Many Theosophists, if asked whether it is possible to be reincarnated as an animal due to negative karma or some other cause, would answer that such a notion is a purely exoteric, superstitious belief, which is repeatedly asserted in the Theosophical teachings to be an impossibility. They would say that having arrived at the human stage of evolution, we cannot go backwards into a less developed form of existence, no matter how evil our human lives might be.

But the original Theosophical teachings actually present a far more subtle picture than that. As we will see from the words of H. P. Blavatsky and also her colleague William Q. Judge, it happens quite often that “we” are reborn as, or in, animal form or a series of animals . . . provided we understand that by “we” is meant not the immortal spiritual entity or Ego or Manas (mind) or “human soul” itself, but rather the “life-atoms” and energetic emanations from the lowest principles or components of that being.

Such “transmigration of life-atoms,” as HPB calls it, is not any the less serious or karmically important just because it is not the permanent spiritual individuality itself which is entering the animal kingdom. If one’s thoughts, feelings, words, and actions are such during life as to naturally cause one’s life-atoms to be attracted by affinity after death to “the forming bodies” of animals, the later after-effects of this are far from good, for the Esoteric Philosophy maintains that such life-atoms reunite when the immortal mind-entity is eventually reborn (as a human) on Earth and will constitute part of its new lower principles – “the effects of which may manifest themselves throughout the next rebirths.” “The atoms he condemns to fall thus to beasts will return to him in some future life for his detriment or his sorrow.”

This is therefore extremely serious. The fact that it is “only a part of us” which can be reincarnated in the animal kingdom does not make such an occurrence of little consequence or importance.

The belief in the risk of being reborn from the human state as an animal is held by the vast majority of believers in reincarnation worldwide. Far from being a “later corruption” of religious or philosophical teachings, it was repeatedly proclaimed by the Buddha himself in the East, and Pythagoras and Plato in the West, among many others. It is a doctrine subscribed to and taken seriously by the whole of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, the only real exception being among Western “Secular Buddhists,” who generally adopt a sceptical and materialistic attitude towards anything to do with rebirth or karma or anything mystical or occult. In Tibet too, Tsong-Kha-Pa (the founder of the Gelug school in the early 15th century) and that sect’s successive Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas have all taught it. These are all figures viewed highly by HPB and her Adept-Teachers and mostly taken to be high Initiates and Adepts themselves.

Adherents of these schools of thought can hardly be blamed if they find the Theosophical claim that these great Teachers were really referring to a transmigration of mysterious “life-atoms” from certain lower principles of a sevenfold human constitution to sound very far-fetched and unlikely. After all, there is no evidence within the known texts and scriptures of these traditions to back up the Theosophists’ assertion. Instead, Buddha, Plato, Pythagoras, Mahavira, the Guru Granth Sahib, and the others, all present the doctrine in a straightforward, largely non-complex, matter-of-fact way, which does not appear to bear any hidden or deeper meaning.

On top of this, there is the fact that memories of a past life as an animal have long been a part of many populaces. While some of these are probably just imagination, others have been verified to varying degrees, including by the famed reincarnation researcher Dr. Ian Stevenson. Most of the people he interviewed and investigated over the decades did not have memories of being animals but some did and were able to remember what type of animal they were, where they lived, and how they died. 

Just as a lot of Stevenson’s cases involve birthmarks that correspond to significant wounds to the body of their previous personality – often associated with that former persona’s death – one Asian boy with medically inexplicable snake-like scales from birth all over the lower half of his body recalled vividly his life and death as a snake, which was killed by a friend of the man who would become his new (human) father and taken to the latter’s home, where it was cooked and eaten by the father-to-be. All the details shared by the boy, including the minutiae of his being hunted and killed, were confirmed by the father and father’s friend. Another case involved a boy who remembered his previous life as a rabbit which lived in the woods near the home of his new (human) family and which was one day killed for food by the man who was to become his new father. His new parents remembered this seemingly inconsequential event the same as the “reincarnated rabbit.”

This unusual feature – found in other cases too – of the slaughtered animal winding up in the home of the new human family for the impending new lifetime may perhaps be one means by which life-atoms reassemble so as to recombine, ready for the moment of human conception to take place, whereupon they enter into the highly complex psychological, psychic, and physical makeup of the forming foetus.

