If I believed in reincarnation, I’d come back as Warren Beatty’s fingers.
Woody Allen
CHARLES Porter was a native North American Indian from Alaska, a member of the Tlingit tribe. Until he was eight years old he would often talk about how he had been killed by a spear in a Tlingit clan fight. He knew both where he had been killed and the name of the man who had killed him. He gave his own name in this previous life. And when he told the story he pointed to his right side to indicate where the spear had struck him. Charles Porter had been born with a birthmark—a pigmented area about an inch and a half long and half an inch wide (3.8 by 1.2 centimetres)—on his right flank, just at the spot he always indicated when he talked about the spear thrust that had killed him.
A belief in reincarnation is part of the traditional religion of the Tlingit. They also believe that when someone is reincarnated his body may bear some trace of its past life. Many cultures in which reincarnation is accepted, such as Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Tlingit of Alaska, regard birthmarks or birth defects as proof of a specific link between past life and present incarnation. Others, the Hindu-Buddhist cultures, don’t require a specific explanation for a birth defect—the doctrine of karma is explanation enough. A malformation will be attributed by the parents to some event in one of the previous lives of their child; they will not be interested in or look for any particular event that might have caused that particular defect.
Professor Ian Stevenson is one of the few scientists who has made a serious attempt to discover whether birthmarks or birth defects really can be related to experiences in a remembered past life. He has investigated and described over 200 cases of people who have been identified as particular persons reborn, and who have physical birthmarks or defects which seem to confirm this identification. The results of his work are published in a mammoth two-volume work, Reincarnation and Biology. For the less intrepid reader a condensed (and cheaper) version, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, is also available. It is easy to pick out and pick holes in many individual cases, but in fairness to Stevenson it must be said that he urges readers not to express an opinion about his conclusions without studying the larger work, which gives a much more detailed account of each case, pointing out its weaknesses as well as its strengths.
Stevenson is interested in reincarnation because he is interested in the reasons for the differences between individual people. He doesn’t deny that individuality comes from both our genes and our environment, but he suggests that there may be another contributory factor—our uniqueness may also derive from reincarnation. He suggests that sometimes mental images in the mind of a deceased person can survive death and can influence the form of an embryo or fetus so as to cause birthmarks and birth defects. The effect of mental imagery interacts with the influence of other factors, such as genetic and cytoplasmic ones, that contribute to the final form of a baby. He admits that the evidence for this is not compelling; his claim is only that it provides a rational, and not a religious, basis for a belief in reincarnation. And if he is right, he has found what might be the missing link between persistence of memory and persistence of personal identity. For Ian Stevenson, the evidence from birthmarks and birth defects provides one of the strongest rational reasons for a belief in reincarnation.
Birthmarks are areas of discoloured skin which are present from birth and are the result of some developmental defect. The most common are freckles and moles; others are malformations of the blood vessels in the skin, forming the red patches (“stork’s beak marks”) often seen above the bridge of the nose or on the nape of the neck after birth, or bright red strawberry naevi, which at birth may appear as tiny red dots, grow into raised, red lumps during the first months of life, but then usually shrivel and disappear altogether by the time the child reaches school age. Port wine stains are dark red, permanent marks with a sharply defined margin. Finally, there are the brownish, pigmented areas, often called café au lait patches, sometimes associated with a genetic condition called neurofibromatosis.
Birth defects are abnormalities such as spina bifida or cleft lip and palate, which are also present from birth. Birth defects have many recognised causes, of which genetic factors, viral infections and chemicals such as alcohol and other teratogenic drugs are the most common. But these recognised causes account for fewer than half of all birth defects. Stevenson suggests that reincarnation can not only account for the defects of “unknown cause” but can explain why a particular person has a defect, and why this defect is in one place and not another, or takes one form and not another. Cleft lip and palate, for example, have a genetic component. Identical, monozygotic twins have the same genetic make-up. If one of a pair of identical twins is born with the condition, in 38 percent of cases the other will have it too (this figure is only 8 percent if the twins are non-identical). And yet that also means that in 62 percent of cases the other twin won’t have the condition. The genetic make-up is the same, the environment is the same and yet some other factor is clearly also involved.
One can’t attach much significance to a birthmark or birth defect alone, especially as most of the cases Stevenson has studied are from cultures where parents often expect their child to be a reincarnation of some family member and look for proof in the form of birthmarks or birth defects. But when children also have memories of their previous life which can be verified, as in the following case, it is easy to understand how convincing this proof can seem.
U Thet Tin was a Burmese brigand who died at the hands of government troops who had shot him in the knee and lower abdomen. Some time after his death his widow, Daw Unt, dreamed that her dead husband had appeared to her and told her he was coming to protect her. Shortly afterwards she became pregnant, and when the child, Maung Tin Win, was born she saw that he had three birthmarks. One was on his right knee, and of the other two one was on the right side of his abdomen and the other, larger one on the right side of his lower back. These latter two could be said to correspond to the entrance and exit holes of the bullet that killed U Thet Tin.
