Article Keyword: Plato

Honoring Pythagoras: Reincarnation Ideas in Classical Greece – Hans TenDam (Is.20)

by Hans TenDam

 A doctoral thesis at Princeton University Press in 1948, documents carefully and scholarly that Greek reincarnation ideas came from no other than Pythagoras; not from his teacher Pherecydes, the Orphics, Egypt, the Celts, or the Thracians. And as two of the most important doctrines associated with metempsychosis appear first in Greece, and only then in India, any transmission would have rather been from Greece to India than the reverse. It is also likely that the Celts acquired the doctrine from the Greeks.  In the Pythagorean view, metempsychosis is an ethical development and memories of past lifetimes are possible. We can still live with that.

Reincarnation or rather metempsychosis ideas were already known in classical Greece. Orphic and … Read the rest