Ancient Beliefs in the Immortality of Soul

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 14 pages

From the third number of The Theosophist, December 1879, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings II under the heading The Popular Idea of Soul-Survival. The opening admits what cannot be known — at what epoch the dawning intellect of man first accepted the idea of a future life — and rests instead on what can: that from the first its roots struck so deeply and entwined so closely about human instinct that the belief has endured through all generations, embedded in the consciousness of every nation and tribe, civilised, semi-civilised or savage.

The evidence is gathered by comparison rather than argument. In Christian Russia, Wallachia, Bulgaria and Greece the Oriental Church enjoins offerings of rice and drink on the graves at All Saints; in India the same propitiatory gifts of rice are made to the departed; and the poor savage of New Caledonia sacrifices food to the skulls of his beloved dead. Against this Blavatsky sets Herbert Spencer's explanation of the worship of souls and relics — that it follows from the primitive idea that any property characterising an aggregate inheres in all its parts, so that the soul present in the preserved body is present also in its preserved parts. Her objection is that the definition applies equally to the jewelled relic of the cultured Roman Catholic and to the dusty skull of the fetish-worshipper, and that the former would not accept it.

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