Reincarnation: the myth that sells books and fuels hope

Reincarnation: the great promise that metaphysics dismantles

133 days ago, someone raised again the question that has been circulating for decades: do reincarnation and karma exist? The short answer is no, but the road to that denial is full of nuances, books, and more than 2,000 cases studied by a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia.

Guénon versus the new age

The traditionalism of René Guénon considers reincarnation a metaphysical impossibility: a modern idea that confuses the transmigration of ancient doctrines with an elevator of souls heading toward pogre. Against it, contemporary spiritualism, with authors like Michael Newton, Brian Weiss, or Edgar Cayce and films like 'Nosso Lar', sells an evolution of the soul without any need for evidence.

The awkward questions

Skeptics ask: if the population is growing, where do the new souls come from? And why does everyone remember having been pharaohs and nobody an anonymous peasant, nor Einstein perfecting physics? The answer to these objections never comes.

The Stevenson case

Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, documented more than 2,000 cases of children with supposed past lives. Criticized and admired in equal measure, his work remains the only approach with a scientific method, though without conclusive proof.

Reincarnation will remain a business as long as science does not say something more definitive. But a subject with such a capacity for resurrection is not going to disappear tomorrow.