Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next.
Henry Ford
ALL kinds of explanations have been suggested to account for the information about a past life which people apparently acquire. False memory, fantasy, fraud, even telepathy have all been suggested. But none of these can explain adequately another strange phenomenon of the reincarnation experience—that sometimes people exhibit a skill that seems to be a talent reborn, something they feel they knew in a past life but claim they have had no opportunity to learn in their present life. Is there any evidence that what we call a natural talent, an inborn talent, may sometimes be a talent reborn?
Stephanie Wilson describes how several years ago she started to learn calligraphy at her local college:
We were taught several different “hands”—foundation hand, italic and uncial. However, towards the end of the course the tutor asked if anyone would be interested in learning copperplate writing. We were told it was entirely different from the other scripts, required a different nib, etc.
The tutor would come round and write a few letters of a particular script, and we would copy them (I should add it took several terms to learn one script properly). However, on this particular occasion, after the tutor had demonstrated how some of the strokes of copperplate were formed, he walked round the class checking on our progress. By the time he came back to me, about ten minutes later, I had written a full page of copperplate script! The strange thing was, with the other scripts I learned them, but with copperplate I was remembering it. I was explaining to the girl who sat next to me in class that the strokes of the “f” and “p” were shorter than the loop strokes, and there was no way I should have known that.
The tutor smiled and said: “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” I replied, Yes, I’d learned it at school. However, when I was telling my mother about it several days later she said: “What do you mean? You never did any copperplate writing at school!”
It was only then that Stephanie began to think of reincarnation as a possible explanation. As she said to her mother, if she didn’t learn it at school, where did she learn it? Stephanie says she can distinctly remember someone instructing her in the script and saying, “Always start the letter ‘c’ with a dot.” She remembered how to join the letters in certain ways—it all came back to her when she started the class.
Quite recently Stephanie bought a book, The Universal Penman, a book of examples of engraving and copperplate writing, which shows how bills were made out. Stephanie says: “I can remember writing out bills in just the same way, yet these are dated between 1730 and 1800.”
Jo Gordon (pseudonym) describes how when she was nine years old she visited a fairground in London and decided to have a pony-ride. “I had nil experience of horses but knew I loved them. As soon as I sat on the pony and confirmed that I wished to trot, I knew how to rise in the saddle like an aficionado, and the man leading me commented that I knew how to ride well. At the spot we turned, I laid the reins across the neck of the pony, and my fairground friend said the pony was not trained to ‘neck ride,’ saying they only ride like that as far as he knew in America. My brain seemed to click into another ‘radio programme,’ and from that moment I had no doubts that we have many skills and talents gained from experiences in our other lives.”
In the early 1960s Donald Galloway was told by some friends about a mystic who produced, for a fee of 30 shillings, “incarnoscopes” giving details of people’s past lives. So impressed had his friends been that Mr. Galloway sent off his 30 bob and some weeks later received his reading.
I am not artistically gifted but can fully appreciate beautiful art in many forms. Mrs. Helen wrote that in one previous incarnation I had been trained in the artistry of making stained-glass windows; in another my training was in the area of architecture, but only in regard to designed churches, temples, places designed to the glory of God, and in another lifetime I had been schooled by apprenticeship in the design of rich carpets and textiles generally.
This rather took me back to my childhood and something I had completely forgotten about in the many years since. When very young, after I had done my school homework and if there was nothing to interest me on the radio, I would take paper and crayons and most meticulously set about drawing great buildings, or patterns for carpets and rich draperies, and sometimes intricate designs for stained-glass windows! Growing older, I let all this go quite naturally and, as I said, completely forgot about ever doing it at all—until Mrs. Helen prompted my memory!
Don Adams is fifty years old, and for most of his life he has been convinced that he has “lived” before. “When I started making medieval longbows forty years ago there was very little information available on how to make one. It seemed, though, that I knew intuitively a lot about it as I went along over the years, even though I was much criticised and ridiculed by others. I was using techniques which I could not possibly have read about. When the Mary Rose was raised and the bows examined, all became clear.”
About sixteen years ago Don decided to have a past-life regression. People who have a strong conviction about a past life often hope that a past-life regression will confirm their belief. More often than not, the experiment from that point of view is a failure—the life they are regressed to is not the one they expect or have memories of. Don, however, was not disappointed. His past-life regression revealed that he had lived in around 1415, and that he was an archer who died at the age of sixteen in the Battle of Agincourt, killed by a lance.
Where did these odd, unexpected talents come from? Was Donald Galloway, for example, right in thinking his artistic skill came from a past life or can we find an alternative explanation? The most straightforward explanation would be that he was brought up in an artistic family, that his parents encouraged him to draw these intricate patterns and stimulated his interest in art. But Donald is very clear that he drew these great churches, stained-glass windows and intricately patterned carpets entirely for his own satisfaction. This certainly suggests a talent and probably a well-developed spatial sense too. But still one would expect there to have been a trigger of some sort to fire his imagination—a teacher or maybe a book he had read. He has no recollection of this. So what are we left with? A talent and an interest. What is missing is the initial stimulus that fired his interest. He knows of none. So do we have to look more widely than that? And is his explanation more economical than the others?
