A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.
Elizabeth Gaskell
FRAUD suggests a deliberate intention to mislead others. Almost certainly, such cases are very rare. To set up a reincarnation scenario which is accurate and consistent enough to be convincing would require an enormous amount of time and effort. The financial rewards, at any rate, would hardly make it worthwhile. However, self-deception, an overzealous interpretation of the facts, could be considered equally fraudulent and is almost certainly much more common. Whether one regards Alfred Howard Hulme, for example, as the perpetrator of a fraud or a deluded victim of his own wishful thinking makes little difference. He was persuasive enough to make many people believe his account of what appeared to be one of the most remarkable cases of xenoglossy ever recorded.
Alfred J. Howard had two main interests in life: art and spiritualism. It was his love of art which in 1911, when he was forty-one, led to a job as curator of the embryo art collection of the wealthy industrialist Lord Leverhulme which at that time included a few Egyptian antiquities. Howard’s connection with the collection lasted only a few years; by 1922 another curator had been appointed, and Howard had moved to Ovingdean, near Brighton. But those years had left their legacy—a fascination with ancient Egypt which changed the course of his life.
On his move to Brighton Howard seems to have reinvented himself as a professional Egyptologist. He bought a cottage whose name he changed from “Eagle’s Way” to “Egypt’s Way.” He acquired a smattering of ancient Egyptian, probably from Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar, published in 1927. He even awarded himself (for there is no record of the university in question ever having done so) an “Hons. Cert. in Egyptology, Univ. of Oxford.” And he changed his name, thereafter styling himself Alfred J. Howard Hulme.
In 1931 there occurred an event that was to be pivotal in Alfred Howard Hulme’s life, giving him the opportunity to combine his passion for Egyptology with his interest in spiritualism. He read, in a spiritualist magazine, an article by a Dr. Frederick Wood, a doctor of music who was deeply involved with spiritualism. The article described the reincarnation of “Vola,” a young temple dancer in the reign of the eighteenth-dynasty pharaoh, Amenhotep III, in the twentieth-century person of Rosemary, a spiritualist medium living in Blackpool. During Dr. Wood’s sessions with Rosemary, Vola had started passing him messages from Nona, a Babylonian princess who was living in Egypt as a member of the pharaoh’s harem.
The article clearly fired Alfred Hulme’s imagination. Immediately, he wrote to Dr. Wood expressing his own interest both in spiritualism and as a “professional Egyptologist” (a somewhat exaggerated claim) and asking if actual ancient Egyptian words ever came through during the consultation. Not one to undersell himself, he also led Dr. Wood to believe that he was the author of a unique Esperanto-Egyptian grammar and dictionary.
So far all Nona’s messages, transmitted by Vola/Rosemary, had been in English. But to Dr. Wood’s delight, some weeks after he had received Alfred Hulme’s letter (whose contents one assumes he had shared with Rosemary) Vola reported that messages from Nona were coming through in ancient Egyptian! Dr. Wood does not seem to have found anything suspicious either in this serendipitous event or in the fact that Nona, having abandoned her surprisingly good English, should have chosen to communicate in ancient Egyptian rather than her native Babylonian tongue. What Rosemary had actually said sounded, to Dr. Wood’s attentive ear, like “ah-yita-zhula.” That, at any rate, was as near to its phonetic transcription as Dr. Wood could get. Immediately, he wrote this down and sent it off to Hulme. One can imagine his excitement when the verdict came back—Nona had undoubtedly been speaking ancient Egyptian!
The two then set up a strange collaboration. Over the course of the next five years Wood wrote out phonetic transcriptions of around nine hundred phrases uttered by Rosemary and sent these off to Hulme, who analysed them and assured Wood that not only were they in ancient Egyptian but showed an “infallible use of Egyptian grammar.” He also transcribed each phrase back into its original hieroglyphics. In 1937 the pair published the result of their labours, Ancient Egypt Speaks, a book that claimed to have “completely restored the spoken language of ancient Egypt.”
