In search of a soul

 An Anglican pastor, preaching an evening sermon, used the following incident to make the worshippers at the service aware of the relationship between earthly life and eternal life: at one point, a nocturnal bird swooped into the church through an open window. It circled the church several times, perched for a moment on a pillar, and then flew back out of the window.
The pastor compared the House of God with mortality and the bird with the human soul. The bird flew out of the darkness, out of nowhere. He stayed in the temple for a little while and - this moment, this brief fragment of his life, was a temporal existence. But then the night visitor flew away, melted into the darkness and its further fate is shrouded in mystery.

What is hidden in this darkness? Where does the human soul reside before it is bound by the chains of the body and after it is freed from them? - Man has been asking himself this question since time immemorial, and unfortunately he has not been able to find an answer... However, he is always looking for a solution to this mystery, searching persistently, with a spark of hope in his heart, that he will finally find a way to break through the veil hiding the mysterious world of the afterlife. And when that spark goes out, what follows is a terrible spiritual dilemma that has already put a suicidal tool in the hand of many (in 1931, a student at the University of Warsaw committed suicide for these very reasons. "I want to know what it is like on the other side". -were the words of the last letter. - Translator's note).
Already in prehistoric times, the question of spiritual life troubled the people of that time. Archaeological excavations testify to this, the oldest of which were discovered in the Gargas cave in the Pyrenees. These are wall paintings from the Middle Orinician period (Palaeolithic or Stone Age). The people of this period were involved in hunting, which had a significant impact on man's attitude to spiritual phenomena. Whereas the agricultural population sees that the phenomena that surround them do not depend on them, but are determined by atmospheric and climatic changes, etc., the hunter sees that the success or failure of the hunter is not dependent on them. whereas the hunter puts his success or failure in hunting down to chance, guided by certain mysterious causes. Man can bring these causes about himself and certain magical procedures are used to do this. Magic consists in the fact that man causes a cause, an effect, but there is no logical link between this cause and effect. The well-known archaeologist of history and at the same time art historian Luguel supposes that the first magical procedures to produce an effect were hand movements. We know that even in today's magic (and also in magnetism), hand movements play an essential role. In the Gargas cave, white handprints were discovered on a red background, in various positions, intended to express certain magical procedures. It is extremely interesting that these hands are clearly mutilated. It would be very difficult to establish for what purpose the prehistoric magician mutilated his hands, were it not for the fact that even today, in many primitive peoples, the artificial deformation of the hands is a prerequisite for successful magical experimentation. Similarly, the mere knocking out of teeth (Bantu Negroes), the deformation of the skull (Incas) are supposed to predispose certain people to perform magical procedures.


The relics from the Gargas Cave are the first known evidence that even in such remote times, man tried to get his hands on the forces that governed the world, and there were even female figures with strongly marked sexual characteristics (such as the famous "Venus of Willendorf") used for magical operations to enhance fertility.

In the Magdalenian era (also the Palaeolithic era), so-called "baton de commendement" or magic sticks were in use, covered with realistic, liguraine or geometric drawings, which were used by prehistoric magicians. These sticks have survived to the present day and we know what a momentous role they play in modern magic.In the same era we have for the first time a clearly crystallised human attitude to the afterlife. In the graves at Chant Seiappe and others, skeletons were found so strongly contracted that the knees touched the chin and the calves touched the thighs. The head was bent horizontally downwards and the face was hidden in the hands. In order to shrink the dead man in this way, his tendons had to be cut and he was restrained tightly with ropes made of bast.


