Metempsychosis

Metempsychosis is the belief that a soul passes after death into another body. It appears in religious and philosophical traditions that differ over which beings receive souls and how rebirth occurs.

Soul: A nonphysical or enduring essence understood in many traditions as the core of a person. Metempsychosis depends on something that can persist beyond bodily death.
Orphism: An ancient Greek religious movement associated with ritual practices, sacred texts, and beliefs about the soul. Orphic teachings linked the soul’s fate to purification and repeated embodiment.
Transmigration of souls: The doctrine that a soul leaves one body at death and enters another. This is the central process described by metempsychosis.
Resurrection: The restoration of the dead to life, commonly understood as the reconstitution of the same person. Unlike metempsychosis, resurrection does not ordinarily place a soul in a different body.
Reincarnation: The belief that a being is reborn in a new body after death. It is the broad modern term often used for the soul’s passage between bodies.
Pythagoras: An ancient Greek thinker associated with a school that combined mathematics, philosophy, and religious discipline. Ancient sources associate Pythagoras with the doctrine that souls move between bodies.
Samsara: The cycle of birth, death, and rebirth in several Indian religious traditions. Metempsychosis describes a soul’s passage within a broader cycle of repeated existence.
Annihilationism: The view that the dead ultimately cease to exist rather than live forever in an afterlife. It denies the continuing soul required for postmortem passage between bodies.
Afterlife: Existence or experience believed to continue after bodily death. Metempsychosis is one account of what can happen after death.
Plato: An ancient Greek philosopher whose dialogues shaped Western philosophy. Plato gave metempsychosis a prominent philosophical treatment in myths of postmortem judgment and rebirth.

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