Reincarnation in H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine

Abstract

Throughout her career as an occultist, H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), the primary theorist of the nineteenth century’s most influential occultist movement, the Theosophical Society, taught two distinct theories of rebirth: metempsychosis and reincarnation. This paper provides a detailed description of the latter, as outlined in Blavatsky’s magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine (1888), and contemporaneous publications. In so doing, it offers several correctives and refinements to scholarly analyses of Theosophical reincarnationism offered over the last thirty years.