We would suggest that from the Theosophical perspective, actual former lifetimes in animal form are being legitimately and genuinely recalled, but the part of the individual which was embodied within those forms was “merely” some of the life-atoms emanated from the previous human personality’s lower principles. One might think that such atoms would not be capable of storing and transmitting memories but H. P. Blavatsky emphasises that each such life-atom is a “monad, a little universe endowed with consciousness, hence with memory.” 

This is undeniably a highly complex metaphysical teaching and it can never be clearly grasped unless one is willing to sit down quietly and meditatively and carefully think it through while engaging the imagination to try to picture – imperfect though such imaginings will invariably be – the processes being spoken of, in a way that makes it come alive to one’s perceptions. This also applies to many other teachings and ideas found in Theosophy.

Seeing as even many students of Theosophy who have already read articles on the subject struggle to understand this teaching about life-atoms, it is not surprising that Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, Tsong-Kha-Pa, Guru Nanak, Adi Shankaracharya, and all the rest – assuming that they did all know the esoteric teaching on this point – chose to promulgate it in a much simpler, diluted, and more homely form to their audiences, one which just about anyone could easily understand.

In her Indian travelogue, HPB observes that Jains “firmly believe, as do all the other sects in India, in the transmigration of souls. Their fear that in killing an animal or an insect, they may perchance destroy the life of an ancestor [or, more commonly, the idea is that every being caught in the aeons-long cycle of rebirth is likely to have been our mother, father, sibling, child, spouse, or friend, at some time or another, whether in a human or animal life], causes them to go to unbelievable extremes in their love and care for every living creature.” (“From The Caves and Jungles of Hindostan” p. 35, “Collected Writings” edition)

One is also far more likely to feel a sense of urgency and serious striving in one’s spiritual life if one believes that rebirth in the human kingdom is not guaranteed and that one may lose this wonderful and precious opportunity – at least for one or several lifetimes – if one does not make serious inroads towards eradicating one’s lust, greed, anger, and hatred in this present life. There are thus helpful spiritual advantages deriving from the popular religious belief on this matter.

According to the Theosophical Mahatmas, rebirth in the human kingdom is guaranteed for those of us who have already reached this stage of monadic evolution . . . but the abstention of our life-atoms from taking part in animal births between our soul’s earthly lives is not guaranteed at all. The ancient Egyptians sought in vain to guarantee it by embalming and mummifying corpses but the only way to guarantee the purity and beneficence of the life-atoms present in one’s lower vehicles is to be pure and beneficent oneself; in other words, to live the higher life, a life of wisdom, meditative concentration, and compassion.

“The avoidance of all evil, the cultivation of skilfulness, and the purification of the mind – this is the teaching of the Buddhas.” (Dhammapada, v. 183)

~ * ~

“We are taught that for 3,000 years at least the [Egyptian] “mummy” notwithstanding all the chemical preparations goes on throwing off to the last invisible atoms, which from the hour of death re-entering the various vortices of being go indeed “through every variety of organized life forms.” But it is not the soul, the 5th, least of all the 6th, principle, but the life atoms of the jiva the 2nd principle. At the end of the 3,000 years, sometimes more, and sometimes less, after endless transmigrations all these atoms are once more drawn together, and are made to form the new outer clothing or the body of the same monad (the real soul) which had already been clothed with two or three thousands of years before. Even in the worst case . . . the monad or individual soul is ever the same as are also the atoms of the lower principles [Note: “Lower principles” here is explained at the end of the article to mean the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd principles: sthula sharira or physical body, prana (sometimes termed jiva) or life-energy, and linga sharira or astral body/astral double, largely the same as the “etheric” body of later versions of Theosophy] which regenerated and renewed in this ever flowing river of being are magnetically drawn together owing to their affinity, and are once more re-incarnated together.

“. . . we regard and call in our occult phraseology those atoms that are moved by Kinetic energy as “life-atoms,” while those that are for the time being passive, containing but invisible potential energy, we call “sleeping atoms,” regarding at the same time those two forms of energy as produced by the one and same force, or life. . . .

“And now to the Hindu doctrine of Metempsychosis [i.e. the teaching that the soul – or, in the case of Buddhism, which denies the soul, the mindstream-process or impersonal stream or flux of constantly changing consciousness – can revert to an animal incarnation as a result of bad karma]. It has a basis of truth; and, in fact, it is an axiomatic truth – but only in reference to human atoms and emanations, and that not only after a man’s death, but during the whole period of his life. . . . [It] bears no reference to the human Ego, but only to the atoms of his body, of his lower triad, and his fluidic [i.e. auric] emanations. . . .

