Seldom any splendid story is wholly true.
Dr. Johnson
MOST of the best past-life stories have emerged under hypnosis. And unfortunately a good story is just what one would expect from a hypnotic subject. Suggestibility is stock in trade for the hypnotist. Under hypnosis people become much more suggestible, or at least more inclined to accept suggestions uncritically. People vary in their hypnotisability, but regressions are easy to induce in those who will allow themselves to be put into a trance state. Moreover, people under hypnosis show very specific characteristics, all of which contribute to the creation of very convincing alternate personalities.
Hypnosis can induce a loss of inhibition and an enhanced capacity for imagery and role enactment, which means that subjects can play out their roles very convincingly. Under hypnosis, too, sources of memory are confused, and imagined events are experienced as real; the subjects may be totally convinced of the hypnotic life they are living, and because they are totally convinced themselves it’s easy for them to convince others. It is the sheer vividness of the regression experience, the intensity of the emotions the subjects shows, that is so compelling. It often persuades not only the subject but also the observer that a genuine experience is being remembered.
Under hypnosis people seem to have easier access to childhood memories, though they do not literally regress to an earlier stage of development. They are also less inclined to test reality, and to show a greater tolerance of logical incongruities—this is the so-called “trance logic.”
If you are a good hypnotic subject you will probably experience a past life (or even several past lives) if you undergo a hypnotic regression. The more hypnotisable you are, the more intense the experience will seem. But hypnotisability has nothing to do with how credible the experience seems. This is determined much more by your own previous beliefs and attitudes towards reincarnation, and also to your expectations—and the expectations that may be transmitted to you by the hypnotherapist.
What must also be taken into account is that the person under hypnosis may develop a rapport with the hypnotist, with a consequent willingness to please him or her. If a hypnotist suggests to a good hypnotic subject that he is going to regress to another life in another age, it is a virtual certainty that he is going to oblige, even if he has never before considered the possibility of a past life. This is how Morey Bernstein, having already regressed Virginia Tighe to the age of one, persuaded her to take the further steps into the past which were to lead her to her life as Bridey Murphy:
Oddly enough, you can go even farther back. I want you to keep on going back and back and back in your mind. And, surprising as it may seem, strange as it may seem, you will find that there are other scenes in your memory. There are other scenes from faraway lands and distant places in your memory . . . I will talk to you again in a little while. Meanwhile your mind will be going back, back, back and back until it picks up a scene, until, oddly enough, you find yourself in some other scene, in some other place, in some other time, and when I talk to you again you will tell me about it.
Many past-life hypnotists take advantage of this suggestibility to “lead” their clients in a way that would be considered outrageous in a court of law, and yet still claim that the accounts they are given are evidence of reincarnation. Dr. Helen Warnbach, for example, used to hypnotise her subjects and then suggest to them that they were regressing to a particular time, or a particular place. When they obligingly produced a personality for her, she would question them further: “I decided to ask my subjects to go to a market to get supplies and to describe the market and the supplies that they bought. Money is also a clue to a place and time in the past, so I asked them to visualise the money they might have exchanged for goods.”
One young woman was regressed to AD 25 and discovered herself to be a carpenter in northern Italy. She found herself purchasing supplies with a very odd coin:
Subject: [It] was dark grey and had a hole in the middle. It seemed to be shaped like a square with the corners pounded to try to make it look round. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Dr. Wambach: Did it seem to be crude around the edges?
Subject: Yes, as though it had been hammered rather than moulded.
Dr. Wambach: I’ve had that coin described to me at least 20 times before. It was used around the Mediterranean Sea in the time-period 500 BC to AD 25.
Hypnosis seems to enhance our capacity for imagery and role enactment, so that imagined events are experienced as “real.” Many hypnotists use imagination when they are inducing a trance state—the subject is invited to create a scene, step into it and experience it. For the hypnotic subject to create a fantasised character and act out a role is a natural extension of this. Many past-life memories produced under hypnosis probably fall into this category—they are simply fantasies, created, as dreams are created, by our own minds.
Self-induced hypnotic-trance states, deep relaxation or meditation all seem to create a similar state of consciousness which facilitates the emergence of apparent past-life memories. Rex Caddick told us about the experience he had under self-hypnosis about ten years ago. Rex is now sixty-four and is a linguist who has taught art and photography, writes short stories and paints a little. None of his immediate family showed similar interests or abilities; he was brought up in a poor working-class family and educated at a secondary modern school. Whether his experience was a genuine past life he doesn’t know, but it does seem to him to explain many things about himself which had previously puzzled him.