Don Adams is quite certain that he had never learned about the construction of a longbow. But here the devil is in the detail. If there are principles involved in the construction of a longbow which cannot be intuitively grasped by someone wanting to make one, then we have to look for an external source for this information.
Like Donald Galloway, one can argue that Don Adams has good spatial skills and understanding of spatial relationships. But many people have such talents and yet don’t feel, in the way that Don did, that they have privileged information in a particular field. When you have a talent and can do something easily, there is always a tendency to feel that it must arise innately. You can grasp the concepts easily and learn them almost unconsciously—you don’t have to struggle. This would be a better explanation for Don’s ability to make a longbow. It does have testable features. If Don were in general a cackhanded chap who could barely wield a screwdriver, then one would certainly have to look for some other explanation for his ability to make a longbow. But let’s assume that he is someone with good spatial skills and a good eye for the way things work who happened to be interested in longbows. In that case, unless the principles behind the making of a longbow are extremely complex and not at all obvious, by working out from first principles how a longbow ought to be made, it is not surprising that he arrived at the same solution that those early longbow manufacturers reached.
However, Stephanie Wilson’s knowledge of calligraphy seems to be in a different category, because she seemed to have not only the knowledge but the memory of actually being taught the skill. She attributes her knowledge to a previous life because there seems to be no other easily available explanation, unless she did indeed have early lessons in calligraphy at school which her mother had not known about.
Here is an account given by a man who has no intellectual belief in reincarnation and yet who had an experience of it so powerful that it shaped the whole future course of his life.
For Robert, the violin has always been a powerful source of memory. The first time he ever saw a violin he felt an instant recognition; he knew that he had to play it. For a professional world-class violinist, Robert was a late starter; it wasn’t until he was eight that he began lessons. He joined the class half-way through its first term, and so at his first lesson the teacher told him he had missed so much it would be hard for him to keep up; he had better just sit and listen for the rest of this class. Towards the end he finally turned to Robert. “I picked up the fiddle, and it was just as if I knew what to do.” When he went home that evening he told his mother: “I’m a violinist!”
A few years later, when he was about eleven or twelve, Robert was at boarding-school. One day he was practising his violin, and as he was playing he drifted into a semi-dream-like state. He was aware suddenly that he was playing a piece he did not know, in a hall he did not recognise, and that he was playing with a full orchestra, all its members dressed in what seemed to him to be old-fashioned clothes. He was also aware that his playing had changed; he was making a sound on the fiddle that as a child he simply could not make. His vibrato had changed: it was much stronger. In fact, he was playing like an adult. His whole body felt different, too: his chest felt deeper, he was breathing quite differently.
When he came out of this altered state he was on cloud nine, almost hysterical with joy. It was, he says, the most wonderful experience of his life. He then made the mistake of trying to explain what had happened to him to his music teacher and was promptly sent off to matron and the sickbay.
At that stage of his life Robert was a very unhappy, very introverted little boy, and he accepts that all manner of rational psychological explanations might account for what happened to him. And yet it had so much meaning, and has had such an influence on his life, that he believes it had to be more than simply that. Intellectually, the idea of reincarnation is still one he can’t accept. And yet, as he says, whatever questions we have about the nature of existence, in the end all we have to go by is our own experience.
Other people have told us of similar experiences. In 1945, as a child of three or four, Mary Balaam moved with her family to a small farm in Wales. Next to the house was a field with many clumps of rushes growing in it. “I pestered my mother to attend to them. ‘Shouldn’t we be making something with them?’ I continually enquired. I vividly remember worrying and never having my anxieties assuaged.”
Many years later, in 1982, Mrs. Balaam happened to turn on a schools television programme, How We Used to Live. “The hairs on my neck and my whole spine seemed to shiver when the candle-making was explained. The inside pith from rushes was used as the wick, being rolled in tallow and dried repeatedly until sufficiently thick to form a candle. I do not claim to have lived before but do wonder whether we have ‘ancient knowledge’ imprinted in our hindbrains. I still remember a terrible sadness as the rushes died and turned brown in the autumn.”
When people with a special talent feel that it originated in a past life, usually they mean their own past life. Equally interesting are the people who have a different but closely related experience—they believe not that they are reincarnations of dead artists but that they are being used as “channels” by those artists to communicate their posthumous works through automatic writing or drawing or musical composition. The experience is essentially the same, but the interpretation is different.
The physicist Dr. Vernon Harrison, a forensic and photographic expert, has studied several of these cases of “channelling,” of which the most interesting is that of the psychic and healer Matthew Manning. During his adolescence Matthew was plagued by poltergeist activity and found that he could reduce this by allowing himself to be used as a channel for automatic writing and drawing. Matthew, a teenager with no particular artistic gift, “received” dozens of very creditable drawings very much in the style of several artists, including Albrecht Dürer, Picasso and Aubrey Beardsley.
Dr. Harrison considered the possibility that Matthew’s drawings might have been the result of either eidetic imagery (the ability to take a quick glance at a picture and retain it in memory) or cryptomnesia. So far as eidetic memory is concerned, he pointed out that even when the source of a drawing could be identified, Matthew’s version was not simply a copy of it but a “transcript, paraphrase, reworking of a theme or composite.”
