A Witches' Bible by Janet Farrar

Author:Janet Farrar [Janet; Farrar, Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4463-5790-3
Publisher: F+W
Published: 2012-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

XII Reincarnation

Almost all witches believe in reincarnation.1 It is probably true to say that they share this belief with a majority of the human race (or of those members of it who believe in survival after death in whatever form), because the concept of a single life followed by a one-off, heaven-or-hell judgement is peculiar to the patriarchal monotheist religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — though the Jewish belief is perhaps more shadowy than the other two, and reincarnation is certainly implicit in Hebrew Cabalistic thinking.

Belief in reincarnation was widespread among early Christians, and was general among the Gnostics. St Jerome (AD 340-420) says that a form of it was taught to a select few in the early Church.2 But it was declared anathema by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, for obvious reasons. The Church had become a State disciplinary machine, with its structure inseparable from that of the Imperial civil service; and the promise of heaven or the threat of hell, as a reward or punishment for behaviour in this immediate life, was therefore an essential Establishment weapon. Gnostic versions of the teachings of Jesus (some of them probably with as much claim to authenticity as the official Gospels) had to be banned, hunted down and destroyed for the same reasons; they saw salvation in terms of individual enlightenment, whereas the official Church saw it in terms of obedience to the bishop.

The theory of reincarnation holds, briefly, that each individual human soul or essence is reborn again and again, in a series of bodily incarnations on this earth, learning its lessons and facing the consequences of its actions, until it is sufficiently advanced to progress to the next stage (whatever that may be). The actual working out of the theory is closely bound up with the Theory of Levels, since it involves the stratification of the human entity into its component planes, which correspond to those of the Cosmos as a whole.

These planes are interpreted in various ways, according to the school of occult thought being followed. But the table of them given can be taken as a generally accepted standard. The numbering and definitions are those used by Dion Fortune in The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, and The Cosmic Doctrine. She does not list the Etheric as a separate plane, but this is purely a matter of nomenclature; many other writers (and even Dion Fortune herself elsewhere) often speak of the Etheric Plane, and it is reasonable to do so, because it is of great practical importance in psychic working. It is, for example, the substance of the innermost band of the human aura as seen by sensitives, and there is reason to believe that it is responsible for the phenomena recorded by Kirlian photography.

The seven (or eight, if we include the Etheric) levels or ‘bodies’ of a human entity are divided into two groups, generally called the Individuality and the Personality. The Individuality (Upper Spiritual,3 Lower Spiritual and Upper Mental) is the immortal part, which survives from incarnation to incarnation.

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