This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.
Winston Churchill, remark in the House of Commons following the parachute descent of Rudolf Hess (13 May 1941)
THIS is one of the most interesting and arguably one of the most convincing cases of hypnotic regression on record—not because the story itself is convincing; on the contrary, it beggars belief. It is an extravaganza, a story so colourful, full of such torrid passion and high adventure—in fact, so thoroughly over the top—that common sense would suggest it had its origins in either fantasy or fiction. Its interest lies in the fact that hundreds of hours of diligent and painstaking research over a number of years not only verified the numerous historical facts of the story but found that some were so obscure that there seems no way in which the subject could have acquired them. Dr. Linda Tarazi, the hypnotherapist who has described the case, had many sessions with her subject and meticulously checked out every detail of her story. Eventually, she was forced to the conclusion that reincarnation had to be considered a possible explanation of the case, if only because no other explanation seemed plausible.
The central character in this story is Laurel Dilmen (pseudonym), a woman now in her late sixties who was born and raised in Chicago during the Depression years. Both Laurel Dilmen and her mother say that, in common with many children who remember past lives, she was a precocious child, claiming to have experienced life as an adult. Although there is no record that she actually talked in detail about a past life when she was a child, when she was about six she did show an unusual interest in clothing, weapons, buildings and artefacts of the sixteenth century. Her all-time favourite gift, which she had wanted for two years and received for her seventh Christmas, was a pair of fencing foils. She disliked history in school because, she said, “they made it dull, not at all like what really happened.” She never studied Spanish history or learned Spanish. At college she majored in education and took courses in German, English and various sciences. After graduating from Northwestern University she went into show business for a few years before becoming a teacher. She married and had two children.
In the mid-1970s LD joined a club of amateur hypnotists, of which Linda Tarazi was a member, in the hope that hypnosis might help her lose weight and also cure her headaches. Some members of the club were studying past-life regression, and LD volunteered as a subject. Between June 1977 and January 1978 LD had eight sessions in which she regressed to several past lives. But only one seemed to hold any real interest for her—that of a woman called Antonia in Spain. She “remembered” other lives, happier or more successful than Antonia’s, and yet it was to this that she returned again and again. This is Antonia’s story.
Antonia Michaela Maria Ruiz de Prado was the daughter of a Spanish officer, Antonio, and his German wife, Erika. She was born on 15 November 1555 on a small plantation on the island of Hispaniola. For much of Antonia’s childhood her father was away on military campaigns, and during his prolonged absences her mother, who was in poor health, suffered from depression. Antonia, a lively, intelligent child, nominally in the care of uneducated servants and slaves, was left to run wild, riding bareback in peasant clothes, climbing trees and swimming nude in the river or sea.
Antonia’s mother spoke German to her, but when her father came home he expected her to speak Spanish and to behave properly. However, he also treated her like the son he knew he would never have, teaching her to ride and shoot, in case in his absence their home should be attacked by bandits, pirates, natives or rebellious slaves.
In 1569 Erika took Antonia to Germany to visit her brother Karl, a university professor who had left the priesthood to marry but was now a widower. Unfortunately, shortly after they arrived Erika died and Antonia was left in the care of her uncle. Karl not only educated Antonia but taught her to think for herself and make her own decisions. He took her with him to the Universities of Prague, Leipzig and Heidelberg and encouraged her to read widely. Here she started to show a propensity for cross-dressing, first of all sneaking into the libraries disguised as a boy, then into the lecture halls, and finally enrolling as a student and taking part in student activities such as brawling and fencing.
In 1580 they left Germany and went to Oxford. Karl himself had by now abandoned the Catholic Church and embraced the ideas of the Catholic humanists, Protestant reformers and the newly emerging scientific disciplines, but although he introduced these to Antonia he never tried to impose them on her and she remained a devout Catholic.
She also remained a loyal Spaniard, aligning herself with a group of rebellious Catholic students and on a few occasions acting as a courier for the Spanish ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, who was plotting with Mary Queen of Scots. Antonia seems to have been a most useful agent, able to assume a different nationality, social status and even sex at will.
