XII Reincarnation

Almost all witches believe in reincarnation.1 It is probably true to say that they share this belief with a majority of the human race (or of those members of it who believe in survival after death in whatever form), because the concept of a single life followed by a one-off, heaven-or-hell judgement is peculiar to the patriarchal monotheist religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — though the Jewish belief is perhaps more shadowy than the other two, and reincarnation is certainly implicit in Hebrew Cabalistic thinking.

Belief in reincarnation was widespread among early Christians, and was general among the Gnostics. St Jerome (AD 340-420) says that a form of it was taught to a select few in the early Church.² But it was declared anathema by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, for obvious reasons. The Church had become a State disciplinary machine, with its structure inseparable from that of the Imperial civil service; and the promise of heaven or the threat of hell, as a reward or punishment for behaviour in this immediate life, was therefore an essential Establishment weapon. Gnostic versions of the teachings of Jesus (some of them probably with as much claim to authenticity as the official Gospels) had to be banned, hunted down and destroyed for the same reasons; they saw salvation in terms of individual enlightenment, whereas the official Church saw it in terms of obedience to the bishop.

The theory of reincarnation holds, briefly, that each individual human soul or essence is reborn again and again, in a series of bodily incarnations on this earth, learning its lessons and facing the consequences of its actions, until it is sufficiently advanced to progress to the next stage (whatever that may be). The actual working out of the theory is closely bound up with the Theory of Levels, since it involves the stratification of the human entity into its component planes, which correspond to those of the Cosmos as a whole.

These planes are interpreted in various ways, according to the school of occult thought being followed. But the table of them given can be taken as a generally accepted standard. The numbering and definitions are those used by Dion Fortune in The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, and The Cosmic Doctrine. She does not list the Etheric as a separate plane, but this is purely a matter of nomenclature; many other writers (and even Dion Fortune herself elsewhere) often speak of the Etheric Plane, and it is reasonable to do so, because it is of great practical importance in psychic working. It is, for example, the substance of the innermost band of the human aura as seen by sensitives, and there is reason to believe that it is responsible for the phenomena recorded by Kirlian photography.

The seven (or eight, if we include the Etheric) levels or ‘bodies’ of a human entity are divided into two groups, generally called the Individuality and the Personality. The Individuality (Upper Spiritual,³ Lower Spiritual and Upper Mental) is the immortal part, which survives from incarnation to incarnation. The Personality (Lower Mental, Upper Astral, Lower Astral, Etheric and Physical) is the transient part, built up during a single incarnation and discarded when it ends.

The Individuality is bisexual — which does not mean sexless but signifies that it contains the creative male and female essences, in dynamic balance. The Personality, on the other hand, is either male or female; each of us has to experience both male and female incarnations, learning the lessons of each polarity, so that the dynamic balance of the Individuality may become fully developed.

The concept is perfectly expressed by the Chinese Yin-Yang symbol. (See Figure 6.) The white part represents the male, positive, light, fertilizing Yang aspect and can be taken as a symbol of the Personality in a male incarnation; it will be noted that it contains the seed (the black spot) of its complementary opposite, the Yin aspect. The black part represents the female, receptive, dark, formative Yin will be noticed that it, too, contains the seed (the white spot) of its complementary opposite, the Yang aspect. The complete Yin-Yang symbol represents the immortal Individuality, with both aspects in perfect balance.

Fig. 6

Another symbol which represent the process in its serial sense is the Wiccan High Priestess’s amber-and-jet ‘necklace which is the circle of rebirth’ — the amber (solar) beads representing male incarnations, and the jet (lunar) ones female incarnations. (Though such lives do not necessarily alternate.)

