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This chapter discusses the idea of decline of dharma. Social and moral decline underlined in Purāṇic cosmological time was consistently endorsed as characteristic of change over the four ages. Sometimes the description of the yugas were merely a prelude to the lengthy statements on the reversal of norms and mores, which reversal characterizes the Kali age. The gradual decline of dharma is stated both directly and in symbols. The Utopian conditions of the first age, also sometimes referred to as Satya, the age of Truth, diminish slowly until nothing of the Utopia is left in the Kaliyuga. Slotted into the theory of the decline of dharma was also the notion of transmigration or metempsychosis — karma and saṃsāra. The cyclic notion is reinforced by the idea of transmigration, where the ātman or soul being constantly reborn.

This chapter examines different models of fetal growth in premodern religious and medical Tibetan embryological narratives, which describe causal forces such as karma, the natural elements, the energetic winds, and the wisdom of a Buddha. Embryology is presented as a means for Tibetan thinkers to define acceptable paradigms for change and growth and a theoretical model for addressing other issues of vital concern to Buddhists.

To understand how Muslims view the matter of life after death, it is necessary to see what the Qur’an says about God, about human beings, and about the structure of time. God, creator of all, is both just and merciful and works within the linear flow of time. Human lives proceed from birth to death individually, and are collectively rejuvenated and gathered for judgment by God at the end of time. Final dispensation is directly related to ethical choice, for which humans are fully responsible.

This chapter discusses the process of undergoing rebirths continuously, known as samsāra. In principle, the process is without a beginning and an end, unless brought to an end by religious and spiritual practices. The process has been defined as the ‘indefinite transmigration of living beings’. The author feels that to get a full sense of what this involves, it is worthwhile to narrate a segment of a living being's or jīva's involvement in the process for a few lives. The Bhāgavata Purāna presents such an account in the popular story of Bharata and his many lives.

This chapter uses the trope of transmigration, so popular in oriental tales, to describe the relationship established between Orient and Occident through the consumption of narratives of the East in 18th-century England. It maps each of the major genres of oriental narrative so that readers can orient themselves in the following discussions of the interaction between the representation of geographical spaces and generic traditions. The passage of consciousness from body to body in a process of both penance and improvement (the ‘oriental’ doctrine of transmigration) can function as a metaphor for the passage of narrative from one cultural space to another. It is, moreover, and importantly, both a spatial and a temporal experience; the soul moves through time from one body to another, adapting to its new environment at each turn but also bearing the imprint of its previous ‘life’, if only in terms of the role (high or low status) it takes on in each new form. The act of reading narrative might also be figured as a kind of transmigration: the projection of the reader's ‘spirit’ into the place/space/time of an ‘other’ or many ‘others’, which requires a constant shifting of consciousness and perspective that transforms the reading self in the process.

A belief in spiritual destiny and the existence of the soul runs through Kafka’s dream chronicles. Similarly, a thematic treatment of the soul and its transmigrations figures in some of his fiction. Two short stories Kafka wrote in 1917--“The Bucket Rider” and “The Hunter Gracchus” deal with after-life experiences. To better understand Kafka’s eschatological viewpoint which is a component of his mystical life, this chapter examines the symbols and motifs used in these two stories to portray the journey of the soul. However, Kafka’s representation of transmigration can also be understood in light of theories about post-death experiences and doctrines of reincarnation associated with certain esoteric traditions which were revived during the modern Spiritual Revival.

This chapter discusses two related conceits that express how literature is passed down between generations. In the first, tradition is viewed as a process of filiation: a great writer of an earlier time stands to one of a later era as a father to his son, and a great work of a previous age can be seen as a sort of familial heirloom passed down from one generation to the next. In the second, the later writer is linked to the former not through figurative parentage, but through the Pythagorean transmigration of souls. Specifically as regards English literature, an influential metaphor has long been one in which the unfolding of tradition is figured as a paternal-filial nexus: the earlier writer uses his influence, as it were, to sire the later one. The conceit of literary paternity has become a standard way of imagining the relations of influence and emulation obtaining between writers in the literary tradition. The popularity of the parental metaphor may still owe much to the particular use made of it by one writer alone: John Dryden.