After several of her friends had been arrested, tortured and executed, Antonia asked Karl to let her go to Spain. He warned her that if she did she would be in grave danger from the Spanish Inquisition, who would never accept her freedom of thought however devout she professed herself to be. Fate, however, stepped in. First, Antonia received a letter from her father, asking her to join him in Spain at Cuenca, where he now owned an inn. Secondly, in January 1584 Karl died. Finally, diplomatic relations between England and Spain were broken off. Antonia was arrested, but escaped to France and then made her way to Spain.
When she finally arrived in Cuenca in May 1584 it was to discover from her father’s attorney that her father had died ten days before. The inn was heavily in debt, and all the waitresses were moonlighting as prostitutes. The one piece of good news she was told was that her father had had a powerful friend who would help her if she proved worthy, although in the meantime he wanted to remain anonymous.
Antonia rose to the challenge. Her Spanish improved, the business slowly recovered, and she made various new friends, including a Jesuit priest, Fernando Mendoza, and a couple called Andres and Maria de Burgos. Meanwhile, she was under close surveillance by the Inquisition. In fact, the Inquisition already had a good deal of information about Antonia, largely gathered from her own father, who had been a close friend of Arganda, one of the two Inquisitors at Cuenca. It was this same Arganda who was Antonia’s anonymous protector. Knowing that he was dying, that Antonia would then be left alone in a strange country, and that she had been exposed to many heretical ideas that might make her a very suspect figure in the eyes of the Inquisition, her father had asked his old friend to watch over her. He had also, somewhat rashly, passed over to Arganda Antonia’s letters, in which she discussed these prohibited ideas and which also made it clear that her uncle Karl had indeed been a heretic. Her father’s justification for this was that the letters also showed Antonia to be a devout Catholic and devoted to Spain. He had also assumed that the Inquisition would be made aware of their contents anyway, as Antonia would, as the law demanded, make inquisitorial confession when she arrived in Spain. But, ignorant of the law, she did not.
The Inquisitors of Cuenca soon felt it necessary to quash her freethinking ideas and rebellious spirit. She was summoned for questioning three times, and arrested and tried once. Eventually, she made a full confession and submitted to the instructions of the Inquisitors, paying a heavy fine and performing other penances.
In the ordinary course of events, trial by the Inquisition would have meant disgrace not only for Antonia but for all her descendants. However, both the Inquisitors seem to have grown fond of Antonia, appreciating both her piety and her beauty. With Arganda she already had a special relationship through her father; the other had tried several times to make Antonia his mistress. She offered numerous objections, none of which dissuaded him. “Finally, I decided to appeal to his honour as a conscientious Inquisitor: ‘Can you honestly believe that such a wilful and deliberate sin will not alter your decisions as Inquisitor?’ I asked coolly. He sighed. ‘I suppose in a way it already has. In reviewing my cases recently, I noticed that they indicate a far more lenient view of fornication since I decided to indulge myself. To me the liberality was so striking that I feared it might arouse suspicion in the Suprema. I suppose I shall have to revert to my sterner judgements.’”
Antonia was reassured that her name would disappear from the records of the Inquisition. A bottle of ink “accidentally” spilled on her folio and rendered it illegible.
Despite her adventurous and unconventional life, Antonia, now 29, had so far remained a virgin. But now, in a steamy episode that seems to have been the climax of her life, she finally lost her virginity to a man she had secretly adored. The episode (which bears all the hallmarks of fantasy) involved a highly erotic and masochistic rape scene set in a torture chamber. Antonia’s passionate and selfless love for her seducer did not go unrequited; her perfect love changed his own lustful feelings to an equally deep and powerful passion. Linda Terazi tells us that “They shared every faculty of mind, soul and body in a love that was both deeply spiritual and passionately erotic.” Antonia’s lover was a strong, dominant, powerful man. She became his mistress and bore him a son, and together they embarked on many more adventures around the world. Eventually, Antonia was drowned near a small unknown island in the Caribbean, her lover nearly dying in a vain attempt to save her. She was so wholly focused on his wellbeing that she was unaware of her own death until she realised that she did not feel his arms around her or his tears splashing on her face.”