However, the ‘male-positive, female-negative’ formulation is over-simplified — and here again, the levels come into it. The male tends to be positive on the physical and mental planes, and negative on the astral and spiritual; while the female tends to be positive on the astral and spiritual planes, and negative on the physical and mental. Or perhaps it would be better to say ‘active-fertilizing’ instead of ‘positive', and ‘receptive-formative’ instead of ‘negative', in each case. This cross-over pattern of functions between male and female is one of the meanings of the caduceus symbol of snakes intertwined about an upright staff (see Figure 7); it is interesting that it is the badge of Hermes/Mercury, the most bisexual of the Classical gods, whose astrological sign is itself a combination of male and female symbols.⁴

A familiar example of this change-over of polarity with the different planes is that of the woman-Muse and the man-artist. Beatrice fertilizes Dante, and Dante gives birth to the result; an exact parallel to the impregnation of a man by a woman on the physical plane.⁵ As Wilfred says in Dion Fortune’s The Sea Priestess: ‘Then I saw why there must be priestesses as well as priests; for there is a dynamism in a woman that fecundates the emotional nature of a man as surely as he fecundates her physical body; this was a thing forgotten by modern civilisation which stereotypes and conventionalises all things and forgets the Moon, Our Lady of Flux and Reflux.’

But to return to what may be called the mechanics of reincarnation. On physical death, the first of the ‘outer shells’ is shed: the physical body. The etheric body disintegrates, breaking the vital link between the physical body and the astral, mental and spiritual bodies. Cut off from the mains, so to speak, the physical body is no longer a part of the total entity and begins to decay.

Fig. 7

The focus of consciousness becomes, in the first place, the astral body. For the time being, one is in a continuous state equivalent to astral projection.

The rate of withdrawal up the planes depends on the person. Some (particularly those with the grosser obsessions, such as alcoholism or an unhealthy sexual libido) resist the process, either taking a long time to understand that they are physically dead, or refusing to come to terms with it; this is the explanation of many ‘hauntings’ or sensations of psychic vampirism felt by the still-incarnated. Effective exorcism, by a skilled sensitive who knows what he or she is doing, is often a matter of confronting the astral entity and persuading it of the necessity of normal withdrawal. A typical case was recounted to us by our friend the Rev. Christopher Neil-Smith, one of the best exorcists in England; he was called in by a family who could not keep au pair girls, because they were all terrified by the bedroom (on the face of it, very pleasant) which they were given. Christopher contacted the cause — a lesbian ghost! He disputed with her, using his own Christian words of power, and persuaded her of the error of her astral molestations. The trouble ceased thereafter.

(On this question of words of power: their effectiveness depends on their reality and significance to the exorcist, and of course to the astral entity. In this case, the Christian ones were obviously the effective ones; a witch, a Hindu or a Jew might use different ones with equal effect — though the beliefs of the ‘ghost’ are significant too. One is reminded of the story of the vampire challenged with a crucifix, who retorted: ‘Oy, oy, oy — have you got the wrong vampire!’ — which is not such a joke as it sounds.)

At the other end of the scale, well-integrated and advanced souls may of their own choice delay complete withdrawal in order to help still-incarnated friends. We believe, on good evidence, that Stewart’s parents are such a case. His father died physically in 1953, and his mother in 1958; and Stewart and Janet did not meet until 1970. Yet on several key occasions in recent years, Stewart’s mother, with his father in the background, seems to have got in touch with us using Janet as a medium, communicating by automatic writing and in other ways, including some startling ‘meaningful coincidences', and making use of utterly characteristic phraseology, references and concepts of which Janet could not possibly have known. Leaning over backwards to be sceptical, one might admit unconscious telepathy between Stewart and Janet as an explanation; but in all the circumstances, we can only find direct communication from Agnes Farrar believable.

The intermediate stage between detachment from the physical plane and complete withdrawal of the Individuality seems to be a period of varying duration in what are generally called the Summerlands. The Summerlands have a real existence on the astral plane, and yet are to a certain extent self-created, whether on an individual or a group basis. In other words, the kind of Summerland in which you find yourself, and the company you meet there, depends on your own stage of development and on the strength of your links with the other entities concerned. Parts of the Personality of your last incarnation, on the astral and lower mental levels, are obviously still involved. In general, it seems to be a period of necessary rest and recuperation, and of the absorption (and discussion with friends?) of the lessons of the incarnation just experienced.

