Beyond Archetypes

Fiction and Reincarnation

Some ideas, and characters, never seem to die. They’re recycled, reborn, rebirthed, revisited way beyond the explanation of tropes. What is this?

The cycle of life is perspective based. Humans have a different life cycle than Cicadas. Some species of Cicadas emerge every seven years. Adults but for a moment, they mate, die, only to have their offspring explore a future world that may or may not be suitable to them. By jumping seasons, they fare better than those who tarry day to day on this planet. The 1954 film Brigadoon had a village traveling through time, emerging once every 100 years. You’d almost need a century to bypass humanity’s crazy, but is that hope of the past longing for a future, just the delayed inevitable- or hints of something deeper?

Possession is not the same as reincarnation. There are similarities, if all souls are lingering to possess a body, does it matter if it’s a fetus first? Do entities that prefer possession just wait around to see if people get intimate so they can catch a ride on any egg fertilized? The only difference between possession and reincarnation is that in the latter the soul is designated a body. The soul world and the humans agree, and for the duration of the life of the human it…