Was Matthew unwittingly reproducing pictures that he had seen but forgotten? Cryptomnesia is notoriously difficult to prove or to disprove. Matthew could have seen some of the pictures that were obvious sources for his work, though Dr. Harrison thought this was unlikely. But again, his own pictures were not direct copies, and cryptomnesia would not explain the ability of this untutored boy to reproduce so accurately the styles and techniques of the various artists, or to draw as rapidly and competently as he did.
It is interesting to read Matthew’s own description of what happened the first time he found himself producing automatic writing. He was writing an essay that he didn’t find easy and had to keep stopping to think about what he was going to write next. “As I sat with my pen poised above the paper ready to start writing whatever I thought of next, my hand went down on to the paper in a completely involuntary way and began to write. While thinking about what I was going to write, my mind had wandered from the subject on to nothing in particular. I watched, startled, as I wrote words in a handwriting different from my own. Then, becoming momentarily frightened, I pulled my hand away and looked at what I had written. The words were incomprehensible and sprawled across half of the page.”
Matthew later tried to repeat what had happened, sitting down with the express intention of allowing his hand to be used for automatic writing. This time he produced a legible and coherent sentence. This process of practice making perfect seems to be common to most channellers. But does it mean that Matthew was learning how to produce “automatic” writing? Or was some outside influence “learning” how to use Matthew as a channel? Clearly, there was a willed action on Matthew’s part.
Channellers seem to operate in an altered state of consciousness probably very similar to the light trance state of a hypnotic regression. It’s possible that in this state natural talents are enhanced, and certainly inhibitions would be lessened. Musicologist Melvyn Willin has a special interest in what he calls “paramusicology,” which includes the phenomenon of channelling, and once conducted a regression experiment with a Dutch didgeridoo-player who believed he was an Aborigine in a previous life. He could certainly, reports Mr. Willin, play considerably better when in a light trance than in his normal state.
The case of Patience Worth is the one that Dr. Harrison himself considers one of the most important examples of channelling produced this century. Between 1913 and 1938, when she died, Pearl Curran, a medium, was the channel through which one Patience Worth communicated a voluminous oeuvre of poems, plays, novels, and a book, The Sorry Tale, set in the time of Christ. This last was a volume of 325,000 words, dictated at great speed. Patience gave little information about her life, except that she had been born in Dorset in the seventeenth century and brought up a Quaker. Her family emigrated to America, and shortly afterwards she was killed by Indians. Dr. Harrison points out a difficulty here. “Patience” spoke not in a Dorset but in a Northumbrian or Borders Scots dialect—and, moreover, a dialect that Dr. Harrison maintains can be dated with some precision to 1623. The Quaker movement did not start until 1646, which would make it impossible for Patience to have had a Quaker upbringing. She might, however, have sailed on the Mayflower (1620) and been killed in the massacre of 327 settlers in Virginia in 1622. But this is all conjecture. There is, in fact, no evidence that “Patience” ever actually existed.
Mrs. Curran was an unlikely choice as an alter ego for Patience Worth. She lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and had never travelled. She had had only a limited education, had little interest in books and owned only a few, some whose pages had never been cut; she disliked reading and had no literary ability. Dr. Harrison, who has published a study of the case, maintains that her work is distinguished by quality as well as quantity. In his words: “To be appreciated, Patience Worth has to be read—and read with a small library of reference books close at hand . . . Whoever she is, I know that [she has] . . . witched me by her wit and verve; by her keen observation of human foibles; by the swiftness and deadly aim of her repartee; and above all by the beauty of so much of her writing and her philosophy . . . To me she seems as ‘real’ as my well-loved Walter de la Mare . . .”
For his own working hypothesis to explain these phenomena, Dr. Harrison draws on the teachings of Swedenborg and the Theosophists, which suggest that at death only the physical body disintegrates. “Kama,” the motivating force of man—desire, emotions, memories, passions—can survive for hours or even years after death before it, too, is sloughed off, leaving man’s true individuality, the permanent, growing, reincarnating self. When Kama is shed, however, it can be reactivated in the presence of people like Matthew Manning, who act as a power source. Kama may re-create the personality, prejudices and emotions of the former life, but, lacking man’s higher principles, shows no sign of creativity, imagination or moral judgements. The alter ego remains a second-rate shadow of its former self.
Professor Stephen Braude, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, has suggested that an alternative, and perhaps more fruitful, way of looking at these cases is by assessing the lives of the people involved (lecture to the American Society for Psychical Research, March 1998). He suggests in particular that investigators ask a very simple question: Who benefits? In the case of Pearl Curran, for example, he points out that her own creativity seemed to be enhanced or liberated while she was in the altered state of consciousness. Pearl herself was a housewife who did not express her own opinions; Patience Worth held very strong views and was a feisty woman. By assuming this alter ego, Pearl was able to express views she might have hesitated to admit to as her everyday self and avoid taking responsibility for her own work.