Rex found himself in the 1790s, an elderly “pedant” living not far from Covent Garden in a small square of Georgian town houses. Here he had a room over a milliner’s shop and earned his living by teaching young ladies to draw and paint. He also taught English grammar and French and occasionally translated German documents. “I can still see my ‘rooms,’ the milliner’s shop, the street itself—a sloping lane about 16½ feet [5 metres] wide, mainly unpaved but with a sort of cobbled gutter in the centre. The lane was muddy, with pools of water in the ruts made by carts, both hand- and horse-drawn.” He continued:
There was an exhibition of paintings by some new artist in one of the houses in the square and I went to see it. Again I felt a tremendous emotional turmoil as I looked at the paintings of this young upstart who had succeeded in doing what I had studied and had been trying to do all my life. In the current life I recognised one of the paintings—a painting of St. Paul’s—and it was by Turner. I “knew” then that it was all imagination. I felt sure that Turner had not been painting that early. I checked in the Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists and I was wrong. He had been painting at that time.
I have never liked Turner’s paintings, which was something my son could never understand when he was studying art, design and photography.
I don’t know if this is proof of reincarnation, but I am sure in my own mind that I “lived” these events. I could smell the stink of the river and know that my shoes let in water. The teaching, love of painting and art, even some little facility in art all seem to stem from this time. To argue against the episode being a genuine past-life experience, in the 1970s I had seen a televised programme about Turner’s life, although I can remember little of it. And I had later spent a day looking at the paintings held in the Tate (and thinking similar daubs by another artist would have been consigned to the waste basket!).
Was Mr. Caddick recognising elements of his past life in his present one? Or was he simply creating a past life that incorporated many of the feelings experienced in his present one (including his views on Turner), in much the same way as dreams are created?
It has certainly been suggested that at least some reincarnation experiences, like dreams, are just an expression of conscious or unconscious desires or hopes or fears. Every hypnotherapist who offers past-life regressions has a sprinkling of emperors and queens and courtesans among their case histories. But the late Helen Wambach, who had recorded 1,100 past lives in her casebook, believed that fantasy and wish fulfilment were not the explanation because, she claimed, the lives most of her subjects regressed to were very ordinary lives. They included a crippled beggar who starved to death, an infant born into a Seminole Indian tribe and a peasant dying of disease in ninth-century northern Italy. In her view these kinds of lives did not seem to be wish-fulfilling fantasies.
Perhaps they show no signs of wish fulfilment, but they were by no means “ordinary lives” from a present-day perspective, and the element of fantasy is certainly much more evident than it would be in, say, a past life of a solicitor in East Grinstead in the 1950s. One of the uses of fantasy is to give ourselves the freedom to explore situations we are curious about but don’t particularly want to experience in real life.
Most people who want to undergo a past-life regression probably do so simply out of curiosity or because they think it might provide them with evidence of survival. Often, though, people want to be regressed to confirm some spontaneous glimpse they have already had of a past life. Spontaneous past-life feelings are always tantalisingly incomplete. To be given a mere glimpse of a life that seems so personal and so real is like reading a page or two of a book over someone’s shoulder in a train, becoming instantly fascinated by the plot but being unable to see the development or denouement before they get off. It’s not surprising that people who feel strongly that they have had a past life should want to know more, to explore their past and find out who they were, what happened to them—in fact, to complete the story.
For such people the obvious next step is to follow up their experience through hypnotic regression. The results are often disappointing. It is seldom that the life they are regressed to is the life they experienced spontaneously. The regression experiences are usually described as interesting but not convincing. Many people say that however vivid the hypnotic regression seems, it has a different quality from the spontaneous experience. Robert, the violinist whose past-life memories are described in Chapter Twelve has also had a past-life regression, but this produced a quite different incarnation, as a victim of the Holocaust. It, too, felt utterly real, and was in its way just as powerful. And yet, he says, it did not have quite the ring of truth of his earlier, spontaneous childhood experience. The hypnotic regression, he feels, could easily have been the product of fantasy and imagination, but he remains convinced that as a schoolboy he was truly remembering himself in an earlier life.
Rachel J. (pseudonym), whose story is told in Chapter Ten also experienced both a spontaneous past memory and a later hypnotic regression and had much the same reaction. “In the first experience I was that person, I was in that body. The hypnotic regression was an equally powerful experience in many ways, and a very valuable one in what it showed me about problems I was having to deal with in my current life. But it wasn’t quite the same—in the regression I was an observer, watching my physical body but not in it.”
