Wicca: Book of Spells and Witchcraft for Beginners. The Guide of Shadows for Wiccans, Solitary Witches, and Other Practitioners of Magic Rituals - Arin Chamberlains 2018

The Idea of Reincarnation
The Fundamentals of the Craft

The idea of reincarnation is by no means new. The belief is ancient and forms a part of several religions, for example, Buddhism and Hinduism. Reincarnation is the concept of a human soul, a spirit, or a fraction of the divine that exists within us during our lifetime, and upon death, returns to the divine source. The belief continues that this soul, spirit or divine fragment is required to undergo all life experiences for the purposes of its own evolution. This belief may explain many things, like child prodigies for example. Looking at Mozart, the belief that, at five years old, he likely retained knowledge from his previous lifetime, enabling him to compose concertos of genius form, is an understandable explanation for the phenomenon that would otherwise make little sense.

Reincarnation may be extended to several other examples, another being homosexuality. Feelings and sexual preferences from a previous life may be carried over to the next, explaining why some people have tendencies that are considered ’unnatural’ by scientific analyses.

In Wicca, it is a belief that not only humans possess souls, but all things. It is believed that each element of the earth has a reason for existing — a dog will always reincarnate to be a dog, a human will always reincarnate to be a human etc. This is unlike some schools of belief as in some religions, where there is an idea of rebirth in different forms, a human in one life, a plant or animal in the next; or some that believe in a graduating of species from one to the next with humans being at the top. In Wicca, it is believed that what changes is the gender in reincarnation, from male to female.

To explain the fact that the population is growing, Wicca acknowledges that there are also births of new souls, and thus existing in us are either ’old’ souls, which have been reincarnated and experienced several lives or ’new’ souls, which are beginning their journey of experience.