This passionate love affair lies at the heart of Antonia’s story, and certainly seemed to be the reason why this life, above all the other past lives Laurel Dilmen remembered under hypnosis, became so important to her. In fact, it was more than important: it became an obsession. She started to have dreams and daytime flashbacks of Antonia’s “life.” Eventually, it began to obsess her to the point that it came to seem more vivid and far more worthwhile than her normal life. So involved was she with “Antonia’s” life, with the search for this one lost perfect love beside which all other relationships paled, that she realised she was in danger of jeopardising her present life as LD, neglecting her friends and activities. It was at that point, three years after the initial regression sessions in which “Antonia’s” memories had emerged, that she decided to seek help and turned to Linda Tarazi.
Dr. Tarazi was intrigued by the case and felt that the best way to persuade LD to give up her obsession and return to reality would be to convince her that Antonia’s life was pure fantasy. Between June 1981 and March 1983 she regressed LD 36 times to her life as Antonia. The tapes of these sessions contained a huge amount of information about Antonia’s supposed life. Dr. Tarazi then embarked on a search for inconsistencies and errors, which involved hours of library research, consultations with historians who had specialised knowledge of Spain in that period, and a visit to Cuenca, during which she was able to examine the town’s archives and Inquisition records. She also checked the ease with which LD would have been able to acquire the information that she “knew” as Antonia, had she set out to do so.
Any educated person would be expected to know many of the people who had walk-on parts in Antonia’s story: Queen Elizabeth I, King Philip II of Spain, Mary Queen of Scots, for example. Fifty or sixty more facts were easily verifiable from most history books or encyclopedias, but another twenty-five to thirty Dr. Tarazi discovered only with difficulty in rare books found in specialised research libraries. Over a dozen facts were published only in Spanish, and a few were not published at all but could be found only by checking local archives. The names of the two Inquisitors of Cuenca, for example, whom Antonia correctly identified, and their biographical details, were verified only by checking the diocesan archives of Cuenca.
Much to her own surprise, instead of discovering a catalogue of errors and discrepancies, Dr. Tarazi’s research simply confirmed Antonia’s story. Of the hundreds of detailed facts that formed the background to her life, all were correct.
Antonia was able to recall and recount factual events of her life with apparent ease but found more difficulty in talking about emotional material related to those events. If her story were fantasy, one might have expected the emotional memory to be the “easy” bit, the facts to bolster the story to be elicited with more difficulty. For example, in Antonia’s second regression session she recalled her death in the Caribbean on her way back from Peru, where she had visited her uncle, Juan Ruiz de Prado, an important official in Lima. She refused, however, to say what his position was and became defensive when questioned about this, asking why the hypnotist wanted to know. This meeting was apparently traumatic, but she did not reveal any details of it until a later session.
Dr. Tarazi found several aspects of Antonia’s story particularly convincing. Most hypnotic regressions, she says, have a nebulous quality, but Antonia’s was quite different. From the first she came through as a proud, independent woman who knew exactly who, what and where she was. Her account also presented an intriguing contrast between the extreme accuracy of the details that affected her personal life and her relative ignorance of contemporary events that did not affect her directly. At her very first session, for example, the hypnotist who questioned her was a Dutchman, knowledgeable in Dutch history. The Netherlands were at that time under Spanish domination. Antonia was able to give a detailed account of the assassination of William of Orange in July 1584 and the succession of his son Maurice because, she said, this was what the local intellectuals were discussing at her inn. She referred correctly to the Spanish governor of the Netherlands at that time as Don Alejandro Famesio, sometimes incorrectly referred to as the Duke of Parma, although he did not succeed to his title until 1586. More impressively she referred to the Duke of Alva, Spanish governor from 1568 to 1573, by his name—Don Fernando de Toledo—rather than by his much better-known title.