R. Donald told us that he has been regressed a number of times but has never been entirely convinced by the experiences. But, he says, he was quite gripped by an occurrence that happened spontaneously:
The first intimation came when I was walking near woods with very tall trees, and the call of the rooks triggered a feeling of pleasure—one could almost say joy—in that it was associated with me “being” a soldier—an early Norman sergeant to be precise—accustomed to walking through such surroundings behind two mounted officers. I noticed that “I” was a bit shorter than my present height of six feet [1.8 metres] and was of a thicker build. I did not resent the fact that I had no horse: I had great stamina and did not suffer from sore feet. Previously, I have always been “anti” the Normans as I felt they came and took over England and so were “baddies.” Therefore I had certainly never fantasised about being one.
Occasionally, though, a past-life regression does confirm someone’s spontaneous memories of a past life, and when this happens the impact on that person is dramatic.
Jenny Cockell is a forty-five-year-old chiropodist living in Northamptonshire. Born in 1953, she is one of the relatively rare people whose past-life memories did not fade as she grew older but intensified. For as long as she can remember, she has had memories of a past life that she was convinced she lived as “Mary,” in Ireland, from about 1898 until the 1930s. “I can’t explain why or how,” she says; “the knowledge was just there in my consciousness.” Jenny also studied a map of Ireland and felt drawn, again without being able to explain exactly why, to a place called Malahide, near Dublin. She “saw” the cottage where she lived quite clearly, “the first on the left in a quiet westward lane,” and she even drew a map of the village where she lived, with the position of the cottage marked.
Much of Jenny’s information about her life as Mary came to her in childhood dreams. Jenny’s childhood was not happy, and as a child she would frequently dream that she was “Mary,” lying in bed, alone, and with the realisation that she was dying and would be leaving her children behind. She remembered being desperately poor, with scarcely enough money to buy food. Memories of her husband were vague and peripheral.
Eventually, Jenny’s parents separated, and after this she seems to have become happier and to have thought much less about her other life. She grew up, married and had two children. Then in 1987 she met a hypnotist who practised past-life regression, and she decided to try to find out more about her past life in a series of hypnotic-regression sessions. Under hypnosis Jenny was taken back to her past life as Mary, living in Malahide. She described a cobbled street, with market stalls down one side, and her dying moments (a scene she was already familiar with through her childhood dreams). She also recovered what she believed to be her husband’s name (Bryan O’Neil) and the names of four of her children (James, Mary, Harry and Kathy). Jenny’s most powerful memories had always been of her seven or eight children, and her desire to be reunited with them eventually grew so strong that she set out on a quest to find them.
It wasn’t until some years later, in 1989, that Jenny could afford actually to make a trip to Malahide and try to find “her” family. From a detailed map of Malahide, she had managed to identify what she believed was the location of Mary’s cottage, in Swords Road. Malahide in 1989, however, had changed considerably from her memories of it earlier in the century. The cottage had long since been demolished, though a butcher’s shop still stood where she remembered it. But a former resident of Swords Road was able to tell her who had lived in the cottage that used to stand where Jenny remembered it during the 1920s and 1930s. This was indeed a woman called Mary—Mary Sutton—who had had seven children and died in 1932, soon after the birth of her youngest child. The children had been sent to orphanages.
Women called Mary who had borne seven children cannot have been too thin on the ground in Ireland in the 1930s, but this does not seem to have been a problem. Neither did the fact that Mary’s married name was Sutton and not O’Neil, nor that her children were called Jeffrey, Philomena, Christopher, Francis, Bridget, Elizabeth and Sonny prove a barrier. Jenny was and remains convinced that she had found her family. Since then she has managed to trace most of these elderly children, old enough to be her own parents, and one at least (Sonny, the eldest) seems quite readily to have accepted Jenny as his reincarnated mother. What seems to have convinced Sonny was Jenny’s memory of incidents from his childhood that he felt no one but his mother could have known about. One of these memories was of “Mary’s” children surrounding a live hare trapped in a snare. Sonny, too, remembered this incident and confirmed that the hare had indeed been alive when they had found it. Jenny also told him that she could remember standing on a jetty waiting for a boat, though she could no longer remember why. Sonny told her that he often used to act as golf caddie on an island to which he had to take the ferry Whenever he did this, he would always find his mother waiting for him on the jetty when the boat returned.
Was Jenny’s quest really successful? In terms of Jenny’s personal needs (which, after all, is why she undertook the quest), one has to accept that it was. She feels at last that she has fulfilled her obligations towards her lost children. In her own words: “By his acceptance, Sonny has given me what I have searched for. The sense of responsibility and guilt has fallen away, and I feel a sense of peace that I have never really known before.”
