Reincarnation and the Law of Karma

...early Taoists, that the deeds, good and evil, of the present life would bear fruit in future existences. In addition to the orthodox heavens and hells in which the Chinese believed—of which they had a great variety adapted to the requirements of the various grades of saints and sinners—there were minute descriptions of these places. These were described with an attention to minor details and particulars peculiar to the Chinese mind. The teaching? of a later date, which claimed that the soul of the ancestor dwelled in the "hall of the ancestors" and similar places, was a corruption of the ancient teaching. Other Chinese teachers taught that the soul consists of three parts: the first being the "kuei," which had its seat in the belly and perished with the body; the second being the "ling," which had its seat in the heart or chest and persisted for some time after death, but eventually disintegrated; and the third, or "huen," which had its seat in the brain and survived the disintegration of its companions, then passed on to other existences.

As strange as it may appear to many readers unfamiliar with the subject, the ancient Druids Ancient Celtic priests and scholars, particularly those dwelling in ancient Gaul Modern-day France and surrounding regions, were familiar with the doctrine of reincarnation and believed in its tenets. These people, generally regarded as ancient barbarians, really possessed a philosophy of a high order, which merged into a mystic form of religion. Many of the Romans, upon their conquest of Gaul original: "Gallia", were surprised at the degree and? character of the philosophical knowledge possessed by the Druids, and many of them have left written records of the same—notably Aristotle, Caesar, Lucan, and Valerius Maximus. The Christian teachers who succeeded them also bore witness to these facts, as may be seen by reference to the works of Saint Clement, Saint Cyril, and other of the early Christian Fathers. These ancient "barbarians" entertained some of the highest spiritual conceptions of life and immortality—the mind and the soul. Reynaud Jean Reynaud (1806–1863), a French philosopher who argued that Druidism was a precursor to modern spiritualism has written of them, basing his statements upon a careful study of the ancient beliefs of this race:

"If Judea represents in the world, with a tenacity of its own, the idea of a personal and absolute God; if Greece and Rome represent the idea of society, Gaul represents, just as particularly, the idea of immortality. Nothing characterized it better, as all the ancients admit. That mysterious folk was looked upon as the privileged possessor of the secrets of death, and its unwavering instinctive faith in the persistence of life never ceased to be a cause of astonishment, and sometimes of fear, in the eyes of the heathen."

The Gauls possessed an occult philosophy and a mystic religion, which were destroyed by the influence of the Roman Conquest.