One day when the little boy was about three or four years old and looking at a snapshot of U Thet Tin, he suddenly remembered his previous life. “I asked where Ma Unt was . . . I remembered Ma Unt and was feeling lonely for her. Suddenly I knew that my mother was my previous wife.”
Ian Stevenson met the family in 1979, when Maung Tin Win was a young man. Maung Tin Win insisted that nobody had ever told him about his previous life, and he did not dream about it. His family recounted how, when he was a child, he had described his previous life and how he had died. They also reported that he showed various personality and behaviour traits (not particularly attractive ones) which made it feasible that he might be the reincarnation of a man who had lived and died a bandit. As a child he was interested in guns and playing robbers, for example, and later in alcohol and gambling. However, none of these traits need a past life to explain them—his father in his present life was a heavy drinker, for example, and alcoholism is known to be an inherited characteristic. As for his interest in guns, most small boys, however pacific their parents, regard any long stick as a potential kalashnikov.
Perhaps more interestingly, until the age of about ten Maung Tin Win seemed to be very jealous of his father for marrying his previous spouse and unusually hostile and aggressive towards him. In his previous life his present father had been a member of the band insurgents U Thet Tin had led, and the child Maung Tin Win refused to address respectfully someone he said was a subordinate. But perhaps Freud would have an explanation for that.
Many people believe not only that they will be reincarnated but that they have some control over where they will be born again. In some cultures the body of a child who has died is marked in some way, in the expectation that when the child is reincarnated a corresponding mark will be found on the reborn body. Birthmarks serve a similarly useful purpose of identification. So sometimes, Stevenson suggests, someone who dies a natural death and wants to be identified on reincarnating may draw the attention of relatives to any scars or birthmarks that he may have. There is, after all, little satisfaction in being reborn unless your chosen family recognise and honour you for it.
William George Sr. was a Tlingit fisherman who claimed repeatedly that he would reincarnate as the son of his own favourite son. He had two birthmarks, one on his left shoulder and one on his left forearm, and he predicted that in his next incarnation his body would have the same two birthmarks at the same two places. As a second test, in the summer of 1949 he gave his son a gold watch and asked him to keep it for him, William George, to have after he was reborn. The watch was put away in a jewellery box, where it remained for the next five years.
In August 1949 William George disappeared from the fishing-boat of which he was captain; it was presumed he had fallen overboard and drowned. Soon afterwards his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Reginald George became pregnant. During her labour, she dreamed under anaesthesia that her father-in-law appeared to her and said that he was waiting to see his son, and on 5 May 1950 the baby, William George Jr., was born. It should come as no surprise to any of us that William George Jr. had two prominent birthmarks, one on his left shoulder, one on his left forearm.
Between the ages of three and five William George Jr. said and did several things that suggested to his parents he had some memory of his grandfather’s life. The most impressive of these was his recognition of the gold watch when he was about four and a half years old. His mother happened one day to sort through the various objects in her jewellery box and spread them out in her bedroom. William George Jr. picked up the watch and said: “That’s my watch.” He was very possessive about it, and, in fact, they had some difficulty in persuading him to give it back. From time to time afterwards he would again demand that his parents give him “his watch.”
The child also referred to his aunts and uncles as his sons and daughters, and expressed paternal concern about their welfare. Members of the family entered into the spirit of the thing at first and called him “grandfather,” but his father eventually decided that his son was becoming too preoccupied with his previous life and discouraged him from talking about it. They noticed other things too. He had a mild phobia of water, which is perhaps unexpected in a reincarnated fisherman, even one who had drowned at sea, and an odd gait, turning his right foot outwards: his grandfather had had an ankle injury as a young man and walked with his right foot turned out in a similar way.
Birthmarks are not inherited, so one cannot argue that the child had simply inherited his grandfather’s birthmarks. It is certainly odd that in this one child out of the ten in the family should have been born with a birthmark as if in accordance with the grandfather’s prediction. But on the facts as we are given them, the birthmarks form a real stumbling block to belief, largely because there is some doubt about exactly how many birthmarks grandfather had. Reginald George, the old man’s son, remembered his father having only one birthmark, though his wife, Mrs. Reginald George, was certain that her father-in-law had had two. This is quite a significant point. Birthmarks are common; by chance two people might each have a birthmark at the same site, but that they should each have two corresponding birthmarks raises the odds considerably. Reginald George thought that his father’s birthmarks had been slightly raised, whereas the baby’s were not. Again, his wife didn’t remember this. However, both agreed that the baby’s birthmarks were smaller—about half the size—of his grandfather’s.
One would be inclined to think that Reginald George would have had the more intimate knowledge of his own father’s skin blemishes. In any case, there must have been some family discussion about the birthmarks if William George Sr. had indeed been so insistent that they would be the means to identify him in his next incarnation. It is odd that Mr. and Mrs. Reginald George could not agree about how many birthmarks there really were.
