Belief in reincarnation has never been a part of official Christian or Jewish teaching, or at least, in Christianity, it has been a formal heresy since it was rejected by a narrow margin at the Second Council of Constantinople in AD 553. However nearly all polling in Western countries reveals significant levels of this belief. "Puzzled People" undertaken in the 1940s suggested that only 4 per cent of people in Britain believed in reincarnation. Geoffrey Gorer's survey, carried out a few years later, arrived at 5 percent (1955, p. 262). However, this figure had reached 18 percent by 1967 (Gallup, 1993), only to increase further to a sizable 29 percent by 1979, a good six-fold increase on the earlier "Puzzled People" figure. Eileen Barker has reported that around one-fifth of Europeans now say that they believe in reincarnation.