Reincarnation

• 1. Introduction

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  Reincarnation is the belief that something essential in a living being survives death and begins again in a new body. This belief is not the property of one culture or one era. It appears in ancient India, in the writings of Plato, among the druids of Gaul and Britain, in Kabbalistic Judaism, in the Yoruba religion of West Africa, and in the traditions of Inuit communities from Greenland to Nunavut. Demographic survey data gathered between 1999 and 2002 found that roughly one in five people in both Europe and America hold some version of this belief.

  How did an idea so ancient travel so widely? What exactly do different traditions think is reborn, and into what? And why, across such different cultures, do so many people arrive at the same conclusion: that death is not the end?

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  The first textual references to reincarnation in Indian religious thought appear in the Rigveda, Yajurveda, and Upanishads, texts dated to the late Vedic period from around 1100 to 500 BCE, predating both the Buddha and Mahavira. The ancient Vedic rishis wrestled with a question they found the simple heaven-and-hell model unable to answer: if people live lives of varying moral complexity, how could a binary afterlife be fair? They proposed instead an afterlife proportional to one's merit, a system that developed over centuries into the idea of an endless cycle of rebirth driven by accumulated karma.

  The tribes of the Ganges valley and the Dravidian traditions of South India have been proposed as additional early sources, though no direct evidence has been found. What is clear is that by the middle of the first millennium BCE, detailed doctrines of rebirth had emerged across Buddhism, Jainism, and various Hindu schools, each giving distinct expression to the same underlying question.

  In ancient Tamil literature, the Purananuru, part of the Sangam corpus, mentions rebirth and moksha and describes Hindu rituals surrounding death, including the offering of riceballs called pinda and the practice of cremation. The texts of Jainism that have survived into the modern era are post-Mahavira, likely from the last centuries of the first millennium BCE, and they assert that reincarnation into a new body occurs instantaneously after death.

• 3. The Greek Thread

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  Pherecydes of Syros, who flourished around 540 BCE, is among the earliest Greeks known to have considered rebirth. His younger contemporary Pythagoras, born around 570 BCE, became its first famous Greek exponent and founded societies dedicated to spreading the doctrine. Ancient authorities disagreed on whether Pythagoras learned the idea from Orphism, a Thracian religion, or brought it from India, or was himself Pherecydes' student.

  Plato, writing in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, wove reincarnation into several of his dialogues. In the Myth of Er, Plato has Socrates tell how a man named Er, son of Armenius, returned to life on the twelfth day after death and reported what he had witnessed in the other world. In the Timaeus, Plato argues that reincarnation itself functions as punishment or reward, replacing any distinct intermediate phase between lives. In the Phaedo, Socrates says before his death: "I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead."

  Plato also offered a striking philosophical argument for why non-human animals exist: they are former humans, being punished for their vices. The Orphic tradition, which taught reincarnation around the sixth century BCE, held that the soul aspires to freedom while the body holds it prisoner. Unlike Pythagoras, who seems to have envisioned a neutral, eternal cycle of rebirths, the Orphics viewed metempsychosis as a cycle of grief from which liberation was possible through the grace of Dionysus and through self-purification.

• 4. Druids, Celts, and the North

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  Julius Caesar recorded that the druids of Gaul, Britain, and Ireland held the soul's immortality as one of their core doctrines, writing that this belief "robs death of all its terrors" and enables the highest form of human courage. Alexander Cornelius Polyhistor, writing in the first century BCE, described the Pythagorean doctrine as prevailing among the Gauls.

  The customs that accompanied this belief were vivid. Pomponius Mela reported that Gauls buried or burned useful objects with their dead, so the deceased would have what they needed in a next life. Valerius Maximus recorded that they lent money to each other, repayable in the next world. Diodorus added that Gauls cast letters onto funeral pyres so the dead could read them. Hippolytus of Rome believed the Gauls had been taught reincarnation by Zalmoxis, a slave of Pythagoras. Clement of Alexandria argued the reverse, that Pythagoras had learned it from the Celts and from Galatian Gauls, Hindu priests, and Zoroastrians.

  Scholar T. D. Kendrick rejected a direct connection between Pythagorean and Celtic reincarnation beliefs, noting substantial differences between them, but proposed that an ancient common source may have fed both traditions, perhaps also linked to Orphism and Thracian belief. In the Germanic north, surviving eddic poetry and sagas also suggest a belief in rebirth, potentially connected to the practice of naming children after recently deceased relatives.

• 5. Kabbalah and Gilgul

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  In Judaism, reincarnation was initially alien to the tradition. The concept began to emerge in the eighth century, possibly under the influence of Muslim mystics, and was first mentioned in Jewish literature by Saadia Gaon, who criticized it. The spread of Kabbalah in the twelfth century changed the picture. The Sefer ha-Bahir, the Book of Clarity, introduced transmigration of souls as a Kabbalistic concept, and the Zohar, first published in the thirteenth century, discusses reincarnation at length.