Mrs. Reginald George seems to have had the most emotion invested in this reincarnation. Her announcing dream of her father-in-law’s impending birth suggests that she was very ready to accept her baby in this guise. Given her acceptance, and the fact that it was quite within the cultural norm for grandfather to return in this way, she may well have encouraged the young lad to play father to his uncles and aunts. It was certainly she who allowed young William George to find “his” watch, and if she wanted him to be a reincarnation of his grandfather she must have been sorely tempted at the very least to draw his attention to it among the various contents of her jewellery box. Finally, it was her husband, not she, who finally decided that enough was enough and put a stop to any more talk about reincarnation.
Another case of identification by birthmark also concerns a Tlingit fisherman, Victor Vincent, who died in the spring of 1946. Victor was very fond of his niece, Mrs. Corliss Chotkin, the daughter of his dead sister Gertrude. Victor was convinced that Gertrude had already been reincarnated in the person of the Chotkins’ young daughter, and it was with a nice sense of family feeling that he decided he, too, would like to rejoin the family. About a year before he died he said to his niece: “I’m coming back as your next son. I hope I don’t stutter then as much as I do now. Your son will have these scars.” He then showed her two scars that he had from minor operations, one on his right upper back, the other on the bridge of his nose, the result of an operation to remove the right tear duct.
In the spring of 1946 Victor died. Eighteen months later his niece gave birth to a boy who was named Corliss, after his father. According to his mother, the young Corliss did indeed have two birthmarks at exactly the sites of the two scars on his great-uncle’s body.
When Corliss was thirteen months old, his mother was trying to get him to repeat his name. The child said to her: “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Kahkody [Victor Vincent’s tribal name].” Later he spontaneously recognised several people Victor Vincent had known and also made two statements about events in his great-uncle’s life which his mother did not think he could have obtained normally. Corliss Jr. showed other traits that reinforced the family’s belief that he was the reincarnation of his great-uncle. He, too, was a stutterer, and, like his uncle, he had a strong interest in boats and in being on the water. Corliss Sr. had no interest in engines, but Victor Vincent had had considerable mechanical skill, and Corliss Jr. had the same ability.
Unfortunately, we can’t really regard the birthmarks as providing the sort of clincher this story needs. To begin with, by the time Ian Stevenson came on the scene, when Corliss was fifteen, he was told that both the birthmarks had migrated downwards since the boy’s birth. The mark that should have been on the bridge of his nose was now on the lower part of the right side of his nose; the mark on his back had also moved downwards.
We consulted Professor Sam Schuster, Professor of Dermatology at the University of Newcastle, about these apparently mobile birthmarks. He confirmed that birthmarks never migrate, although they may change in size and shape. If the lad’s birthmarks were at exactly the sites of his great-uncle’s operations when he was born, that is where they would remain.
The mark on the boy’s back Ian Stevenson described as particularly interesting because it was “scarlike,” “darker than the surrounding skin and slightly raised . . . Its resemblance to the healed scar of a surgical wound was greatly increased by the presence at the sides of the main birthmark of several small round marks that seemed to correspond to positions of the small round wounds made by needles that place the stitches used to close surgical wounds.”
Ian Stevenson tried to confirm the presence of the original scars on Victor Vincent, but while he was able to find hospital records of an operation to remove the right tear duct he wasn’t able to obtain any medical report that related to the scar on Victor Vincent’s back. He did learn that Vincent had had pulmonary TB of his right lung, and conjectured that the scar might have been the result of some procedure relating to this. But there is no independent evidence that Victor Vincent ever had an operation on his back. We have only the family’s unsubstantiated account that this occurred. Some strawberry naevi may look indistinguishable from healed wounds, and it seems most likely that Corliss Jr. had this kind of birthmark on his back, although this type of birthmark often fades in early childhood.
The evidence for reincarnation here looks thin—in fact, almost threadbare. The first problem is the mystery of the migrating birthmarks. The second is the doubt about whether great-uncle ever even had a scar from an operation on his back. The third is the very high expectation within the family that young Corliss would be the incarnation of his great-uncle and would have the birthmarks to prove it. Fourthly, the testimony seems to have emanated largely from the mother, who probably felt under some personal obligation to her uncle to recognise him in this, his next incarnation.
In his book Reincarnation and Biology Ian Stevenson describes four cases of Burmese people who remember a previous life as a Japanese soldier killed in Burma during the Second World War.
Ma Win Tar was born in Upper Burma in 1962. She was born with severe defects of both hands. Several fingers were missing; others were only loosely attached to her hands and had to be amputated. Around her left wrist were three depressions, which looked as though a rope had been tightly wound around her arm.
