Do you know who you are?
Dostoevsky
FEELINGS about a past life are usually little more than an echo of the past, a scene that flashes before the mind’s eye. But sometimes a previous personality can emerge so strongly that it takes over an individual completely, replacing his (or her) present-day personality so that he does indeed seem literally to be living again the life that he remembers.
This happens most easily and most often under hypnosis, when the personalities that emerge can take over, dominating the ordinary personality so powerfully that it is completely suppressed. But for this to happen spontaneously, so that a secondary personality takes over whole periods of a person’s daily life, is extremely rare. The best-known example is probably that of Chris Sizemore, whose life formed the basis of the film The Three Faces of Eve.
The phenomenon is popularly known as multiple personality. Multiple personality became a fashionable diagnosis in the last half of the nineteenth century. Before 1850, most such cases would probably have been diagnosed as demonic possession. It has been pointed out by experimental psychologist Richard Gregory that the great majority of the physicians reporting cases of multiple personality have been men, and the cases they have reported have been women younger than themselves. Certainly, Dr. Morton Prince of Boston, Massachusetts, fits this picture very well.
It was Dr. Prince who in 1905 wrote the classic textbook on multiple personality, The Dissociation of a Personality. It was a subject on which he had already published papers, and in which he was well known to be interested. The book developed from his meeting with Miss Beauchamp, a young woman twenty years his junior, who suffered from various nervous disorders. Miss Beauchamp pleaded with him to hypnotise her, and when he agreed she produced not just one but four distinct personalities. “There was,” Dr. Prince recounts, in all pre-Freudian innocence, “over her spine a ‘hypnogenetic point,’ pressure upon which always caused a thrill to run through her that weakened her will and induced hypnotic sleep.” One of Miss Beauchamp’s manifestations was as “Sally,” a flighty minx who liked to play practical jokes, on one occasion evidently persuading Miss Beachamp herself (a high-minded young lady who neither smoked nor drank and would naturally never have thought of such a thing herself) to pose stark-naked on a pile of furniture.
Dr. Prince’s explanation of the phenomenon was that the self was a fusion of several simultaneous psychological entities, and that multiple, or dissociated, personalities emerged when these entities failed to integrate. A more plausible explanation, given the nudity and the hypnogenetic thrills, was that some erotic frisson had developed between doctor and patient, and that in producing these multiple personalities, which she knew would arouse his interest, Miss Beauchamp was aiming to please.
In any case, most modern psychiatrists would give a different name and offer a rather different explanation of multiple personality. They would describe it as hysterical dissociation and explain that it was not a failure of the personality to integrate, but rather that it is psychological in origin, an escape or defence mechanism, a manifestation of the ability of the mind to dissociate—to split off and suppress various mental processes, either partially or completely, perhaps because they are particularly painful. The dissociation may take the form of a fugue state in which the person wanders off not knowing who or where they are, or by a total loss of memory for the event. Fugue states are relatively common and can occur in many forms of psychological distress.
A tendency to dissociate in this way is known to be related to a variety of childhood traumas, in particular to childhood sexual abuse, and also to be linked to damage to a particular area of the brain, the hippocampus. One theory to account for this association is that traumatic events, particularly traumatic events early in life, such as sexual abuse, may damage the hippocampus through the action of a hormone, cortisol, which is secreted by the adrenal gland in response to stress. It is the hippocampus, together with other neighbouring structures, which switches on the production of cortisol. Normally, once the stress has passed, cortisol secretion is switched off via receptors in the hippocampus. Unfortunately, these receptors themselves can be damaged by high levels of cortisol: this then interferes with the feedback mechanism so that cortisol secretion continues, causing further damage. High levels of cortisol are also linked to depression, and so people whose hippocampus has been damaged in this way also tend to suffer from depression.
With these links in mind—an unhappy childhood, a tendency to depression, and a tendency to dissociate and develop an apparent alternative personality—let us look at the case of A. J. Stewart, a woman who for the last thirty years has believed herself to be the reincarnation of James IV of Scotland.
