ABSTRACT
Reincarnation' surpassed 'metempsychosis' in the number of occurrences in print in 1901, 'transmigration' only in 1915 based upon Google Books Ngram viewer. The procedure for influencing the future body suggests a discarnate personality during the intermediate state between death and rebirth somehow indirectly by influencing the selection of parents or fertilized ova, or directly by influencing the new body. The classic teaching in the Buddhist sutras is of a conditioned conscious process that goes through the round of rebirth. Reincarnation in the popular and most expansive sense of the term represents a transferal of an essence or substance from one body to another. It is true that Mills and Slobodin identify three types of reincarnation, human-to-human, human-to-animal, and human-to-animal-to-human, which allows us to identify the variations, but it is not clear whether they are restricting these varieties only to communities and tribes under their investigation or whether it is meant to be a general description.
