Reincarnation

[Klärchen]

No compromise: We believe that God loves every man, but we also believe that God's love is tormenting to those who hate him. Here is a piece on that:

The River of Fire by Alexandre Kalomiros.

It's long, but it's good reading.

This is really a good explanation of how God's love works, and it is also true that our theology has made God sort of a ferocious tyrant. The same applies to Judaism and Islam, by the way, they all imagine God as someone whose grace must be deserved by immolation. That is in fact why I turned away from our Church when I was about 15. The Churches could not answer my questions satisfactorily, and I was searching for (and found) authentic experience. In this new light, I can now accept the Christian teachings – with one exception: I do not believe that there has been only one Saviour.

As for the "Light of God" – in the secret library of the Vatican old scriptures were found and translated by Edmond B. Székely, and here is one very interesting source:

... For at the beginning of the times, the Holy Law said, let there be Light, and there was Light. And you shall be one with it, and the power of the Holy Light Stream will fill your whole body, and you will tremble before its might. Say the word "Light," as you breathe deeply of the angel of air, and you will become the Light itself; and the Holy Stream will carry you to the endless kingdom of the Heavenly Father, there losing itself in the eternal Sea of Light which gives birth to all creation. And you shall be one with the Holy Stream of Light, always before you sleep in the arms of the Heavenly Father.

I tell you truly, your body was made not only to breathe, and eat, and think, but it was also made to enter the Holy Stream of Life. And your ears were made not only to hear the words of men, the song of birds, and the music of falling rain, but they were also made to hear the Holy Stream of Sound. And your eyes were made not only to see the rising and setting of the sun, the ripple of sheaves of grain, and the words of the Holy Scrolls, but they were also made to see the Holy Stream of Light. One day your body will return to the Earthly Mother; even also your ears and your eyes. But the Holy Stream of Life, the Holy Stream of Sound, and the Holy Stream of Light, these were never born, and can never die. Enter the Holy Streams, even that Life, that Sound, and that Light which gave you birth; that you may reach the kingdom of the Heavenly Father and become one with him, even as the river empties into the far-distant sea.

The Holy Streams

[Anthropos]

”Moreover, there is still much more than this to say about reincarnation; for from the viewpoint of pure metaphysics one can demonstrate its absolute impossibility, and do so without any exceptions [...]. Moreover, here we mean the impossibility of reincarnation, not only on earth but also on any other planet, as well as of bizarre notions like the multiplicity of simultaneous incarnations on different planets; [...] The same metaphysical demonstration is equally valid against such theories as the ’eternal return’ of Nietzsche; [...] We will only say, in order to reduce the claims of the Theosophists to their just value, that no traditional doctrine has ever admitted reincarnation and this idea was entirely foreign to all of antiquity, even though some have wished to support it by tendentious interpretations of certain more or less symbolic texts. Even in Buddhism it is only a question of ’changes of state’, which obviously is not the same thing as a series of earthly lives; and, we repeat, it is only symbolically that different states have sometimes been described as ’lives’ by analogy with the present state of the human being and with the conditions of his terrestrial existence. Let us also explain that despite the false interpretations current today, reincarnation has nothing to do with the ’metempsychosis’ of the Orphics and Pythagoreans, any more than with the theories of certain Jewish Kabbalists on the ’embryonic state’ and the ’revolution of souls’."

René Guénon, Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion, Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2nd impr., 2004, 104-106.

In The Spiritist Fallacy by the same author there is a twentyfour-page chapter dedicated to reincarnation, in which its metaphysical impossibility is demonstrated. Metempsychosis and transmigration are also treated there; contrary to reincarnation both of them are traditional doctrines in the strict sense, according to Guénon.

The two titles, Theosophy and The Spiritist Fallacy, offer profound insights into the rise and nature of Neospirituality, and many of the observations and conclusions are applicable to such things as 'Heathenry' or Neopaganism as well.

There are also many points there that shed light on the modern mentality considered apart from the specifics of Neospirituality.

[Hrimskegg]

So, obviously, when it's mentioned in the sagas that doesn't count?