A. J. Stewart was born Ada F. Kay in Lancashire in March 1929. She is certainly very knowledgeable about the historical facts of the time of James IV and has even written an “autobiography” of herself as James “presented by A. J. Stewart,” composed of her own fragments of “James’s” memories. She gives interviews and lectures as James and often wears an approximation of sixteenth-century costume. She even bears a certain facial resemblance to at least one portrait of the real James IV.
From early childhood and throughout her teens she had flashbacks of historical scenes involving images of “men in steel” and battles, and of riding out through a gateway at the head of a small band of horsemen. She also had a longing to visit Scotland.
None of this at first prevented her from leading a normal and productive life. In 1949 she began a successful career as a television playwright, and in 1957 she married Peter Stewart, an architect. But gradually her obsession with Scotland became more powerful and her flashbacks more frequent and intrusive. She moved to Edinburgh and began to research and to write a play about James IV. As she retreated further and further into a private world, her career began to suffer and so did her marriage. She suffered bouts of depression and self-neglect.
Gradually, her feeling that she might be the reincarnation of the Scottish king grew stronger. For her, the conclusive proof that this was so came one night in 1967, while she was staying in a house at Jedburgh, in the Borders region between England and Scotland. The next day she had planned to visit Flodden Field, a place she had always tried to avoid without understanding why. In bed that night she had a waking vision of a sixteenth-century battlefield. “I could see the flash of blades before me . . . I was fighting. Through the slits in my visor grille I could see the English standard-bearer before me on his white horse. I looked downwards at its hooves. There is great difficulty in looking through a visor grille. It is like tunnel vision . . . At that point I felt a mighty explosion in my face and must have been rendered unconscious. I awoke lying on my back looking up at a circle of blades and staves driving into my body, and I remember howling.”
A. J. Stewart’s vision that night was of James’s death at the Battle of Flodden Field. And it was with that vision that the twentieth-century A. J. Stewart seems finally to have been submerged in the reborn personality of James IV.
How and, more important, why did this takeover of one personality by another occur? Ian Wilson examined the case of A. J. Stewart in some detail for his book Mind Out of Time and has documented a childhood that was, in her pre-school years, very lonely and isolated, and later, in her pre-teen years, what she herself has described as “hideously unhappy,” though she does not make explicit the reasons for this, Ian Wilson also mentions one other significant fact: A. J. Stewart suffered from migraine.
Alterations of consciousness and mental confusion are common accompaniments of migraine. There may be disturbances of speech or memory, hallucinations, or odd dreamy mental states in which the person may have feelings of déjà vu, depersonalisation and derealisation (uncertainty about whether they or things around them are real or not), timelessness, or forced reminiscence (memories of the past which come back into the mind unbidden), and all or any of these may appear in the absence of the typical migraine headache as what is called a “mental migraine equivalent.”
It seems to be during adolescence, the time at which migraine attacks typically start, that A. J. Stewart’s identification with James IV began in earnest. Just how easily migraine-induced mental disturbances might be interpreted as scenes from a past life is shown by the following case history, given by Oliver Sacks in Organic Psychiatry:
A forty-four-year-old man suffered very occasional attacks of migraine from adolescence . . . In one attack a profound dream-like state followed the visual phenomena thus: “First I couldn’t think where I was, and then I suddenly realised that I was back in California . . . It was a hot summer day. I saw my wife moving about on the verandah, and I called her to bring me a Coke. She turned to me with an odd look on her face, and said: “Are you sick or something?” I suddenly seemed to wake-up, and realised that it was a winter’s day in New York, and there was no verandah and that it wasn’t my wife but my secretary who was standing in the office looking strangely at me.
One more incident from her adolescence forms yet another link between A. J. Stewart’s migraine and her identification with James. Ian Wilson describes how, in her late teens, A. J. Stewart looked into a mirror in the WC compartment of a train and “saw herself with a masculine-looking face, longer and older than her real face, and with points of sapphire around the head.” This inability to recognise something very familiar—agnosia—is also a characteristic of migraine, and almost certainly accounts for this distorted perception of her own image. But for A. J. Stewart it may have been all that was needed to consolidate her growing conviction that she was not Ada Kay but James IV of Scotland.