In due course, you withdraw from the Summerlands too; all that is left is your Individuality, your immortal self, existing on a level of consciousness about which we, at least, are not prepared to be dogmatic, because its nature can hardly be grasped except perhaps in flashes of intuition, or described in the language of the level on which we find ourselves at the moment. But it can be said that it, too, is a period of absorption of experience, at the fundamental level of the Individual; and perhaps, in proportion to one’s degree of development, of consideration and choice of the circumstances of one’s coming reincarnation.

As the time for that reincarnation approaches, the Individual starts to gather around itself the raw materials of the ‘outer shells’ required for a new Personality. They can only be the raw materials, because a fully developed Personality is the gradual creation of the circumstances of the new incarnation, and of one’s reaction to it.

The final step is physical reincarnation, when the entity (Individuality plus raw materials of the new Personality) ensouls a foetus at the moment of conception. On the implications of that for the parents, more will be said in Section XV, ‘Witchcraft and Sex’.

What does the Individuality accumulate from incarnation to incarnation, apart from ‘experience'? It accumulates karma. This Hindu term has become the accepted Western word for the concept, because no exact equivalent exists in the European languages. Its original literal meaning is merely ‘action', or ‘cause-and-effect’.

The simplest way to look at karma is as a kind of spiritual bank-balance of one’s good and evil deeds, and of the results of one’s wisdom and stupidity, over the totality of one’s lives. But to get a clear picture of its meaning, one should not think so much of ‘someone up there’ totting up the balance and rewarding or punishing us accordingly, as of the root meaning cause-and-effect. The concept is that everything we do sets up a chain reaction of effects, as inevitably as a pebble dropped in a pool causes ripples, and that we have to live with the results. A ripple (or tidal wave) which we cause may not bounce back at us till many lives later — but bounce back it will, by the nature of the totally interconnected structure of our universe. This interconnection compels us, sooner or later, to restore equilibrium which we have disturbed, to harvest the crops we have sown (including the good ones), to pay the debts we have incurred and to draw the interest on our wise investments. Creative activity or moral embezzlement alike come home to roost. To return to the bank-balance analogy — the karmic bank’s computer is foolproof, inexorable and equipped with infinite memory.

The process of repeated reincarnation, therefore, is one of working out the karmic balance until a permanently healthy equilibrium is achieved. (A dynamic equilibrium, not a static one, be it noted.)

The immortal Individual, freed by its own efforts from the need for further incarnations on this plane, can then move on to the next stage. The nature of that stage we can only envisage dimly, at our present level of development; if we could grasp its essence and its detail, we should not still be here.

And yet there is an exception to that rule, too: the bodhisattva. This is another Hindu word which has entered into Western usage in the absence of a European equivalent. A bodhisattva is a perfected Individuality which no longer needs to reincarnate but chooses to do so of its own free will in order to help and guide less-developed mortals. One may reasonably infer, for example, that Jesus6 and the Buddha were bodhisattvas; and human nature being what it is, the impact of such entities on the people of their time often led to their deification in later memory. It may well be, for instance, that such God-figures as Isis, Osiris, Zeus, Athene, Dana and Brid were built on the revered memory of human bodhisattvas. The goddess Aradia, inherited by Wicca from Tuscan tradition, seems to us to bear the hallmarks of such a development, and perhaps more clearly than most; the legend describes her as bringing to humans the teachings ‘of my mother Diana'; she represents herself as the channel of divine wisdom, not its source, and this would be typical of a bodhisattva. So if we are right, not even witches are immune from the tendency to turn a dimly remembered outstanding teacher into a God or a Goddess. (Not that that should deter anyone from continuing to use Aradia as a Goddess-name if, like ourselves, they are already doing so. The thought-form has been powerfully built up over the generations, so that Aradia has become an effective call-sign for, and channel to, the Goddess Herself. Which is basically what all God-forms and Goddess-forms are; but more on that in Section XIV, ‘Myth, Ritual and Symbolism’.)

Not all bodhisattvas have had such a remembered impact as these great figures, of course. It depends on the nature and scale of the task they have incarnated to perform. Many of them will work unobtrusively, deliberately not letting themselves be recognized as anything more than remarkable human beings; and that, of course, is what they are. The divinity which shines through them does not mean a shedding of humanity, but its perfection.

