The Resurrection of (Which) Body?

(part two of an ongoing series on rebirth and the long story of our souls)

[art: Lazarus by Eduard von Gebhardt]

One of the reasons witch’s and heretics were orginally burned (aside from rampant sadism) was because of the belief that such souls would be denied the resurrection of the body at The Second Coming…because, of course, they would not have any bodies to rise up out of their graves. They would be only char and ash. Except exhume any body, even one not burnt to a crisp, and with enough time all is dust again anyway, giving the faithful pause and inviting no end of theological speculation about which body might be actually be resurrected on the great big day. Our hot 20 year old bodies? Our withered elder carcasses? The body we could have had if we’d taken care of it maybe? It all gets very confusing indeed.

Unless we accept the truth of our more ancient ancestors—that every body returns to the earth, and every soul returns to another body.

Hidden in the Gospels and explored with such power and beauty by Sophie Strand in The Madonna Secret is the difference between the resurrection of Lazarus, dead four days in the tomb, rising in his shroud, and Yeshua, whose body disappears and reappears but whom never really returns as he was. Lazarus, after his total death experience, doesn’t become the founder of a new religion, but rather an eternal wanderer. In Sophie’s book he cannot, like so many brought back to life after their NDEs, fathom why he must return when he had already gone on. Yeshua, on the other hand, seems to have a resurrection that is more in keeping with ancient experiences of the eternal return. He “disappears” from the tomb but when Mary Magdalene sees him again, she doesn’t initially recognize him. “Are you the gardener?” she asks. Yeshua is becoming something else. For 49 days, the length of the bardo, he appears to various friends—but ultimately, unlike Lazarus, he moves on. Where did he go next I’ve often wondered? Did he become the child inside the body of the women he loved? Did he reincarnate in India, in France, in China, in so many other places? Possibly. The Church will say Jesus only gets to come back once, and nobody else gets to come back ever until he does, but this is really only about controlling the money and the power. Reincarnation undermines biblical and institutional lineages after all (unless they are expertly integrated into a hierarchichal system as they are in Tibetan Buddhism.) When the Cathars said that Yeshua and Miriam are always reincarting they were introducting a doctrine that undermined the power of the popes—and meant there was no way to predict or control who might be in charge.

I’ve often thought Francis, arriving on the scene just after the genocide against the Cathars, is a reincarnation of Yeshua. He is in communion with all beings, trying to live a life not so much of poverty but faith in nature’s ways, opting for brotherhood not dominance. The first saint to bear the stigmata I’ve often wondered if the moment his palms began to bleed if he remembered his own long story—and saw with horror all that had been done in his name.

To accept the long story of our souls, from one body to another, is to know that we have all been saints and sinners, heroes and villains, men and women and probably 36 different genders of fungi. To experience the long story of our souls is to know that there is no soul that is not entangled with ours, no identity apart from the life-force of this earth itself.

“Be no one,” offers Yeshua in the Gospel of Thomas. “Be passer by.”

How many no ones has he been?

On the one hand matter doesn’t go anywhere. Our bodies become the dirt of this planet out of which new life, new bodies will grow. On the other hand, nature is always on the move, always growing, transforming into something else, dying and returning. There is no static state of being and thus no perfect body to which we return. Every moment of our body is a new incarnation. Every new incarnation—as owl, as fish, as raindrop, as a mountain—is an opportunity to experience the body anew.

Who are we today? Who will we be tomorrow? What is the prayer we will carry with us from one body to another?

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I had ambitions that this would be a nine-part series before Easter. Now it’s going to be an ongoing series for the nine months leading up to the Nativity. No coincidences that the Nativity is nine months after The Resurrection.

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World (Running Press) and the forthcoming (in 2026) Mother Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. With her husband Clark Strand she is the co-founder of The Way of the Rose and the co-author of the book of the same name.