What was the purpose of this procedure Well, people wanted to keep the soul in the body for as long as possible. It is extremely interesting that even today people claim that after a person's death the soul becomes hostile and harmful to the surroundings; such a soul, until the body disintegrates, circulates in the form of a wraith or vampire in the vicinity of the grave, harming and scaring the inhabitants. The fettering of the body is supposed to prevent these posthumous wanderings. This is still practised in Java, Sumatra and Celebes. In Russia and Poland, people tie a handkerchief around the mouth of the deceased, sprinkled with holy water, also for this purpose. (Dr Wlodzimierz Antoniewicz, professor at the University of Veraz, discovered a Tartar cemetery near Trakai in Lithuania, very interesting because the deceased in their coffins were heavily restrained. During one of my first excursions in the country, I witnessed the following event: in June 1930, I stopped for the night in the village of Svarychiv at the foot of the Eastern Carpathians. Outside the village there is a mound under which lies the corpse of a beggar, murdered by a certain mulatto from Poznan. Late one evening, one of the local villagers, half-conscious with fear, came into the village and told him that the wraith of this beggar was chasing him. Just then an old blacksmith, nearly 90 years old, spoke up: "And I told you to tie Vasyl's mouth with a rag and his legs together before burying him. You did not listen to me - and now you have. Even the aspen wheels won't help any more, it's too late!"


There are also traces indicating that in the Magdalenian era, funeral services were held in honour of the deceased, with the use of - for drinking - human skulls.


This belief in spirits and their contact with the living, of which we have the first clear traces in such remote history, continues and develops through the Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages. When writing finally comes into being, even in its oldest monuments we have references to the relationship between the two worlds: the living and the dead. We know, for example, that the most important part of the service of the Indian Brahmans was the worship of the dead. There were certain days of the year (21 January and 14 June, it seems) dedicated to the invocation of spirits. Only priests of higher ranks were allowed to take part in these gloomy and mysterious rites.


In ancient Egypt, priests and sorcerers made contact with the dead very easily. They supposedly used for these purposes a medium, who was put into a hypnotic trance, which is practised to this day, during modern spiritualistic séances, In one of the oldest monuments of Egyptian writing, namely in the "Book of the Dead", we find a lot of interesting records for learning about the views of the ancient Egyptians on the course of the human soul after death. Of particular interest is the issue of metempsychosis, i.e. the wandering of the soul and its successive incarnations in animals and humans. This wandering lasts for about 3,000 years, with the first stage being a stay in the body of a pig.
In some Arab tribes living in the northern Sahara (south of the Tidikelt desert), remnants of beliefs in metempsychosis still survive today. It is noteworthy that the human soul, after travelling posthumously in the bodies of various animals, is finally incarnated in ... the blacksmith, as the lowest degree of humanity. It is important to know, however, that the blacksmith's trade is - for reasons unknown - deeply despised by all Berbers.

But let us go back into the darkness of distant antiquity and lift the veil hiding the secret spiritualistic practices of the Chaldeans. From them the Egyptians took over many details, connected with the cult of the dead, it is said, that Chaldean priests disposed of means, with which they could at any time call up spirits and consult them in important matters. A few incantations have survived to the present day which, apart from their unfailing power, possess the grace and beauty of the highest poetry.
The spiritualistic practices of the ancient Greeks are also interesting. They attached great importance to oracles and instructions given by the spirits of the dead. There were even places specially haunted by the spirits and spiritualistic ceremonies were held there in secret, accessible only to a select few. These places included Figalia in Arcadia, Heracles on the Pont and apparently Cumae, where there was a Greek colony (southern Italy). Some writers state that associated with the cult of the dead in Greece was - the cult of the senses. At Cape Teneamaron there was a temple whose priestess was the most beautiful virgin of the province. Once a year, young men would gather for a mysterious spiritualistic ritual, at which a spirit would appear and choose the man himself to whom the priestess would belong.


However, precedence in the highest development of the cult of the dead must be given to Ephesus. The inhabitants of this city were so engrossed in witchcraft practices that St Paul the Apostle stepped in and, with fiery sermons, moved the Ephesians to put all their works and magical formulas on one great pyre and burn them. We read about this in the Acts of the Apostles (XIX, 19). How many priceless documents then fell victim to exaggerated religious fanaticism!


The Romans fared no better, who, as Suetonius mentions, burned, on the orders of the Caesar Augustus, some 2,000 works of sorcery, among which was the famous formula - and always infallible - for invoking spirits, compiled by some magician from North Africa.
From the history of spiritism in ancient Rome we have an interesting fact to note. stating that already at that time it was known to communicate with the spirits of the dead through a knocking table. In fact, according to the Roman historian Tertullian, several fraudsters were caught exploring this new field of knowledge.