Search

Metempsychosis, otherwise knows as reincarnation in the Indian tradition, appears in antique Greece firstly as an imported mystical belief and a cult among Orpheans and later on as a philosophical doctrine. Metempsychosis presupposes the immortality of the soul (psykhḗ), a sequence of deaths and rebirths in a new body, an award or punishment in the next life, depending on moral activity during one's life, and a possibility of breaking out of the circle of rebirths. The comparison between antique Greek and Indian beliefs in metempsychosis reveals their gradual relation. In some aspects these beliefs are identical: immortality of the soul, transmigration of the soul to a different body, morally -dependent regulation of (re)births, possibility of breaking out of the circle of life and death, vegetarianism. In some aspects the beliefs are only similar: conception of cyclical time, understanding of (the immortality of) the soul as identical with immortal universal and, later on, as coming out of the hylozoistic idea among Greeks, and, among Indians, the belief in the being (ātman) as a reflection of infinite consciousness or an illusion of individuality (jīva). In some aspects, they are different: (im)possibility of rebirth of rational soul in an animal body among Greeks in the later phase of the teaching that does not exist at all in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]