This chapter explains how in searching the Classical texts for a core of Druidic doctrine, it is the Druids' tenet of reincarnation that stands out. Better known as the mathematician who gave the world his theorem, chief among Pythagoras's philosophical teachings was the concept of reincarnation or, more precisely, the transmigration of souls. The mystery of dying and the fate of people and their souls after death were issues of major concern for the Druids and the communities they served. Their knowledge of the Otherworld gave them insight into how the dead, particularly the noble dead, should be treated in order to placate their spirits and send them safely into the world beyond the grave.

This chapter assesses the portrayal of the cyborg in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987). RoboCop was part of the cycle of 1980 films in which the cyborg was consolidated as a genuinely ambivalent iconographic motif of science-fiction cinema. In many ways, it is the complicated experience of emotion and memory that defines the ubiquity of the cyborg in science-fiction cinema. The chapter then considers the ‘transmigration’ theory of Robotics professor Hans Moravec, who helped pioneer the development of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). It also discusses religious, philosophical, and mythological dimensions, chiefly the potential of reading the film as an allegory of Christ. Whereas the Christ parable is nothing innovative to the way Hollywood heroism can be read, what makes RoboCop's Christian allegory markedly distinctive is that it takes places in the context of the science-fiction-cyborg-film sub-genre.

This chapter examines Wolf Krakowski's legendary CD Transmigrations, which was the first example of Yiddish worldbeat. Transmigrations comprises principally secular songs, although these are at times referenced, as is nearly unavoidable in chronicles of Jewish life. Two songs, ‘Shabes, shabes’ and ‘Zol shoyn kumen di geule’ (Let the Redemption Come), are traditionally devotional, if non-liturgical. The songs that address the Holocaust and other Jewish suffering pose basic spiritual questions that Jews must ask, though not in formal prayer. In determining any music's Jewishness, lessons from the sacred repertoire of Judaism may be applied. On utilitarian grounds, all settings of sacred Hebrew texts for use in Jewish worship are Jewish music. This principle extends to all Yiddish song, since Jewish languages are tools of Jewish community. This includes all twelve songs on Transmigrations. Ultimately, Transmigrations—an album of Yiddish folk songs and works by Yiddish theatre and literary artists, its melodies forthrightly Jewish—defies expectations of Yiddish song in broader aspects of style.

This chapter focuses on the topic of humanity's ultimate felicity, which is another common interest between some Greek philosophers and believers of scriptural religions. It discusses assumptions that a person's mundane existence as a material entity was not the end of the matter; that there had to be something more than a life of material pursuits and satisfaction. This chapter includes Plato's dialogues in Phaedo where he enunciated and argued for the doctrine that the human soul is immortal by virtue of its essential incorporeality and hence incorruptibility. In other dialogues of Plato, the core doctrine of an immortal soul is associated with the ancillary ideas of the pre-existence of the soul and of the transmigration of souls. It talks about how in later Platonism, especially the philosophy of Plotinus, the basic idea of an immortal soul is interpreted in terms of the doctrine of the ascent, or “reversion”, of the human soul to some higher entity, the World Soul, or even to the One, the ultimate reality.

This and the following two chapters focus on the teachings of the Ōjōyōshū. This chapter takes up the first two chapters of the Ōjōyōshū, which describes the suffering inherent in the six realms of transmigration and the bliss that awaits all who are born in the Pure Land. The section on the six realms of transmigration includes the most famous section of the Ōjōyōshū: a graphic description of the suffering that await people who are reborn, as the result of their evil deeds, in the eight hells of the Buddhist cosmology.

After his bankruptcy, Roth founded a new publishing house, opened a midtown book shop, and published a comprehensive anthology of quotations from the world’s leading writers past and present. Published under the pseudonym “Norman Lockridge,” it was a highly acclaimed and steady selling work. He also was distributing underground erotica. The FBI as well as the post office investigated. The trial was significant as an early example of the Post Office’s use of the “pandering” concept in advertisements, even of innocuous printed material. Roth spent the years 1937-39 in federal prison. There, he wrote copiously. The unpublished novel “Transfiguration” posited the replacement of Hitler by Yeshea, who brought about a transformation of tyranny into democracy, averting the World War. As fanciful as the plot was, the manuscript contains both modernist and Hasidic themes such as transmigration of souls, the exorcism of demons, and atonement.

