A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"""REINCARNATION. 99dead the Mlechhas mostly trying their best to preserve the dead, bodies, either by careful burial or by the<jnore elaborate processes of mummifying, and the Aryasgenerally burning their dead.Herein lies the key to a great secret the fact that noMlechha race, whether Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian,ever attained to the idea of the soul as a separate entitywhich can live independent of the body, without the helpof the Ari/as, especially of the Hindus.Although Herodotus states that the Egyptians were thefirst to conceive the idea of the immortality of the soul, andstates as a doctrine of the Egyptians that the soul, afterthe dissolution of the body, enters again and again into acreature that comes to life ;then that the soul wandersthroughall the animals of the land and the sea andthrough all the birds, and finally after three thousandyears returns to a human body," yet modern researchesinto Egyptology have as yet found no trace of metempsychosis in the popular Egyptian religion. On the otherhand, the most recent researches of Maspero, A. Erman,and other eminent Egytologists tend to confirm thesupposition that the doctrine of palingenesis was not athome with the Egyptians.With the ancient Egyptians the soul was only adouble, having no individuality of itsown, and never ableto break its connection with the body. It persists only solong as the body lasts, and ifby chance the corpse isdestroyed, the departed soul must suffer a second deathand annihilation. The soul after death was allowed toroam freely all over the world, but always returning towhere the corpse was at night, always miserable, alwayshungry and thirsty, always extremely desirous to enjoylife once more, and never being able to fulfil it. If any