“. . . he condemns by his own evil acts every atom of his lower principles to become attracted and drawn, in virtue of the magnetic affinity thus created by his passions, into the forming bodies of lower animals or brutes. This is the real meaning of the doctrine of Metempsychosis. . . . it is a cause created, the effects of which may manifest themselves throughout the next rebirths . . . from cause to effect, every effect becoming in its turn a cause, they will run along the cycle of rebirths, the once-given impulse expending itself only at the threshold of Pralaya.” (H. P. Blavatsky, “Transmigration of The Life Atoms”)

“The life-atoms of our (Prana) life-principle are never entirely lost when a man dies . . .  As the individual Soul is ever the same [i.e. in the sense that an individual series of reincarnations is that of one particular soul and never another], so are the atoms of the lower principles (body, its astral, or life double, etc.), drawn as they are by affinity and Karmic law always to the same individuality in a series of various bodies, . . . The collective aggregation of these atoms forms thus the Anima Mundi of our Solar system, the soul of our little universe, each atom of which is of course a soul, a monad [i.e. “The Secret Doctrine” teaches that every atom in the universe is the clothing of an elemental monad], a little universe endowed with consciousness, hence with memory.” (HPB, “The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 2, p. 671-672)

“Those atoms fly from all of us at every instant. They seek their appropriate center; that which is similar to the character of him who evolves them. We absorb from our fellows whatever is like unto us. It is thus that man reincarnates in the lower kingdoms. He is the lord of nature, the key, the focus, the highest concentrator of nature’s laboratory. And the atoms he condemns to fall thus to beasts will return to him in some future life for his detriment or his sorrow. But he, as immortal man, cannot fall. That which falls is the lower, the personal, the atomic. He is the brother and teacher of all below him. See that you do not hinder and delay all nature by your failure in virtue.” (William Q. Judge, “The Persian Student’s Doctrine”)

~ * ~

In his introduction to the famed first English translation of the Bardo Thodol or Tibetan Book of The Dead, on which he collaborated with Kazi Dawa Samdup (1868-1922) who was often miscalled a Lama but actually a layman (though the difference between the two is admittedly often blurred in the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism to which he belonged), Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965), who was a member of The Theosophical Society – Point Loma, writes:

“The late Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup, the translator, has left on record his own complementary opinion, as follows: ‘The forty-nine days of the Bardo symbolize ages either of evolution or of degeneration. Intellects able to grasp Truth do not fall into the lower conditions of existence. The doctrine of the transmigration of the human to the sub-human may apply solely to the lower or purely brutish constituents of the human principle of consciousness; for the Knower itself neither incarnates nor re-incarnates – it is the Spectator.

“‘In the Bardo Thödol, the deceased is represented as retrograding, step by step, into lower and lower states of consciousness. Each step downwards is preceded by a swooning into unconsciousness; and possibly that which constitutes his mentality on the lower levels of the Bardo is some mental element or compound of mental elements formerly a part of his earth-plane consciousness, separated, during the swooning, from higher or more spiritually enlightened elements of that consciousness. Such a mentality ought not to be regarded as on a par with a human mentality; for it seems to be a mere faded and incoherent reflex of the human mentality of the deceased. And perhaps it is some such thing as this which incarnates in sub-human animal bodies – if anything does in a literal sense.“”

In this, Kazi Dawa-Samdup is very close to the teachings of Theosophy, so much so that many have suspected Evans-Wentz of fabricating such quotes, especially as the former was already deceased and unable to challenge or deny their accuracy by the time “The Tibetan Book of The Dead” was published. However, this theory attributes rather base motives to Evans-Wentz, whereas he is not known to have been a deceptive individual. It is of course possible that Dawa-Samdup had simply read and reflected on the writings of H. P. Blavatsky, rather than being himself personally connected with the Trans-Himalayan Esoteric School of the Masters of Wisdom. But Evans-Wentz observes:

“The late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup was of opinion that, despite the adverse criticisms directed against H. P. Blavatsky’s works, there is adequate internal evidence in them of their author’s intimate acquaintance with the higher lamaistic teachings, into which she claimed to have been initiated.”

