Lévi on Death Being the Birth-Pang of Life

Éliphas Lévi, Arthur Edward Waite · Constitution of Man Series · 6 pages

A short piece in Waite's translation whose first sentence is its thesis: there is no such thing as death. Nothing in nature perishes; whatever has lived goes on living always under new forms, and even the anterior forms are not destroyed, since they persist in memory — we still see in imagination the child we once knew, though he is now an old man. Traces we believe effaced are not blotted out, since a chance circumstance may recall them; and the manner in which we see them is in the astral light, which transmits them to the brain through the nervous system.

The consolation offered is that death will come no more impiteous and terrible to mow down the ripe blades of the new age, but will give place to the angel of progress who gently liberates souls from mortal chains — for when men know how to live they will no longer die, but transform like the chrysalis that becomes a butterfly. The terrors of death are called daughters of ignorance, death herself being hideous only by reason of the rubbish that covers her and the sombre hues surrounding her images; and death truly is the birth-pang of life. The force in nature that does not die, and perpetually transforms beings in order to preserve them, is the reason or word of nature — to which the word of man is analogous, being the expression of his will directed by reason, and omnipotent when reasonable.

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