Conceptualization of Reincarnation and Embodiment in African Religious Belief
The doctrine of reincarnation concerns the rebirth of the soul in a series of physical or preternatural embodiments, which are customarily human or animal in nature but are in some instances divine, angelic, demonic, vegetative or astrological (associated with the sun, moon, stars or planets). The concept of rebirth may also be expressed in such terms as metempsuchosis (or accurately, metensomatosis, (“passage from one body to another) and palingenesis (means to begin again). The belief in rebirth in one form or another is found in tribal or nonliterate cultures all over the world. The notion is most dramatically evident in the native societies of central Australia and West Africa, where it is intimately associated with the cult of ancestor worship. It is also in ancient India and Greece. In India the precept is linked inextricably with the teaching and practices of Hindusim, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. In ancient Greece, the idea is identified primarily with the philosophical lineages of Pythagoras, Empedocles, plato and Plotinus. This doctrine is asserted to be one of the most elaborately developed of other doctrines. Reincarnation as a doctrine does not incorporate the idea of symbolization, symbolization is an act of the human imagination to depict or represent spiritual forms in physical modes. This is unlike reincarnation wherein the spirit initiates the process of its own embodiment, whereas symbolization and containment begin as a human initiative.
Keywords: african, belief, conceptualization, embodiment, reincarnation, religious