or instance. Herodotus tells us:

"The Egyptians were the first to hold the opinion that the soul of man
is immortal and that when the body dies it enters into the form of an
animal which is born at the moment, thence, passing on from one animal
into another until it has circled through the forms of all the
creatures which tenant the earth, the water, and the air, after which
it enters again into a human form and is born anew. The whole period
of the transmigration is (they say) three thousand years."[104]

This passage evidently refers to the resurrection of the "life atoms."
H. P. Blavatsky, in the _Theosophist_, vol. 4, pages 244, 286,
confirms this in the following words:

"We are taught that for 3000 years, at least, the 'mummy,'
notwithstanding all the chemical preparations, goes on throwing off to
the last invisible atoms, which, from the hour of death, re-entering
the various vortices of being, go indeed 'through every variety of
organised life forms.' But it is not the soul, the fifth,[105] least
of all, the sixth[106] principle, but the life atoms of the Jiva,[107]
the second principle. At the end of the three thousand years,
sometimes more, sometimes less, after endless transmigrations, all
these atoms are once more drawn together, and are made to form the new
outer clothing or the body of the same monad (the real soul) which
they had already been clothed with two or three thousands of years
before. Even in the worst case, that of the annihilation of the
conscious personal principle,[108] the monad, or individual
soul,[109] is ever the same, as are also the atoms of the lower
principles,[110] which, regenerated and renewed in this ever-flowing
river of being, are magnetically drawn together owing to their
affinity and are once more reincarnated together...."

Certain authors have stated that belief in Resurrection was the origin
of embalming, because it was thought that after three thousand years
the soul returned to the same body, that it immediately rose again,
when the body had been preserved, whereas if such had not been the
case, it entered wherever it could, sometimes even into the body of a
lower creature. Herodotus, however, says that after the cycle of three
thousand years the soul enters a new body, not the mummified
one,[111] and this would lead one to imagine that there were other
reasons for the process of embalming. Indeed, it became general only
during the decline of Egypt; at the beginning