Ma Win Tar began to talk when she was about eighteen months old, and when she was about three began to talk about a previous life as a Japanese soldier. As she grew older she became fervent in her insistence that she was Japanese and started to behave in a way that seemed more appropriate to this previous life than to her present life as a young Burmese girl. She liked to dress like a boy and keep her hair short. She complained that Burmese food was too spicy and refused to eat it, preferring sweet foods and pork. She also had a streak of cruelty which is said to be rare in Burmese children. She would slap the faces of her playmates—something apparently typical of the behaviour of Japanese soldiers but which the Burmese rarely do. She was also said to be relatively insensitive to pain and more hard-working than most Burmese children.
Ma Win Tar’s memories of her previous life included being captured by some Burmese villagers, tied to a tree and burned alive. Although Ma Win Tar has no memory of her fingers being damaged, Stevenson suggests that a soldier resisting capture might well put his hands up to ward off a blow, so that his fingers might well have been struck by a sword. But that can only be conjecture.
Maung Aung Htoo first spoke of his life as a Japanese soldier when he was just over three years old. Like many other Burmese subjects of Stevenson, he tended to think about his past life more on cloudy days than on sunny ones. He preferred to wear shirt and trousers and boots rather than the traditional longyi (a cloth tied around the waist) and sandals. Like Ma Win Tar he had a Japanese taste in food, disliked the traditional spicy Burmese food, preferring sweet foods, and liked to eat raw or partly cooked fish and meat. And, like her, he was hard-working and relatively insensitive to pain. He had the same prominent streak of cruelty, liked hunting and killing small animals, and would slap and kick his younger brothers. He seemed to be hostile towards Burmese people and rejected Buddhism.
Maung Aung Htoo had deformed hands and feet—birth defects attributed to his memory that he was murdered by mutinous soldiers of his own unit, who tied him to a tree and tortured him by chopping off his fingers and toes. This is unusual; most Burmese who remember being Japanese say they were tortured by Burmese villagers, and this method of torture is one that was more characteristic of the Burmese than the Japanese.
Another of these past-life Japanese, Ma Win Yee, showed no Japanese behaviour traits—her only unusual behaviour was a preference for strong tea (the Burmese like to drink very weak tea, the Japanese, in general, drink strong tea). She was feminine, and showed no desire to look, dress or behave like a boy. She did, however, have deformed hands and feet, and this was attributed to her past-life memory of being tortured, before being killed, by having her fingers and toes chopped off.
The fourth case is that of Maung Hla Hsaung, born with deformed hands and feet. When he was not yet three he started to refer to a previous life in Japan. He spoke in a “strange language” for a time, but then learned Burmese normally. He explained the defects of his hands and feet as the results of torture after he had been captured. As a child he would sometimes ask for money so that he could go to Japan. And he, too, showed many of the “Japanese” traits described in the first two cases—a liking for long trousers instead of the Burmese longyi, a preference for sweet foods, a certain insensitivity to pain and a tendency to cruelty towards insects, though not humans. Unlike his two brothers, he liked to play at being a soldier when he was a child.
If we simply look at the data Stevenson presents, quite independently of the family and the culture in which it has been collected, then this combination of past-life memories and the physical evidence of the birthmarks do seem to make a good case for reincarnation. Unfortunately, we can’t consider the data in isolation. The cases he describes occurred in a culture where reincarnation is accepted as a fact, and where birthmarks and birth defects are regarded as strong evidence for it. One can easily imagine the mother of a child born with a birth defect discussing this with friends and family, wondering about the possibility that it might have occurred as the result of something that had happened in a previous life. The child would inevitably hear such discussions even if he did not fully understand them. The family would unwittingly allocate the child a role, and the child would be likely to act out that role in subsequent behaviour—thus confirming the family’s belief. We have to wonder whether the birthmark is the result of a past life or vice versa—that the parents assume that there must be a past life to explain the birthmark and set out to find or create one that fits. Certainly, we have not come across accounts ftom other cultures of children who have birth defects and corresponding past-life memories to explain them. But this may, of course, simply be because no one has looked for them.
We could only really test this hypothesis by finding children from these cultures who had birth defects but had been adopted at birth into a different culture. If, in the absence of family and cultural reinforcement, such children produced past-life memories that seemed to explain their defects, it would go a long way to confirming Stevenson’s theory.
Violent death is a recurring theme in a great many of these cases. In fact, it figured so prominently in the cases Ian Stevenson studied that he feels such a death must play an important part both in the occurrence of recovered past-life memories and in that of birthmarks and birth defects. Violence, he says, may act through concentrating attention and fixing memories.
Whenever he investigated such cases, Ian Stevenson tried to verify claims that a birthmark corresponded to a wound acquired in a previous life by examining the medical records of the dead person. A single birthmark may not be very convincing. But Stevenson describes several instances of people who claimed to remember a previous life in which they had died by shooting, and had birthmarks corresponding to both the entrance and exit holes of the bullets that had killed them. The odds against this happening by chance are, he says, only 1 in 25,000. One such case is that of Cemil Fahrici.
