Firstly I should say that I’m on the fence about whether there’s any sort of afterlife at all. For me, as a Pagan, what’s important is this life, and making the best of it that we possibly can. I do, however, think that there’s a life-force, or spirit, that animates all living things, but whether this equates to those things having a soul, by which I mean a continuing individual identity, is another matter.
But if such a thing is possible, what form could it take? Reincarnation seems to be a very popular option, and I’ve met a lot of people who are convinced that it exists, even to the extent of being able to recount details of previous lives, which they have either spontaneously remembered, or have accessed via some sort of meditation. But to be honest, the more concrete the details, the less convinced I am, as it seems to me, that if anything like that exists, we would not be able to know much about it. I’ve even known people who claim to remember future lives, and who say that reincarnation isn’t linear. If this is the case, then we might all be the same person, reincarnated billions and billions of times over. And that’s not even including animals, plants, and so on. It all gets a bit ridiculous.
Another rather thorny subject is karma. In the Hindu concept, reincarnation and karma are inextricably linked, and the ultimate goal is to escape the cycle of life, death and suffering. But for most Pagans, at least those who believe in reincarnation, it’s a joyous thing, by which they will know their loved ones over and over again through all of time. Most do, however, accept a form of karma. Even I do, to an extent, but only in the sense of what goes around, comes around, and it’s very much something that happens in this life, rather than the next. In other words, if you’re friendly and helpful to people, they tend to be in return, though obviously, it’s not a hard and fast rule.
If an individual soul exists, where is it? Perhaps it’s made of this dark matter that we keep hearing about, which is supposedly far more abundant than normal matter. Seems like a bit of a cop out, though, trying to explain one unknown thing with another unknown thing, but it remains a possibility, I suppose.
I suspect that if a definitive answer to any of these questions were possible, we’d have found it a very long time ago, and human history would have turned out very differently. But this is not a bad thing, in my opinion. The fact that we don’t know for sure is surely more interesting than being certain.