Who Were You in a Past Life? Type Your Name

Rebirth as a serious doctrine

Long before it was a party trick, rebirth was a problem to be solved. The Upanishads, composed from roughly the eighth century BCE, describe samsara, a wheel of birth and death turned by karma, and treat escape from it rather than another turn as the goal. Buddhism complicated the picture elegantly: there is rebirth, but no permanent self to carry across, which makes the question of who exactly you used to be closer to a category error than a mystery. Jain and Sikh traditions carry their own versions of the wheel. The Druze of the Levant hold that a soul passes at once into a newborn, and one strand of Kabbalah teaches gilgul, the rolling of a soul through further lives to finish unfinished work.

The Greek line of descent

Metempsychosis reached Europe by another road. Pythagoras was said to recall having been Euphorbus, wounded at Troy, and to have recognised a dead friend's voice in a beaten dog's yelping. Empedocles claimed earlier turns as a bush and as a fish. Plato gave the idea its finest scene at the end of the Republic, where the soldier Er watches souls queue to choose their next lives, a tyrant's or an animal's or an obscure one, before drinking from the river Lethe so that each arrives having forgotten the choosing.

How it became a Western pastime

Theosophy did the transmission work. From 1875 Helena Blavatsky and her circle repackaged Indian doctrine for European and American drawing rooms, and reincarnation went from foreign to fashionable within a generation. The parlour version arrived in 1952, when a Colorado businessman, Morey Bernstein, hypnotised a neighbour, Virginia Tighe, who began speaking as Bridey Murphy, a nineteenth-century Irishwoman with an alarming amount of local detail. Reporters later established that a Bridie Murphey Corkell had lived across the street from Tighe's childhood home, and the case became the standard illustration of cryptomnesia: remembering something perfectly well while forgetting where you got it. Nicholas Spanos went on to show how readily hypnotised volunteers invent previous lives when invited to.

Why the archetypes fit so comfortably

The lives on offer below, bard and warrior and healer and exile and voyager, are roles rather than biographies, broad enough that almost anyone finds a corner of themselves inside one. That is not a swindle; it is the machinery that makes a good Tarot spread satisfying. The interesting part is which one you hope for. Somebody who wants to have been the healer is saying something accurate about themselves right now, in a language less exposing than saying it outright.

How this one works: the name you type is turned into a number, and that number picks one of the outcomes below. It is a party trick rather than a reading — the fun is in which one you land on, not in it being true.