Cemil was born in Turkey in 1935. The night before his birth his father had dreamed that a distant relative, Cemil Hayik, entered the house. Cemil Hayik had been a bandit, on the run since killing two men who had raped his sisters. Just a few days earlier, Cemil Hayik had reached the end of the line; surrounded by police and with no hope of escape, he had placed the muzzle of his gun beneath his chin and pulled the trigger.
The dream convinced the parents that the bandit Cemil would be reborn as their son and, indeed, when he was born they noticed a prominent birthmark on the right beneath his chin, a scar-like area that bled for a few days and required stitching in hospital. On the left side of the top of his head was a second birthmark, a hairless area about 0.8 inches long by 0.08 inches wide (2 centimetres by 2 millimetres). These marks corresponded to the entrance and exit holes of the bullet that had killed Cemil. From the time he was two, the child began to talk about his life and death as Cemil Hayik, and until he was six or seven used to have nightmares about fighting the police. Although he had been christened “Dahham,” the boy refused to be called by any other name but Cemil. He developed a markedly hostile attitude towards the police and would throw stones at them, and he once tried to take his father’s rifle and shoot some soldiers with it.
The biggest barrier to belief in this case is the timing. A baby is most vulnerable to any kind of damage during the period its major organs and systems are being formed—which is largely during the first three months of pregnancy. Birthmarks are developmental abnormalities in the skin. The skin is one of the earliest body organs to develop—in fact, by the third month of pregnancy a baby’s skin will already be growing hair and nails. By the end of pregnancy, any birthmarks or birth defects will be long established. And yet it was only a few days before the baby’s birth that Cemil shot himself, causing the wounds that were supposedly reproduced in the baby’s birthmarks.
One rational explanation would be that the relationship between the birthmarks and the wounds occurred by chance, that there is no causal relationship between the two. Once they had seen the birthmarks, however, the family would be almost bound to make the connection, and the scene would then be set for the child to play out his expected role as Cemil reborn. Another possible explanation is that the facts of the case became distorted over time so that by the time Stevenson met the family, some years after Cemil’s birth, there had been some rewriting of history.
But assuming that the facts are indeed as reported by Stevenson, the only way, using our current scientific understanding, that we can link Cemil’s death, apparent rebirth and the birthmarks is through a parapsychological explanation. We would have to say either that the child’s developmental blueprint had some foreknowledge of Cemil’s future death and rebirth, which caused the birthmarks to develop, or that Cemil “chose” this particular baby to be reborn into because it had already developed the appropriate birthmarks. We have to remember, too, that Cemil was a distant relative, not someone who might perhaps have close psychic ties to the family. Does it seem feasible?
Even more spectacular, and more convincing, was the case of Necip Unlutaskiran, a child born with seven birthmarks who remembered a previous life as a man who had died of multiple stab wounds in corresponding places.
Necip was born in Turkey in 1951. Some time before his birth his mother had a dream in which she saw a man she did not know standing before her with bleeding wounds. This dream seemed to make sense to her when she saw, after her son was born, that he had seven birthmarks.
Unlike most children who remember previous lives, Necip was a late talker, and it wasn’t until he was six that he started to tell his mother that he had lived in Mersin, a city about 50 miles (80 kilometres) from his home, that his name then had also been Necip, and that he had been stabbed. As he described the stabbing, he pointed to various parts of his body to indicate the stab wounds. He also began to ask his mother to take him to see “his” children in his previous home.
At first his parents paid little attention to his story. But when he was about twelve years old his mother took him to meet her father, and Necip met, for the first time, his grandfather’s second wife. To everyone’s astonishment, Necip suddenly said that he recognised her as someone he had met in his previous life. This woman said that she had indeed known a man in Mersin named Necip Budak, a quarrelsome type who had died after being repeatedly stabbed in a drunken brawl.
On the strength of this, Necip’s grandfather agreed to take him to Mersin, where he recognised several members of the family of Necip Budak, who confirmed Necip’s statements about his previous life. The most convincing of Necip’s claims was that “his” (Necip Budak’s) wife had a scar on her leg, the result of a stab wound he had once given her. Necip Budak’s wife admitted this and is said to have shown a scar on her thigh to other people, though whether Ian Stevenson himself saw this is not made clear. Ian Stevenson did not meet Necip Unlutaskiran until he was thirteen, by which time a few of his birthmarks had faded. Stevenson did, however, see the hospital notes made when Necip Budak was admitted after the stabbing, and was able to confirm that six of the birthmarks did indeed correspond to stab wounds.
It’s very difficult for the sceptic to find a way out of this case if the facts are as reported. There is the correlation between the multiple stab wounds and the birthmarks. There is the family’s reluctance to accept the story. And finally there is the confirmation of Necip’s statements about his previous life, about which there seems to have been no previous family knowledge. The best the sceptic could do is to argue for multiple coincidences, which in this instance makes a very weak case.