Particularly interesting was Antonia’s mention of the Inquisitor who had attempted to make her his mistress. He had, she said, become more lenient towards people who had committed the sin of fornication. When Dr. Tarazi examined the Inquisition records of Cuenca she found that a much smaller percentage of those arrested for fornication were penanced, as opposed to being released for insufficient evidence or receiving a suspended sentence, during the time that one of the Inquisitors was supposedly enamoured of Antonia. The figures were:
| Before Antonia’s arrival: | 1582 | 73% penanced for fornication |
| 1583 | 75% | |
| 1584 (to May) | 60% | |
| After Antonia’s arrival: | 1584 (May–Oct) | 10% |
| 1584 (end of year 100% when Antonia was under suspicion) | 100% | |
| 1585 | 11% | |
| 1586 | 35% | |
| 1587 | 50% |
She revealed in a later session that in a dispute between Inquisitor Ulloa of Peru and Viceroy Villar, her uncle, Juan Ruiz de Prado, had supported Ulloa. All these names Dr. Tarazi eventually found, though with some difficulty: it took her many years to trace the names of de Prado and Ulloa, eventually finding them in a very obscure old Spanish book.
Another convincing aspect of Antonia’s story is that two of the facts she reported were at first uncorroborated by the authorities in Spain, and yet further research proved Antonia to be correct. One of these was her description of the building that housed the tribunal of the Inquisition in Cuenca: she described it as a castle standing above Cuenca and dominating the entire region. The Government Tourist Office in Cuenca sent a photograph of the building that had housed the tribunal, but LD was stunned when shown it because it did not even slightly resemble the one she’d recalled. Dr. Tarazi describes the moment: “All present observed her dramatic change in mood from eager anticipation to a deep depression. She made no attempt to reconcile Antonia’s description with this building. It never occurred to her to question the authorities. In quiet resignation she said her whole story must have been imagination because this was nothing like the building that had played such an important part in the life of Antonia!”
However, because this was the only apparent error she had found in Antonia’s account, and because Antonia had seemed so sure of her ground, Dr. Tarazi decided not to let the matter rest. Finally, she found, in an obscure Spanish book on Cuenca, that the tribunal had been moved in December 1583, five months before Antonia’s arrival in Cuenca, to an old castle overlooking the town, a castle that fitted her description perfectly.
The second discrepancy concerned the existence of a college in Cuenca. Antonia had said that students at the college met regularly at her inn. But Dr. Tarazi found that there was no college in Cuenca, and could find no reference to there having been one. The archivist at the municipal archives said that he had never heard of one. Eventually, in a century-old seven-volume work in Spanish, Dr. Tarazi found a reference to a college having been founded in Cuenca in the mid-sixteenth century. The work quoted mainly from obscure sixteenth-century Spanish sources and was, Dr. Tarazi pointed out, difficult even for Spanish teachers.
A third oddity in the story was that although there were normally three Inquisitors at a tribunal, Antonia had mentioned only two. However, when Dr. Tarazi checked the episcopal archives in Cuenca she found that from 1584 to 1588—the entire period during which Antonia lived in Cuenca—there had been only the two Inquisitors she had named.
Dr. Tarazi describes one more piece of evidence which seems to support the view that if this were fantasy it was a fantasy with a very special and compelling quality. In the hope that it would help to cure LD of her obsession with Antonia’s life and love, Dr. Tarazi decided to try to persuade her that her ecstatic love affair would, in reality, never have lasted. Had she not died such a tragic early death, her romantic love would have gone the way of most romantic loves, passion spent, tempered by time and familiarity to a calmer affection. If LD could be persuaded to live out the unfinished part of Antonia’s life in her imagination, Dr. Tarazi reasoned, she might at last be able to let it go.
When she had undergone her regression analysis, LD had been asked to try to recapture impressions of a possible past life. This time, again under hypnosis, she was told to try to fantasise what the rest of Antonia’s life would have been like had she lived. In trance she was told that neither Antonia nor her son had drowned but that her lover had revived her and they had gone on to have another child, a daughter. They returned to Spain, where she lived out her life happily until the death of her lover nearly twenty years later. She was then told to visualise the rest of her life and the upbringing of her two children.
Antonia could not accept the idea that they had all survived, but was told that this did not matter; all she had to do was to imagine what her life would have been like had they survived.
The life that LD imagined was of a quite different quality from her original life as Antonia. Her descriptions were far less vivid, she added no new facts and recounted no new adventures. She and her lover remained faithful to each other but never married, and they spent less and less time together as both became more involved in their own careers. She showed little emotional involvement with her story, except when she was talking about her lover’s death.
