Reincarnation is not part of original or core animism: belief in a lasting individual “I” that is reborn emerges with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. People are free to keep the belief, but it is worth considering why our animist ancestors, for most of human history, did not hold it. In animism, the AncestorsAncestors. The human Oversoul: the whole of humanity held as one Lower-World being. Distinct from individual dead ancestors (small a), who are not worked with in this approach. Read the full answer are not individual people but branches of Human. Past-life memories may be our ego’s way of framing experiences of being part of something far bigger.
Did hunter-gatherer animists believe in reincarnation? #
Reincarnation “is absolutely not part of original or core animism.” Like the belief in everlasting life, it emerges with the Fall, and both rest on the idea of a lasting, individual “I”. Only two hunter-gatherer peoples have been found that seem to have believed in it at all, both seeming to say it happened only rarely, and it is not certain that even they were untouched by the Fall.
No one is asked to give the belief up. But there is one question to face: “why, for around 195,000 years for the vast majority of human history, did none of our animist ancestors believe in reincarnation?” See How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand death, and what happens when we die?
What are the Ancestors, if not individual people? #
In animism, the Ancestors with a capital ‘A’ are not our individual ancestors. They “are not a single twig but a whole branch”, and if we trace any tribe’s Ancestral branches far enough back, “then they all converge into one branch: Human”. “The Ancestors are different branches of Human.”1
See What is the difference between an ancestor and an Ancestor?
Should a practitioner impose beliefs about past lives or karma? #
One healer imposed her own beliefs on a client by assuming that “the notion that we choose our parents is true; that reincarnation is true; and that the notion of karmic bonding and karmic duty is true.” Believing these things is one matter: “Now you may believe in reincarnation, or karma, or the idea that we choose our parents. Fair enough. What is neither useful or okay in working with people though is to impose our beliefs on them”.2
What are “past lives”, then? #
Anyone who says they remember past lives might ask whether they actually remember them, or whether that is simply how they are interpreting or framing the experience. Much of our experience is co-created.
He speaks from his own experience. “In my 20s, I was really open to the idea of past lives and spent a lot of time doing past life regression work. And I had all sorts of very, very profound and vivid experiences through doing that.” At the time, he interpreted them as memories of his own past lives. As he got more committed to shamanism in his thirties, he came to realise that although on one level there is an “I”, on another level we are a tiny part of something much bigger, the Human Oversoul. “My ego, maybe, was having that experience and saying, oh, that’s me”.
What about the evidence for reincarnation? #
People tend to have a confirmation bias about this. Whenever Paul Francis has looked at the evidence, he has found lots of problems, among them that the stories are very few in a world of billions of people.
At the University of Virginia, the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson began collecting reports from young children who describe memories of a previous life, and Jim Tucker later took the work on. Their collection now holds more than 2,500 cases, and they think some are hard to explain in ordinary ways.3 Critics such as the philosopher Paul Edwards point out that most of the cases come from cultures that already believe in reincarnation, and that memories can be reshaped in the years before anyone investigates them.4