Professor Braude’s approach certainly helps to explain the case of “L”—a man who feels he could be the best tenor that ever lived. “L” claims that the spirit of Enrico Caruso inspires his voice, that when he is practising he has clairaudiently heard Caruso giving him instructions, and that when he sings his own voice is augmented by the spirits of Caruso and Mario Lanza. Mediums, he says, have seen the spirits of these illustrious gentlemen standing beside him.
Melvyn Willin has interviewed “L” on several occasions. He says that musicians who have heard “L” sing agree that he does indeed have a powerful tenor voice, though he lacks musicianship and polish. Willin’s view is that, with further training, “L” has the talent to become a professional tenor in his own right. So why should this talented man be so keen to share the credit for his own admirable voice with the spirits of two long-gone tenors? Willin points out that “L” has a compulsive need for public recognition, which may be due both to self-aggrandisement and to a genuine desire to spread his message of personal conviction that there is life after death.
Rosemary Brown is the best-known example of musical channelling. She is generally acknowledged to have limited musical ability and knowledge. And yet for over thirty years composers of the past have apparently been channelling their music through her. It has to be said that most of these composers’ afterthoughts have not greatly enhanced any musical reputations—Vernon Harrison has described them as “of inferior quality . . . more . . . sketches or memoranda jotted down for future reference by the composers concerned.”
He does, however, make one exception. There is, he says, “at least one of Rosemary’s pieces, attributed to Liszt, which is not a pastiche, paraphrase, reworking or copy of anything that Liszt actually wrote. However, it could well be something that he would have written had he lived another two or three years. In other words, it shows knowledge of the direction Liszt’s work was taking at the time of his death. The piece in question is Grubelei. It is interesting, complete in itself and far from easy to play, with its persistent five-in-a-bar in the right hand against three in the left. My attention to this work was first drawn by Humphrey Searle, composer, musicologist and authority on Liszt . . . Grubelei is very Lisztian in feeling—and late Liszt at that.”
Vernon Harrison does not take this any further, but we can ask if this is a sufficient explanation. Could such a piece be produced by someone who has a naturally good ear for music but no musical education?
We know that a natural talent can sometimes reach prodigious heights. Charlton Greene passed his GCSE maths at nine years old—the youngest pupil ever to do so. Ruth Lawrence gained first-class honours in maths at Oxford at the age of 13. Wesley Chu, of Calgary, Alberta, has been a charismatic concert pianist since the age of three and before his fifth birthday had completed nine grades in one year with the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music. These children have such a stupendous natural talent, so far beyond the experience of most of us, that it seems to demand some explanation beyond the normal. Even though none of them has claimed past-life memory of discovering the principle of gravity or the laws of relativity, or of composing a clarinet concerto, it is perhaps surprising that no one else has suggested that they, or others like them, are reincarnations of Newton or Galileo or Einstein or Mozart.
And yet there is no need to invoke the paranormal as an explanation for such gifted children. Dr. Valsa Koshy, of Brunel University Able Children’s Unit, believes that: “The difference between an exceptional child and a child who is just bright is that the truly exceptional can process information so quickly that they basically teach themselves.” Most experts on gifted children believe that prodigies are created when a natural, genetically inherited talent is matched by a powerful environment that nurtures and encourages it. Dr. David Feldman, a professor of child development at Tufts University and an expert on gifted children, believes that even a modest inherited talent can still be a key to developing prodigious skill. Of the many musical-prodigy families he has studied, many have had only one musical parent, but he has come across no families where neither parent was naturally musical.
When one looks at what the truly gifted can achieve, entirely under their own steam, the achievements of channellers such as Matthew Manning and Rosemary Brown seem less astonishing. Why should it surprise us that some natural talent, combined with a good ear for music, enables Rosemary Brown, for example, to produce her imitative but generally mediocre compositions, even though she does produce an occasional work of a higher standard? What is usually lacking in these communicators of the great and gifted is innovation and consistent quality. Channellers never exhibit genius. They are usually a second-rate approximation to their source, without any real creative talent. One imagines it must be a source of great irritation to the likes of Beethoven to see what channellers produce in their name.
A supreme talent looks even more inexplicable, even more demanding of some paranormal explanation, when it appears in someone who is grossly handicapped in almost every other way.
Nadia was the child of Polish parents living in Britain. She was thought to be autistic, and in 1974, when she was six years old, she came to the attention of Nottingham University psychologists Elizabeth Newson and Loma Selfe. She was a clumsy child, large for her age, and almost totally lacking in normal speech development. However, she had one extraordinary talent. From the age of three she had been producing astonishingly mature drawings. These were inspired by pictures she had usually seen only once. They had great vitality, and she was able to handle perspective, foreshortening and movement and use shading and shadow to create three-dimensional representations. Nadia particularly liked drawing horses, and when doing so would begin not with the outline of the head, as virtually all children and most untrained adults would, but with the neck, in the manner of a trained artist. And while everything else about her was clumsy, her whole hand–eye coordination was far in advance of that of the normal five-to six-year-old. Loma Selfe describes the way Nadia drew: “her lines were firm and without unintentional wavering. She could stop a line exactly where it met another despite the speed with which the line was drawn. She could change the direction of a line and draw lines at any angle towards and away from the body. She could draw a small but perfect circle in one movement and place a small dot in the centre.”
