An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Reincarnation

Some years ago, in the 1950s, Mr Geoffrey Gorer made an enquiry into the current religious beliefs of the English people. Its results were printed in The Observer; and Mr Gorer wrote that the most surprising thing he had discovered was the prevalence of the belief in reincarnation. Thinking that this idea belonged exclusively to the creeds of the East, he was at a loss to account for its widespread acceptance in modern England.

The work of occultists such as Madame Blavatsky, and popular romantic stories like Ivor Novello’s Perchance to Dream, made the belief that we live more lives than one known among the public generally. However, this is far from giving such an idea widespread and serious acceptance; unless it was not in reality an alien idea to the soul of the British race at all.

In fact, reincarnation is a very old idea indeed; and it is part of the Old Religion of Western Europe, as well as of the faiths of India and Asia. Charles Godfrey Leland has testified to its survival among the secrets of La Vecchia Religione in Italy; and Leland’s own beautiful poem, “One Thousand Years Ago”, is evidence of his own belief in this doctrine. The last verse of it runs:

Thou and I but yesterday

Met in fashion’s show.

Love, did you remember me,

Love of long ago?

Yes: we kept the fond oath sworn

One thousand years ago.

So general was the acceptance of reincarnation throughout the civilised world at the beginning of the Christian era, that the Early Christian Church had many eminent members who subscribed to the belief. Only slowly did it fall into disfavour, and become replaced by the doctrines of death, judgement, heaven and hell, final and fixed for eternity; of vicarious atonement instead of working out one’s own destiny; or of the dead sleeping in their graves until the Last Judgement.

All of these latter doctrines were frightening and depressing, but they were very good for keeping people in order, and submissive to the rule of the Church. Also, however monstrously wicked a medieval nobleman, for instance, might have been, he had only to make a good death-bed repentance and die fortified by the rites of Holy Church, and all was well. He had no need to fear the destiny he had made for himself catching up with him in subsequent lives on earth, as the pagan philosophers had taught. It was the Pope who held the keys of heaven and hell, and delegated his power to the bishops and priests. The old powers of Fate, Destiny or Nemesis were just accursed heathen notions.

As for the serf, it was God who had appointed his servitude to his feudal lord; and his chief virtue was to know his place and submit. There was only one life, in which some were appointed lords and barons, and others artisans and serfs. The one blood was noble, the other base. To contemplate the possibility of more than one life, meant that things might get dangerously mixed up, to the subversion of the social order.

Subversion is what the witch cult was constantly being accused of by its ecclesiastical critics. In other words, there were doctrines being secretly taught and disseminated among the common people, which were not orthodox doctrines. Ideas were being kept alive, against which the Church had pronounced its anathema.

The old Druidical teachings, for instance, very definitely contained the idea of reincarnation. So did the Qabalistic teachings, secretly studied by the Rosicrucians. The Gnostics and Neo-Platonists retained much of the philosophy of the ancient world. This philosophy had as one of its most respected masters Pythagoras, who taught reincarnation and claimed to remember his past lives.

In Dryden’s version of the Roman poet Ovid, Pythagoras speaks as follows:

Death has no power th’ immortal soul to slay,

That, when its present body turns to clay,

Seeks a fresh home; and with unlessened might

Inspires another frame with life and light.

So I myself (well I the past recall),

When the fierce Greeks begirt Troy’s holy wall,

Was brave Euphorbus: and in conflict drear

Poured forth my blood beneath Atrides’ spear.

The shield this arm did bear I lately saw

In Juno’s shrine, a trophy of that war.

Virgil, in the Sixth Book of his Aeneid, also expounds the doctrine of reincarnation, and describes how the souls in the Otherworld gathered to drink the waters of Lethe, which made them forget the memories of the past, before being reborn in new bodies upon earth.

Apollonius of Tyana, the famous philosopher and Adept of the first century A.D., also believed in reincarnation, and said he could remember a previous life in which he was a ship’s pilot.