Many forest management institutions and the ideologies that govern them, all hallmarks of modern states, were produced in Southeast Asia in the crucible of war. Insurgencies, ethnic wars, and “Cold Wars” in the tropics shaped institutions and practices, because “jungles” were their front lines. Although the direct impacts of war on forests are well-known, indirect and institutional effects of war and an array of “medium hard “technologies of power, such as forced relocation ( strategic hamlets), state colonization of historical territories (resettlement and transmigration), criminalization of traditional practices (edicts against the use of fire, shifting cultivation, etc.), exclusion of local populations from their traditional resource terrains (national park and forest legislation), and the transformations of bureaucratic/ military structures and surveillance for the management forests, are barely documented. This chapter focuses on the institutional dimensions of war in the creation of forest politics that exclude traditional ethnic or “racialized” populations. It further argues that war, insurgency, and counter-insurgency contributed to the resurgence of forests in many areas.

This chapter examines the manifestation of Òrìsà Ochossi in Toni Morrison's novel Jazz. It explains Morrison's use of a set of distinctive epic characteristics and construction of the concept of spirituality as the matrix for text, context and ritual performance in this novel. It explores the transmigration of soul and spirit through the main character Joe Trace's quest for fulfilment.

This chapter focuses on the era between the death of Bonnie Lu Nettles and the mass suicide that ended the Heaven's Gate's existence. It analyzes the shifts in the group's naturalistic approach engendered by the loss of Nettles, whose death resulted in a moment of cognitive dissonance for the group. The group had hitherto insisted that its members would enter the heavens in their current living bodies, something that failed to occur for Nettles. Applewhite and the other members of the group therefore shifted toward a more supernatural or nonmaterial interpretation of bodily salvation predicated on the transmigration of the souls, a clear break from Heaven's Gate's earlier position. Overall, however, the movement continued to attempt during this time to recast religious concepts in the languages of materialistic naturalism. Several sources from the 1980s and 1990s revealed the continuing emphasis on the incorporation of scientific language and the methodological foundations of science into the movement. The chapter also considers sources from this latter period of Heaven's Gate that began to assume a vocally anti-religious perspective. These sources indicate how the group attempted to situate itself as more scientific than religious, despite making claims about salvation, God, and the nature of human life that most observers would consider religious by nature. Finally, it considers the material produced in the final years of the group's history by the adherents of Heaven's Gate, especially the three longtime members of the group calling themselves Jnnody, Chkody, and Jwnody. The chapter ends with an analysis of how the group's view of science and the absorption of scientific approaches into religion led to the 1997 mass suicides that ended Heaven's Gate.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book examines the racialized belongings of Okinawan-Bolivians in a transnational context. It considers multiple contradictions that Okinawan-Bolivians (Okinawan settlers, or Issei, and their offspring in Colonia Okinawa, and Okinawan-Bolivian dekasegi migrants in urban Japan) faced in Bolivia and Japan. First, how did Okinawan-Bolivians experience and make sense of paradoxical socioeconomic class positions they occupied in a transnational social field? Second, how did educational institutions, such as community schools in Colonia Okinawa, shape Nisei and Sansei (third-generation) Okinawan-Bolivian youth's identities and behaviors? Finally, how did Okinawan-Bolivians interpret and negotiate their historical and cultural distinctiveness as Okinawans, whose past as the colonized subjects under imperial Japan still stirred ambivalent feelings toward Japan among Okinawans in Okinawa Prefecture and the Okinawan diaspora abroad? This study, then, is an attempt to understand the contradictory processes of class and cultural identity formation of transmigrants; an ethnography of postcolonial subjects in diaspora; and an effort to theorize race, class, and culture in a transnational context.