Nadia was described as seeming like a different person while she was producing her drawings; after finishing a drawing she would sometimes lapse into a “staring reverie” lasting for several minutes. On other occasions she talked jargon to herself that no one could understand. From the age of about six, Nadia’s drawing skills started to fade, though the drawings she made at 8½ still seemed far in advance of what a normal 8½-year-old could produce.
Nadia never talked about a past life—indeed, she did not have the language with which to do so. But there are interesting parallels between her story and children who do have apparent past-life memories, which have led some people to suggest that Nadia’s very special talents originated in some other lifetime. It has been suggested that one drawing in particular, of an eighteenth-century horse and rider, may have had its origin in some memory of a past life because, unlike all her other drawings, its source has never been found. Then there is the trance-like state Nadia seemed to enter while she was engrossed in her drawing. Other children have been observed to enter a similar “staring reverie” when something seems to remind them of a past life, before suddenly snapping back to normality. The final parallel is the fact that, just as past-life memories fade and eventually disappear, Nadia’s ability seemed to wane after about the age of six.
However, we don’t need to postulate a past life to account for Nadia’s special skill. We can explain it instead by saying that Nadia is one of a very unusual group of people, the “savants” (in less pc times they were known as “idiot savants”). The savant syndrome is an extremely rare condition in which people with profound mental handicaps show spectacular islands of genius in some narrow but very consistent range of skills. Many of these children, like Nadia, suffer from early infantile autism, a disorder present from birth. Autistic children are profoundly withdrawn, show an obsessive desire for sameness, and an inability to empathise with other people and to show or feel emotions for them.
Savants have difficulty with abstract thinking, and seem able to think only in terms of concrete visual images. But they have phenomenal memory and are able to recall something they have seen or heard in minute detail, though only within a very narrow and limited range. Identical twins George and Charles, for example, are “calendar calculators.” They can tell you, within a span of 40,000 years backwards or forwards, the day of the week on which any date you choose to mention fell or will fall. And yet they cannot perform simple additions. Leslie Lemke is blind and severely mentally handicapped. But he has only to hear a piece of music once, however long or complex it is, to be able to play it back perfectly.
Darold Treffert, in his book Extraordinary People, suggests that the fundamental cause of the savant syndrome is either impaired brain development before birth or brain injury during or after birth. The damage is to the left hemisphere—the hemisphere which in normal right-handed people is dominant, and in which speech develops. Another factor then comes into play to produce the savant: there are changes in the structure and wiring of the brain in an attempt to compensate for the damage, and the right hemisphere, due to increased interconnectedness, becomes larger and takes over as the dominant hemisphere. In addition, and probably due to the same brain damage, there is abnormal brain function and circuitry, which is responsible for the prodigious memory of the savant.
Savant memory is very different from ordinary memory. We all of us have tremendous storage capacity in our brains, but under normal circumstances we can recall only a fraction of the vast amount of data we have tucked away somewhere in the memory filing system. Savants seem to use some alternative memory filing system which allows them automatic and unlimited access to some narrow set of concrete and nonsymbolic data. The savant does not have the capacity to work things out in the normal way. Instead, the savant uses an unusual and highly developed “habit” memory to compensate for the damaged or absent “cognitive” memory pathway. Certainly, music, a skill that tends to be very marked in the savant, is associated with right-cerebral dominance. Verbal and language skills, which are associated with left-brain dominance, are usually poor in the savant. Maths does not fit into this pattern, but Treffert suggests that mathematical processing may move to the right hemisphere in the savant. It is well known that speech migrates from the left to the right hemisphere if the left hemisphere is seriously damaged before the age of five to seven. Possibly maths processing in the savant does the same.
The final factors probably needed to produce the savant, just as is the case with the non-savant musical prodigy, are some genetically inherited ability and at least some degree of encouragement from those around them.
Even among savants, Nadia is unusual, because savants rarely display artistic talent. Lorna Selfe suggests that Nadia’s drawing ability was linked to her almost-complete lack of language. Selfe’s hypothesis is that visual imagery is used as the initial “language” by all children but that, as we mature, this mental imagery is supplanted by language and decays through lack of use. According to Lorna Selfe’s theory, if Nadia developed language, her spectacular drawing ability would disappear. And, indeed, this is exactly what happened. When she was seven Nadia went to a special school for autistic children. Her language improved and as it did so her genius deteriorated and, sadly, finally vanished. She seldom drew spontaneously and, when she did draw, her drawings showed none of the skill of her earlier drawings.
However, Darold Treffert points out that a sudden appearance and disappearance of a skill also happens in other savants and, indeed, in normal children, who quite often seem to show, for a brief period, some precocious talent that fails to flower but simply fades away.
The dying back of a savant’s talent is not inevitable. A look at other savants shows that even though their extraordinary abilities may have developed because of some gross neurological deficit, they can and often do learn other skills and develop in other areas without any diminution of their special genius. Stephen Wilshire, for example, is another gifted autistic savant artist, who, after once seeing a building or even a photograph of a building, is able to draw a detailed and accurate three-dimensional representation of it from memory. Stephen, who was described by Sir Hugh Casson as “possibly the best child artist in Britain,” has managed to retain his extraordinary artistic ability even though he has learned some language and acquired other skills.
