Transmigration, Reincarnation, Gilgulim

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 25 pages

The most careful set of distinctions in the section, and the one most often got wrong elsewhere. Transmigration, metempsychosis and metangismos all refer to the passing of an unspecified entity into another body, and the file separates what each actually names. Transmigration is the passing of lower entities, through the agency of life-atoms or skandhas, into the crucible of evolution — every single atom in the universe being endowed with memory, will and sensation, and so a life-atom, an integral part of the One Life. Two kinds are then distinguished: transmigration after death, by the recycling of life-atoms, and transmigration during life, by throwing away life-atoms during intense feeling.

Metempsychosis is something else again: the progress of an animal soul to a higher stage of existence, metangismos having been the technical term for it among the Pythagoreans. Reincarnation is narrower than either — the rebirth of the same Ego in successive human bodies. Two settings of metempsychosis are then contrasted: in the first, a virtuous but not entirely pure soul withdraws to high realms of subjectivity for a period of rest before a further period of imprisonment in the flesh; in the second, a soul purified by self-induced and self-devised efforts realises its essential unity with the Self of All and annihilates its self-conscious materiality in favour of the peace that dwells in unconscious immateriality. A foreword by the series editor and a historical review of the doctrine open the file, and the Hebrew gilgulim supplies the third term of the title.

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