It is interesting that one of the few instances in the West where a birthmark has been cited as evidence of reincarnation does not follow the pattern of most of Stevenson’s cases, in which birthmarks usually represented past-life injuries that were either fatal or at least caused by extreme violence, usually at the time of death. This is the case of the Pollock twins, whose parents believed them to be the reincarnations of their two older daughters, killed in a tragic accident. The twin Jennifer was identified as the reincarnation of Jacqueline largely because when she was born her father noticed that she had a birthmark on her forehead, just above her right eye. It was in this very same place that Jacqueline had had a scar, the result of an accident when she was three years old and had fallen and hit her face on a bucket.
Jacqueline was six when she died—three years after this incident, which is a long time in a small child’s life; long enough for her to have recovered, long enough for it to be more or less forgotten. It seems odd that this relatively minor injury should have been perpetuated in a subsequent life, especially when one remembers that she received horrific injuries in the accident in which she met her death. If Jennifer were to bear any mark at all which related to a previous life as Jacqueline, why did it not relate to the injuries that caused her death?
Ian Stevenson has also suggested that Jennifer’s birthmark is significant because Gillian, her identical twin with an identical genetic make-up, did not have a similar birthmark. But identical twins do not have identical birthmarks—birthmarks (as opposed to some birth defects) are developmental and have no genetic basis. Identical twins are no more likely to have similar birthmarks than any other two siblings.
If we are even to begin to accept Stevenson’s suggestion that birthmarks may be indications of injury in a past life, we have to explain how marks acquired during the lifetime of one body might be passed on to another. The genes provide the only mechanism of inheritance that we know of, and the genes do not allow for the inheritance of characteristics acquired during an individual’s life. Lamarckism, the theory of evolution that did allow for this by suggesting that, for example, the giraffe’s long neck evolved because the animal continually had to stretch to reach the tops of trees, is now largely rejected as a serious scientific hypothesis, though it surfaces occasionally on a folklore level, as it seems to have done in this case. And even that hypothesis would not explain those cases in which there is no relationship between the two people involved: for example, the case of Necip, described above. In almost half of the cases Ian Stevenson has studied, the two families concerned lived far apart, had never met and had no knowledge of each other. Even Lamarckism could not explain how a member of one family could have inherited characteristics acquired by another.
We have to remember that most of the cases Ian Stevenson has studied are from cultures where parents often expect their child to be a reincarnation of some family member, and look for proof in the form of birthmarks, birth defects or announcing dreams. When such a child talks about a past life, how do we know that he has not simply picked up the information about his past personality in the normal way from his parents, even if they have not intentionally fed it to him?
Stevenson and Jorgen Keil, a psychologist at the University of Tasmania who has studied past-life memories in a group of children in Turkey, Thailand and Burma, both claim that there is some indirect evidence that this doesn’t necessarily happen. They cite the “silent cases”—the children who don’t claim past-life memories despite the strong belief of their parents that they have been reincarnated. In these cases there is no evidence from the children for reincarnation, only the belief of the parents that it has occurred. Clearly, these cases are quite different from those in which the child has a past-life memory. However, their interest lies in the fact that some children will not take on board their parents’ beliefs about reincarnation. Stevenson estimated that about 12 perent of his 225 cases were “silent”; Keil found rather fewer—5 percent of “silent” children in a group of 112 cases. Keil found nothing in these children’s personalities which would explain why they were less likely to talk about past lives even though they were expected to do so.
Ian Stevenson believes that he has found many cases in which there is indisputable correspondence between wounds or birthmarks on a deceased person and birthmarks and other features (including statements about a previous life) of a child. One explanation he advances is reincarnation. But he considers alternative hypotheses too. One is that the birthmarks occurred by chance and that the child acquired his claimed memories through extrasensory perception. However, he has found no evidence that any of these children show any paranormal ability at any other time.
Stevenson has also suggested that attention concentrated on a part of the body before death in a previous life may be a factor in generating birthmarks and birth defects in the present life. He cites the case of a child, Ruvan Ranatunga, who had a very deformed left ear. Ruvan Ranatunga remembered the previous life of Sampath, a child who had also had an abnormality of the left ear. Sampath’s mother had tried repeatedly to reshape his ear into a normal form by massaging it. This undue concentration on the ear must, Stevenson concludes, have focused so much of Sampath’s attention on that organ that the deformity was generated again in his next incarnation. In essence this is no different from his argument that the marks of a violent death can be reproduced in a subsequent body because of the attention focused on them at that time.
An alternative explanation Stevenson considers is that of “maternal impressions”—the theory that images in a pregnant woman’s mind can have a physical effect on her unborn child.