In fact, this exercise served its purpose. After it, LD seemed reconciled to her own present-day life and even admitted that in some ways it was better than Antonia’s. She was no longer interested in being regressed. Her last regression to her life as Antonia took place in March 1983.
There are a few barriers to a total acceptance of Antonia’s story. The first and perhaps the most fundamental is that although Antonia’s lover is a real historical character, there is no evidence at all that Antonia Ruiz de Prado herself ever existed. Dr. Tarazi did not even attempt to find records of her birth, believing that it would be impossible to find proof of her birth on an isolated plantation, or her baptism in a small local church she could not name. But the Inquisition is known to have kept meticulously accurate records, and she did expect that if such a woman had existed, some traces of her would be found in the record of her tribunal. It is true that Antonia had produced a plausible, though perhaps suspiciously convenient, explanation of this omission. But on checking the Inquisition records, Dr. Tarazi found no missing number where Antonia’s folio should have been. When asked about this, Antonia replied that the Inquisitors had probably foreseen the desirability of eliminating her file and probably gave it a number identical to another, but with an “a” after it so that there would be no gap in the record. Dr. Tarazi comments that this practice was indeed sometimes followed, though probably not for this reason.
Another fact that is hard to explain is that Antonia spoke no Spanish. How could it be that so many memories of her past life are apparently accurate and intact, and yet apparently no trace remained of her memory of the language that must have been one of the most fundamental elements, one would have thought, of her whole life? She pronounced Spanish names very well, was able to recite the prayers required by the Inquisition in Latin, and composed words and music to a song in Latin. But when she told her story, when she recalled so vividly her life as a Spaniard, she told it entirely in English.
What do we know about Laurel Dilmen? Linda Tarazi describes her as someone who had a very active imagination and a great ability to fantasise. As a child she rarely played regular children’s games, but used to entertain her playmates with stories about heroes and gods, witches and wizards, princes and princesses, knights and dragons. She would make up games of the “dungeons and dragons” type and often felt that she had actually experienced the pretended situations before. So in being Antonia was she simply acting out yet another role? If she had known the facts of Antonia’s life, there is no doubt that she could have woven them into a story and created around them the life and the personality of Antonia.
So was Antonia’s story all a fantasy, the product of a vivid imagination? Almost certainly fantasy played a part. But we still have to explain how she learned the facts to flesh out Antonia’s life. The personality may have been a fabrication; the facts certainly were not.
Clearly, Antonia’s story could not have been entirely fantasy. But could it have been fantasy combined with a carefully planned fraud? If so, it would have required an incredible amount of effort and forward planning. To get her story right, to create a convincing and consistent life as Antonia, LD would have had to have worked her way through numerous obscure sources, many of them in Spanish, a few in sixteenth-century Spanish difficult even for those fluent in the language to decipher. Why on earth should she bother to do this? And where would she have found the time? Linda Tarazi collected evidence from Laurel’s family and friends and found that in the three years before she consulted her Laurel had been heavily involved with work and further studies. Moreover, much of the factual detail that makes the story so convincing was revealed in the earlier hypnotic sessions, before Dr. Tarazi was consulted, although it was only later that it was checked out and found to be accurate.
What makes it even more improbable that she did this is the way in which she told her tale. To begin with, she herself seemed to regard facts as unimportant. She would reveal them when they were relevant to her story, but certainly didn’t make a point of displaying what she knew, or seem as though she was trying to impress or prove that her story was true by the depth and breadth of her knowledge. In fact, she gave the impression that she probably knew much more than she bothered to volunteer and would get irritated when her narrative was interrupted by questions about mundane things such as money, household commodities or artefacts. All she really seemed to want was to make other people understand the depth and reality of her love—almost as though, Dr. Tarazi says, she felt that if enough souls sympathised with her plight it might influence the “powers that be” to mitigate her sentence of being kept eternally apart from the, man she loved so desperately.
