Transmigration, or METEMPSYCHOSIS, the transition of the soul after death into another substance or body from what it occupied before—a belief deeply rooted alike in primitive belief and ancient philosophical speculation, and at the present moment widely spread within the range of Brahmanism and Buddhism. It is of course to be carefully distinguished from the metamorphosis of living men, which we find in lycanthropy and witchcraft; it is much wider in its range than the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body; and it obviously presupposes a belief in the immortality of the soul, although the ethical conceptions of reward and punishment and of the causal connection between this and a future life are developments of the doctrine unknown, or but rudimentary, at the lower levels of civilisation. The simplest form of this belief is found amongst several tribes of Africa and America who think the poor shivering soul at death must look out for a new host to inhabit, and if need be will enter the body of an animal. This re-incarnation is most often considered as taking place through the soul of a dead man animating the body of an infant of his own kindred or descent, thus accounting naturally for the likeness between parents and children and for the stranger phenomena of atavism. And hence even the persistent transmission of old family names is not without its significance. The Yoruba negroes greet a new-born child with the words 'Thon art come,' and then decide which ancestral soul has returned. Many peoples in Africa consider white men their own manes returned from the grave, finding proof both in their pale colour and superior wisdom.
Still further the primitive notions of the intimate brotherhood between men and beasts make it easy to account for the transmission of human souls into the bodies of the lower animals. Familiar examples of this are the Zulu amatongo, ancestral snakes which may even be identified by some peculiar mark similar to what the man bore in life, and the birds which the Iroquois set free on the evening of a burial to carry away the soul. Both Brahmins and Buddhists admit human descent not into beasts alone, but plants and trees, and the Buddha himself, before his last birth as Sakyamuni, underwent as many as 550 births through such stages as a hermit, a king, a slave, an ape, elephant, snipe, fish, frog, and the genius of a tree. When he attained the perfect knowledge of the Buddha he was able to recall all these existences, and these accounts form the Jatakas. The doctrine of transmigration (Samsāra) does not seem to have belonged to the early Aryan faith, but it lies at the heart of the accepted Indian philosophy, affording a satisfactory explanation of the phenomena of phenomenal existence. The present is ever determined by the past in an unbroken line of causation, and every sentient being is a prey to ever-renewed suffering and sin, destined after every new existence to be born in some new form. The real aim of life is to discover by what means to obtain release from the burden of material existence and find union in absorption with the Supreme Self.
It seems certain that the ancient Egyptians believed in the transmigration of souls; among the Greeks it was a doctrine especially associated with Pythagoras, and apparently with the Orphic and other mysteries. Pythagoras, we are told, himself recognised in the temple of Hera the shield he had borne as Euphorbus at the siege of Troy. The bodily life of the soul is itself an imprisonment for sins committed in a former state of existence—the reward of the best men is to enter the kosmos; of the worst, to sink to Tartarus. The general lot is to live anew in human or bestial forms according to the degree of guilt to be atoned for. This same doctrine of retribution and purificatory wandering meets us again in Plato's speculations on the future life. Among the Jews the Kabbalists accepted the doctrine (Gilgul Neshamoth), and it formed an essential part of the Manichean philosophy. Into Christianity it has never made much way, for although the doctrine of pre-existence touched it at one point, yet the souls of all mankind created by God before the world remained still and silent in the realm of potentiality until united with human bodies at generation. A shadow of transmigration appears in the vagaries of Swedenborg, and it has continued to survive in the speculations of occasional philosophers. Even a thinker so strong as Lessing adopted it as a theory to account for the infinite conceptions of which the finite soul is capable, these being only acquired gradually in an infinite succession of time. See ANIMISM, ANIMALWORSHIP, BUDDHISM, EGYPT (RELIGION), IMMORTALITY, PRE-EXISTENCE; and cf. THEOSOPHY.