Thus it can be amply shown that reincarnation is not an idea confined to the religions of the East. Herodotus, who was an initiate of the Egyptian Mysteries, claimed that the Ancient Egyptians were the first to teach immortality of the soul, and its evolution through a cycle of many lives; and that the Greeks later adopted this opinion as if it were their own.

The old versions of reincarnation sometimes also involved the transmigration of souls, or metempsychosis. The latter teaches that the soul may be reborn in the body of an animal or even a plant or tree; whereas present-day believers in reincarnation generally hold that, while the soul may ascend to the human level through other life-forms, once that level has been reached there is no going back. Evolution continues by means of other human lives; until this earth’s level is transcended, and the soul is confined in flesh no more. Between earthly lives, the soul dwells upon the planes of the Unseen, at such a level, high or low, as its attainment is fitted for.

The Eastern doctrine of Karma has been much misunderstood in the West. It does not mean ’reward and punishment’; at least not in the way that many people think. It says nothing about our limited earthly ideas of reward and punishment at all. The Sanscrit word karma simply means ’action’. This carries the implication that every action must produce its appropriate reaction, sooner or later; and if this process is not worked out in one life, then it will be worked out in succeeding lives.

We cannot dogmatise about the deep things of human destiny, from our limited viewpoint. This is why the pagan religions conceived of Karma in the form of Fate, Destiny, or Wyrd, being dispensed to mortals by the triple goddess. The Greeks had their idea of the Three Fates, who were also called the Moirai. The Romans called them the Parcae. Romano-Celtic Britain had the Three Mothers, the Matres. To the Old Norse peoples who were our northern ancestors, the three goddesses of Fate were the Nornir; and the Old English concept of them was ’The Weird Sisters’, combined eventually into one goddess, Wyrd, meaning ’Destiny’. There is still an old expression, ’to dree one’s weird’, meaning to fulfil one’s destiny.

The triple goddess of Fate was associated with the phases of the moon, probably because the moon is man’s oldest meter-out of time. As they revered the moon goddess, so the ideas of reincarnation and destiny naturally commended themselves to witches. Also, they provided an alternative idea of life after death, and the destiny of the soul, to that of the Christian Church; an idea, moreover, which was much older, and part of the racial mythology of Western Europe.

Caesar, in his brief references to the Druids, tells us: “As one of their leading dogmas, they inculcate this: that souls are not annihilated but pass after death from one body to another, and they hold that by this teaching men are much encouraged to valour, through disregarding the fear of death.”

Diodorus Siculus says of the Druids: “Among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevails, according to which the souls of men are immortal, and after a fixed term recommence to live, taking upon themselves a new body.”

In some ancient Gaelic stories, we find the idea of reincarnation appearing. For instance, the men of Ulster urged their hero Cuchulainn to marry, because they believed that “his rebirth would be of himself”; that is, he would be reborn as one of his own descendants. They wanted the soul of this great warrior to remain with their tribe.

Also, another great warrior, Finn MacCoul, was said to have been reborn after 200 years, as an Ulster king called Mongan. This king was an historical personage, who died about A.D. 625.

The story is well-known, of the inscription which was found upon the tomb of King Arthur, “Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus”; meaning, “Here lies Arthur, the once and future King.”

However, it has generally been argued by commentators upon our Celtic past, that the Celts did not believe in reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, in quite the same way that the peoples of the East do. The Celtic genius cast its own glamour over all things that it touched, hiding its beliefs in legends and tales. The atmosphere of haunted twilight, and the peat-fire flame, that comes with Celtic things, is very different from that of the Orient or of Ancient Greece or Alexandria. But this does not mean that the arcane traditions of the British race are in any way belittled, rather the reverse, by being of their own nature. The diamond of Truth is a jewel with many facets, flashing now one colour and now another; but the jewel does not change.

Commentators have also frequently stated that the idea of Karma is peculiar to the Far East. However, it can be found, either implied or openly revealed, in Western beliefs as well.

For instance, Plotinus, who was born in Egypt in 205 or 206 A.D., tells us in his works: “The gods bestow on each the destiny which appertains to him, and which harmonises with his antecedents in his successive existences. Every one who is not aware of this is grossly ignorant of divine matters.”