 Human beings, understood as combinations of body and soul, perished. But what of their souls? Bruno stated unequivocally that they were individual, that is to say, that they were indestructible, “atomic”. Death was an illusion, no more than the dissolution of an ephemeral conjunction of soul and matter. We should await mutation serenely, not fear death, as Pythagoras, or more exactly Ovid’s ‘Pythagoras’, had rightly observed (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15.153–175; BOI I, 665). Bruno’s doctrine of metempsychosis required him to uphold the soul’s immortality, even though, as he noted, he interpreted the doctrine differently from Pythagoras, Pythagoreans, Plato, Platonists, the Sadducees, Scripture (Psalm 36:6 [KJV]), Origen and the Druids. Souls of the dead did not endure a shadowy existence in some other world before reincarnation in the manner that the “Pythagorean” Virgil (Aeneid, VI.743–751) and others had described (BOI II, 511–515). That is to say, on the death of one body, a soul did not retain the personality that it had accrued and commandeer another body, like a helmsman changing ships. Rather, we should understand that the soul turned its operative powers to forming a new body, the limitations of which were determined by Providence (BOL III, 257, 429–430). What made ancient accounts worthy of close consideration was the underlying idea that souls were punished or rewarded for their conduct. The One Being, as Providence or Fate, ensured that, by means of the perpetual change or vicissitude which it imposed on natural things, retributive justice prevailed (BOI II, 180–185, 197, 457–459). A soul that behaved like a pig had been a pig in a previous incarnation or, on account of its conduct, was doomed to become a pig in the next.  Bruno’s patron in Venice, Giovanni Mocenigo, reported to the Inquisition that Bruno had once admonished him for killing a spider.  It may have been, he had remarked, the incarnation of a former friend of his (Firpo 2000, 341, doc. 51, §22.179).  In keeping with these convictions, Bruno, inspired by Erasmus or perhaps Agrippa von Nettesheim, condemned the aristocratic obsession with hunting and the customs that it nurtured (BOI II, 388–389).