still prevalent in those parts of Brittany in which civilisation had
not yet exercised its sceptical, materialising influence; there even
existed druids--probably degenerate ones--in Great Britain and France;
in the Saone-et-Loire district, they seem to have been called the
"Adepts of the White Religion"[127]; both in them and in their
ancestors, belief in rebirth remained unshakable.

ANCIENT GREECE (_Magna Graecia_).

In Greece, the doctrine of Rebirths is met with in the Orphic
tradition, continued by Pythagoras and Plato. Up to the present time,
this tradition has probably found its best interpreter in Mr. G. R.

S. Mead, an eminent theosophist and a scholar of the first rank. We
recommend our readers to study his _Orpheus_, if they desire a
detailed account of this tradition.

Its origins are lost in antiquity, only a few obscure shreds
remaining; Pherecydes, however,[128] when speaking of the immortality
of the soul, refers to the doctrine of Rebirths; it is also presented
very clearly by both Pythagoras and Plato.

According to the Pythagorean teaching, the human soul emanates from
the Soul of the World, thus affirming, at the outset, the divine
nature of the former. It teaches subsequently that this soul assumes
successive bodies until it has fully evolved and completed the "Cycle
of Necessity."[129]

Pythagoras, according to Diogenes of Laertius,[130] was the first in
Greece to teach the doctrine of the return of souls to earth. He gave
his disciples various details of his past lives; he appears to have
been the initiate Oethalides, in the times of the Argonauts; then,
almost immediately afterwards, Euphorbus, who was slain by Menelaus at
the siege of Troy; again he was Hermotimus of Clazomenae, who, in the
temple of Juno at Argos,[131] recognised the shield he was carrying
when his body was slain as Euphorbus, and which Menelaus had given as
an offering to the goddess[132]; at a later date he was Pyrrhus, a
fisherman of Delos, and, finally, Pythagoras.

In all likelihood this genealogy is not correct in every detail, it
comes to us from the disciples of the sage of Samos, who were not very
trustworthy in their reports.

Empedocles, one of the early disciples of Pythagoras, said that he
inhabited a female body in his preceding existence. Saint Clement of
Alexandria quotes a few lines of his, in which we find the philosopher
of Agrigentum teaching the general evolution of forms.

"I, too, have bee