Reincarnation: Western Perspectives

Modern cases of reincarnation studied by westerners mostly involve children who remember a previous life in detail. They remember the names of previous family members. In many such cases, the child reports dying of violence or early in life in some traumatic fashion—while giving birth, for instance. The previous (remembered) family may live in the same or in a distant town. The child usually insists. It says that it does not belong here, in its current family. Some children carry birthmarks at those sites where they were injured in their supposed previous life.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, then at the University of Virginia documented such reports in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University of Virginia Press, 1974) and in Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (Praeger Publishers, 1997). He maintained a database of some 3,000 reported cases; of these 200 were “suggestive” of reincarnation in his opinion. Stevenson was an original, erudite, and courageous figure. He was trained in medicine, worked in biochemistry, and, with a partner, made a discovery about oxidation in kidneys. He later took another degree and qualified as a Freudian psychoanalyst; but dissatisfied with Freudian approaches, he eventually began investigating paranormal phenomena. In the process he became the leading scientific investigator of reincarnation. I ought to put “scientific” in quotes because he was treated as an outlaw by many would-be spokesmen for science, described (because he had to be) as objective, careful, and disciplined—but he was said to entertain an “unacceptable hypothesis.” Here is a classical case of the clash between the search for truth on the one hand and of an orthodoxy on the other.

Stevenson labeled only those cases as suggestive of reincarnation where no other explanation of the data seemed as plausible. Even so he studiously avoided making any claims. Hence he used the word “suggestive” rather than some stronger term like “evidentiary.”

All such cases rely on memories—of children. The memories are vivid, including, for instance, the location where some money was buried or what the names of the reincarnated person’s children were. The child recognizes previous locations, the layout of residences and neighborhoods it had never visited before, and people who were its claimed relatives in the previous life. The child greets these people by name, sometimes by nickname known only in narrow family circles. In all of these cases, the will not to believe causes doubters to reach for concepts like telepathy to argue for an alternative means whereby information may have reached the child.

The cases are much more persuasive than the “super-psi” explanation, outlined here, used to explain them away. Indeed the raw data become almost banal, and the birthmarks, where present, suggest that the minds appearing now in new bodies actually participated in their formation along lines that remind one of stigmata, but here caused by unpleasant memories.

Stevenson’s cases come from all over the world, but many more from cultures where reincarnation is accepted. In cultures where the doctrine is taboo, children are shushed when they first begin to talk about such things. They are certainly not believed. No doubt they sense their parents’ anxiety and disapproval. In any case, these memories tend to fade away as the children grow older, no matter which culture they inhabit.

Now for some older western views of reincarnation. The concept has been around from very early on and seems to have been widespread. It was and is held by Hindus and by followers of the Jewish Kabbalah today. The Kabbalah calls the process gil-gul. One of the greatest if also admittedly one of the more controversial of the Church Fathers, Origen (185-254), taught the preexistence of the soul. Origen had an, ah, original view of the scriptures too, declining to follow the “letter” of the scripture strictly where he judged it unfit to be the word of God. He wrote: “Every soul comes into this world strengthened by the victories and weakened by the defeats of its previous life.” One source is here, on p. 42.

Platonist ideas influenced Origen, but he seems to have held his belief in “preexistence” as a matter of logical necessity based on an argument I personally find silly. Origen thought that souls coexist with God and thus have no beginning. Origen argued that God could not be omnipotent without subjects. No one is master without servants. Souls therefore had to coexist with God. Origen’s father died as a martyr; Origen himself was tortured for his faith. He was a teacher of great renown and wrote many books—a shining light, in other words, much admired by numerous people who were later canonized. He was not.

Belief in some Christian version of reincarnation seems to have been held by various groups for at least 300 some odd years in the West—dated from around the time when Christianity formed. With the coming of the Emperor Constantine (reigned 306-337), the Church gained power and began consolidating its ideological rule. The process took the form of various councils, the first of which Constantine organized himself. Bishops gathered at various places and hammered out the shape of orthodoxy. Until then all kinds of sects coexisted uneasily, snarling at each other in their tracts. All this had to be organized. Competing groups now morphed into heresies. At the Second Council of Constantinople, held in 553, “preexistence” was finally rooted out. Souls had to be created within time and only went round once. The council published some 13 anathemas in the summer of that year. One dealt with the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” and condemned those who asserted the “monstrous restoration which follows from it.” If the belief had not been common, it wouldn’t have required quite so firm a sanction. This event, in the sixth century, was not really a philosophical but a political resolution of an article of faith. It is well to hold that in mind. The organization of churches, while deeply intertwined with ideas and their meanings, is an expression of social force aimed at regulating society, not at clarifying thought.