It is also worth noting that some of the more obscure facts were reported very early. She mentioned the name of her uncle Juan Ruiz de Prado, for example, at a very early stage in her exploration of her past life—at only her second session. This was a name verified only with the greatest difficulty by Dr. Tarazi in an old and very obscure Spanish book. It is difficult to believe that LD would have had the opportunity to research her supposed background in this kind of detail at that early stage. Moreover, facts about the same incident confirmed from the same source were not reported at around the same time, as might be expected if LD were collecting information from an obscure library source. Details from the same source might be given months, even years apart, mixed with details that had to be verified from other sources.
Finally, where would she have found the time? Simply verifying the facts of LD’s story took years: it would have taken even longer for her to collect the hundreds of facts involved in her story in the first place. In any event, if it were fraud, it is difficult to see what LD could have gained from it. She didn’t want publicity for her story and has always refused to allow her real name to be published. She has never capitalised on her story by attempting to publish it as sensationalised fact or as fiction.
Here one also has to consider the possibility of fraud not on the part of the subject but of the past-life therapist. Linda Tarazi, who published her account of the case in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in October 1990, has since written a novel based on the transcripts of her regression sessions with Laurel Dilmen. Might she have invented the whole thing? It seems unlikely. There were witnesses to the early sessions in which Antonia appeared, and so clearly neither Laurel Dilmen nor Antonia are figments of the therapist’s imagination. One has to assume that the historical research that Linda Tarazi carried out is accurate—someone who has the same amount of time and energy will sooner or later check her research findings, and if there are inaccuracies they will be found. If Linda Tarazi had simply wanted to write a historical novel, she has gone about it in a singularly labour-intensive way.
Most modern psychiatrists believe that one defence mechanism of the mind, a way it sometimes deals with various painful mental processes, is to suppress them—a phenomenon known as hysterical dissociation. Very rarely, the person dissociates so completely that he or she escapes into what appears to be a quite different personality. A tendency to dissociate is known to be related to a variety of childhood traumas, in particular to childhood sexual abuse. Is there any evidence that the “Antonia” personality was an alternative personality in this sense, a psychological creation of Laurel Dilmen, created in response to some unhappiness or stress?
Certainly, Laurel’s childhood does not seem to have been particularly happy. During her early high-school years she was a lonely and somewhat isolated young girl who studied hard and socialised little. She had different interests from her peers and felt that she had nothing in common with them, and to make things worse her family moved twice during this time, which must have added to her difficulty in making close friends and to her feelings of isolation. But she seems to have found her own positive ways of dealing with this by making a conscious effort to “rewrite” herself as a rebel rather than a recluse. She joined a street gang and proved not only that she could stand up for herself but also that she had potential usefulness to the gang as its “brains.” She learned jujitsu and had a romance with a German prisoner of war. At fifteen she left home to live alone 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometres) from home and family. There seems to be no evidence that she dealt with any problems she had by dissociating.
Different personalities do quite often emerge during a hypnotic trance, but they are typically very different from the person’s normal personality. Laurel Dilmen and Antonia do not fit this pattern. In fact, “Antonia” seems to have been very much a reflection of Laurel Dilmen herself, and Laurel speaks of Antonia not as if she is a totally different personality but much more as if the two of them are essentially the same person, as if “Antonia” is simply another, earlier stage of her own life. They have the same personality traits, likes and dislikes, interests and skills. There are numerous echoes of Antonia’s independent, freethinking, erotic and adventurous life in Laurel’s own life. But even if we did decide that dissociation was a possible explanation, we would still be left with an unanswered question—how did Antonia find her facts?
Cryptomnesia is the most usual explanation for past-life memories. So perhaps at this point in the story we should look a bit more closely at Laurel Dilmen’s background to see if there is any obvious way she could have acquired such detailed and convincing knowledge of sixteenth-century Catholic Spain. Linda Tarazi went to enormous lengths to examine Laurel’s life and discover how she could have acquired her knowledge of, and feeling for, the Catholic practices of sixteenth-century Spain. She had no Spanish or Roman Catholic relatives or ancestors, and didn’t attend a Catholic school or church.
