THE CELTS AND THE OTHER LIFE.

...or punishing in another life the man who in this world was guilty of a crime against his fellow, or rewarding in that other life the man who was just and charitable toward his neighbor. Among the Celts, the belief in the immortality of the soul had a power that vividly struck the minds of the Romans, but this belief was not, as it is among Christians, associated with the theological doctrine of heaven and hell. The deceased, it was thought, found in the other world a life similar to this one, and where, just as in this life, any higher justice was absent.

Regarding the Celtic belief in the immortality of the soul, ancient texts are explicit. The first Greek scholar to study the customs of the Gauls believed he recognized in Gaul a Greek doctrine: the metempsychosis From the Greek metempsychosis, meaning the "transmigration of souls"—the belief that after death, a soul moves into a new body. of Pythagoras. According to Pythagoras, souls are judged after death; when they are found unworthy of returning to heaven, they must be incarnated once more in this world, either in the body of a human or in that of an animal, depending on their moral state or their degree of perfection. Pythagoras, it is said, claimed to remember having lived four lives in this world, and of those four lives, there were three in which he had been a historical figure. He supposedly lived for the fifth time when, in the sixth century BCE, he founded the philosophy named after him, Pythagoreanism.

Posidonius A Greek Stoic philosopher, politician, and astronomer (c. 135–51 BCE) who traveled throughout the Roman Empire and wrote extensively on the Celts., who visited Gaul around the year 100