There are other clues to the genesis of James in Ada’s adolescence. When she was twelve her class was set Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem Marmion to read. Marmion is set in Scotland in the reign of James IV and is particularly concerned with the events leading to the Battle of Flodden Field. But although it is an obvious source both for Ada’s historical knowledge of the period, and also as a trigger for her personal fascination with James, she insists in her autobiography not only that she never discovered what the book was about because she missed the relevant lessons because of migraine but that she could not even bear the sight of it. It brought her out in goose pimples so that she was forced to bury it in her desk beneath every other book she could lay her hands on.
Any of these incidents alone would probably not have been enough to create this alternative and convincing personality. But the flashbacks and change of body image which were almost certainly migraine-induced, combined with the need of a lonely child and an unhappy adolescent to find a more fulfilling fantasy life, all these made fertile ground for the dream that triggered the final metamorphosis.
Psychiatric diagnosis sometimes depends on a particular patient meeting a particular doctor at a particular time. If Uttara Haddur had met Dr. Morton Prince in the 1870s she would almost certainly have gone down in psychiatric history as a classic case of multiple personality. If she had visited a British psychiatric clinic in the 1990s she would probably have been diagnosed as having a hysterical dissociation. As it happened, she met Dr. Ian Stevenson and, separately, Dr. V. V. Akolkar in the 1970s. Both of them were interested in cases of apparent reincarnation, both of them examined her case very painstakingly and in great detail. And both of them concluded that her experiences were best accounted for by supposing that she had memories of a previous life as a Bengali woman, Sharada, who died in about 1830.
They based their conclusions, quite logically, on her behaviour as Sharada, her memories of Sharada’s life, and above all on the fact that she seemed to speak Sharada’s language. But it may be that if they had started in the present, if the focus of their attentions had been primarily Uttara herself, and not Sharada, her alter ego, they might have come to a different conclusion.
Uttara Haddur was born in Nagpur, India, in March 1941. She grew into an intelligent young woman with a flair for languages. She took MA degrees in English and in Public Administration in 1969 and 1971 respectively, and was on the teaching staff of Nagpur University from 1973 to 1975.
Until she was thirty-two years old, Uttara’s life was unremarkable. But then, in March 1974, she began to undergo alterations of personality during which she claimed to be a young married Bengali lady named Sharada. “Sharada” emerged at regular intervals, usually on the same day of each month. She claimed to be from Burdwan, about 590 miles (950 kilometres) north-east of Nagpur, and to be the wife of a physician and the daughter of a Sanskrit pundit, both of whose names she gave. She said that when she twenty-four and pregnant, her husband had taken her to her maternal aunt’s house in Saptagram. Here, in the seventh month of her pregnancy, she received a fatal snakebite while picking flowers in the garden, and died on the same day of the month as Sharada habitually appeared.
To begin with, Sharada manifested frequently—more than twenty-eight times between March 1974 and August 1981. At first the episodes were relatively brief, lasting less than half an hour. But as the Sharada personality became more established, she emerged for longer. Between 1974 and 1983 Sharada manifested almost twice a month and often remained in control for several days—the longest spell lasting for 41 days. Thereafter her influence started to fade, and she would appear only occasionally, around the time of the religious festival of the goddess Durga.
When Sharada retreated, Uttara would have no memory at all of this other life. Sometimes Uttara would go to bed as her normal self and wake up as Sharada. But usually Uttara had a premonitory sign a few hours before Sharada emerged—a feeling as though ants were crawling on the top of her head. The most likely explanation of this feeling is that it was due to anxiety: “funny feelings” or a feeling of bands around the head are all common features of anxiety. Feelings like this can also signal the onset of some epileptic event, but this is unlikely simply because there is no evidence that Uttara suffered any loss of consciousness. However, we can’t discount this possibility entirely because there is some evidence that at these times she did become confused. One observer described Sharada’s emergence on 8 February 1976 thus:
Visiting the toilet, returning from it in a state of exhaustion and disorientation with pallor in the face; lying on the bed for quite some time, as though in a strange house and among strangers; taking a head bath with cold water; then putting vermilion in the parting of her hair; dressing up in a Bengali way, draping only a sari and covering her head with the sari.