One might have expected the world of Egyptology to be set alight by this achievement. Scholars had been able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics for more than a century, but these conveyed only the consonants of the words. The vowel sounds, and therefore the actual sound of the spoken language, could only be guessed at. Alas, when academic Egyptologists examined Ancient Egypt Speaks their judgement was scathing. In a review in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology in June 1937, Battiscombe Gunn, Professor of Egyptology at Oxford, pointed out that not only was Nona’s grammar far from infallible but that Hulme had manipulated Wood’s transcriptions to fit what he imagined the original Egyptian to have been, by arguing either that Nona’s pronunciation was at fault (despite her excellent grammar) or by amending Wood’s transcription on the grounds that it was inaccurate. If Nona was reported, for example, to have said a va stee vong tu, which was meaningless, Hulme would amend this to eph e; stirf o(ng) tu: “to enumerate, now, the items.”
One can see that the possibilities for translation are infinite.
Ian Wilson re-examined this case for his excellent book Mind Out of Time, an investigation of reincarnation. Aware that academics are no more immune than the rest of us from spite and professional jealousy, he decided to ask a modern Egyptologist to look at Hulme’s work to see if the original criticisms of it were fair. He approached John Ray, Reader in Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, to give his view of Ancient Egypt Speaks. Ian Wilson describes the result.
As John Ray was able to confirm, there could be no mistaking Hulme’s incompetence. In a number of sentences Ray found inexcusably bad grammar, and he pointed out that Hulme had frequently confused Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian in his translations of Nona’s phrases, despite the fact that these languages were as distinct as classical Latin and present-day Italian. In any phrase sent to him by Wood, Hulme had in fact a wide choice of Egyptian words that could be made to fit the consonants to give his preferred meaning. To give an English example: if the word “bend” were received, for instance, the possible words to be matched against this would be any with the letters “b,” “n” and “d.” Thus, Hulme’s possible choices would include band, bend, bind, bond, banned and boned, to name but a few . . . On this basis Hulme could conjure up an ancient Egyptian meaning for any set of sounds produced by Rosemary . . .
John Ray also confirmed, another of Professor Gunn’s observations—that although Rosemary/Vola had described visions that included camels being used as domestic transport, the camel was not used in this way in eighteenth-dynasty Egypt.
So was this fraud? Or was it simply a folie à deux between Wood and Hulme? And what about Rosemary? Rosemary’s identity was closely guarded by Wood during her lifetime, but after her death in 1961, at the age of sixty-nine, he revealed that her real name was Ivy Carter Beaumont and that she had been a schoolmistress until she retired in 1953. Did she deliberately set out to dupe Dr. Wood? Or was she merely, and probably unconsciously, trying to please him? Rosemary and Wood had known each other for many years; it was through her mediumship that Wood had contacted the brother whose sudden death in a car accident had sparked off his own interest in spiritualism. It is well known that when people are in analysis they tend to dream the kind of dream their analyst expects of them—Freudian analysands, for example, will have Freudian dreams, clients of a Jungian analyst will have Jungian dreams. One can well imagine that the same kind of situation might arise between medium and client.
Ian Wilson notes that Wood, although eventually disillusioned by Hulme’s claims to be an Egyptology expert, went on to learn ancient Egyptian himself and remained convinced that many of Nona’s messages were authentic. But a gramophone recording made of some of Rosemary’s/Vola’s utterances suggests that they are similar to the “speaking in tongues” of various Pentecostal and charismatic sects—that is, they are meaningless babble.
Speaking in tongues (glossolalia) is a curious phenomenon. It can vary from meaningless and incoherent sounds and emotional exclamations, which are usually uttered in a state of religious ecstasy, to the fabrication of words—neologisms—which occurs sometimes in children attempting to invent a new and a private language, sometimes as a symptom of mental illness, and sometimes in dreams (see Chapter Six). These dream neologisms are probably the explanation for the strange phenomenon described to us by Chris Tidy—something that puzzled first her mother and then her husband.
