REINCARNATION:

Transmigration of the Soul

©Eileen Holland - www.open-sesame.com

"Souls never die but always on quitting one abode pass to another... All things change, nothing perishes. The soul passes hither and thither, occupying now this body, now that, passing from the body of a beast into that of a man, and then into a beast's again. As a wax is stamped with certain figures, then melted, then stamped anew with others, yet it is always the same wax, so the soul, being always the same, yet wears at different times, different forms." - Pythagoras, to his disciples, according to Ovid

Most witches believe in reincarnation, which is also called metempsychosis or the transmigration of the soul. Wicca has this in common with many Eastern religions. Globally, there are more people who believe in reincarnation than do not. The doctrine of the Transmigration of Souls is generally believed to have originated in Egypt. Greeks shared this belief but it reached fullest flower in the East. Tibetan Buddhists, for example, have it down to such a science that they know exactly when and where to look for a newborn Dalai Lama after the previous one dies.

Reincarnation is a sort of cosmic recycling, like water into ice into fog into water. We die, our energy returns to the Matrix and we are re-formed, born anew. There is a new personality with each incarnation, but our individuality is immortal. At some point we Go On, moving to a new plane of existence. Buddhists call this stage Enlightenment, which brings freedom from the cycle of reincarnation.

An Old Soul is a person who has lived more than once before. Human population growth means the presence among us of people who are actually of ancient origin. This may be in part responsible for the rebirth of Goddess-worship and Bronze Age sensibilities. A mahatma, or Great Soul, is one who has achieved enlightenment but chooses to return, to continue to serve the Universe. Mohandes K. Gandhi was better known by this title, as Mahatma Gandhi. Witches see teachers like Jesus, Zoroaster and the Buddha as Great Souls. I think John Lennon was a mahatma.

Are we always reborn as humans? Can we return as animals? (Cat or dolphin would be great.) How much time passes before we come back? I have no idea. I don't know anything about the mechanics of reincarnation. I just know, in the way a witch Knows things, that I have been before and will be again.

The Goddess brings reunion with those who have gone before. This could happen in a future life or it could be in the Summerlands, the place where we rest between incarnations. Witches don't believe in a heaven or a hell, in eternal reward or eternal punishment. We believe in personal growth and transformation. We recognize karma, that which we bring to each lifetime from previous ones. We understand that what goes around comes around, that we reap what we sow.

Karma can be good (positive) or bad (negative), depending on what sort of lives you have lead. The actions of each lifetime add to the karma of the next one. Karma is not the only force at work in our lives, so it influences but does not determine our fate. We work to improve ourselves with each incarnation, work toward achieving our fullest potential. The population explosion also means there are many new souls on earth, people who have not lived before. I have often wondered if the presence of so many new souls is not responsible for the worst excesses of this century, wondered if the madness and the violence cannot be seen as the result of technology in the hands of raw souls.

The Summerlands is not a heaven or a hell. It is more like the Otherworld of Celtic mythology, a not-here place from which souls go and come. We would like to think it is a place of peace and beauty, a place where we are reunited with our loved ones and in full possession of all the wisdom we have accumulated in our lifetimes. Celts believed that bards could access this realm at will. I have an intuitive belief in such a Summerlands, in the place where we are our full selves, but of course cannot be sure about this.

I was once terrified of death, which I called The Big Sleep. I feared it as erasure, as annihilation, until I discovered Wicca. Oddly, reincarnation was the only Wiccan tenet that I had trouble accepting. I argued with myself that this is all there is, all we get, that if I had lived before I would certainly have some memory of it. I did not think I had such knowledge. But I did know, from an experience in early childhood, that love can survive death:

"The three experiences that are still pinpricks in my consciousness are similar in nature. The first came shortly after the death of my grandfather, who adored me, when I was four. He died two days before President Kennedy. I thought that all the black limousines and weeping crowds were for him. I was impressed. I wasn't permitted to go to his funeral, so for me the televised funeral of the president was my grandfather's funeral. Anyway, about a week after his death I saw him standing on my back porch, smiling at me. Then he disappeared. Everyone patiently explained to me that I hadn't really seen him, that I had just imagined it because I wanted to see him, but I knew otherwise. "

- From an essay for sociology class (Age 17)

I can still see him as he was that day, in the thin November sunshine, smiling behind his mustache. He wore suspenders, wore a flannel shirt and corduroy pants. He had died of a bleeding ulcer after a long hospitalization. Children were not allowed to visit hospitals back then, so he came to say farewell. I never saw my grandfather again, but I can still feel his love all these decades later.