What can be said is that in epilepsy a personality change of the degree shown by Sharada would be extremely rare, so unusual that we can probably discount epilepsy as a factor in the emergence of Sharada.
Sharada was devout, and spent almost all her time in prayer, the worship of the Bengali goddess Durga and the singing of devotional songs. She always spoke as though she was living in the Bengal ruled by the East India Company, and used to refer to fights between the natives and the English soldiers. She displayed a wide knowledge of Bengal and Bengali customs, and her social behaviour and the type of Bengali she spoke were both consistent with this time-frame. She seemed fearful and suspicious of modern electrical appliances, referring, for example, to a tape recorder as a witch. She wore a sari but no undergarments. When she was menstruating she asked for plantain leaves and cotton wool. She bathed and washed her hair with cold water, rubbing herself dry with one end of her wet sari instead of using a towel. At meals she would watch the way Uttara’s family ate and copy them.
Sharada claimed to be a daughter of the Chattopadhyaya family, a family of pundits, and mentioned the names of several members of her family. Such a family did indeed live in Bengal during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and much (though not all) of the information Sharada gave about them was found to be correct. So completely did the “Sharada” personality take over that she did not seem to recognise Uttara’s family and friends and behaved as though her house was unfamiliar.
Uttara’s native language was Marathi, and she is known to have read Bengali novels in Marathi translation, including novels by Sharad Chandra Chattopadhyaya, who not only shared the same surname as Sharada’s presumed family but also came from the same general region of the country. Stevenson and Akolkar asked authorities on Bengali literature whether any of the elements of Sharada’s claimed life—family and place-names, the locations and descriptions of temples, for example—might have any fictional basis in these novels. But despite an extensive search, no evidence seems to have been found that this was so. Although Uttara adopted the name Chattopadhyaya, for example, this is a very common Bengali name: other names of Sharada’s relatives and ancestors don’t appear in the novels at all. The names that do crop up in both Sharada’s life and in the novels are again such common Bengali names that no particular significance can be attached to them.
But the feature of the case which has aroused the most interest is that although Uttara and her family spoke Marathi, one of the northern Indian languages, during those periods when Uttara seemed to be completely taken over by Sharada’s personality, she spoke Bengali, a language she claimed never to have learned. And not only did she speak it when she was awake, but she 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.
As a young girl Uttara had shown a great interest in Bengal and Bengali, and we know that she had expressed a strong desire to learn the language. She had even had at least some Bengali lessons with a classmate, F., in her matriculation year at school. But she seems to have been much more fluent in the language than these rudimentary lessons would explain. What is more, she spoke Bengali much as it would have been spoken in the early nineteenth century, the period she claimed to have lived in.
This is the aspect of the case which, if one is to believe the language experts who have studied it, is very difficult to explain by rational hypothesis, and it is discussed in more detail on pages 211–213. In fact, interest has always focused so strongly on Uttara’s apparent ability to speak Bengali that little attention has been paid to the personality of Uttara herself, to why the Sharada personality emerged when it did and in the form it did.
It has always been accepted that thirty-two is an odd age for the spontaneous emergence of a past life. Past-life memories that emerge spontaneously, not under the influence of a hypnotic regression, nearly always do so in very early childhood, and have usually disappeared by the age of seven or eight. So what happened to Uttara around the time that her past-life memories began to emerge?