We know that beliefs and mental images about the body can induce the physical changes known as stigmata. Suggestible people can develop stigmata under hypnosis as well as by self-inducing them at will. Under hypnosis, it is possible to suggest to someone that a cold penny placed on their palm is red-hot, and a weal and blister characteristic of a burn will develop under it. One gifted sensitive, Olga Kahn, has even been able to self-induce stigmata through telepathy. Various researchers conducted telepathy experiments with her in which a “target” image (a letter or simple design) was transmitted telepathically to her, and an image approximating to this (she sometimes made mistakes or produced a distorted image) would appear as red lines on the skin of her arm and upper part of her chest.
In 1946 a London psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Moody, published in the British Medical Journal the account of Alec, a twenty-six-year-old army officer serving in India four years before the outbreak of the Second World War. While he was in hospital for a minor infection, it was discovered that he repeatedly walked in his sleep. To prevent him injuring himself, the nurses sometimes tied his hands behind his back while he slept. In spite of this he managed to slip away one night and wandered around the countryside.
Alec’s sleepwalking grew worse and was sometimes accompanied by aggressive behaviour for which he had no memory when he awoke. He was admitted to a psychiatric unit for observation, and one night was seen to thresh about for an hour as if trying to free himself from imaginary bonds. He then crept out of the hospital, with his hands held behind his back as if they were still tied. But even more astonishing was the fact that when Alec returned to the ward deep weals could be seen on his arms, as if he had, in fact, been bound tightly by ropes. The matter was reported to the consultant in charge, Dr. Moody, who decided to watch the patient himself one night. Exactly the same thing happened, and this time Dr. Moody saw deep indentations appearing on both Alec’s forearms, and finally oozing small quantities of fresh blood. Even the next morning the marks were still clear enough to show up in photographs.
An impressive case of induced stigmata was described by Morton Schatzman in his book The Story of Ruth. Ruth was a young woman with a gift for creating very strong mental imagery that appeared to her as external hallucinations. She could make the hallucination slap her, and red fingermarks in the form of weals would appear on her skin. She could hallucinate her daughter putting hallucinatory hands over her eyes, and then, when a light was flashed into her eyes, her brain would respond as if she were in fact unable to see it. If Ruth hallucinated biting into a lemon, her mouth would pour saliva, but if she merely thought about eating it, then the saliva would scarcely flow.
We know, then, that the mind has an extraordinary ability to influence the body. Stigmata may develop, blisters be raised by suggestion, wounds revived by vivid memories. The mechanism of transfer of imagery from the brain to the body surface is thought to be by the autonomic nervous system. But the action of the autonomic nervous system so far as we know does not cross the placenta. So it is much more difficult to understand and explain how a mother’s mental images can cause physical changes in her baby’s body, which is what the theory of “maternal impression” suggests.
In Reincarnation and Biology Ian Stevenson describes several cases where there is an almost identical correspondence between a sight seen by a pregnant woman and a subsequent deformity in her child. He quotes, for example, a woman whose brother’s hand was torn off by machinery and his forearm later amputated above the wrist: her baby was later born with a congenital deformity of the same arm, the hand and forearm absent.
Unfortunately, virtually all of the cases he describes occurred in the nineteenth or very early twentieth centuries, when knowledge of the causes of birth defects was more limited. The only relatively modern case quoted dates from 1949 and concerns a woman who saw a man with only one external ear (the other having been cut off by a sword during the war) when she was only one to two months pregnant. She later gave birth to a baby with a congenitally absent left external ear. The French physician who delivered the baby also knew the soldier whose ear had been cut off. His report did not, unfortunately, mention which of the unlucky man’s ears had been lost.
The belief that if a pregnant woman sustains a severe shock or sees a distressing sight, then this can somehow affect her unborn baby and produce some mark or defect, is one of the oldest old wives’ tales in the business. One can understand why a mother coming to terms with a deformed child and looking for an explanation should attribute the deformity to her own experience. But in the West maternal impression is a notion that has been subject to general medical derision for several centuries. There is no known mechanism by which mental imagery could be transmitted from a woman to her unborn child. And while the number of women who suffer traumatic events or see distressing sights during pregnancy must be considerable, the number of major birth defects and birthmarks is relatively small and constant—about two percent. If there really is any substance in the theory, it is hard to explain why no more modern cases have been published, or why no papers have been published to suggest an increased incidence of such cases after a major catastrophe or war where large numbers of women must have seen horrific sights. However, we can’t be certain that there is no correlation until we actually look for it: for example, by doing a prospective study in, say, Bosnia or Ruanda, to correlate birth defects with prior exposure to such incidents.
However, there are at least one or two reports in modern times which suggest that the power of the mind may have played at least some part in the causation of a birth defect. One of these was intriguing enough even to have made its way into tha astion of medical respectability, The Lancet. The case concerns a sixteen-year-old Australian girl who, in an effort to gain parental consent for her marriage to a man they strongly disapproved of, became pregnant by him. Far from giving her blessing, the enraged mother cursed her daughter, saying that if she continued with the pregnancy the baby would be born without arms and legs, and blind. Several people witnessed the cursing, which took place during the fifth or sixth week of the pregnancy and was then repeated in letters to the hapless daughter every two or three weeks for the rest of the pregnancy. When the baby was finally born, its lower limbs were absent, and only a small part of the right arm was present. The left arm was normal, but the left hand had only two fingers and the thumb.