PAST LIFE WORK: Who were we?

Jewel: carnelian, for access to past life data
Gazing into Fire of Azrael, which is kindled of juniper, cedar and sandalwood, is supposed to enable you to see images from past lives.

There are many ways to find out who you were, if you have lived before. You may, like me, discover you had the information all along, just had not accessed it. When I began to try to learn if I had lived before I looked to my dreams, my diaries, my memories and insights:

"I'm in the Egyptian Section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I am sitting on marble, hiding behind the potted plants. I am so happy that it is difficult to breathe. A people in my own image. It's too bad that I don't believe in reincarnation. I feel so at home. I want all the people to go away so that I can be alone with my culture. I have come home. I will open the cases and put on the jewelry. It is all so familiar to me. The cats, the birds of terror, tamed like my owls ("Women are still cats and owls." - Nietzsche) and the hair, the eyes, most of all the eyes. I feel like I am surrounded by mirrors, like I am actually looking at myself. I am a Western cousin to them with their black hair and eyes, their desert skin. I am a descendent of the adventuring Egyptians who reached England to build Stonehenge and mix with the natives, so that I could be born centuries later, a hybrid, a throwback with twinges of racial memory. The other visitors to the museum are all around me, gaping at the strangeness, but I am hearing other voices, ancient voices, which are more real to me.

On a humid summer day I have found my people. I have come home, in spirit. There is one place where I am no alien."

- Diary, July 13 1977

Personal quirks may have their explanation in another time. I have never been able to eat fish or eggs, even as a child. My aversion to seafood is so strong that it is more like a taboo than a food preference. In studying mythology I encountered Atargatis, the Syrian love goddess whose worship reached Egypt at its height. She is a mermaid to whom fish and dolphins are sacred, so her devotees were forbidden to eat fish. Atargatis was born from an egg. Naturally, I wonder if I served her somewhen in time.

It may take a combination of things to recover a lifetime. I have come to believe that my most recent incarnation was as an Arab man in North Africa. I remember his/my death. He is old, in bed, with his eyes closed and his face turned toward a window. The sunlight is so strong that he sees it through his eyelids. He has trouble breathing but is completely at peace. He likes the feel of the sunlight on his body. He is ready to die, welcomes it even. He is satisfied. Voices murmur in Arabic, the softly accented Arabic of the Maghreb. Probably people are praying.

This memory was triggered on a warm, sunny afternoon in France while I dozed on a park bench, listening to Moroccan conversation. The memory has become more defined over the years, as I have tuned in to it. I have other reasons for thinking I have been an Arab man more than once:

The Sahara desert calls to me, exerts a strange pull, makes me feel like no other place I have ever been. I could easily succumb to desert madness, simply keep walking across the burning sand until I drop.
It would explain many things about the choices I have made in this lifetime.
My body chemistry.
This dream:

"I dream I am a young Arab man, floating above the scene. I see my village - tents in the moonlight. I live with these people now, but I am from another village and I have no family. I am engaged to the daughter of a prominent family down below, and will be adopted into their family. Floating, I know all this about myself, but looking down I see nothing but tents under the moon of a silent night. My slippers are outside her family's tent. As we are not yet married I cannot spend the whole night in their tent. I must leave each night when the moon rises. Having no tent of my own I spend each night in the open.

When I see myself emerge from the tent and put the slippers on I am no longer floating, I am inside my body. I climb the hill behind the village. It is a hard climb. I finally reach the top and there before me are the beach and the sea. It is a glorious night. This is what I do every night. Standing near the rock is a girl I went to grade school with, in this lifetime. She is watching the sky. She turns when she hears me, and we smile briefly in acknowledgment. I also watch the incredible sky. There are thousands of stars, whirling, twisting, shifting and falling. The sky is incandescent, alive. Whales rise from the ocean to watch the skies. I am very happy. At some point I split from the Arab and there are three of us on the rock. Later my brother comes up from behind me to join us, silent and watching. There are spaceships in the sky now.