To understand this we need first to go back to Uttara’s adolescence. When she was a young child, Uttara had lived mainly with her grandparents and had seen little of her father. Not until she was 14 did they become closer and develop what has been described by Dr. Akolkar as more of an intellectual friendship than a father–daughter relationship. Uttara’s father was a strongly spiritual man who would have liked to become a yogi, but he was too involved with political and other activities to be able to fulfil this ambition. Perhaps in compensation, he did his best to put his daughter on a spiritual path. The two of them discussed philosophical and spiritual matters, and he introduced her to meditation in 1965.
At around this time, when she was twenty-four, Uttara suffered an emotional blow that seems to have been powerful enough to change the course of her life. She met again F., the young man with whom she had shared those adolescent Bengali lessons. This time she felt drawn not only to F., but to his father, Bhau. The two seem to have developed a close emotional relationship, and Bhau told her: “Like a straw to a drowning man, your support is like that of a little goddess.”
Gradually, she began to dream of marriage to F., but her dreams were not simply of becoming F.’s wife but of being Bhau’s daughter-in-law. However, when she made her feelings clear to F., she was devastated to find that they were not returned. Some years later, describing the experience to Akolkar, she wrote:
I simply could not believe him. But at the same time I resolved, and even expressed it, that if I could not marry him, I would not marry at all. The fear, however, that I would lose my life’s pillar made me very restless. But I kept on hoping. During this period I began to experience mental exhaustion.
She begged Bhau to get his son married, if not to her then to the girl he preferred, so that her misery might end. But he did nothing. In November 1972, a few months before her thirty-second birthday, and the first manifestation of Sharada, Bhau died. To Uttara, this was the final blow, the end of her hopes of marriage to F. She also seems to have been tormented with guilt:
The thought that Bhau did not favour the marriage was already pricking me; now it began to torment me. I began to feel terribly exhausted, perhaps because the pillar of my life had begun to shake. I was at a point of transition in my life . . . I began to feel that I had sinned against the girl to whom F. rightfully belonged.
One wonders, though this is speculation, just which of the two, father or son, she regarded as her “life’s pillar” whose loss she dreaded.
It was while she was in the state of emotional turmoil which followed Bhau’s death and the death of her hopes of marriage to his son that another male father figure entered Uttara’s life. This relationship was to prove crucial to her future and to the emergence of Sharada.
Uttara’s spiritual life was already important to her, and so, like many a young woman disappointed in love, she sought solace in religion. In 1970 she consulted a homoeopathic doctor, Dr. Z., a man in his fiffies. He, too, had strong spiritual leanings and had established an ashram-cum-nursing home near Nagpur. At Dr. Z’s first touch, Uttara felt drawn to him “like an iron particle to a magnet.” She felt a strong desire to meet him again and again. Soon after his treatments began, her agony of mind was calmed, and she started to sleep soundly, for the first time in months. Uttara decided to go to stay in the ashram, giving herself entirely over to the meditative life. Once the decision was made, it was liberating, as is evident from the description of her feelings at this time when she wrote in an autobiographical note of 14 October 1974:
A hurricane-like force swept me off and liberated me completely from the attraction towards my young friend F. . . . I was now rid of everything that had so far stood in the way of spiritual search . . . Knowledge and ignorance, good and evil, happiness and suffering of the entire world had now reached up to my heart, and I myself became that which I so much had wanted to be . . . In my mind now there was no opposition; there was no past behind me and no eagerly awaited future ahead. I had no caste, no name, no clan, no country, nothing . . . It was as if a new happiness was sprouting. I began to feel that I must now allow my life stream to stagnate. I must move towards a new life regardless of the sacrifice it might entail. I experienced a strong urge within me to give myself fully for the sake of whatever I thought proper in this transition to a new life. I had to keep my psychic stream flowing. It was impossible to arrest it and allow it to stagnate.
This is the background, and the state of mind, against which Sharada made her first appearance.
Uttara joined Dr. Z’s ashram in December 1973. Almost immediately, “a strange idea began to take shape” in her mind. She became convinced that she was to embark on a spiritual pilgrimage and that she needed a companion to help her on this spiritual journey. Needless to say, it was Dr. Z. whom she had cast in this role. She envisaged their relationship as a purely spiritual one, but marriage would, she believed, be necessary to make it socially acceptable. Unfortunately, Dr. Z. failed to share her belief that their marriage was necessary for Uttara’s spiritual development. Once again, she was rejected.