It seems to be quite common for people undergoing past-life regression to develop an appropriate and consistent accent while they are under hypnosis. Bridey Murphy, for example, developed an Irish brogue that grew more pronounced as she became more involved with her previous life. Some of the words she used were contemporaneous with her past life—a “linen” for a handkerchief, for example, “ditched” for buried.
Very much rarer are the people who, when they recall a past life, seem to have the ability to speak in a language they have apparently never learned (the phenomenon known as xenoglossy) and to understand when they are spoken to in that language (which is called responsive xenoglossy).
One might suppose that everyone who recalls a past life as someone of a different nationality would have this ability. Language, after all, is one of the most fundamental skills we have, an ability programmed into us, learned as soon as we are out of infancy, retained even in old age. If we are to recall memories of any aspect of a past life, surely we could expect to recall the language we spoke throughout it. And yet this doesn’t seem to happen, or at least it happens very seldom. This is why the few convincing cases of xenoglossy which have been recorded are of very special interest.
In a letter to us, Dorothy Smith described how, twenty-two years ago, she was on holiday with her twelve-year-old son Peter on a cruise around the Greek islands. Every day they stopped at a different port and did as much sightseeing as possible.
On one of these sightseeing trips we were approached by a friendly gentleman who had a little girl with him, and I became engaged in a conversation with him. We talked about trivial matters: the weather, how we were travelling, etc. I was totally unaware of his nationality. However, when he asked me which part of Germany I was from I was quite startled. I became ill at ease, and because of this the conversation came to a hasty conclusion.
As we walked away my son was agog. He was amazed that I had such a lengthy conversation with a German gentleman and that I could speak fluent German—I was born in England and I have never been able to speak any other language. My conversation with the German gentleman had lasted for approximately twenty minutes.
I was shaken and horrified. Although my son was rather young to judge my capability in speaking German, he was at the time studying both Latin and French at school. Even if we allow for the fact that my son had been wrong, how could a stranger from Germany think that I was a native of Germany? I was at the time perplexed, and I still am.
Mrs. Smith’s account is all the more interesting and convincing because she herself was apparently quite unaware that there was anything unusual about the conversation she was having. She was also clearly able to understand the language and respond to questions rather than simply to reproduce odd words or phrases, which most of us could probably do in many European languages. It is as if the language, triggered by the meeting, sprang from some quite different level of memory and consciousness. Mrs. Smith has no explanation, and certainly she has no conviction that it was due to a past-life memory; it is simply that it is difficult to think of any alternative explanation.
Another equally interesting case, which has been extensively investigated by Professor Ian Stevenson, also involves an unexpected talent for German.
One day in May 1970 the Reverend Carroll Jay, a Methodist minister in Gretna, Virginia, who had been practising hypnosis for 16 years, was hypnotising his wife, Dolores, in an attempt to cure her backache. Suddenly, she replied to a question he had asked her with the German word “Nein.” Carroll Jay had previously experimented with past-life regression under hypnosis, and he now decided to hypnotise his wife again to see if he could encourage this German-speaking personality to emerge further. The experiment was successful. Gretchen manifested, and during a series of experiments over the course of the next year spoke almost entirely in German. Carroll Jay, who knew no German, spoke to her in English, which she seemed to understand, but he, of course, could not at first understand her. With the help of friends who did know some German, and a German–English dictionary, he managed eventually to understand the general drift of what she was saying.
Under hypnosis, Dolores claimed that her name was Gretchen Gottlieb, that she had lived in Eberswalde, Germany, and that her father, Hermann Gottlieb, had been the mayor of the town. Her mother was dead, and she was cared for by a housekeeper. She did not go to school and could not read or write. During the experiments Carroll found that he could persuade Gretchen to assume different ages between eight and sixteen, but not beyond that age. She said she had died at sixteen but seemed unable to give a coherent account of exactly how.
Gretchen rarely spoke spontaneously, but would answer questions. She couldn’t name any political leaders but did return repeatedly to the theme of religious strife. In fact, it was difficult to get her to talk about any other topics. She was evidently a Roman Catholic, as she identified the head of her church as Pope Leo. She usually seemed rather depressed and seemed to live in constant fear of persecution by the Bundesrat (federal council), which suggested that she was remembering a life at the time of Bismarck’s persecution of German Catholics in the 1870s.
In the summer of 1971 Professor Ian Stevenson learned about the case and visited Carroll and Dolores Jay. As he himself knows the language, he was able to converse with Gretchen in German during several of the trance sessions. He found that Dolores understood the questions he asked her in German and was able to give sensible answers. He then enlisted the help of three native German-speakers who attended sessions with Gretchen. Two of the three signed statements to say that in their view Gretchen could speak German responsively—that is, give sensible answers to questions she was asked in German. The third felt that though Gretchen answered the questions put to her, she had doubts about whether Gretchen really understood what she was saying.