Buddhism speaks of “the six paths of existence,” into which any being – human or otherwise – can be reborn for one or more lives, in accordance with its karma. These are presented as the six possible rebirth routes, namely rebirth in one of the heavens as a deva, rebirth on this Earth as a human, and rebirth as an animal, ghost, demon, or a being in one of the hell-states.

In “The Theosophical Glossary” entries for “Djati” and “Gati” (both of which would nowadays be transliterated as “jati”) it is said by HPB that in the esoteric system there are seven, not six. But she repeatedly defines them as “The six (esoterically seven) conditions of sentient existence,” “the six (esoteric seven) Gâti or paths of sentient existence,” “the six gâti (conditions of sentient existence),” etc. She does not speak of them as the six paths of rebirth which are universally open to all but rather as paths or conditions “of sentient existence,” an enumeration of the totality of conscious states, without a specific idea of rebirth being attached thereto. “The seventh mode of existence is that of the Nirmanakâya” or Bodhisattva.

The same subject is found on p. 107-108 of “The Mahatma Letters” but there described as “these seven groups that form the principal divisions of the Dwellers of the subjective world around us.” This is therefore somewhat different and so are the seven listed by the Master K.H.:

“(1) “Rupa-devas”—Dhyan Chohans, having forms;

(2) “Arupa-devas” ” ” having no forms;

[No. 1 & 2:] Ex-men.

(3) “Pisâchas”—(two-principled) ghosts.

(4) “Mara-rupa”—Doomed to death (3 principled). . . . i.e. bodies doomed to annihilation . . .

(5) Asuras—Elementals—having human form [Note that “asura” in Tibetan is Lhamayin, a term whose significance is brought out in “The Voice of The Silence,” although HPB defines the term “asura” entirely differently in “The Secret Doctrine.”]

(6) Beasts— ” 2nd class—animal Elementals

[No. 5 & 6:] Future men.

(7) Rakshasas (Demons) Souls or Astral Forms of sorcerers; men who have reached the apex of knowledge in the forbidden art. Dead or alive they have so to say cheated nature; but it is only temporary—until our planet goes into obscuration, after which they have nolens volens to be annihilated. . . .

“It is these seven groups that form the principal divisions of the Dwellers of the subjective world around us. It is in stock No. 1, that are the intelligent Rulers of this world of matter, and who, with all this intelligence are but the blindly obedient instruments of the ONE; the active agents of a Passive Principle. And thus are misinterpreted and mistranslated nearly all our [Buddhist] Sutras; yet even under that confused jumble of doctrines and words, for one who knows even superficially the true doctrine, there is firm ground to stand upon.”

~ * ~

“I mean, for example, that those who have indulged in gluttony and violence and drunkenness, and have made no efforts to avoid them, are likely to pass into the bodies of donkeys and other beasts of that sort. Do you not think so?” “Certainly that is very likely.” “And those who have chosen injustice and tyranny and robbery pass into the bodies of wolves and hawks and kites. Where else can we imagine that they go?” “Beyond a doubt,” said Cebes, “they pass into such creatures.” “Then,” said he, “it is clear where all the others go, each in accordance with its own habits?” “Yes,” said Cebes, “of course.” “Then,” said he, “the happiest of those, and those who go to the best place, are those who have practised, by nature and habit, without philosophy or reason, the social and civil virtues which are called moderation and justice?” “How are these happiest?” “Don’t you see? Is it not likely that they pass again into some such social and gentle species as that of bees or of wasps or ants, or into the human race again, and that worthy men spring from them?” “Yes.” “And no one who has not been a philosopher and who is not wholly pure when he departs, is allowed to enter into the communion of the gods, but only the lover of knowledge. It is for this reason, dear Simmias and Cebes, that those who truly love wisdom refrain from all bodily desires and resist them firmly and do not give themselves up to them, . . . And therefore those who care for their own souls, and do not live in service to the body, turn their backs upon all these men and do not walk in their ways, for they feel that people in general do not know where they are going. They themselves believe that philosophy, with its deliverance and purification, must not be resisted, and so they turn and follow it wherever it may lead.”
(Socrates teaching his disciples, in Plato’s Phaedo, § 81-82)

~ BlavatskyTheosophy.com ~

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