When I was in my late teens/early twenties my late first husband John asked my mother if I spoke German, as he had heard me speak it in my sleep. My mother was not surprised by this question (to my surprise) and informed John that I was speaking backwards! At the time I never thought to question this reply, nor did John. Now I wonder if maybe I can speak German and not know it. I have never mentioned this to anyone before for obvious reasons, but I have often wondered if in a past life I was imprisoned, as a Jew, in one of Germany’s concentration camps. I was born in 1955. 1 have no idea why I think this. I have always had an intense interest in this subject and did attempt to read about the Holocaust but had to stop as it played on my mind too much.
Speaking in tongues can also occur in the trance state. In February 1896 a French medium, Hé1ène Smith, started to speak, and later to write, in a language that seemed to her hearers utterly foreign and incomprehensible—not surprisingly, as it soon transpired that she was speaking Martian. Happily, each Martian hieroglyphic had its exact equivalent in the French alphabet, which made translation relatively easy. Over many months an impressive body of Martian texts was built up which, together with the many visions which Mlle. Smith also experienced, gave a never-to-be-equalled portrait of life on the red planet.
Mlle. Smith and many of the habitués of her seances were as convinced of the reality of the Martian language as Wood and Hulme were that they had unlocked the secrets of ancient Egyptian. However, Théodore Flournoy, a professor of philosophy and psychology who attended Mlle. Smith’s seances and transcribed and translated her words, believed that although she had indeed created a language, in that the sounds she made formed words that expressed definite ideas and were consistent in meaning, it was, in his opinion, just an infantile travesty of French. But Flournoy, who described the case in his book From India to the Planet Mars, did not believe it was an intellectual creation in cold blood but rather an automatic product of the unconscious activity of the mind. It looks as though the only real difference between Rosemary/Vola and the medium with the message from Mars was that the messages from Mars fell on slightly less gullible ears.
Reincarnation experiences convincing enough to be regarded as “proved,” in Ian Stevenson’s words, are rare. Professor Erlendur Haraldsson of the University of Iceland has made a serious study of such experiences over the last decade, mostly in Sri Lanka, where reincarnation is part of people’s cultural expectation and so might be expected to be relatively common. And yet even his intensive and widespread searches in this potentially fruitful territory managed to find only four or five new cases each year.
It does, therefore, require a certain suspension of belief to accept the unfolding saga of Arthur Guirdham and the Cathars, in which first one, then two, then three reincarnated Cathars finally became a veritable torrent of heretics who had lived together under Roman Catholic persecution in thirteenth-century France and discovered each other anew in their present-day incarnations, in Bath, in twentieth-century Britain.
Was this any more than an intriguing and unusual case of cumulative lunacy in which each member fed on and reinforced the beliefs of the rest of the group? Two things make this story interesting enough to look at in some detail. The first is the historical accuracy of some of the information provided by the first of the reincarnated Cathars. The second is the central character, a respectable retired NHS psychiatrist called Arthur Guirdham.
The Cathars were a heretical Christian sect which flourished in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One of their heresies was a belief that good and evil had two separate creators. In this dual creation the spiritual world of goodness was created by a good God; the material world was evil and was created by Satan, the evil god. Their other heretical belief was in the transmigration of souls, either from man to man, or from man to animal, as animals too, they believed, had souls. Persecution by both the Roman Catholic Church and the state, perhaps combined with their lack of popular appeal (they believed passionately in celibacy and the renunciation of all worldly and sensual delights), led to their gradual demise. Although traces of the heresies lingered on until the early fifteenth century, as a sect they had virtually disappeared by the end of the thirteenth century, most of them being massacred in 1244 at the Siege of Montségur.
Two facts must be noted about Arthur Guirdham. before his story is told. The first is that although he was a qualified doctor and had had a conventional scientific training, he had another, psychic side to his nature, a side that was very important to him and which became ever more dominant over the years. He had a long-standing interest in the subject of reincarnation and for many years had been a close friend of Joan Grant, a woman who had written several books about her memories of her own past lives.
