Metempsychosis — the transmigration or reincarnation of souls across successive bodies — enters the depth-psychology corpus primarily as a doctrinal inheritance from Pythagorean and Orphic tradition, where it serves less as a literal eschatological claim than as a mythological index of the soul’s moral-cosmic journey. The scholarly record, from Rohde’s foundational Psyche through Burkert’s Greek Religion and the Platonic scholarship of Claus and Sullivan, establishes metempsychosis as the axial teaching distinguishing Pythagorean soteriology from Homeric soul-belief: the psyche accrues guilt, undergoes purgative wandering through elemental and underworld stations, and returns — purified — to higher forms or divine apotheosis. Jung himself references the concept obliquely, once in the Two Essays and once via Plato’s Republic, treating it as a symbolic coefficient of psychological transformation rather than a metaphysical doctrine. Kerenyi and Jung together, in the Eleusis essays, notably subordinate metempsychosis to the more fundamental Eleusinian mystery of cyclical birth as a transpersonal phenomenon. The central tension in the corpus runs between literal transmigration-belief and its symbolic reappropriation as an image of individuation, moral development, and the soul’s encounter with archetypal depths.
According to Empedocles the wandering through all of the elements is atonement for a blood guild incurred in the divine world; the goal is return to the gods, apotheosis.
Burkert outlines the Pythagorean-Orphic doctrine in which metempsychosis is an expiatory cosmic journey through all elements and life-forms, culminating in reunion with the divine.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977thesis
Pherekydes was regarded as ‘the first’ who taught the immortality of the soul or more correctly metempsychosis; This teaching seems to have been the chief reason which tempted later writers to make the old theologos into the teacher of Pythagoras, the chief spokesman of the doctrine of the soul’s transmigrations.
Rohde traces the genealogy of metempsychosis to Pherekydes and Pythagoras, establishing it as the foundational doctrine of the soul’s immortality and transmigration in archaic Greek thought.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894thesis
the influence of metempsychosis and allied beliefs-like those of the Katharmoi-in primal sin, ascetic purification, punishment and reward of souls after death, and the existence of an occult personality are taken to be crucial to the semantic history of ψυχή.
Claus argues that metempsychosis and its associated Orphic-Pythagorean beliefs are constitutive of the deeper moral and occult meanings that the concept of psyche acquires in the pre-Platonic and Platonic traditions.
, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981thesis
These psychai appear to have undergone some form of purification in the underworld. In their reincarnation, ‘in the ninth year’ … they return to earth as people particularly endowed with authority, power, and wisdom.
Sullivan documents Pindar’s account of metempsychosis as a graduated moral process: psychai purified in the underworld are reincarnated as exceptional individuals, ultimately attaining heroic status.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis
216 is the period of the Pythagorean Metempsychosis
The Platonic commentary identifies the number 216 as the mathematical period governing Pythagorean metempsychosis, embedding transmigration doctrine within Plato’s numerological cosmology.
, Republic, -380thesis
The Pythagoreans, combined the doctrine of metempsychosis with the doctrine that the ‘images’ of the departed remained with Persephone. The principal thing in Eleusis was not metempsychosis but birth as a more than individual phenomenon.
Jung and Kerenyi distinguish Eleusinian mystery religion from Pythagorean metempsychosis, arguing that Eleusis centred on transpersonal rebirth rather than individual soul-transmigration.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis
in examining Greek doctrines of immortality Rohde felt he was thereby describing how a universally shared conception of the human psychological life began to have deeper significance for the Greeks by acquiring connotations of immortality and divinity.
Claus situates Rohde’s project as an account of how Greek soul-concepts, including metempsychosis, transformed a basic psychological notion into a vehicle of immortality and divinity.
, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981supporting
metempsychosis, 68
Jung’s index reference places metempsychosis in the immediate vicinity of moon symbolism and memory within the Two Essays, signalling its role as a background concept in the broader psychology of the soul.
, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1953supporting
Liberation from ancient guilt and better hopes for the next world are effected by mysteries, teletai, over which Plato, in the Phaedrus, has Dionysos preside.
Burkert links Orphic mystery rites and their promise of liberation from ancient guilt to the broader framework in which metempsychosis operates as a doctrine of moral retribution and redemption.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
metasomatosis, 75
The index entry for ‘metasomatosis’ — a variant transmigration concept — appears in Jung’s alchemical context, indicating the term’s presence as a cognate of metempsychosis within the Collected Works index apparatus.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907aside