Law & destinySimplifiedDefined by Blavatsky

Reincarnation

Also: Rebirth · Metempsychosis (she distinguished this) · Transmigration

Latin-derived English for a doctrine she insisted was the lost key of both East and esoteric West

Blavatsky

Original sense

The reincarnating entity is the higher Ego (Manas), not the personality. Personal memory usually dies with the body. Lives are separated by long Devachanic intervals, not by a quick bounce. She rejected the popular idea that humans reincarnate as animals (a misreading of transmigration), and she rejected ‘I remember being Cleopatra’ as, usually, astral-light romance.

Reincarnation means that this Ego will be furnished with a new body, a new brain, and a new memory.
The Key to Theosophy, on rebirth; Secret Doctrine on the Ego

Karma and reincarnation are, for her, a single law. She also claimed the number of human monads is finite for this cycle — hence old karmic debts from Atlantis still being paid.

New Age

Later sense

A choose-your-own-adventure: souls pick parents, sign contracts, and return quickly to ‘learn lessons.’ Past-life regression is a clinical and party technique. Famous previous identities are common; centuries of Devachan are not.

Typical use. Regression hypnosis, ‘your soul chose this family,’ celebrity past lives.

The drift

The core survived; the metaphysics was flattened.

She restored reincarnation to the West as a severe, amnesiac, long-cycle doctrine of the Ego. New Age made it a story the personality can consume about itself. The difference is who is reincarnating: her Manas, or your memoir.

Related terms

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