The second fact to be taken into account is that he had been fascinated by the history of the Cathars for several years. In his own words, “Anything to do with Catharism had a magnetic effect on me.” He had had powerful feelings of déjà vu in Toulouse and other places in the Languedoc area of southern France which had been centres of Cathar heresy.
Throughout most of Guirdham’s adult life he had suffered a recurrent nightmare in which he was lying down when he was approached by a tall man. So when, in 1962, one of his patients, a housewife in her early thirties, confided to him that since adolescence she had often had a similar nightmare, he was intrigued, especially as both of them found their nightmares ceased after she became his patient. He was more than intrigued when, about a year later, Mrs. Smith (the pseudonym Dr. Guirdham gave her for the sake of medical confidentiality) confided to him that she had also for many years had dreams and daydreams about her life as a girl in thirteenth-century France. In these dreams she had been the lover of a young man called Roger de Grisolles. She showed Guirdham notes she had made in her diary at the time. “I could write a book about Roger and it would not take any effort at all . . . It is a comfort to know that other girls dream of lovers. I wish I didn’t have the uneasy feeling that this is different. I don’t want to live in a world of fantasy and that world is so real to me, but if I write it maybe I shall get it out of my system.”
By the time she left school, Roger was such a constant presence in her thoughts and dreams that he seemed almost real. Persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church, Roger died in prison, and she was burned at the stake. At around this time she recorded a dream that gave a graphic description of her own death:
The pain was maddening . . . [but] not half so bad as the pain I felt when I knew he was dead. I felt suddenly glad to be dying. I didn’t know when you were burned to death you’d bleed. I thought the blood would all dry up in the terrible heat. But I was bleeding heavily. The blood was dripping and hissing in the flames. I wished I’d had enough blood to put the flames out. The worst part was my eyes. I hate the thought of going blind . . . I tried to close my eyelids but I couldn’t. They must have been burned off . . . The flames . . . began to feel cold. Icy cold. It occurred to me that I wasn’t burning to death but freezing to death . . . I started to laugh . . . I am a witch. I had magicked the fire and turned it into ice.
When Mrs. Smith first consulted Dr. Guirdham she had (he says himself) “no realisation whatever that she had been a Cathar.” It was, in fact, Arthur Guirdham himself who “realised” this and, having suggested it, set in motion the whole intriguing saga.
Once prompted, memories of Cathar life and rituals poured from Mrs. Smith. From Dr. Guirdham’s own knowledge of the Cathar period, several things Mrs. Smith said impressed him. She said, for example, that the robes worn by the Cathars were dark blue. Dr. Guirdham believed, as most historical sources maintained, that they were black. However, he decided to check this information with the French scholar Jean Duvernoy, an expert on the Cathars, and discovered that more recent evidence confirmed that the Cathar robes had indeed been dark blue at that particular time.
Mrs. Smith also described how Roger had a chest complaint that was treated with loaf sugar, a commodity so rare at the time that it was kept under lock and key. To Guirdham this seemed an unlikely remedy. But in 1969 it was discovered that sugar was imported from Arab countries in loaves at that time, and was recommended for diseases of the chest by the Arab doctors whose influence was particularly strong in that part of France.
But perhaps the most astonishing thing that Mrs. Smith told Arthur Guirdham was that as soon as she met him she had recognised him as the “Roger” of her dreams.
So strong was Guirdham’s conviction that the story he had been told was a matter of historical fact, and so deeply did he become involved, that the next step seems almost inevitable. He, too, became convinced that he was indeed the reincarnation of the Roger of Mrs. Smith’s Cathar life. What is more, he wrote a book about this, The Cathars and Reincarnation, which was published in 1970.
So far, so good. It is subsequent developments in this tale that start to stretch credulity. To begin with is the arrival on the scene of Miss Mills, a woman with whom Guirdham apparently struck up an acquaintanceship one day when she happened to be passing his house in her car. They had not known each other long before she asked him whether the words “Raymond” and “Albigensian” meant anything to him. Indeed they did, as they would to anyone who knew anything about Cathar history. Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, was a friend to the Cathars—a French nobleman who resisted the attempts of Pope Innocent III to coerce him into helping him put down the heretics. And Albigensian is simply another word for Cathar, meaning “men of Albi,” Albi being one of the Cathars’ main centres of influence in southern France.
