Pagans believe in re-incarnation and uses a religion-neutral "Summerland" when speaking about the Afterlife.
Pagans don’t believe in a Heaven and Hell as Christianity imagines it - where your salvation or condemnation is forced upon you regardless of your actions and solely on what your beliefs in God was during your life. Pagans believe that the results of our actions are very clearly important on this plane of existence so it can not be irrelevant in the Afterlife. Your faith has nothing to do with where you go in the Afterlife, only what you did.
Beliefs about the Afterlife are different for every person, there is no single Pagan Afterlife belief.
- Here is an outline of what the Summerlands and Afterlife entails: -
To believe in reincarnation, you believe that you’d return to the Earth after death to learn different lessons. We choose our own life lessons or path for every reincarnation – we choose a Path that would challenge us and our previous experience, so that can we grow and learn.
Death of the physical body and the moving on of the soul / Higher Self is a journey, not the end. Physics tells us that energy can not be created or destroyed – it can only change from one form into another – and since we are energetic beings, the end of our physical body does not mean the end of our Soul and as a result only moves on to another form. However, we do not seek death, our life cycle will move on for us at its own pace until we’ve learned our lessons for this life and until its time for us to depart.
Every soul can reborn many times into differing forms, so we can live many lives that’s still ahead for us. Between our times of life we believe that our soul journeys to a place called the Summerlands before being reborn to a new existence on this Plane.
The Summerlands (or also known as the Otherworld, Annwynn or Underworld (Celtic), Valhalla (Norse) etc.) is a place where we can rest, build up our strength and reflect upon the previous lives lessons.
The Summerlands are all around us, we’re only separated from those who’ve come before us by the boundaries of the different Planes of existence.
Unlike Heaven, there is no-one to deny us entry or judge us upon the actions we have performed in our past lives. However, our souls go before the “Divine Judge” but, that “entity” does not serve as your judge, s/he allows you to see YOURSELF truly and judge yourself. The highest thing that you’ve done in the life just past is the point of reference by which you measure your growth, progress and learning.
Some souls that haven’t had many lives and do not have as much to process and judge themselves on return very quickly.
Others who have much to take into themselves may stay longer.
All souls who have determined that they need to return to the body will do so, when they are ready.