The usual sources for cryptomnesic past-life memories are historical novels and films. Laurel claimed that from adolescence onwards her reading had been limited to non-fiction; she had read no novels, historical or otherwise. She did, however, admit that she enjoyed historical plays and films and watched all that she could of these. Linda Tarazi used hypnosis to try to discover whether Antonia’s story had its roots in any such sources. She first asked Laurel (under hypnosis but not regressed to Antonia) to search her memory and list all the books she had read relating to history. She also checked several indexes of historical fiction dealing with the period and read those that were available in any Chicago area library. She found nothing that could have provided the meat of Antonia’s story, let alone the significant, obscure historical facts.
Dr. Tarazi also asked Laurel under hypnosis if she could recall any possible source for the material reported for Antonia’s life. She replied: “No, not really.” When pressed to recall when she had become interested in the sixteenth-century conflict between Spain and England she responded immediately that it was when she was eight or nine and had seen a movie, The Sea Hawk. But although the period—1584—of the film was right, nothing in it corresponded to Antonia’s life. She was also asked under hypnosis when she had first heard of the Spanish Inquisition and replied that it was when she was about twenty and saw the film Captain from Castile. But although the Inquisition played an important part in that, the tribunal was set in Jaén; Cuenca was never mentioned. Moreover, the film was set in the early part of the sixteenth century, before Antonia was born. Antonia did, however, say that when she saw the film, she had a vague feeling that it didn’t give an accurate picture of the Inquisition, though she didn’t know why. When, many years later, after the emergence of “Antonia,” she saw the film again, she was able to spot various inaccuracies.
If cryptomnesia deriving from some fiction was truly the explanation for “Antonia,” her attitude towards the Inquisition is particularly interesting. In fiction and in the public’s mind generally, the name of the Spanish Inquisition is synonymous with atrocity and terror. Antonia’s view seemed to be entirely at odds with this. She describes it respectfully and depicts the Cuencan Inquisitors as moderate men who rarely imposed the Inquisition’s severest penalties. During her lifetime, for example, they never sent a living person to the stake.
Modern research on the Inquisition records bears this out. Henry Kamen, in his book The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, has pointed out that the Inquisition was not the killing machine that it has often been assumed to be: the numbers of those executed has been greatly exaggerated. Neither is the image of the Inquisitors as ruthless and sadistic thought police a fair one. For the most part they were career lawyers. As for their reputation as torturers, we must not forget that torture was common practice in every state at that time; in fact, the Inquisition used it more sparingly than most.
So the picture Antonia paints is not only an unusual one but is unexpected in view of what we know of both Laurel Dilmen and Antonia. If this story is purely fantasy, one might have expected Laurel’s vivid imagination to have taken the opportunity to create at least a scene or two of mild torture.
However one tries to explain the Antonia story, whether as a case of cryptomnesia, or fraud, or simple fantasy, one comes up against the same problem every time. Even if any one of these explanations is true, or partly true, how did Laurel Dilmen come by her information? And yet even to suggest that Laurel Dilmen is a reincarnation of Antonia raises at least one other unanswerable question: why was such apparent total recall of another life not accompanied by recall of another language?
There is another reason for feeling uneasy about accepting reincarnation as an explanation for the Laurel Dilmen story. It is, if not too good to be true, too good to fit comfortably into the normal pattern of past-life memories. Even the most persuasive accounts of past lives—the memories of Shanti Devi, for example, or Bridey Murphy or Jenny Cockell—give us the mere skeleton of a life, with occasional scraps of flesh clinging to the bare bones. Antonia’s story, with such total recall of a life, such an accurate memory for detail—names, dates, places—is in a quite different category and, so far, it is in a category of one, unparalleled in the annals of past-life stories.
For Linda Tarazi reincarnation is still the explanation that most easily fits most of the facts. The only alternative explanation she feels might be plausible is that some discarnate entity—Antonia herself or possibly her lover—communicated the information telepathically to Laurel Dilmen, whose ability to fantasise created the Antonia personality as a fictionalised vehicle for the information she received. You may want to reserve judgement on this, but for the time being at any rate the story of Antonia and the Spanish Inquisition is a case—perhaps the only case—of past-life regression under hypnosis that so far defies rational, scientific explanation.