The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and PrivateJefferson, Thomas
History
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private
Jefferson, Thomas
United States -- Politics and government -- 1775-1783; United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865
Priestley ought to have told us that Pythagoras passed twenty years in
his travels in India, in Egypt, in Chaldea, perhaps in Sodom and Gomorrah,
Tyre and Sydon. He ought to have told us that in India he conversed with
the Brahmins, and read the Shasta, five thousand years old, written in
the language of the sacred Sansosistes, with the elegance and sentiments
of Plato. Where is to be found theology more orthodox, or philosophy more
profound, than in the introduction to the Shasta? "God is one creator
of all universal sphere, without beginning, without end. God governs all
the creation by a general providence, resulting from his eternal designs.
Search not the essence and the nature of the eternal, who is one; your
research will be vain and presumptuous. It is enough that, day by day,
and night by night, you adore his power, his wisdom and his goodness,
in his works. The eternal willed in the fullness of time, to communicate
of his essence and of his splendor, to beings capable of perceiving it.
They as yet existed not. The eternal willed and they were. He created
Birma, Vitsnou and Siv." These doctrines, sublime, if ever there were
any sublime, Pythagoras learned in India, and taught them to Zaleucus
and his other disciples. He there learned also his Metempsychosis, but
this never was popular, never made much progress in Greece or Italy,
or any other country besides India and Tartary, the region of the grand
immortal Lama. And how does this differ from the possessions of demons
in Greece and Rome? from the demon of Socrates? from the worship of cows
and crocodiles in Egypt and elsewhere?
After migrating through various animals, from elephants to serpents,
according to their behavior, souls that at last behaved well, became
men and women, and then if they were good, they went to heaven.
All ended in heaven, if they became virtuous. Who can wonder at the widow
of Malabar? Where is the lady, who, if her faith were without doubt that
she should go to heaven with her husband on the one, or migrate into
a toad or a wasp on the other, would not lay down on the pile, and set
fire to the fuel?
Modifications and disguises of the Metempsychosis, has crept into Egypt,
and Greece, and Rome, and other countries. Have you read Farmer on the
Dæmons and possessions of the New Testament? According to the Shasta,
Moisasor, with his companions, rebelled against the eternal, and were
precipitated down to Ondoro, the region of darkness.
Do you know anything of the Prophecy of Enoch? Can you give me a comment
on the 6th, the 9th, the 14th verses of the epistle of Jude?
If I am not weary of writing, I am sure you must be of reading such
incoherent rattle. I will not persecute you so severely in future, if
I can help it.
So farewell.
TO THOMAS LIEPER.
MONTICELLO, January 1, 1814.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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