certain that one can only with difficulty explain how a man without erudition, like Boehme, never having received this opinion from anyone, has been able to explain it so clearly. "When one sees man existing," says this theosophist, "one can say: Here all Eternity is manifested in one image."[1]
The abode of this being is an intermediate point between heaven and hell, love and anger; that, of the things to which he is attached, becomes his kind. . . . If he inclines toward the celestial nature, he assumes a celestial form, and the human form becomes infernal if he inclines toward hell; for as the mind is, so is the body. In whatever way the mind projects itself, it shadows forth its body with a similar form and a similar source.[2]
It is upon this principle, which one finds still everywhere diversely expressed, that the dogma of the transmigration of souls is founded. This dogma, explained in the ancient mysteries,[3] and received by all peoples,[4] has been to such an extent disfigured in what the moderns have called Metempsychosis, that it would be necessary to exceed considerably the limits of these Examinations in order to give an explanation which could be understood. Later I will endeavour to expose my sentiment upon this mystery, when I treat of Theurgy and other occult sciences to which it is allied. 33. God! Thou couldst save them by opening their eyes.
Lysis here approaches openly one of the greatest difficulties
of nature, that which in all time has furnished to the
skeptics and to the atheists the weapons that they have
believed most formidable. Hierocles has not concealed it in