Is this anything more than a good story, a series of coincidences reinforced by hypnotic regression? It’s easy to dismiss most of the details Jenny remembered, apart perhaps from the incident of the snared hare and her memory of waiting for Sonny’s boat to come back, as coincidence. But should we dismiss as readily her strong conviction, the feeling, which has been such a constant and driving force in her life since early childhood, that she has lived before? True, her memories are not razor-sharp, and many of her facts are clearly wrong, including the names of her children, which she should surely have remembered. Does this matter? What it does suggest, yet again, is that even the “best” past-life memories are available only as snapshots, moments of a life frozen in memory. Whether we believe in the reality of Jenny’s past-life memory probably depends on whether we attach more weight to the objective evidence—facts that check out—or to the subjective evidence—Jenny’s inner conviction that this was a life she actually lived.
Someone who is searching for a past life under hypnosis is looking for proof. To help him or her the hypnotist will try to elicit as many details as possible—names, dates, places, anything that can be checked to see how well the past-life story hangs together. Perhaps one should not expect complete correspondence: after all, memory is never perfect, and these are past-life memories interpreted by a twentieth-century brain.
Disappointingly, very few of the past lives that have been disinterred under hypnotic regression stand up to close analysis—which is why the few that make a comparatively good showing are so well known. Most are full of historical inaccuracies, inconsistencies and anomalies.
Very occasionally, such apparent inconsistencies actually strengthen the case for a past life: Mrs. Smith, for example, remembered the Cathar robes as dark blue when the accepted view at the time was that they were black. But much more often such inconsistencies simply destroy the credibility of the past-life memory and suggest very strongly that the memories produced have their origins firmly set in the twentieth century, that people see what they would expect to see from a twentieth-century perspective.
One subject of the hypnotist Harry Hurst, for example, remembered a life during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses III, regardless, or ignorant, of the fact that a system of numbering the pharaohs was not adopted until the nineteenth century. He also referred to a “sestertius,” a coin not in use until 1,000 years later.
A subject of Arnall Bloxham, remembering a life as an American Indian, talked of coastal tribes who had brought tales of men with horns, carrying round shields and sailing in tall ships driven by huge blankets. To most casual listeners, this would conjure up a picture of invading Vikings in horned helmets, and the Vikings very probably did land on the American mainland some time in the eleventh century. However, they would not have been wearing horned helmets. Although many people associate these with the Vikings, the fact is that the helmet worn by the ordinary soldier was a simple close-fitting, often conical cap. Horned helmets were worn only occasionally, by high-ranking individuals, and usually for religious ceremonial occasions rather than battle or invasion.
Hypnotherapist Joe Keeton, who has conducted hundreds of past-life regressions, believes that only about two in every hundred regressions are not the product of imagination and fantasy. Sometimes errors and inconsistencies in a past-life story are glaringly obvious. Very occasionally, a past-life regression throws up a personality who is a matter of historical fact, and whose memories are largely verifiable. But even then a sharp eye may spot inaccuracies in a story that seems to stand up to analysis in every detail. And once this happens, like a house of cards, the whole magnificent edifice collapses. Such is the case with the story of Joan Waterhouse, the Chelmsford witch.
In the library of Lambeth Palace, in London, is the only surviving copy of the sixteenth-century chapbook recording the trial for witchcraft, at Chelmsford Assizes in July 1566, of Agnes and Joan Waterhouse, mother and daughter, from the Essex village of Hatfield Peverel. The trial, presided over by Judge John Southcote and with the Attorney-General, Gilbert Gerard, taking the role of prosecutor, was one of the earliest witch trials on record. Agnes Waterhouse was found guilty and hanged; Joan was acquitted.
Joan’s chief accuser had been another Agnes, a twelve-year-old girl called Agnes Brown, and the charge against Joan was that she had summoned a creature called Sathan, who assumed the form of a black dog to frighten and then haunt the girl. Agnes had apparently fallen foul of the witch by refusing her request to be given some bread and cheese.
In 1977 Jan, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Merseyside, answered an appeal by the hypnotherapist Joe Keeton for volunteers for past-life hypnotic regressions. At her first (and, as it turned out, her last) session, Joe asked her, while in deep hypnosis, to go back to before her birth to search out a memory. An extraordinary scene then unfolded as, before the watchers’ gaze, Jan seemed actually to become Joan Waterhouse, to live again the mental and physical agony that Joan must have suffered during her trial, and eventually to show such distress that Joe Keeton quickly brought her back to a waking state. So horrifying had the experience been for Jan that she refused any subsequent sessions and has never allowed herself to be hypnotised since.
