Post-Mortem Wanderings of the Wicked Soul

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 44 pages

The longest study in this batch, and the fullest statement in the section of what happens to the part of a man that does not go on. Reincarnation is defined first as the serial and periodical rebirth of every individual monad from pralaya to pralaya, indissolubly linked with Karma. Against it is set the astral monad — the shell of the deceased personality, disintegrating along with the corpse, known as bhut in Hinduism, eidolon in Greek philosophy and elementary in Theosophy: the deceptive image of lingering desires in Kama-Loka, the Limbus of the Catholics and the Hades of the Greeks.

One passage is uncharacteristically blunt and worth knowing about in advance. The evocation of the dead, and equally the preservation of corpses, is called a violation of the laws of nature and an outrage on the modesty of death, which hides the works of destruction as we should hide those of reproduction — with the observation that cemeteries poison the atmosphere of towns and that the miasma of corpses blights children in their mothers' wombs. The constructive half follows the immortal Ego instead, described as the root of every new incarnation and the string on which the ephemeral personalities are threaded one after another; and it ends where the whole section tends, with the Spiritual Soul entering Devachan in full consciousness once the post-mortem stupor is over and the last ante-mortem desire dissipated.

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