It transpired that Miss Mills, too, had two vivid recurring dreams that seemed to indicate a previous life among the Cathars. In one she was walking along a rough, stony path down a hill, on the summit of which was a medieval castle in which something horrible was happening. In the other dream she, too, was about to be burned at the stake. As she was walking towards it, she was struck on the back with a burning brand. With all of this she regaled the fascinated Dr. Guirdham. She also allowed him to discover, quite by chance (she had developed a pain in her hip and had asked him to examine her), an extraordinary—and highly significant—birthmark. This is how Guirdham describes the occasion:
When I looked at her left hip I saw slightly above it a belt of strange protuberances arising from her skin. I have never in my life seen anything comparable . . . In shape and appearance they looked like large blisters produced by burns. The difference was that there was no fluid in their interior and they were semi-solid. The distribution of these semi-solidified vesicles was significant. They extended from above her hip across her back to the midline.
“I suppose this is part of your dream? This is where the burning torch hit you?” I spoke lightly and not at all insistently.
“Yes,” she said simply.
To Dr. Guirdham the conclusion was inescapable: Miss Mills, too, had been his companion in a previous Cathar life.
Miss Mills’s nightmares ceased soon after her friendship with Guirdham began in 1968. But events then took an even stranger turn. To this odd trio other reincarnated Cathars soon gravitated, most either born or living in the same area of the West Country, some still alive, but many of them dead, and, according to Guirdham, establishing communication from the next world, enabling him to acquire Cathar memories by telepathy and clairvoyance.
Many of these people apparently had some connection with Miss Mills, who began to produce a host of much more detailed memories of the Cathars’ life under siege at Montségur, the Cathar fortress in the Pyrenees which was besieged by the Roman Catholics between May 1243 and March 1244. Gradually, Miss Mills came to realise that her thirteenth-century persona was Esclarmonde de Perella, a plucky woman who, although an invalid, stayed in Montségur throughout the siege, and afterwards chose to die at the stake rather than recant. Two women friends of Miss Mills, it transpired, had also formerly been Cathars, and so, too, had the mother of one of these friends. It appeared that Miss Mills’s 80-year-old father had been a Cathar bishop, and an old boyfriend of hers had been a Cathar sergeant-at-arms. This strange group reunion is described in Guirdham’s second book, We Are One Another, published in 1974.
Two years later, in 1976, Guirdham published the final and most bizarre volume of his reincarnation trilogy, The Lake and the Castle. This revealed his conviction that not only had this doughty group fought shoulder to shoulder against the persecutors of the Cathars but that they had been reincarnated together in other stirring times as well: in Roman Britain in the fourth century AD and in France during the Napoleonic era, for example.
There are innumerable difficulties in accepting the saga of the Cathars at face value. The first and most profound is that, save Arthur Guirdham himself, none of the characters involved has ever been identified. All appear in the trilogy of books which Dr. Guirdham wrote about this group and their reincarnation experiences, but all have their anonymity carefully preserved by him. Ian Wilson made persistent attempts to identify and make contact with some—any—of these people, but each approach was blocked “politely but firmly” by Dr. Guirdham. We have, Ian Wilson says, only Dr. Guirdham’s assurances that these people ever existed. The author Colin Wilson, who became friendly with the Guirdhams while researching his book Afterlife, did manage to meet Miss Mills and says that she confirmed everything Arthur Guirdham had said. And like most people who met him, Colin Wilson insists that Arthur Guirdharn was “a perfectly normal, honest, well-balanced individual, not a crank.”
However, it is worth noting that as well as being a psychiatrist, Guirdham was also an occasional writer of fiction. While the scientist’s role is to report facts as he finds them and interpret them with cautious diligence, the fiction writer’s job is to entertain and intrigue. One cannot ignore the possibility that in Arthur Guirdham’s case the two roles may have overlapped and, in the last book particularly, one may have largely supplanted the other.