And in reaching forward towards that goal, the steady working out of karma is the conscious task of all initiates, including those whose path is Wicca. This task, and not mere curiosity, is the purpose of deliberate efforts at incarnation recall, which we shall be dealing with in a minute. Once one reaches a certain stage of conscious development, the wider view one has of the meaning of one’s own karma, and of the factors which have created it over a series of lives, the more intelligently one can take control of the way ahead.

There are magical techniques for speeding up karma (or, come to that, for slowing it down) but these are not lightly taught until initiates are ready for them. Well-meaning initiates who plunge enthusiastically into such techniques, in the hope of developing themselves as rapidly as possible, all too often find they have bitten off more than they can chew; the pace of events can run ahead of their understanding, leaving them in a worse state than when they started. The mere fact of genuine initiation, or of occult involvement of any kind, including witchcraft, tends to speed up karma in any case, because of the sleeping levels that are being awakened; and that is as much as most of us can cope with.

One more point should be made on karma, before we go on to the question of group reincarnation phenomena. We have spoken of karma as an almost impersonal process, set in train by the inexorable laws of cause and effect. And that is its basic principle of action. But that does not mean there is no intervention or that what are sometimes called ‘the Lords of Karma’ are mere observers. Higher entities of many kinds do exist and function on the non-material planes, intermediate between humankind and the ultimate creative force, as every religion has recognized. We are only a part of a complex, many-levelled, interdependent Cosmos. And these higher entities have their own roles to play in the evolving life of the whole. So it would be arrogant to imagine that their actions do not affect us, or that they never intervene or steer us in a required direction. What is more, they can be appealed to by the self-attuning process known as invocation.

They can be compared, if you like, with farmers. A good farmer does not ignore or try to sabotage the laws of nature; he works with them for maximum yield and a balanced ecology. In the same way, the Lords of Karma do not override the laws of cause and effect; but they can and do, if we are willing, help us not to fall foul of them. They can help us to make use of natural processes instead of battling against them to our own and other people’s hurt. Co-operate with them deliberately, try to put ourselves in tune with their purpose, and we will sometimes find ourselves pushed in directions the immediate significance of which we cannot grasp. In our own professional jargon, we sometimes call this ‘the Script'; and for us personally, as for many other people, ‘the Script’ can move in mysterious ways which turn out in the end to be purposeful.

To sum up: the working out of karma, like farming, is a combination of inexorable natural processes, and the intelligent manipulation of those processes by purposeful beings who are aware of the overall programme.

(If you choose to call these entities angels and archangels and so on, why not? Whether you find the words acceptable depends on how loaded with associations they are from your own upbringing. If those associations raise your hackles, use other words. When you get down to it, the concepts are the same. But there is no point in scratching old sores just for the fun of it.)

As soon as one starts investigating reincarnation, and having one’s first experiences of recall, one comes up against the phenomenon of group reincarnation; one discovers that one has met, and interacted with, certain people before, in other lives, perhaps in many lives. This knowledge may range from a sudden (and maybe mutual) flash of recognition when meeting a complete stranger (the flash often having positive or negative emotional overtones that seem quite disproportionate in terms of your this-life situation), to the realization that a relationship in this life is merely the continuation, development and working-out of a many-life relationship, maybe involving several people. The cautious researcher into his own history (and one should be cautious in such matters) is likely to tell himself that such a flash or realization is probably wishful thinking, the projection of unresolved emotions, or facile rationalization of puzzling elements in a present relationship. He may well be right, in any particular case; every occultist knows how temptingly easy it is to dodge the hard work of analysing a personal situation by shrugging the shoulders and saying ‘it’s probably karmic'! But however hard he leans over backwards to avoid such pitfalls, as his past-incarnations picture builds up and is confirmed by external evidence, or by the independently noted recall of others, he will find it more and more impossible to escape the fact that certain people he knows today have been associated with him in past lives.

And when you think of it, such continuing relationships are logically to be expected, on several grounds.

