Epic, Lyric, and Elegiac Poems of Andreas Libavius

For some have thoroughly damned all things of death, and have given no works to the Stygian ghosts, nor to heaven, thinking that nothing remains after death and that all things end on the final day, just as before the figure of the body, minds were nothing if not the body itself, an empty dream, but afterwards the breath was to perish for all hours; just as the spirit of birds vanishes into thin airs, dissolved into ashes in a thick structure. A part withdraws souls from death and inserts them into the stars; pushing bodies into eternal tombs, although the opinion of Socrates stands smeared on the papers, that indeed the revived troops of spirits hasten to the upper airs, but not their own bodies again, and to revisit the ancient members repaired for themselves, but now the skins of quadrupeds, now of winged ones, or the mass of another man crawling from the earth. Therefore, at the same time, hope of a better life is taken away, and the heavens and the ghosts are nothing, and the human race is created for death, and only those whom they feign as gods live for the ages, nor can bodies rise, although holy faith dared to imagine for itself a life promised by the heavens, to which the highest power of the King belongs. Night thus holds ancestors, and the ancestral people from the origin, since they have lost so many precious gifts of life, having fallen through atrocious wounds with the great hope of another. Not so does the pressed power of God lie unmentionable. Not so does it cling, captive to the knots of the fates, but that with powerful divinity it can unlock the abyss, but to repair only if it closes something with a vast barrier, if Neptune has submerged something in the gulf, or it has been consumed by flames. He calls ashes back to their original members, and drags human faces from chaos to the stars.