped and healed and blessed;
Kind words shall cheer and be as goads
To urge to heights before unguessed.
My road shall be the road I made,
All that I gave shall be repaid.
So shall I fight, so shall I tread,
In this long war beneath the stars;
So shall a glory wreathe my head,
So shall I faint and show the scars,
until this case, this clogging mould,
Be smithed all to kingly gold.
A Creed