However, although Stevenson made extensive enquiries he failed to find any trace of the Gottlieb family. Eberswalde had had no mayor by the name of Hermann Gottlieb. “Gretchen” had apparently never existed. But what still needed explanation, and what was by far the most interesting aspect of the story, was Dolores’s ability to speak German.
Although Dolores spoke German, she spoke pretty poor German. Her grammar scarcely seems to have been at the level of schoolgirl German. She seemed to have no knowledge of how to use the past and future tenses of German verbs, and her word order (very important in the structure of German sentences) was often incorrect. It was interesting that her grammar did not improve over the course of the next three years, although, during the experiments, people who spoke correct German often talked to her. Most of the time her pronunciation was satisfactory or good; sometimes it was excellent; occasionally it was dreadful. Her vocabulary was limited, and she spoke in short phrases of a few words, often omitting words altogether. In the transcribed tapes of nineteen sessions (altogether there were twenty-two sessions, but tapes of the remaining three were either not recorded or lost), Ian Stevenson counted 237 German words used by Gretchen before anyone else had spoken them to her. About half of these were words very similar to their English equivalent (“Mutter” for “mother,” for example), although she also used a few rather obscure and somewhat archaic German words.
On one occasion Gretchen wrote a few short phrases in German. Some were spelled correctly; others were not, and looked as though they had been written by someone who had only heard the German word and was trying to reproduce it phonetically. The phrases were difficult to translate, because words were omitted, as they were when she was speaking, but they, too, referred to the theme of religious persecution, her main preoccupation.
Stevenson made extensive enquiries to discover whether Dolores had ever been exposed to German or German-speaking people, but he could find no evidence that she had. German hadn’t been taught in the schools she attended, and there were no German-speaking people in the community she grew up in. She passed a lie-detector test in which she was asked about her previous knowledge of the language. The only clue he could discover was a dream she reported after the development of the case, in which she saw herself in her grandmother’s house examining a German book called Greta. Stevenson questioned Dolores’s family but couldn’t confirm that this was based on any actual event, or that any book called Greta had ever existed. One possible source that Stevenson does not mention is cinema. Many Second World War films, for example, contained snatches of German dialogue.
The impression one gets from reading Stevenson’s account of Gretchen’s German-speaking ability is of someone who has heard the language spoken, picked up a few words and phrases, but has never formally learned it. If Dolores were truly reliving a past life as a native German woman, or somehow accessing memories of such a person or even if ( Stevenson’s alternative hypothesis) she were “possessed” by some discarnate German entity, one might expect her to speak rather better German than this. Even if she did not have total recall of the language, it is surprising that the phrases she did remember were not structured correctly. If cryptomnesia were the explanation, if she had seen a book in German about religious persecution, she might have been able to reproduce the text but would not have understood it. Understanding could have come only through being taught German, but there is no evidence for this. Against this are Stevenson’s two explanations of discarnate possession or reincarnation. It is up to the reader to decide which is the more likely explanation.
Far more impressive than Dolores Jay’s German was the nineteenth-century Bengali spoken by Uttara Haddur in her “Sharada” incarnation. Uttara’s native language was Marathi, but during the times when she was taken over by Sharada’s personality she spoke Bengali, a language she claimed never to have learned. She spoke it not only when she was awake, but muttered it in her sleep and when she was suddenly awakened by a splash of cold water on her face. When family or friends spoke to her in Marathi, Hindi or English, “Sharada” did not seem to understand.
It has always been difficult to judge just how much Bengali Uttara herself spoke, and of course this is crucial in looking at her “Sharada” personality. Marathi, Hindi and Bengali are all northern Indian languages which derive from Sanskrit, just as French, Italian and Spanish derive from Latin. Knowing one language may facilitate the learning of another, as it does with these European languages, but they are not mutually intelligible. Uttara had studied Sanskrit for three years in high school and had then had one year’s private tuition in the language. She had learned Bengali script and had expressed a strong desire to learn Bengali.
Although there were rumours that she had once passed an examination in Bengali, Dr. Akolkar, one of the researchers who investigated her case, checked university and other records carefully and found no evidence that she did. However, we do know that in her matriculation year at school, Uttara did have some Bengali lessons with a classmate, F. Exactly how much they learned, though, is in some doubt. F. has said that “we had progressed enough to read a Bengali primer.” He also told Akolkar that he had challenged Uttara, asking how she could deny that she had learned Bengali when, in fact, they had learned it together. She had, he said, replied dismissively: “Is that to be called learning Bengali?”
So how does Uttara’s knowledge of Bengali compare with Sharada’s? It is generally acknowledged that although Sharada’s command of Bengali was impressive, she did not speak it like a native. However, she was said to be fluent in the language. Ian Stevenson obtained testimony about Sharada’s ability to speak Bengali fluently from six native speakers of the language. Some pointed out imperfections in her Bengali, but all agreed that she had an excellent command of the language. Professor Pal, who had long talks with her on four separate occasions, noted that her intonation and pronunciation closely resembled his own, and this, he believed, was because they had both lived in the same district in West Bengal.