The most obvious is the karmic one. The karmic debts one owes, or is owed, must sooner or later be individually paid by the debtor to the creditor, if that equilibrium towards which all karmic imbalance strives is to be achieved; they cannot be dodged by physical death.7 If in one life, for example, I have warped your development by my own selfishness, the balance will not be restored until I have positively (either in spite of myself or by my own improved understanding) contributed to conditions for your natural development in a later life. Such debts, of course, may be more complex than a straight ‘one-to-one': A, B and C may have created a distorted situation between them in one life which can only be straightened by A, B and C meeting again in the new circumstances of a later life. Or A, B, C, D and E …

The factors tending to such re-meetings are not always negative ones, of course. Creative teamwork for which one life was not enough naturally gives rise to a positive karmic impulse, an urge (both within each of the developing Individualities involved and in wider karmic energy-fields) for the team to re-combine and carry forward what was fruitfully begun.

Such positive and negative ‘loose ends’ all tend to draw people together in life after life, as naturally as gravity draws separate tributaries through or round all geological obstacles, to seek out a particular valley floor and combine in a river which is not quite like any other river, even though it flows ultimately to the same ocean (of karmic equilibrium, to pursue the metaphor to its end).

Experience and logic both confirm that the nature of a relationship may change from life to life; in fact it is to be expected, for imbalances to be resolved or for dynamic development. A and B may be brother and sister in one life, and re-meet in later lives as mother and son, husband and wife, colleagues, rivals, lovers, casual acquaintances or sister and brother the other way round.

Nor need the importance of the relationship be the same (or even arise at all) in any particular subsequent life. That depends on the nature of the lessons to be learned, or the balances to be worked out, in a particular life.

To take a personal example. Janet and Stewart know that they have met in many lives; but two have been especially vividly (and with much confirmation) recalled in this life, presumably because of their relevance to it. The first was in Egypt about the time of Rameses II, and the second in Segovia about the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. In both incarnations, we were associated with people whom we know or have known in our present incarnation. And yet (so far as we have established up to now) only one of those people was involved in both incarnations, the Egyptian and the Spanish; and even that person was known only to Stewart in Egypt, having been born after Janet’s Egyptian death, though in Spain he was involved with both of us. The implication, which tallies with what we know of those two lives, is that they involved different lessons and different problems, which would only be relevant to certain of our ‘fellow-travellers’ in each case.

This, of course, would explain the phenomenon of intense but passing recognition of a stranger. He or she may have been deeply involved in the central ‘agenda’ of some past incarnation, but in this life you may be working out quite separate agendas, and therefore be irrelevant to each other at the present stage. But the sudden recall of a now-irrelevant emotion (even though, in most cases, it would only be subconsciously remembered) can be sharp and puzzling at the time.

Sudden if unconscious recall of this kind may not always be irrelevant to this life; it may be the start of an important re-meeting. Genuine cases of ‘love at first sight’ are often to be explained in this way — being, in fact, not ‘at first sight’ at all, even though the couple think it is.

Which brings us to one of the most powerful of life-after-life reunion drives: love which truly involves the interaction of two immortal Individualities, and not merely of their Personalities in any one incarnation (happy enough though such Personality-love may often be). It is this kind of love which is implied by the term ‘soul-mates’. Perhaps ‘binary stars’ would be an even apter description; two unique entities, each with its own nature, which have formed a complementary whole by revolving in close orbit around a common centre of gravity, in no way isolating themselves from their neighbouring stars — indeed, often affecting them more powerfully than they would as two lone stars, because of the energy generated by their tight, and therefore rapid, mutual orbiting.8

Dion Fortune writes in depth on soul-mates (or, as she calls them, ‘twin souls') in The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, Chapters XVII and XVIII.

As she says (ibid.,), it is ‘unexhausted emotion which forms the Karmic Tie'; and such ties can be set up on many levels less intense and all-embracing than that which exists between soul-mates. Any love or friendship of which something still remains at the time of physical death leaves a bond, of varying strength, tending to draw people together in later lives so that the emotion may be either ‘exhausted’ or developed. As the witches’ Legend of the Descent of the Goddess (Eight Sabbats for Witches,) puts it: ‘To fulfil love, you must return again at the same time and at the same place as the loved ones; and you must meet, and know, and remember, and love them again.’ The witches’ attitude in this case is a deliberate one; they work to ‘know and remember', not merely to react to unconscious memory.