Lynda Harris, author of The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch and a writer who has a particular interest both in reincarnation and the Cathars, has talked to several people who were Guirdham’s neighbours near Bath. What she was told suggests very strongly that what began as an interest finally became an obsession.
Apparently, during the early 1970s Guirdham spent many hours trying to convince the ageing mother of one of his neighbours that she had been an eleven-year-old girl who had lived through the siege at Montségur. He never managed to get her to agree with him on this point, and no one today remembers the reasons he gave for believing it himself. Most likely he based his idea on information that had been communicated through Miss Mills. As the saga of reincarnation continued to unfold, Guirdham clearly accepted the “facts” that were passed on by his Cathar communicants with less and less questioning.
An explanation which is sometimes advanced is that Guirdham, who had acquired some considerable knowledge about the Cathars, was transmitting it telepathically to the rest of the group, who then relayed it back to him. Certainly, members of the group were consistent in their memories of events, people and places; their stories always tallied, and they always seemed to mirror Guirdham’s own beliefs—even when these were historically inaccurate, as they sometimes were. (Miss Mills, for example, remembered her Cathar initiation as taking place in a cave, a romantic idea that was current at the time but is now known to be fantasy and not fact.) But telepathy seems an unlikely explanation. There is now considerable evidence that telepathy does exist, but not that it exists on that kind of scale. The best experimental evidence suggests that some people, some of the time and under some conditions, are telepathic. To suggest that a whole group of people could transmit such a wealth of accurate and detailed information to each other at more or less the same time goes way beyond evidence and even beyond anecdote. Two far more likely explanations are either that members of the group were colluding with each other or that there was no group—that the origin of the whole story lay with Guirdham himself.
Let us suppose that Mrs. Smith and Miss Mills did exist outside the world of Arthur Guirdham’s imagination: how far can their past-life memories be trusted? Of the bevy of Cathars, Mrs. Smith sounds by far the most convincing. Her memories were much more individual than those of the rest of the group, more rooted in the personal details of an everyday life and less in Catharism, about which it is said she knew little.
From Arthur Guirdham’s first book, The Cathars and Reincarnation, we learn several interesting things about Mrs. Smith. The first is that she had an excellent memory—so good, in fact, that it resulted in her being accused of cheating in an examination at school. “I had a photographic memory and scrawled off yards of a commentary on Wordsworth word for word as in the textbook.” It is at least possible that much of her intimate knowledge of the Cathars derived not from a past life but from some twentieth-century source, once read and then apparently forgotten. There is even some evidence for such a source, In 1954 Mrs. Smith had begun to write a novel, not about the Cathars but about the troubadours in France. Guirdham had many times asked to see the novel but had been refused. Finally, she confessed that she had burned it, her explanation being that she had recently come across an article in a back issue of a journal which contained a passage identical to one she had written in her novel. What she called her “unconscious plagiarism” of something she believed she had never read so terrified her that she felt compelled to destroy her novel.
So far as Guirdham was concerned, the only significant thing about the article was that he, too, had happened to come across it and read it for the first time at about the same time as Mrs. Smith did so. This, for him, was yet another example of the “synchronisation of action and thought between Mrs. Smith and myself.” Much more significant, though, is the fact that although Mrs. Smith did not mention this, and Guirdham apparently considered the fact unimportant, the article was about Catharism, a topic in which the author, a theosophist, had been particularly interested. Unfortunately, Guirdham doesn’t mention its date of publication, which would have helped to work out the sequence of events. But at least we know that Mrs. Smith had at some time read an article about Catharism and that, although she had apparently forgotten having done so, she had reproduced at least one passage from it accurately in a novel she had started to write long before she met Arthur Guirdham.
She also started to read about Catharism at the time of Guirdham’s revelation to her that she had been a Cathar—he mentions that she was reading a library book on the subject the very day he broached the topic. Again, his only comment is to marvel at the synchronicity of this; he doesn’t seem to consider the book as a source of apparent Cathar memories.
