What is the transmigration of souls?

Reincarnation is the belief that the atman, a person's uncreated and eternal soul, must repeatedly be recycled into the world in different bodies. In some forms of Hinduism, souls may be reincarnated as animals, plants or even inanimate objects. Reincarnation is the process that takes the Hindu through the great wheel of samsara, the thousands or millions of lives (all full of suffering) that each atman must endure before reaching moksba ‑ liberation from suffering and union with the infinite.

330 There was another system, which Origen applied even to Christ, that the higher soul could not come into this world without taking a secondary soul, and so, consequently, the body. Indeed, according to him, they are born here according to their conduct in a previous existence. Josephus says the Pharisees held the metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. It would seem that this trinity of the soul was someway connected with their speculations about the Godhead, the Memra, Shekinah, and a tissue of irreverent absurdities, which I need not enter into here.

175 John 9:2. — The Pharisees supposed that the souls of good men passed from one body to another (Josephus, "Antiquities," xviii. 1, 3; "B.J.," ii. 8, 14). So Herod, of John the Baptist. By the "pious and learned author" referred to in the Exposition Tholuck would seem to be meant, for such is the view that he propounds.

Herod seems to have supposed there was a change of soul from an old body into a new one, as part of the current Jewish notion of pre-existence: cf. John 9:2.

343 All this was borrowed from Egypt, as different points shew, though made up into Grecian philosophy, as in other parts we find him stating the Egyptian doctrine of the transmigration of souls, accompanied with another doctrine, greatly taught there afterwards, that the soul existed before, and came down to dwell in the body, two natures making up one person, as will be found in the places I have quoted from. But, though in a heathen form, we have the Roman doctrine of saints who go to heaven, the wicked to hell, and a middle class to purgatory. So Virgil, when Aeneas goes down to hades, he is told by them in purgatory, "When life leaves with the last light (of day), not yet is every evil over to the unhappy, nor all corporeal infection wholly gone; and it is altogether necessary that many things should have grown up as part of ourselves in wonderful ways* therefore they are exercised with penal torments, and pay the penalty of old evils." And then he speaks of different punishments before they go to elysium. And, further, in the Odyssey, souls complain that sacrifices have not been offered for them, to get them out of this place. So Ovid's Fasti, lib. 2, 33.

Plato teaches the pre-existence of the soul (Phaedo, 923) and transmigration. Only true saints, who had kept alone from every snare of corporate existence, went, it is suggested, to God: so did Pythagoras. Philo, the Jew, held the pre-existence of the soul, as Plato, and that the air is full of demons up to the moon; and the lower, or inferior class, were disposed to be earthly, and came into bodies. This came from Indian or Egyptian heathenism. Why do I speak of these things? Because the great early doctors of the church, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, were educated in Platonism. Origen, too, embraced the whole system — transmigration, and the renewal of the whole series of the soul's history in another earth. Jerome and Ruffinus (Latins), and even, in part, Ambrose followed Origen in a great deal, as did Gregory of Nyssa, and many others in the East.

217 Noah and the first patriarchs had a large knowledge of God as then revealed in creation, judgments, and testimony; of promises, warnings, sacrifice, etc.: and as to the early events of divine history, they were much more familiar with the details than we are. But man did not like to retain God in his knowledge, and idolatry was set up, and (with many traditions of these early times preserved, and various deeds of wickedness which made the mighty men which were of old the "men of renown" of after ages, as scripture speaks, preserved in their memory) an immense system was established, in which shreds of ideas of the true God, mental speculations about Him, facts as to the deluge, its character, causes, and author, dim remembrance of paradise, vivid recollections of wickedness before the flood, and of the persons spared in it, the greatness of men's rebellion exalting the men of renown into gods (while yet they are treated as reprobate, so as to puzzle mythologists); the sun, moon, and stars brought in, peopled by the imagination with a personified existence of the departed great ones; a knowledge that the serpent was the cause of the evil and of knowledge, yet therefore worshipped as God; hence the flood looked at as vengeance, yet mixed up with the serpent having to say to it; the deification of the ark itself as a preserving mother connected with the earth itself as the womb of nature and of all things; and all this mixed up with the most degraded and degrading superstitions that corrupt human nature could indulge in practised, yet mystified into abstract notions — all were used by Satan to obscure and confound the mind, and leave to conscience, which he could not help, some possible shady Tartarus and Elysium, or the transmigration of souls, and, as Paul declares, some "unknown god" to be declared to them.

217 Noah and the first patriarchs had a large knowledge of God as then revealed in creation, judgments, and testimony; of promises, warnings, sacrifice, etc.: and as to the early events of divine history, they were much more familiar with the details than we are. But man did not like to retain God in his knowledge, and idolatry was set up, and (with many traditions of these early times preserved, and various deeds of wickedness which made the mighty men which were of old the "men of renown" of after ages, as scripture speaks, preserved in their memory) an immense system was established, in which shreds of ideas of the true God, mental speculations about Him, facts as to the deluge, its character, causes, and author, dim remembrance of paradise, vivid recollections of wickedness before the flood, and of the persons spared in it, the greatness of men's rebellion exalting the men of renown into gods (while yet they are treated as reprobate, so as to puzzle mythologists); the sun, moon, and stars brought in, peopled by the imagination with a personified existence of the departed great ones; a knowledge that the serpent was the cause of the evil and of knowledge, yet therefore worshipped as God; hence the flood looked at as vengeance, yet mixed up with the serpent having to say to it; the deification of the ark itself as a preserving mother connected with the earth itself as the womb of nature and of all things; and all this mixed up with the most degraded and degrading superstitions that corrupt human nature could indulge in practised, yet mystified into abstract notions — all were used by Satan to obscure and confound the mind, and leave to conscience, which he could not help, some possible shady Tartarus and Elysium, or the transmigration of souls, and, as Paul declares, some "unknown god" to be declared to them.

"In Thy light shall we see light"; but this theory is a return to pagan darkness. For after all, evolution is but a modification of the heathen doctrine of metempsychosis. What Pythagoras and others taught of the individual soul migrating to and from the brutes, Haeckel, Darwin, etc., taught, and Drummond echoes, of the race.

Upon what evidence or proof is this house of cards, this juggling with words, this Satanic delusion, based? Hear the na ȉ v é te of our author: “It might be said, in objection to what has been stated before, that it is pure spinning of thoughts, and such external proof might be demanded as one is accustomed to in ordinary natural science. The reply to this is that the re-embodiment of the spiritual human being is, naturally, a process which does not belong to the region of external physical facts, but is one that takes place entirely in the spiritual region. And to this region no other of our ORDINARY powers of intelligence has entrance save that of THINKING” (p. 66).

They affirm their belief in the existence of an impersonal God, and of human beings, either incarnate—that is, in their human bodies in this world; or discarnate—that is, disembodied in the spirit-world; as they term it.