Metempsychosis: An Interreligious History

Diverse religious and philosophical traditions around the world have adopted ideas of metempsychosis or the transmigration of the soul. Christians, Jews, and Muslims have also experimented with the idea, while such Abrahamic experiments have been disregarded and even silenced. On the other hand, these engagements can teach us not only the diversity within each of these faiths, but also the deep interconnections between their intellectual heritages. The adoption of metempsychosis often mirrored intellectual exchanges between religious traditions, as in the case of the prominent School of Illuminationism, which exemplifies such philosophical interactions between Muslims, Jews, and Indian religions. This project aims to generate renewed academic focus around the interreligious history of reincarnation. The project team will provide English translations of a rich set of original mystical, theological, and philosophical texts on the transmigration of the soul. They will develop an archive of historical sources on metempsychosis, and pursue the hypothesis that the history of metempsychosis is also the history of forgotten transcultural and interreligious exchanges.