  The most comprehensive Kabbalistic work on the subject is Shaar HaGilgulim, compiled by Chaim Vital from the teachings of the sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac Luria, who was said to know the past lives of individuals through his semi-prophetic abilities. In Lurianic Kabbalah, reincarnation is not punitive but an expression of divine compassion. Each Jewish soul reincarnates to fulfill the 613 Mosaic commandments, each of which elevates a spark of holiness. Once all sparks are redeemed, the Messianic Era begins.

  The eighteenth-century Lithuanian scholar Elijah of Vilna, the Vilna Gaon, authored a commentary on the Book of Jonah reading it as an allegory of reincarnation. Within this tradition, even stones and leaves are understood to possess a soul that came into the world seeking rectification. Today, reincarnation belief is universal within Hasidic Judaism and remains esoteric within other Orthodox streams, while Reform and Conservative branches do not teach it.

• 6. Diverging Doctrines

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  Buddhism offers perhaps the sharpest conceptual challenge to other reincarnation theories. The Buddha rejected the materialist school of Charvaka, which held that death is total annihilation and that there is no soul, no karma, and no afterlife. Yet Buddhism also introduced the doctrine of anatta, the teaching that there is no permanent self or soul. This creates a puzzle: if there is no self, what is reborn? Buddhist theory answers with the image of a flame from a dying candle lighting a new one. Consciousness continues as a causal stream, neither identical to nor entirely separate from what came before.

  Hinduism and Jainism both assert that a soul does exist and transmigrates. Hindu traditions hold that the soul, called atman, is eternal, indestructible, and ultimately identical to Brahman, the unchanging ground of all existence. Jainism asserts that the soul, called jiva, exists and is involved in the rebirth mechanism, and that asceticism is the central means of burning away accumulated karma and achieving liberation. Buddhism, by contrast, does not consider asceticism a necessary path.

  The Druze faith, which treats reincarnation as a paramount tenet, holds that souls cannot be divided, that the total number of souls is finite, and that reincarnation occurs instantly at death, always into another human body. The Bhagavad Gita captures the Hindu image directly: just as a person casts off worn garments and takes up new ones, so the self casts off worn bodies and takes up new ones.

• 7. West Africa and the Americas

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  Yoruba reincarnation belief in West Africa centers on the concept of atunwaye, or ipadawaye, meaning "the ancestor's rebirth." According to this belief, the reincarnating person returns along their own family line. Only ancestors who lived well and experienced what is called a "good" death are believed eligible. Their return is marked in children's names: Babatunde means "father has come again," and Yetunde means "mother has come again."

  A "bad" death, including deaths of children, deaths by accident or suicide, or gruesome murders, is generally believed to prevent reincarnation. A separate belief, abiku, describes a spirit child who repeatedly dies and is reborn to the same mother in a cycle, and who is believed to possess the power to ensure its own eventual death. Among urban populations, belief in abiku has significantly declined, a shift attributed to improved hygiene and reduced infant mortality.

  In the Polar North, the concept of reincarnation is enshrined in Inuit languages themselves. In many Inuit cultures it is traditional to name a newborn after a recently deceased person, in the belief that the child is the reincarnation of that namesake. The Ho-Chunk shaman Thunder Cloud left a first-person account of two previous lives, describing being taken after each death toward where the sun sets, consulting elders and a village chief, and then returning to earth. In his account, the time between lives was a period of blessing by Earth Maker and the acquisition of healing powers.

• 8. Modern Western Interest

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  By the nineteenth century, the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were drawing on Indian scriptures to engage with reincarnation. The American Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson took up the idea, and Francis Bowen adapted it into a framework he called Christian Metempsychosis.

  William James brought reincarnation into the emerging field of psychology and was influential in founding the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City in 1885, three years after the British Society for Psychical Research was established in London. Théodore Flournoy was among the first to study a claim of past-life recall, published in 1900, in which he introduced the concept of cryptomnesia, the possibility that past-life memories are actually forgotten ordinary memories. Carl Jung, also based in Switzerland, followed Flournoy's method and later emphasized the importance of memory and ego continuity in any psychological study of rebirth.

  General George Patton, a famous American commander in the Second World War, was a committed believer in reincarnation and held that he was a reincarnation of the Carthaginian general Hannibal. Survey data from 1999 to 2002 found that 44 percent of people in Lithuania held a belief in reincarnation, the highest figure in Europe, while East Germany recorded the lowest at 12 percent. A quarter of American Christians, including 10 percent of born-again Christians, embrace the idea. One 1999 study by Walter and Waterhouse found that among British believers with no religious affiliation requiring the belief, personal experiences such as past-life memories and near-death experiences had influenced most of them, and that most held the belief "quite lightly" as one way of tackling questions about suffering.