The second fact worth noting is that Mrs. Smith may have had epilepsy (the diagnosis seems to have been in some doubt, but she certainly had three unexplained attacks of unconsciousness during adolescence). She also suffered from migraine. Both of these conditions are sometimes accompanied by the feelings of déjà vu which often characterise past-life memories. In a letter to Guirdham dated 10 January 1965 she wrote of “this terrible affliction of ‘going out of time.’ I am sometimes so confused that I cannot honestly be sure if a person has just said something or whether they will say it one day, or did so in the past.”
This statement tells us a great deal. The kind of feelings she describes are typical of a partial complex seizure (minor epileptic attack). Such episodes of confusion in adulthood, together with the probable history of generalised seizures with loss of consciousness as a child, suggest that she may have had temporal-lobe epilepsy. The commonest cause of temporal-lobe epilepsy is damage to the hippocampus—a structure deep in the temporal lobe of the brain which is involved, among other things, with memory. Damage to this structure may lead not only to seizures but, more important, to odd mental states in which the person finds difficulty in distinguishing whether experiences are real or due to imagination. In epilepsy clinics one often comes across patients with epilepsy who have very strong déjà vu feelings which make them feel they have been in that particular place or situation before. Occasionally, this may lead to a strong belief in reincarnation.
The most plausible explanation is that Mrs. Smith was perfectly genuine and recounted perfectly genuine experiences of apparent past-life memories to Guirdham, and that he interpreted these to accord with his own beliefs (not an uncommon practice among dream analysts). The well-known phenomenon of transference, whereby a patient may transfer his or her affections to the therapist, is enough to explain Mrs. Smith’s identification of Guirdham with “Roger,” and his own obsession with Catharism would have made him only too happy to accept the identity.
The mandatory celibacy of Cathar priests does not seem to have been considered a problem by either of them, but this is probably fair enough, as it has never been a problem for a good many other supposedly celibate priests either. Guirdham at one time seems to have decided that Roger was only a trainee priest, though his books are very inconsistent on this point. The blue Cathar robe is always cited as the most convincing evidence that Mrs. Smith’s was a true past-life memory. And yet a dream priest has to be dressed in something. A blue robe seems as appropriate as anything else. In this case coincidence seems a more plausible explanation than genuine past-life memory.
Miss Mills is a different matter. Here it is hard not to believe that the good doctor was being duped, though certainly he would have been a willing victim. So many strands lead back to Miss Mills. So many of her friends and relations were part of the Cathar reincarnation circle. Neither is there any doubt about a probable source for her “memories” of the Montségur siege. All the information given by Miss Mills was readily available to her. A vivid, popular and historically accurate account of the siege of the Cathars at Montségur was given in Massacre at Montségur by Zoe Oldenbourg, published in French in 1959 and translated into English in 1961, seven years before Miss Mills started to recount her Cathar memories to Arthur Guirdham. Arthur Guirdham himself owned a copy of the book, and Miss Mills might very easily have had access to it. The book mentions many of the details of the siege remembered by Miss Mills and includes the names of many of the individuals she mentioned, among them Esclarmonde and her family.
So was this whole affair fraud or was it self-delusion? Whenever it is suggested that the Cathar reincarnation is fraudulent, it is assumed that Guirdham himself perpetrated the fraud. Although most people who knew Guirdham personally testified to his honesty and good character, we have talked to one person who knew him who is convinced that the man was an out-and-out fraud. What is generally acknowledged is the strength of his own beliefs in reincarnation and psychic experiences. Certainly, by the early 1970s he had clearly lost all sense of perspective on the matter.
Anyone who holds such strong personal beliefs may fall victim to self-delusion and would be an easy target for fraud. If fraud were perpetrated, then if Miss Mills did indeed exist she seems an equally likely perpetrator. But even here fraud seems too harsh a judgement. A more charitable explanation is that Guirdham’s own personality (which was acknowledged to be attractive and charismatic) might have inspired the tacit agreement by a group of people who were under his spell to give him something they knew he would value—proof of his own belief in reincarnation.