Reincarnation refers to the doctrine or belief that a person may be reborn after death as a new person or in another form, such as an animal.

Reincarnation might also be known as rebirth, metempsychosis, transmigration, disambiguation, or palingenesis.

It is a common belief of ancient and modern religions and philosophies, including Spiritism, Theosophy, and Eckankar, as well as the more established religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, African Vodun, and others. Most Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) do not teach reincarnation. However, minor groups within these religions refer to reincarnation, such as the Kabbalah, the Cathars, Alawites, Druze, the Rosicrucians, and some of the New Age Christian groups. Christian Gnostics also had a belief in reincarnation.

The term from which reincarnation was derived means "to take on the flesh again."

As civilizations spread to different parts of the world, beliefs evolved into various religions. The most notable differences were seen in the East and the West. The religions that arose in the East were more philosophical and less analytical than those in the West. Reincarnation has a place in many Eastern religions, although there are differences in the teachings on rebirth within Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism.

In its simplest form, reincarnation means that when we die, we leave one physical life behind and enter into another. In a religious sense, our lives are often viewed as being for the sole purpose of spiritual growth and the development of the soul. When a person dies, the individual's soul might take on the form of another human being or an animal or plant, often based on the moral quality of the individual's previous life's actions. This is a crucial tenet of Indian and Greek religions. The soul remains the same, although it occupies a new body.

Science tells us that the individual cells in our body have a limited life span, ranging from days to a few years. The average age of cells in an adult human body is between seven and ten years. As we age, the cells in our body are regularly replaced. Nevertheless, our consciousness of who we are remains unchanged. We might develop changes in our likes and dislikes and are likely to adapt our way of thinking to new life experiences, but we still know who we are regarding our identity. While our bodies are constantly changing, our consciousness is essentially fixed. That is the rationale for reincarnation.

While reincarnation is a tenet of several religions, the sites listed in this category focus on reincarnation itself, as reincarnation as a part of a specific faith will be discussed in sites listed within the categories for these faiths. In other words, a New Age church that believes in reincarnation would more appropriately be placed in the New Age category or the regional category corresponding to its location. However, this might be an appropriate category if that same church created a site to discuss its belief in reincarnation. Some sites may appropriately be listed in both categories.

In a secular sense, reincarnation has been closely associated with past life experiences reported by numerous children.

Ian Pretyman Stevenson, a psychiatrist, founder, and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, researched more than 2,500 young children who claimed to remember a past life, documenting a couple of hundred cases in which birthmarks and birth defects corresponded to the physical attributes of the deceased person whose life the child recalled and found numerous accuracies in other details reported by the children in respect to other aspects of their past lives.

Other experts have analyzed some of these same accounts and called them anecdotal. Carl Sagan cited cases from Stevenson's investigations as examples of carefully collected empirical data, although he rejected reincarnation as an unsatisfactory explanation for the stories. Skeptics reject reincarnation because most people do not remember previous lives and, more importantly, because there is no mechanism known to science that would enable an individual's consciousness to survive death and travel to another body. Stevenson acknowledged these limitations.

Whether or not reincarnation is true, it cannot be objectively measured in the way that chemical reactions can be measured. Thus, it appears to be scientifically unprovable. Science is the empirical measure of the natural world, while the soul would exist beyond the natural world.

Although the world's largest religions, Christianity and Islam, reject reincarnation, a survey conducted by the Global Research Society and the Institute for Social Research reported that fifty-one percent of people worldwide believe in reincarnation. A Pew Research Center survey found that twenty-five percent of Americans believe in reincarnation.

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Reincarnation in the Western World

In the Western world, at least in the United States and, I suppose, Canada, reincarnation is thought of as the superstitious belief of Hindus or of ancient traditions of some Native American tribes. According to a 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center, roughly twenty-four percent of adults in the United States believed in reincarnation, which is nearly one out of every four people. Since Hindus comprise only less than one-half of one percent of the population, and Native Americans make up less than one percent of the population, this suggests that most of those who believe in reincarnation have a basis for their beliefs elsewhere, especially since it is unlikely that a large percentage of Native Americans held a belief in reincarnation in 2009. A report published by James T. Richardson in 2004 numbered the total membership in Native American religions at about nine thousand people.

However, oral traditions and written records throughout the world are clear that reincarnation has played a significant role in the human worldview since the early days of civilization; everywhere, that is, except in the Western World.

The traditional Yoruba people of West Africa believed that a child born to a family that had recently experienced the death of a grandparent was that grandparent being reborn into the family. The Mbuti people of Central Africa believed that every human being existed in a non-physical state prior to conception. The Cherokee people of North America believed that the soul chose a family where it believed it might be appreciated, and where it might be able to complete a cycle of learning. The Sioux, the Inuit, and the ancient Incas also held a belief in reincarnation, but the belief was not all inclusive among the indigenous people of North America.

The Teutons, Celts, and Gauls were believers, as were the indigenous people of Hawaii, the South Sea, and Australia. Reincarnation was a part of the traditional belief system of people in the Orient, including Eastern Russia and Japan.

While beliefs in reincarnation fluctuated over the years, except for some of the indigenous people of North America, the belief was not common in the Western worldview.

While reincarnation can be found in Judaism, in the Kabbalah, it has never been an essential tenet of traditional Judaism. In Christianity, where it came up, traditionally, such as in the case of the Gnostics, it was deemed heretical, and drastic measures were taken to stamp it out.

Depending on the poll, from seventy-three to eighty percent of adults in the United States identify themselves as Christians. Since twenty-four percent of the adult population believes in reincarnation, does this imply that everyone else is Hindu? No, because, according to the same polls, fifteen to twenty percent of adults claimed no religious affiliation.

Interestingly, eleven percent of adults who identified themselves as evangelical Christians also claimed a belief in reincarnation, although only about five percent of those claimed regular church attendance. Although there is nothing in traditional Catholicism to suggest reincarnation, a full twenty-five percent of U.S. Catholics believe in reincarnation. Also included among believers in reincarnation who identify themselves as Christian are adherents to various New Age sects that have become prominent in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s.

In fact, in the United States, and in Europe as well, some level of belief in reincarnation seems to be independent of the age of the person, or of the type of religion they belonged to, the majority of them being Christians.

However, a 1999 study by Walter and Waterhouse found that most of those who responded to its study held their belief in reincarnation lightly, and were unclear on the details of their ideas, and only a few reported direct experience of the phenomena. Most of those in that survey had heard other people's accounts of past lives and found them to be fascinating.

It appears then, that while a belief in reincarnation has flowed from the Eastern into the Western world, the ebb and flow is not held by strong beliefs. The percentage of Christians in the United States who reported a belief in reincarnation is fewer than those who claimed a belief in astrology.

They probably won't be damned for heresy, at least not if their beliefs count, because only fifty-nine percent of Americans believe in hell.

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