It should be added that any unexhausted emotion sets up a karmic tie — and that includes hatred. This, too, can be treated deliberately; just as one can work to perpetuate a bond of love or friendship, so one can (and indeed would be well advised to) work to resolve a hatred-bond, rather than have it crop up again as unfinished business in a later life.

What are the mechanics of the drawing-together of people who have been associated with each other in past lives? After all, one may accept the principle but still find it hard to swallow that ‘unexhausted emotion’ should arrange a series of apparent coincidences of residence, employment, chance encounters and so on, which bring about such reunions in practice. For example, we took the conscious decision to move from London to Ireland in 1976 for what seemed to us a purely economic reason — that the Republic does not tax writers. And yet on the one hand it was a profound turning-point in our Wiccan development and our work, and on the other it brought us into intimate contact with several people of whose crucial involvement in our past lives we have no doubt whatever. And of all this, as mere tax-refugees, we had not the slightest precognition. Did the Lords of Karma book our boat-tickets? As we have said, they may nudge us in the required direction when necessary; but there would surely be little karmic progress achieved by turning us into mere puppets.

We would suggest that the explanation of most such ‘coincidences’ is far more natural. Namely, that closely involved souls communicate and call to each other at Individuality level in ways of which their Personalities are quite unaware. At soul-mate level this would be particularly intense, amounting to continuous dialogue; but it could also be expected between all ‘fellow-travellers’ in varying degrees. So a totally unconscious decision (as far as the Personality is concerned) could prompt one to buy the necessary boat-ticket, or bring about the necessary meeting, through a message from the Individuality to the Personality, which then takes action for what seem to the conscious mind to be quite different practical or temperamental reasons.

One thing that puzzles many people about reincarnation is the population explosion. If reincarnation is a fact, they argue, surely the number of humans incarnated on the Earth at different periods should remain relatively static?

There seems to us to be several possible answers to this. The first is the simple one that, for reasons known only to the Cosmic Planner (however you define It, Him or Her), new souls are being created all the time, and at present faster than ever. Most sensitive people know the feeling that so-and-so is a ‘young soul’ or an ‘old soul', regardless of his or her chronological age in this incarnation; and this feeling may well be a valid one.

But it may not be as simple as plain ‘creation’. The essence of consciousness is individualization. Non-human animals in general (again perhaps excluding cetaceans — see note XI, 1) are not self-conscious; they are only dimly aware, if at all, of their own separate individuality. Psychically, each of them is part of a group soul.9 One theory (which makes sense — after all, it is difficult to believe in an individually reincarnating gnat, lemming or herring) is that on physical death the non-physical elements in an animal are reabsorbed into the group soul of the species, which ‘buds off new individuals from the common pool for physical manifestation. Only in some of the higher mammals, the theory suggests, do some individuals (with a small ‘i') develop a sufficiently strong ‘separateness’ (the first step towards Individuality with a capital ‘I’) to persist as such into a later incarnation; and this is said to happen in particular among species which are closely associated with human beings.

Now it is only comparatively recently, in evolutionary terms, that mankind has emerged from a stage where group-awareness dominated life, and self-awareness (except in outstanding members of the tribe) was a very shadowy thing. One might reasonably deduce that at that stage, reincarnation also operated (again, with outstanding exceptions) on the group-soul principle, differentiating at first, as man’s evolution progressed, into racial, tribe and clan souls, and only separating out into uniquely reincarnating Individuals gradually, with the increasing development of the conscious mind and personal self-awareness.10

On this basis, the sheer number of souls ‘queueing up’ for individual reincarnation would have increased greatly in recent millennia, and meteorically in the last century or two. And today, when even primitive peoples are being forced (for good or ill) into regular contact with the highly self-aware ‘advanced’ cultures, the number of Individuals (with a capital ‘I’, though at various levels of development) must be unprecedented.

