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Wellsprings
soul

Transmigration

μετεμψύχωσις

The doctrine of the reborn soul — passing at death from one body to the next, human, animal, or beyond.

Transmigration is the belief that a single soul can inhabit many different bodies across successive lifetimes. Though the concept appears in various ancient philosophical schools, it is most famously associated with Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, who taught that souls are immortal and cycle through different creatures as punishment or reward based on the moral quality of previous lives. The idea also appears in Platonic philosophy, where souls are purified or corrupted through their choices and thus reincarnate accordingly.

The doctrine had practical moral weight in ancient thought. According to the evidence, Pythagoras claimed to remember his own previous incarnations, including a life as the Trojan warrior Euphorbus, and this memory supposedly demonstrated the soul's continuous existence. The theory offered an explanation for why individuals seemed born with different natures and capacities—a violent man might be reborn as a lion, a cowardly one as a timid animal—making transmigration a framework for understanding both moral responsibility and the apparent inequalities of human existence without invoking divine arbitrariness.

Where this idea shows up

36 Greek sources·2 Jewish-canon citations

Where to read it