There is very little color in the dream, just shades of light and dark, the cold sand running between my hands like liquid velvet and the wonder of the sky. We are all happy and very much at peace. I regret the dawn."
- Diary: April, 1984

I have another memory, one I cannot place exactly. I am in a tent, a tent of black and white striped fabric. Am I male or female? It is cold, late autumn or almost spring. A brazier burns but does not create enough heat to warm the space. It is very early, just after dawn. I am in a hurry, pouring freezing water into a basin, busy with equipment, getting things ready. I have the idea that this is Europe, that I am in the service of someone powerful, someone I am anxious to please. The prince? A general?

I go outside. There are soldiers and steaming, stamping horses, an undercurrent of thrill and fear, more tents, an urgent sense of hushed expectancy. There are no human voices, only the clink and jangle of the horses' trappings. Their hooves have been wrapped with straw or cloth to muffle them. Something is going to happen. A battle? A journey?

Are such memories valid? Perhaps. They might come from novels read in childhood, or half-forgotten films, or the imagination. Respect them if they remain with you, will not let go of you. Respect them if they feel real.

ANCIENT DREAMS

Ancient dreams are not like ordinary dreams. They may have dream motifs and nonsense mixed in, like my dream of the young Arab (I have always dreamed of whales), but these dreams have something that feels real at their core. Physical sensations may mark them, the ability to feel or smell things. If you normally dream in black and white an ancient dream may come in color, and vice versa. You wake hard from an ancient dream, shaken, with the feeling that you have actually been somewhere. In such dreams lie the clues to past lives.

The most powerful ancient dream I ever had also occurred in the 1980's:

I dreamt of a primitive place, primitive people. I was part of a frenzied, half-naked crowd. It was night, in a tropical or subtropical place. The dream was so real that I could smell the stink of the bodies, hear the shouting, feel the heat of the torches on my face and the sweat trickling down my skin. We surrounded an enormous metal image of a crayfish or prawn on a base, one that had been heated until it glowed. It was full of molten liquid, and was being moved slowly along on rolling logs. Priests of some sort directed us in this. Something violent was going to be done with the molten liquid, but I am not sure if we were at war or performing some religious rite. I can still remember exactly how I, the person in the dream, felt. It was a mixture of fear, excitement and awe. I/he was part of the crowd but not a full participant in what was going on. I don't think he knew exactly what was about to happen.

I woke from this dream with my heart pounding, in a sweat. It took a few minutes to completely return to my own bed, in the 20th century. This was the dream that drove me to mythology, in a futile search for the people with a crayfish deity. In all my studies I have never discovered such a culture. This could mean several things:

It was just a dream, with no meaning.
History failed to record this culture.
What my urban mind interpreted as a crayfish was actually a scorpion. There have been scorpion god/desses in many cultures.

Another thing about ancient dreams is that you never forget them:

"Revelation: The crayfish dream is connected to the ancient city of Ur is connected to the ease I feel in cities."

- Diary: February 17, 1994

I have had two ancient dreams in recent years:

The first dream was of a princess/priestess and her vizier or acolyte. At first I watched this dream as if I were floating above them. If I were anyone in the dream, I was the vizier. They had the king's body, her father. This was a dry, desiccated, papery thing wrapped in plain linen, with its arms outstretched to one side. The barbarians were literally at the gate, the thump of their battering ram vibrating through the stonework of the temple/palace.

I could also see the action outside the temple. The entrance was set far back, between the walls of its wings. Soldiers in metal masks and sandals raced back and forth, anxious to gain entry. Stone walls rose featurelessly above them, but there were openings high up in the entryway walls. The attackers were safe until they made for the gate. Then arrows, perhaps spears, and hot oil alternately rained down on them. They kept coming, stomping right over the bodies of their fallen comrades. The screams of the wounded were horrible each time the oil was released.

The princess was desperate to give her father's body proper rites before the enemy stormed in. We put it into a wall crypt. She took a bowl of ink and a brush and began to write on the wall beside the opening, painting symbols that were hieroglyphs or cuneiform. What she was writing meant 'here lies the body of the king' and she was gleeful because the attackers were illiterate. They would march right past, never realizing whose body this was, and so fail to desecrate it. Religious texts followed. The cracking of the wooden gate could now be heard, and she grew frantic. She handed me/him another bowl of ink and told him to complete the text on the opposite wall. He complied, shocked to be working at this sacred task. He knew the passage by heart, painted the words faster and sloppier than she did.

