Cyrus’s instructions to his sons at the moment of death.

I conjure you, my sons, in the name of the gods of our fatherland, to have respect for one another, if you preserve any desire to please me, for I imagine that you do not consider it certain that I shall be nothing more once I have ceased to live. Until now my soul has remained hidden from your eyes; but by its operations, you recognized that it existed. Have you not also noticed by what terrors murderers are tormented by the souls of the innocent whom they have caused to die, and what vengeance these souls take upon those impious men? Do you think that the worship rendered to the dead would have been maintained until today, if it were believed that their souls were destitute of all power? For my part, my sons, I have never been able to persuade myself that the soul, which lives while it is in a mortal body, is extinguished from the moment it has left it, for I see that it is the soul that vivifies destructible bodies while it inhabits them. Likewise, I have never been able to convince myself that it loses its faculty of reasoning at the moment it separates from a body incapable of thinking; it is natural to believe that the soul, then purer and freed from matter, fully enjoys its intelligence. When a man is dead, the different parts that composed him are seen to unite themselves with the elements to which they belonged: only the soul escapes our gaze, whether during its stay in the body or when it leaves it. You know that it is during sleep, the image of death, that the soul most draws near to the Divinity, and that in this state it often foresees the future, doubtless because it is then entirely free.

Now, if these things are as I think, and if the soul survives the body it abandons, do, out of respect for mine, what I recommend to you; if I am mistaken, if the soul remains with the body and perishes with it, at least fear the gods, who do not die, who see all, who can do all, who sustain in the Universe that immutable, unalterable, invariable order whose magnificence and majesty are beyond all expression. May this fear preserve you from every action, from every thought that offends piety or justice… But I feel that my soul is abandoning me; I feel it by the symptoms that ordinarily announce our dissolution.

Observation. – A Spiritist would have very little to add to these remarkable words, worthy of a Christian philosopher, and in which the special attributes of the body and of the soul are admirably described: the material body, destructible, whose elements disperse to unite themselves with similar elements and which, during life, acts only by the impulse of the intelligent principle; then the soul, surviving the body, preserving its individuality and enjoying the greatest perceptions when freed from matter; the liberty of the soul during sleep; and finally, the action of the soul of the dead upon the living. Moreover, one may also note the distinction made between the gods and the Divinity properly speaking. The gods were nothing but Spirits, at different degrees of elevation, charged with presiding, each in its specialty, over all the things of this world, in the moral order and in the material order. The gods of the fatherland were the protecting Spirits of the fatherland, as the household gods were of the family. The gods, or superior Spirits, communicated with men only by means of subaltern Spirits, called demons. The common people did not go beyond this; but the philosophers and the initiated recognized a Supreme Being, creator and orderer of all things. [see Cyrus.]

[1]

[La Cyropaedie, par Xenophon — Google Books, and also: La cyropédie ou Histoire de Cyrus, vol. 2, par Xenophon — Google Books.]