metempsychosis

plural metempsychoses

1. countableuncountableTransmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death.First known use 16th c.

   Hers was a metempsychosis of novelty, her mind a vapid thing until animated by the next absolute conviction.

   1994, Will Self, My Idea of Fun

   5 more examples

   Pythagoras borrowed Metempsychosis of the Ægyptians, but since, it hath been received of divers Nations, and especially of our Druides[…].

   1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 11, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book II, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC

   The Fates that are so careful to shut the doors of each successive life behind us had, in this case, been neglectful, and Charlie was looking, though that he did not know, where never man had been permitted to look with full knowledge since Time began. Above all he was absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold to me for five pounds; and he would retain that ignorance, for bank-clerks do not understand metempsychosis, and a sound commercial education does not include Greek.

   1891, Rudyard Kipling, The Finest Story in the World

   Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for instance. What they called nymphs, for example.

   1922 February 2, James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC

   To go along assuming that Victoria the girl tourist and Veronica the sewer rat were one and the same V. was not at all to bring up any metempsychosis: only to affirm that his quarry fitted in with The Big One, the century’s master cabal.

   1963, Thomas Pynchon, V.

   Faiths and philosophies the world over have entertained prospects of some existence beyond the grave (perhaps in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls), and belief in ghosts, shades or the wandering spirits of lost souls has been ubiquitous. Any culture crediting supernatural powers is likely to entertain an afterlife of sorts. But this Christian identification of the self with a 'separate soul' which transcended the flesh was especially indebted to theosophies rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean.

   2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Ch.1, at p.18