“Upon those who, in the remains of antiquity, see evidence that modern times can lay small claim to originality, it is common to charge a disposition to exaggerate and distort facts. But the candid reader will scarcely aver that the above is an example in point. There were evolutionists before the day when the mythical Noah is made, in the Bible, to float in his ark; and the ancient scientists were better informed, and had their theories more logically defined than the modern evolutionists.
Plato, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, the Eleatic schools of Greece, as well as the old Chaldean sacerdotal colleges, all taught the doctrine of the dual evolution; the doctrine of the transmigration of souls referring only to the progress of man from world to world, after death here. Every philosophy worthy of the name, taught that the spirit of man, if not the soul, was preexistent. “The Essenes”, says Josephus, “believed that the souls were immortal, and that they descended from the ethereal spaces to be chained to bodies.” In his turn, Philo Judaeus says, the “air is full of them (of souls); those which are nearest the earth, descending to be tied to mortal bodies, palindromou’sin au\qi”, return to other bodies, being desirous to live in them.”
In the Sohar, the soul is made to plead her freedom before God – “Lord of the Universe! I am happy in this world, and do not wish to go into another world, where I shall be a handmaid, and be exposed to all kinds of pollutions.” The doctrine of fatal necessity, the everlasting Immutable Law, is asserted in the answer of the Deity: “Against thy will thou becomes an embryo, and against thy will thou art born.”
Light would be incomprehensible without darkness, to make it manifest by contrast; good would be no good without evil, to show the priceless nature of the boon; and so, personal virtue could claim no merit, unless it had passed through the furnace of temptation. Nothing is eternal and unchangeable, save the Concealed Deity. Nothing that is finite – whether because it had beginning or must have an end – can remain stationary. It must either progress or recede; and a soul which thirsts after a reunion with its spirit, which alone confers upon it immortality, must purify itself through cyclic transmigrations, onward toward the only Land of Bliss and Eternal Rest, called in the Sohar, “The Palace of Love”, tbha Ibyh; in the Hindu religion, “Moksha”; among the Gnostics, the “Pleroma of Eternal Light”; and by the Buddhists, Nirvana. The Christian calls it the “Kingdom of Heaven”, and claims to have alone found the truth, whereas he has but invented a new name for a doctrine, which is coeval with man.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 