Abstracts
Spyros RANGOS
(University of Patras)
Rebirth and liberation across philosophy and religious imagery until Plato
The doctrine of reincarnation is generally ascribed to Pythagoras. In the sources, he is supposed to have introduced it to Greece as a new teaching. A foreign land of ancient wisdom (i.e. Egypt) was said to be the doctrine’s birthplace. The doctrine does not appear in any explicit form before the end of the sixth century. By contrast, from the fifth century onwards, traces of it are found in many so-called pre-Socratics (most notably in Empedocles) as well as in the Orphic gold leaves, the bone tablets of Olbia, and Pindar. Plato’s mythical accounts of the afterlife are all based on it: the supposedly essential immortality of the soul implies an indefinite number of past and future lives in human or animal form. Its presence in the Eleusinian mysteries of the classical period cannot be excluded, either.
The use of the doctrine of reincarnation by philosophers, religious thinkers and poets shows contextual variation. The paper addresses the range of its mythical and rational articulations in the surviving documents of the classical period, and suggests that a common esoteric core may be discerned throughout many exoteric formulations. If that is correct, then probably a symbolic, rather than literal, understanding of reincarnation was intended. (Perhaps we might also speak of a path of myth and ritual action addressed to the many, and a path of secret philosophical knowledge restricted for the few.) Liberation (lysis), on that view, would be a rather stable psychological achievement of the living individual, rather than a state of the disembodied soul in the afterlife.
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