Early in 1974 she began to experience spells of blankness and an inability to recall. Sometimes she would see, in her mind’s eye, images of places, people and situations which bore no relationship to her own life and which would interrupt her prayers and meditations. Uttara would also “sort of see” in the mirror another image behind her own, which she felt was her own image but slightly different.
In February she began to “see” Bengali alphabets before her mind’s eye and “hear” Bengali sentences. Occasionally, she would mutter in Bengali. Dr. Z. and a woman friend of his kept notes of what she said, and Dr. Z. told Uttara’s father that she referred to having had a relationship with him (Dr. Z.) in a previous life.
Uttara’s feelings about Dr. Z. were made clear when, two years later, Dr. Akolkar interviewed her during one of Sharada’s manifestations. He read her a list of names and asked her to write down next to each what came into her mind. Some were the names of the relations Sharada had named, and her response was to write down “grandfather” or “brother” or whatever was appropriate. But when the name of a woman friend of Dr. Z.’s was read out, her face became visibly tense and she refused to speak. When she was pressed, the following conversation took place, in Bengali:
Sharada: I shall not speak about her.
Q: Why not?
A: She is a bhogadi [woman of bad character].
Q: Why don’t you wish to speak about her?
A: It is guja katha [a secret tale].
Q: But where did it take place?
A: In this masi-ma’s town [Nagpur].
Q: How old is that lady?
A: Thirty-five years.
Q: Is she married?
A: She does not wear ornaments. She has a husband.
Q: What language does she speak?
A: This masi-ma’s language [that is, Marathi].
Q: Does she have a male friend?
A: No answer.
Q: About the name S. [the woman friend].
A: A vigorous shake of the head indicated her refusal to speak.
Here is the evidence that however hard she tried, Uttara was not able to separate herself completely from Sharada. Sometimes during dissociation there is not a total suppression of normal personality, some awareness is maintained, separation of the two streams of consciousness is not complete. Dr. Z. and his woman friend were part of Uttara’s life, not Sharada’s. And yet it is quite evident that Sharada was not only very well aware of this relationship but was very deeply affected by it. Sharada is Uttara; Uttara is Sharada.
Uttara was thirty-two, the age at which a single, childless woman starts to become increasingly aware that her biological clock is running down and her chances of finding a mate are decreasing every year. Her emotional life had been highly unsatisfactory. Now, in Dr. Z., she seemed to have found the perfect focus for both her emotional and her spiritual needs; he was the older man, the spiritual adviser, the lover. But when she suggested marriage he failed to understand how she felt.
Sharada provided a solution. By displacing her love into a past life, Uttara could both arouse Dr. Z.’s interest and keep his attention. As Sharada, she could declare her love in perfect safety—because it was in the past it was a fait accompli and allowed of no rejection. As Sharada, she could make her sexuality very clear: she wears her sari without undergarments; she draws attention to her menstruation by demanding plantain leaves and cotton wool.
And yet in the end—and this is why hers is such a tragic tale—Sharada was not quite enough. When there is a dissociation of personality, it is because there is some gain to the individual. To begin with the Sharada personality was so strong and so much in evidence that it has to be assumed that it was working for Uttara, influencing those around her as she wished them to be influenced. Sharada was shy and especially reluctant to meet men—with one exception. She was eager to meet Dr. Z., who, she claimed, was her husband in her previous Bengali life, again. But even then, even when she had made the bond between them clear, he would not acknowledge it or reciprocate her interest; he made it clear that he himself had no memories of a past life with or without Sharada.
Sharada appeared regularly until 1983, and then gradually her influence started to fade. When Dr. Akolkar met her in 1989, Uttara told him that in 1988 Sharada had emerged only once, on the eighth and ninth days of the festival of the goddess Durga. The Sharada personality had no more to offer Uttara; it had run its course.