What is perhaps most interesting is that the Bengali Sharada used was not modern Bengali. Modern Bengali contains about 20 percent of English loan words, but Sharada did not use a single English loan word in the course of long conversations with Professor Pal. She did, though, use archaic expressions, and her Bengali had more Sanskrit words than modern Bengali has, as did Bengali in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We have to remember, however, that Uttara herself had learned Sanskrit.
When Sharada wrote Bengali she made spelling mistakes: sometimes a letter from the Marathi alphabet or a Hindi word would creep in. She wrote certain letters of the Bengali alphabet as they used to be written in old Bengali manuscripts contemporary with her existence as Sharada, not as they are written today. She also wrote the letters of the Bengali alphabet anticlockwise, as was customary at that time, but, again, this is not done today. All this suggests that she did not pick up the language through casual contact with modem Bengali-speakers.
Uttara was an intelligent woman, and no one denies that she was proficient at languages. Moreover, she lived in a city with a large number of Bengali-speaking people. Uttara certainly could have learned Bengali—but did she? Given Uttara’s fascination with Bengali, her natural flair for languages, and the boundless opportunities she must have had both to improve her basic Bengali and to talk with Bengali-speaking people, it is almost inconceivable that she should not have done so. But to attain this level of proficiency would have required hours of secret study, and to have learned to speak nineteenth-century Bengali so effortlessly would have been even more difficult, and would suggest a deliberate attempt at fraud. It would also have taken considerable time and required long-term planning, and all the evidence is that the Sharada personality emerged quite suddenly in response to a particular emotional trigger.
In short, a jury might decide that there is a reasonable probability that Uttara knew more Bengali than she was prepared to admit. But there is no evidence that she had studied it seriously and, in particular, no evidence that she had an opportunity to learn nineteenth-century Bengali. Equally, there is no evidence that she did not.
Everything else in this strange story is explicable purely in terms of Uttara’s life, her passionate interest in Bengal and all things Bengali, and her emotional state of mind. But yet the language still remains a problem, an uneasy glitch in what is otherwise a perfectly satisfactory explanation. We must also remember that past-life memories seldom come with the amount of detail displayed by Sharada.
Xenoglossy is a piece of the reincarnation puzzle that is hard to fit in whichever way you look at it. If memories of a past life really do occur, then language should be recalled along with memory. Hypnotherapist Joe Keeton has found that this certainly happens when he regresses someone to an earlier stage in their present life. One client of his was a woman who was brought up in Italy and spoke only Italian until she moved to England at the age of 12. When she was regressed back to the age of eight Joe found that he could not wake her from her hypnotic trance—she simply didn’t understand the English he was speaking to her. It wasn’t until he spoke in Italian that she responded. However, other hypnotherapists do not normally report this kind of literal age-regression.
Even in the most compelling cases of past-life regression, people seldom manage to “remember” the language of their past. Usually they will utter a few words or phrases as if to give convincing colour to their character, or remind us of the period or the nationality of the life they are apparently living. Joan Waterhouse, the Chelmsford Witch, used language that often sounded appropriately archaic to twentieth-century ears. When Joe Keeton asked her age, for example, she replied “nigh on my eighteenth year,” and asked who she was she replied, “I am the daughter, sire, of Mother Waterhouse.” And yet the truth is that language has changed so much in the past 400 years that if she were genuinely speaking as she would have spoken in the sixteenth century, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, she and the twentieth-century Joe Keeton would have had so little language in common that easy communication between them would have been impossible. Perhaps most surprising of all, Laurel Dilmen, in her persona as the Spanish adventuress Antonia, had a detailed knowledge of sixteenth-century Spain but could neither speak nor understand Spanish, though she could pronounce Spanish names very well.
In those regressions that do exhibit xenoglossy, the language spoken is never entirely unfamiliar. There are no convincing cases of xenoglossy in which the subjects speak obscure languages quite unrelated to their own. There is a further puzzle. Why do all the reported reincarnation cases that show xenoglossy involve adults? If xenoglossy really does occur, children would surely be equally likely to show it—indeed more so, as this is the time when past lives seem to be experienced most vividly. In children, too, it would be much easier to believe that they had had no opportunity to learn the language, or even had much exposure to it. And yet this does not seem to happen. Ian Stevenson has studied a group of twenty Burmese children who remember past lives as Japanese soldiers in Burma, but, strangely, none of them spoke any Japanese at all; they could not say where they lived in Japan or even remember their Japanese name. One of these children would apparently sing songs in what her parents said sounded like a foreign language, but there is no evidence that this was Japanese, or indeed any particular language.
Sharada’s story, in fact, is a one-off. No other reincarnation account provides anything like such good evidence of xenoglossy. Both Ian Stevenson and Dr. Akolkar made extensive enquiries among those who knew Uttara well and remain convinced that she could not have learned Bengali in the normal way. They are quite certain that somehow Uttara acquired memories of a previous life.
But we are left with too many if onlys: if only Uttara had not shown such an interest in the language . . . if only we did not know for certain that she had learned even a minimum amount at school. . . if only she had never learned Sanskrit . . . if only she had never lived in a community where Bengali was spoken frequently around her . . . if only . . .