What so impressed the watchers was not simply the wealth of factual detail Jan produced—including the names of the presiding judge, the prosecutor, her accuser and those accused with her at the trial, all of which were corroborated by historical accounts of the trial—but the intense emotion she showed as she described the humiliation of the search to find the extra nipple every witch had with which to suckle her familiar, of being stripped and shaved and pricked all over with pins to find her witchmark (the one spot every witch was supposed to have on her body which was completely insensitive to pain). She held her hands curled up as if in intense pain, and when asked why she did this replied that they were burned by a “rod of iron,” a reference to the hot iron bar victims were made to grasp while being interrogated.
After her regression, Jan was able to remember in detail all the events of the trial. In an interview with the writer Ian Wilson the following year, in November 1978, Jan told him that she had been shocked by her mother’s appearance in the dock—“she looked too old to be my mother.” Her face was “disgustingly spotted.” Both these statements were true. Agnes was old to be eighteen-year-old Joan’s mother—the record gives her age as sixty-four—and the record also mentions that “there were diverse spottes on her face and one on her nose.” Now, Jan might well have been shocked by Agnes’s appearance but why should Joan have been? After all, Joan had lived with it for eighteen years and must have been well accustomed to it. It does sound as though the woman describing the dreadful experience in the dock at Chelmsford was not Joan but Jan.
Other people have made similar observations about her speech. Language has changed so vastly in the last 400 years that it would be virtually impossible to communicate with someone who had been regressed beyond the end of the sixteenth century if they were really speaking as they would have spoken then. The words, the expressions used by “Joan” sounded archaic, but behind them Jan’s native Merseyside accent could still be detected. Ian Wilson asked Stanley Ellis, of the School of English at Leeds University, an expert on English regional accents and the development of spoken English throughout the centuries, to listen to and comment on the tape recordings of Jan’s hypnotic regression. Ellis regretfully concluded that there was nothing in the recording that persuaded him he was listening to genuine sixteenth-century speech. The phrases and sentence structures used were the kind of archaisms regularly used in the twentieth century to convey a period flavour in historical plays or novels: “I know not, sire,” “’Tis a rod of iron,” etc.
However, it was Joe Keeton’s wife, Monica, who noticed what seemed at first like a small discrepancy but was eventually to show pretty conclusively that Jan’s memories as Joan Waterhouse had their origins fair and square in more modern times. Early in her regression Jan had given the year in which she found herself as “the year of Our Lord 1556.” Fifteen fifty-six was near the end of Mary’s reign; Elizabeth did not come to the throne until two years later, in 1558. And yet later in the session, when Jan was asked the name of the reigning monarch, she insisted repeatedly that it was Elizabeth, not Mary.
There is no doubt about the actual date of the trial—the Lambeth Palace chapbook gives it as 1566, a full decade after the date mentioned by Jan, and well within the reign of Elizabeth. So how could Jan, so accurate about so many aspects of the trial, have been so wrong about its date?
It was Ian Wilson who discovered the probable answer, in a reproduction copy of the chapbook, produced in a limited edition by the British Philobiblon Society in the nineteenth century. The front page of the original chapbook reads: “The examination and confession of certain Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie of Essex before the Quenes maiesties Judges the xxvi daye of July Anno 1566.” The front page of the Philobiblon Society copy, which became the most important resource for anyone researching or writing about the trial, is an exact copy—except that the date is given as “Anno 1556.” The typographer responsible for setting the copy mistranscribed the date. No one has discovered the exact origin of Jan’s Joan Waterhouse memories, but it seems certain that they must have sprung from some book, article or drama which used this nineteenth-century copy as its source, and perpetuated this simple error.
To round off the story, Jan should have been hypnotised again and asked under hypnosis whether she remembered such a source, as was done in the case of Blanche Poynings. Unfortunately but understandably, Jan had been so terrified by her experience that she refused ever to be hypnotised again, and so this opportunity was lost. Cryptomnesia remains a possibility, though we have no evidence of the source. The only other explanation is that she was somehow stepping out of time, a possibility that is discussed further in chapter 16.
Many of the past lives that come to light under hypnotic regression are notable for their richness of detail and data, which makes them seem far more convincing than most spontaneously remembered past-life memories. Most are probably the results of fantasy. But fantasy can’t explain every case of supposed reincarnation. At best it is only a partial answer. It may explain the creation of a particular personality or the circumstances of a particular life, but it can’t explain how it is that, in a very few cases, this fantasised past life is fleshed out with facts. Even if the character is a product of fantasy, the historical data which help to make it credible clearly are not. And nowhere has a wealth of historical detail proved more persuasive than in one of the most intriguing of all cases of apparent past-life recall on record—the story of Antonia Michaela Maria Ruiz de Prado and the Spanish Inquisition.