Mystical systems
Metempsychosis
Direct answer
Metempsychosis is the Greek term for the passing of the soul at death into another body, human or animal, as taught by Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato.
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At a glance
- Also called
- transmigration of souls, greek reincarnation, transmigration of the soul
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Reincarnation, Myth of Er, Samsara, Past Life
Metempsychosis is the Greek term for the passing of the soul at death into another body, human or animal, as taught by Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato.
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What does metempsychosis mean?
Metempsychosis is the name by which the ancient Greek belief in the soul's return is usually known. It holds that the soul is something other than the body, that it survives death and that it enters a new body, which need not be a human one. English writers also call this the transmigration of souls.
In Greece it was the view of a minority: of Pythagoras and his followers, of the poems that circulated under the name of Orpheus, of the philosopher Empedocles and, most influentially, of Plato. With it went a way of life. If a soul may come back as an animal, eating meat becomes a grave matter, and several of these groups avoided it. The aim was to purify the soul and in the end to escape the cycle.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Past lives and karma.
What sets Metempsychosis apart
The Greek teaching has a feature the Indian ones share only in part: it is tied to memory and to diet. Pythagoras was said to recall his own former lives, including one as the Trojan warrior Euphorbus, and Plato argued in the Meno that learning is the recovery of what the soul knew before birth. Abstaining from meat followed from kinship with animals. Rebirth was also a sentence with a term. Plato's Phaedrus gives the soul ten thousand years before it regains its wings, or three thousand for a philosopher.
- Word: Greek: meta, change; en, in; psyche, soul
- Earliest witness: Xenophanes on Pythagoras and the puppy, sixth century BCE
- Main teachers: Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato and the Orphic poems
- Plato on it: Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus and the Republic
- Latin echo: Virgil, Aeneid book six: souls waiting by Lethe to be born again
Often mistaken for something else: Palingenesis means being born again and was used by the Stoics for the rebirth of the whole cosmos; metempsychosis is the passing of one soul through a series of bodies.
The story behind Metempsychosis
The earliest witness is a mocking verse by Xenophanes, a contemporary of Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE, in which Pythagoras stops a man beating a puppy because he knows a dead friend's voice in its cries. Empedocles, in the fifth century, wrote that he had already been a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird and a fish. Plato works the idea into the Meno, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus and the close of the Republic. James Joyce made the word a running joke in Ulysses in 1922.
Why Metempsychosis matters
Metempsychosis shows that a teaching of rebirth arose in Europe as well as in India, with its own arguments and its own ethics.
How to read Metempsychosis
Scholars use the word for the Greek and Roman forms of the belief, and for later European writers who took the idea from Plato.
Metempsychosis in practice: an example
A historian describing what Pythagoreans believed uses metempsychosis, and keeps reincarnation for the modern doctrine and samsara for the Indian one.
Where readings of Metempsychosis go wrong
Whether the Greeks took the idea from India, Egypt or neither is unknown. Ancient claims about its origin are not evidence.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- metempsychosis meaning, transmigration of souls, metempsychosis pythagoras, greek reincarnation, transmigration of the soul
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What does metempsychosis mean?
It is a Greek word for the movement of a soul into a different body after death. It covers rebirth as a human being and as an animal, and some authors extend it to plants.
Is metempsychosis the same as reincarnation?
In practice the words overlap. Metempsychosis is the older, Greek term and is used mainly of Pythagorean and Platonic teaching; reincarnation is a nineteenth-century word now used for the belief in general.
Did Pythagoras believe in reincarnation?
Ancient sources agree that he taught the return of the soul, and a verse by his contemporary Xenophanes pokes fun at him for it. He left no writings, so the details come from later reports.