They finished before the gate was breached. She relaxed, triumphant and defiant, but he grew anxious then and urged her to remove all the finery that marked her as a princess. There was perhaps enough time for them to escape, or for her to at least conceal her rank by mingling with the other women. She seemed to have little concern about herself. I could feel the power of her triumph at having fulfilled her duty and outsmarted the enemy.

I later saw drawings of a Mesopotamian temple complex whose layout was very like that of the one in my dream.

The most recent dream took place in a dusty, rocky land with jagged islands that rose straight out of azure waters. The light was the white light of the Mediterranean. It looked like Greece. There was a ragtag army with a king and a catapult on an outcropping above the shore. They had lost a battle and retreated to their ship in disarray, making it as far as this place. I watched the dream as if floating above it.

A ship with white sails entered the harbor, the victors in hot pursuit. The king grew hysterical when he saw the ship making for them. They had a catapult but no time to gather enough boulders for it. He ordered his people to make human missiles of themselves, and they obediently lined up before the catapult. When the ship grew close enough, soldiers would load the person at the head of the line into the catapult, set them aflame and hurl them at the ship. You could hear screaming that grew thinner as the body flew through the air. Some hit the ship, starting fires, others landed in the water. I was horrified by this, horrified that the king would use his people in this way but more shocked and sickened that they would acquiesce.

The king made his getaway as soon as this operation was underway. He had a crown, a gold crown shaped like a ziggurat, that he was desperate to safeguard. He scrambled up the rocks, tearing his fingers and clothes on them. He kept climbing until he reached a plateau, never looking back to see what had become of his people. He searched the scraggly vegetation until he found a cleft in the rocks. He tore his cloak, wrapped the crown and some other jewelry in a piece of cloth from it, and thrust them into the opening. He pulled up some plants and stuffed them in afterward, for camouflage. Then he set out walking, briskly, his back to the fighting below.

Next my husband and I, as ourselves, were in this place. We were dressed for hiking and looking for the crown. We seemed to know where to look and quickly found it. I put it in my backpack and we set off walking in the same direction the king had gone. We walked a ways and found ourselves in modern Cairo, in an open-air food market where vendors were hawking bread, fruit, fish and vegetables from small carts. We were happy to have the crown.

This dream makes the least sense to me and I am at a loss as to how to interpret it. What struck me as most genuine about it were the landscape and the perfidy of the king, with his crown and his curly black beard.

My ancient dreams are focused around moments of extreme emotion, around fear and violence and victory. I am not certain exactly who I was, do not know names or dates, but this certainly tells me a great deal about myself.

PAST LIFE CONNECTIONS

It seems that we encounter and reencounter people as we are reincarnated. It seems that strong personal bonds survive death. I wrote this while I was pregnant with my son:

"The child is not a stranger to me - I have known her or him before. The child was a priestess, I think. And is a witch, for sure. Perhaps I'm not nauseous because my body doesn't reject that which it recognizes, that which is like itself."

- Diary, December 1 1994

From the beginning of my pregnancy it was clear to me that my unborn child and I had known each other before, somewhen in time. As it gestated I could feel the baby's antiquity, its wisdom. This faded as he grew closer to birth until, by the time he was born, he was as blank a slate as any of us was at birth. Old Souls have much knowledge to recover.

"I feel strongly that the baby is a magical child, that we have known each other before. I feel his happiness."

- Diary, February 18 1995

It seems to me, from this experience, that we are still our whole selves at conception. I called my son forth with love and magic. He made an informed choice, came to me with full knowledge of himself.

We can discover past life connections, who we knew as well as who we were, from dreams. My husband (who does not believe in reincarnation) dreamt this:

"He was in a temple with a big altar and I was the priestess, younger, with a lot of long, curly red hair, wearing a diaphanous gown. He says I had a great body. (Well, it was his dream.) He was in trouble, sick in mind or soul or body, and he had come to the priestess for help. She burned incense, made magick and recited incantations. Then she approached him with a large, pointy bud or seed, which she pressed into his chest, and the full force of the healing magick jolted him. He says it was a dream but more than a dream. He says she wore a collar of amber stones and her robe was of the colors of her hair. He thinks it was a vision of something that happened or will happen."

- Diary, August 14 1994

Reincarnation does not require that we believe in it.