In this case the timing at least was right—the cursing occurred during the first trimester of pregnancy, the time when a baby is most vulnerable to damage. The physician who reported the case, Dr. Elizabeth Turner, found no factor other than the stress induced in the woman by her own mother’s curse. Clearly, straightforward explanations won’t do, but current scientific data, which shows that prayer (in the sense of a positive intention to heal at a distance) can influence people at a distance even though they do not know they are being prayed for, could be applied in this case. All the studies relate to positive intention, but there is no reason why a negative intention might not be as effective, and in this case the mother’s will could be directly imposed on the developing fetus.
In Sri Lanka Ian Stevenson found another, very similar case of curse-induced deformity. In August 1980 a young Sri Lankan woman, Leelawathie, and her husband Sompala gave birth to a son, Sampath Priyasantha. He was born without any arms and with severe deformities (talipes) of both feet. Stevenson was sent photographs of the baby and decided to go to investigate, but unfortunately the little boy had died before Stevenson could reach the remote village in which the family lived. The child was about twenty months old when he died, and just beginning to speak, but he had said nothing that suggested he remembered a past life.
Indeed, the parents themselves did not mention it either, and it was left to Stevenson himself to raise the subject. “It occurred to me that Sampath might have been the reincarnation of someone known to his family who had died after having his arms badly injured, perhaps in an industrial accident. I therefore asked the baby’s father whether he knew of anyone who had died after having his arms injured.”
The man’s reply perhaps explains his unusual reluctance to cite reincarnation as an explanation for his son’s deformities. “Yes,” he replied. “There was a man I killed by cutting off his arms and legs with a sword.”
We needn’t be too horrified at this admittedly rough justice. The murdered man, Yasapula, was a notorious bully from what we can only regard as a dysfunctional family. His brother described to Ian Stevenson how he personally had killed three of his family’s enemies and how their own father had died when a bomb he was preparing slipped out of his hands and blew him to pieces. The murder of Yasapula had been precipitated over a quarrel about the murdered man’s dog, which had strayed on to the property of Sampath’s father and eaten some food. Sampath’s father, with the aid of his own brothers, had got their victim drunk and then cut off his arms and legs (some slight exaggeration here: the postmortem report, according to Stevenson, described the limbs as “dangling” rather than actually severed).
The murdered man’s mother was outraged. She repeatedly cursed the murderer and his family. Stevenson’s informants differed about the exact nature of the curse, but the baby’s mother certainly believed that she had been told that she would have a deformed baby.
If this were a case of reincarnation, there is an odd logic and an odder sense of justice about it. Would Yasapula have chosen (if there is considered to be any choice in the manner of one’s rebirth) to be reborn to the family that had butchered him so cruelly in his previous life? Certainly, Yasapula’s own family regarded Sampath’s birth as just retribution to Sompala for killing Yasapula, but they didn’t consider that Yasapula had been reborn as Sampath. Yasapula’s mother, Ian Stevenson says, could not accept the possibility that her son, who had “done nothing,” should be condemned to reincarnation in a deformed body. In this case a more plausible explanation than reincarnation, he suggests, might be maternal impression, which implies that Sampath’s mother saw the mutilated body and this imprinted itself on the developing child by some parapsychological mechanism. If we are to assume a parapsychological mechanism, though, perhaps even more plausible is the possibility that the curse of Yasapula’s mother did indeed affect the developing fetus, as apparently happened in the previous case.
In summary, Stevenson suggests that the physical form of a dead person can influence the form of a living and often unrelated person who seems to be his reincarnation and may have memories of his life. He suggests that these past-life memories are carried by some intermediate vehicle (he calls this the psychospore to avoid using a term with any religious connotations) between death and presumed rebirth.
He has no explanation of why, if reincarnation does occur, only a few people remember a previous life. Although he believes that violent death figures so prominently in the cases he has studied that it may play a part both in the occurrence of past-life memories and of birthmarks and birth defects, some of the instances he gives do not seem to merit the description “violent.” He cites, for example, the case of someone who had red medicine spilled on his face while he was dying, who was reborn with a red birthmark on his face. There are also many cases, such as that of the Pollock twins, where a violent death is remembered, and there are birthmarks that are thought to correspond to much more trivial injuries.
For Stevenson, birthmarks provide valuable extra evidence to support the possibility of reincarnation. But for many people they simply add an extra barrier to belief. Reincarnation already implies acceptance of some as yet unknown method by which memory can survive death and be transmitted to another brain within another body. That physical characteristics, too, can survive death and be transmitted to another physical body is for many people beyond the boggle threshold.