Reincarnation

Reincarnation

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reincarnation is the cultural belief that human beings can be born and reborn in endless cycles of births and rebirths. Forms of reincarnation are found in a wide range of human societies, ranging from small scale or “tribal” groups to the ancient Greeks and most conspicuously, those religions that developed in India during and after 6 BCE, if not earlier. Nevertheless, there has been a surprising lack of ethnographic documentation of the cross-cultural spread of these religions. The reasons are many: Perhaps most significant was the impact of Christian missions generally hostile to indigenous religions, especially reincarnation theories that were declared “anathema” by the Church in 553 CE.

Until recent times ethnographers were unfamiliar with such doctrines and tended to subsume them under the better known class of “ancestor cults,” easy enough to do because reincarnation is often associated with the world of ancestors. Additionally, there was the widespread prejudice that reincarnation is uniquely associated with Indic religions like that of Buddhism and Hinduism, tending scholars to neglect its presence elsewhere. The historical evidence is clear that reincarnation doctrines known as metempsychosis, metacosmesis, or metensomatosis existed in ancient Greece even prior to the Buddha in the cosmology of Pythagoras. These doctrines continued outside of the dominant or mainline Greek traditions of cosmology between 7 BCE to about 3 CE through such figures as Empedocles, Pindar, Plato and the neo-Platonic traditions, especially Plotinus. Greek reincarnation doctrines influenced some Middle Eastern societies, most notably the Druze of Israel and Lebanon from around 1017 CE; the Shiite Nusayriyah of Western Syria belonging to the Ismá’ilí tradition around the same time; and the Alevis of Central Turkey, perhaps during the same time period although no clear historical evidence is available. All these societies had reincarnation theories that for the most part posited immediate reincarnation after death followed by rebirth in the larger religious community, if not a specific social group or clan.

Studies by ethnographers found that the presence of reincarnation doctrines among Northwest Coast Indians was the basis of the Indians’ eschatological and cosmic beliefs. These studies culminated in a 1994 pioneer work, Amerindian Rebirth: Reincarnation Beliefs among North American Indians and Inuit, which described a wide range of Amerindian groups believing in reincarnation. For Melanesia, the only detailed study is the classic work of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942). Malinowski documented in great detail the reincarnation theories of the Trobriand Islanders, most notably in his 1916 essay “Baloma: the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands,” based on his fieldwork in New Guinea during World War I. A similar ethnographic lacuna exists for West Africa where scattered references indicate that reincarnation theories were widely prevalent before colonial contact. Fortunately, there are detailed ethnographic accounts for at least one large group, the Ibo of southeastern Nigeria, now highly Christianized but still retaining some of their traditional reincarnation beliefs. What the cross-cultural evidence reveals is that reincarnation doctrines are found in various parts of the world, many of whom were unaffected by Indic civilization.

In order to bring some order into widely dispersed reincarnation doctrines it is necessary to deal with their simplest manifestation among small-scale societies, and then the more complex Greek and Indic representatives. Propitiation of ancestors (“ancestor cults”) is a widespread form of religious life. After death, the spirit goes into a realm of the ancestors and ancestral spirits continue to interact with living persons, who in turn have to propitiate them. Only one structural feature is required for an ancestor cult to develop into a reincarnation doctrine. The spirit at death goes into the world of the ancestors and then, after a temporary stay in that realm, returns to the human world by being reborn among former kin. Then, after death, the spirit goes back to the ancestral world and the rebirth cycle continues. More complex systems are constructed upon this “elementary form” of a reincarnation doctrine.

Among small-scale societies there are two trajectories of rebirth: The Northwest Coast Indians and the Inuit share a widespread circumpolar complex (spreading into Central Asia) in affirming that after death one could be reborn as an animal. In West Africa and Melanesia one cannot be reborn except as a human being. When there is a belief in rebirth as an animal or when humans and animals have their own reincarnation cycles there develops a concomitant respect for animal life. Thus, while killing animals is necessary for existence, the Inuit hunter thanks the animal for its sacrificial gift and implores it to return to another rebirth, human or animal. Within the two broad complexes of being reborn as animal or human, there is considerable variation as to whether cross-sex reincarnation is possible or not.

The striking feature of reincarnation in small-scale societies is the absence of other-worldly rewards and punishments imposed on the departing soul at death, even though such societies have highly developed secular moral codes. Once the appropriate funeral rites have been performed, anyone can enter the temporary world of ancestors. By contrast, owing to Indian and Greek philosophical preoccupation with social morality and ethics, the entry into the other world is conditional on the good and bad done in this world. Thus, in Indian thought there developed the doctrine of “karma,” the idea that the good and bad humans do on earth will result in punishments or rewards in the other world, followed by similar rewards and punishments in the next reincarnation. By contrast, the Greek tradition does not have this uniformity although considerable emphasis is placed on otherworld compensations rather than rewards in the next rebirth.

Greek reincarnation can be illustrated with an example from Plato in the final chapter of The Republic. Plato mentions the case of a warrior named Er whose spirit escaped after ten days while his hitherto undecomposed corpse was being cremated. Er then went on a long underground journey followed by a sojourn in a strange place where he confronted judges sitting beside two chasms. These judges order the righteous to take a right road of the heavenly chasms whereas the bad must take the left that went downward into places of punishment. Er was instructed to watch and remember the proceedings so that he could relay his experiences to fellow mortals when he returned to Earth. Er mentions specific punishments and rewards offered to people right then and there by the judges, the bad undergoing cruel but just punishment and the good enjoying the rewards of heaven.

Having expiated their past in this manner, people are now free beings who will eventually assemble in a meadow awaiting their rebirth in the human world. One of the Fates, the goddess Lachesis, gives the people a choice of “packages” containing their future life projections on Earth. Unhappily, people do not choose wisely. Enticed by power and wealth they pick the wrong life choices, often replicating the habits of their former lives on Earth. They come back to Lachesis who allocates each a guardian spirit; the other Fates seal these compacts making them irreversible. People then come to a land of dreadful thirst and reach Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. All drink the waters of Lethe except Er, who must remember to tell his tale to mortals when his spirit eventually returns to his corpse and revives it. The Platonic myth culminates in people going to sleep but when midnight comes there is an earthquake and thunder. Suddenly, the people are all swept up and away like shooting stars, here and there, propelled to another rebirth in the human world.

SEE ALSO Anthropology; Buddha; Buddhism; Ethnography; Hinduism; Malinowski, Bronislaw; Religion

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Laguna, Frederica. 1972. Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of Yukutat Tlingit. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian, 1972.

Henderson, Richard N. 1972. The King in Every Man. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Baloma: The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands. In Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press.

Mills, Antonia, and Richard Slobodin, eds. 1994. Amerindian Rebirth: Reincarnation Beliefs among North American Indians and Inuit. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. 2002. Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Uchendu, Victor. 1965. The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Walens, Stanley. 1981. Feasting with Cannibals: An Essay on Kwakiutl Cosmology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gananath Obeyesekere