Metempsychosis, or Transmigration
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
The passing of the soul at death into another body than the one it has vacated. The belief in metempsychosis was very wide-spread in ancient times, and still survives in Braminism and Buddhism, as well as in European folk-tales and superstitions. The Brahmins and Buddhists believe that the soul may enter another human body, or that of one of the lower animals, or even a plant or tree, according to its deserts in the previous incarnation. Thus it is doomed to successive incarnations, till by the suppression of all desires and emotions it loses itself in the Supreme Being. Very similar was the idea of Pythagoras and the Greeks, who believed that all material existence was a punishment for sins committed in a former incarnation. Indeed it is probable that Pythagoras derived his theory from the Brahminical doctrine. The ancient Egyptians would also seem to have believed in metempsychosis. Among certain savage tribes of Africa and America transmigration is generally subscribed to at the present day. These savages imagine the discarnate spirit very much out of its element till it has found another body to dwell in, which it does as speedily as possible. Totemism may perhaps facilitate a belief in the passing of the soul into the body of an animal. In Europe also in early times the belief in metempsychosis flourished, and several popular folk-tales, such as that known in Scotland as The Milk-white Doo, of which variants are found in many lands, contain references to the souls of the dead entering into beasts, birds, or fishes. In some places it is thought that witches are at death transformed into hares, and for this reason the people of these localities refuse to eat a hare. The Jewish Kabalists also believed in the doctrine of metempsychosis, and traces of it are to be found in the writings of Swedenborg.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The doctrine described here is still held by hundreds of millions of Hindus, Buddhists and Jains, and is usually called reincarnation or rebirth rather than metempsychosis. What has moved is the scholarship around it. The 1920 suggestion that "it is probable that Pythagoras derived his theory from the Brahminical doctrine" is now treated with caution — no line of transmission has ever been demonstrated, and most historians of Greek thought regard the parallel as independent or, at most, indirect. Egyptologists likewise no longer accept that the ancient Egyptians taught transmigration; that idea rests largely on Herodotus, and the Egyptian funerary texts themselves describe an afterlife of the individual dead, not rebirth in new bodies. The book's framework of "savage tribes" and totemism as a stepping-stone to belief belongs to Victorian evolutionary anthropology and was abandoned by the mid-twentieth century; meanwhile the belief itself has spread in the West through Theosophy and later New Age currents, and now shows up in a substantial minority of respondents to European and American religion surveys.
Written for this edition, 2026.