As he walks on Sandymount Strand Stephen imagines having been
alive in the 1330s
as a different "I, a changeling."
Changelings, commonly encountered in Irish folklore (as in W.
B. Yeats' poem The Stolen Child), are mysterious
beings swapped for human children by the fairies—or,
sometimes, the stolen children themselves. The belief probably
arose as an explanation for birth defects, diseases, and other
afflictions. It is not clear why Stephen thinks of past lives
in these terms, or even that he believes he had one. He may
only be imagining himself as a fairy child raised in a
medieval bed as a fanciful way of indulging a historical
revery. But a sense of deep racial identity informs his
imagined ability to travel through time: "Their blood
is in me, their lusts my waves."
Less than a page later, Stephen explicitly thinks of
reincarnation, whimsically imagining that the dog he sees
nosing about the beach is "Looking for something lost
in a past life." Still later in Proteus,
he broadens the concept of transmigration from temporal to
spatial extension. Somewhere out there in the innumerable "worlds"
that Giordano Bruno
supposed to populate the cosmos there is a parallel universe,
some unknown planet in which Stephen plays a part: "Me
sits there with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed
sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night
walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars." Opposing the
Christian cosmology of his time, Bruno proposed that the
universe had no center and that the innumerable stars visible
in the heavens were suns that might have their own
life-bearing planets. He also affirmed the transmigration of
the soul.
Bruno was going back to Plato, and beyond him Pythagoras.
When Molly asks her husband the meaning of "met him pike
hoses," which she has encountered in
a novel, he evinces some awareness of this ancient
history: "— Metempsychosis, he said, frowning.
It's Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of
souls." The word is indeed Greek, and the belief
was one feature of Orphic religion in ancient Thrace: Orpheus
was said to have taught that a life of ascetic purity could
liberate the soul from an otherwise endless cycle of
reincarnation. The 6th century BCE philosopher Pythagoras
apparently brought the doctrine into greater Greek
circulation, practicing vegetarianism in the belief that
abstaining from harming other sentient beings could affect the
soul's reincarnation in one animal form or another. This
Pythagorean aspect of the doctrine appears in Lestrygonians
when Bloom thinks of vegetarians: "Only weggebobbles and
fruit. Don’t eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that
cow will pursue you through all eternity."
Many of Plato's works in the early 4th century BCE suggest
that he was strongly influenced by the Pythagorean doctrine.
The myth at the end of the Republic recounts how a
man named Er came back from the dead to tell how departed
human souls are judged and then choose new forms of existence,
many of them animal. Er also saw animals taking the forms of
other animals, as happens repeatedly in Proteus and Circe.
The Phaedrus and the Meno suggest that true
knowledge involves anamnesis or recollection of things
we have encountered in the realm of Ideas between our
different incarnations, and the Phaedo, the Timaeus,
and the Laws all contain thoughts about the doctrine.
Some later classical writers referred disparagingly to
reincarnation, but Virgil made it a central component of his
eschatology in book 6 of the Aeneid, and it was
explored sympathetically by Plotinus and the Neoplatonists.
Bloom's definition of metempsychosis as "the transmigration
of souls" leaves Molly thoroughly unimpressed: "— O,
rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words." In response,
he silently racks his brain for what he knows: "That we
live after death. Our souls. That a man's soul after he
dies. Dignam's soul..." Impressively, he rouses his
inner lecturer to give his wife a brief but coherent account:
"— Some people believe, he said, that we go on
living in another body after death, that we lived before.
They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the
earth thousands of years ago or some other planet. They say
we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past
lives." Interestingly, Bloom too makes the
connection to living on "some other planet."
Realizing that even this may not mean much to Molly, he tries
again, with unfortunate results: "— Metempsychosis, he
said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They used
to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree,
for instance. What they called nymphs, for example."
Metempsychosis should not be conflated with metamorphosis as
Bloom does, but there is certainly overlap, as reincarnation
erases the boundary between animal and human. Ulysses
plays both with metamorphosis in this life (as when human
beings are changed into countless animal forms in Circe)
and with metempsychosis in the afterlife. The two conceptions
share the notion that, in Bloom's words, "we go on living in
another body."
In Nausicaa Bloom watches a bat flitting about near
Paddy Dignam's old house and thinks, "Metempsychosis. They
believed you could be changed into a tree from grief.
Weeping willow. Ba. There he goes. Funny little beggar.
Wonder where he lives. Belfry up there. Very likely. Hanging
by his heels in the odour of sanctity." Paddy returns in
Circe as a baying beagle to announce, Hamlet-like,
"Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. List, list, O list!" When
one policeman, piously crossing
himself, asks, "How is that possible?" and the other one
says, "It is not in the penny catechism," Dignam
answers, "By metempsychosis. Spooks." In these two
passages, Joyce uses the recently departed Dignam to suggest
that the Catholic church's Last Things (Hell, Paradise, and
the Purgatory that Hamlet Sr. reports on) may not be the only
realities that human beings can encounter after death.
The ancient Greeks and Romans almost certainly derived their
ideas of reincarnation ultimately from Indian doctrines that
reach back to the Upanishads. No doubt Joyce encountered some
of these more directly in theosophical
writings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One
section of Cyclops hilariously employs words covered
with Sanskrit-like diacritical marks to narrate Dignam's
afterlife experiences. Such passages may easily be dismissed
as comic hyperbole, but they plant the seeds of speculation.
Whatever Ulysses may be judged to say or not say
about the afterlife, these quasi-eastern thoughts about
reincarnation clearly do invite the reader to think about the
mutability of human personality and the permeability of its
boundaries. In Hades, as Dignam's coffin is diving
down into the dark and the men handling the ropes are
struggling "up and out" of the grave, Bloom thinks, "If
we were all suddenly somebody else." To pursue that
thought, speculations about the destination of Dignam's soul
are unnecessary. Much of Circe can be read as people
suddenly becoming somebody else in the here and now, and Scylla
and Charybdis explores the mechanisms by which
Shakespeare did so again and again in his plays.
Viewed in this way, metempsychosis is another name for
self-knowledge: the ability to imagine the different forms
that one's life can take. It is also a name for empathy or
compassion: the ability to feel the sufferings of others as if
one lived within their bodies. The word is used in this second
way in Oxen of the Sun, when Bloom contemplates "the
wonderfully unequal faculty of metempsychosis possessed by"
the medical students, who cannot imagine the effect that their
raucous laughter may be having on the unfortunate woman trying
to give birth. Remembering a past life "in another body"
probably has less ultimate value than being able to loosen the
bonds of self imposed by inhabiting a body in this life.