Also, of course, we are at a period of very rapid cultural and psychic evolution; everything is accelerating. One decade sees more changes, in almost every sphere, than a century in our grandparents’ time, or a thousand years in neolithic times. Life is an interconnected whole, on all the levels; so is it not likely that this same acceleration, this same compressing of the time-scale, should apply to karma, too, and to the frequency of reincarnation? We are an integral part of Gaia, the Earth Organism, on her spiritual, mental, astral, etheric and physical planes of being; and if some of her rhythms are speeding up, we too are effected on all the levels. Especially as we ourselves are largely responsible for the changes and are at last beginning to worry about their outcome. So may not an increased sense of urgency, a compulsion to be ‘back on the job', be influencing Individuals who once took their time between incarnations?

The population explosion, of course, has been a world issue for some time now. Responsible thinkers in many lands have been pointing out the ecologically, economically and politically calamitous situation into which it threatens to plunge our planet if it is not checked as a matter of urgency. Some nations are taking practical steps to encourage rational birth control programmes. The biggest single obstacle to such sane policies is unfortunately the Vatican, whose condemnation of contraception seems to us (and indeed to millions of Catholics) to be socially and theologically insupportable, even on Christian grounds; but more about that in Section XV, ‘Witchcraft and Sex’.

It may well be that the human race as a whole, by its irresponsible and head-in-the-sand indifference to the population problem, is actually warping the natural rhythm of reincarnation — to put it bluntly, recalling souls to incarnation faster, and in greater numbers, than Mother Earth can care for them or their healthy karmic progress requires. If so, we are adding dangerously to our negative racial karma; and Mother Earth has drastic ways of saying ‘Enough!’ when such problems get out of hand.

Many of these foregoing ideas are no more than theory and would not necessarily be accepted by everyone who believes in reincarnation. But we hope they are provocative of thought.

How to set about recalling past lives?

Before we discuss techniques, we would like to point out three rules which are absolutely essential to serious work on incarnation recall:

1. Keep written (and where possible taped) records.

2. Keep an open mind, healthily sceptical and yet receptive (provisionally) to all incoming impressions.

3. Check everything possible against known fact (e.g. parish records, history books, period costume, details of everyday life of the supposed time, and so on — particularly on things you could not have known at the time when your impression was recorded).

As Christine Hartley points out (A Case for Reincarnation, p. 80): ‘Make no mistake about it, even if you have the gift for reading the records there are dangers on the path — the danger of wishful thinking is probably the most pronounced; one is so anxious to “see” that one can easily be led into flights of imagination uncontrolled by critical reasoning and discrimination. Since a degree of imagination carefully controlled is necessary on all occasions to lift one’s mind from the rooted base in the material world, it is highly important that there should be great discipline in all experiments that the results may be relied upon.’

To consider Rule 1. Whenever you think you may have had a recall experience, write it down (or dictate it onto tape) immediately, before discussing it with anyone else and before applying Rule 3. Keep the written record and/or the tape; even if you have transcribed a taped impression onto paper, keep the original tape as well, because hesitations, tone of voice and so on may turn out to have significance unrealized at the time. Include sketches, maps, plans or rooms and so on if you can. Keep all these records permanently — do not weed out what seems irrelevant at any stage, because later developments (sometimes years later) may throw new light on it. Taped records are invaluable when it comes to recall under hypnosis or trance; cassette recorders are very cheap these days and are the greatest gift of modern technology to reincarnation (and many other fields of psychic) research.

Rule 2 is the key to the whole approach. Christine Hartley is right: imagination is essential to the process, but uncontrolled imagination can sabotage it. Scepticism must not inhibit imagination at the time, but afterwards it must check dispassionately on what imagination has produced. This is particularly true of spontaneous bits of recall which may or may not be mere daydreams: the trick is to let them flow without censorship, record them, then think about them critically, but keep the record with an open mind and see if later knowledge confirms or demolishes it.11 (And even if it seems demolished, do not throw it away; it may still one day have something to teach you.)

Rule 3 is straight detective work. If a name and a place and a date can be tied up with the Registrar-General’s records, or a detail of agricultural practice in eighteenth-century East Anglia seems wrong to you but is confirmed in due course by an expert on the subject, you have strong evidence of genuine recall.

Another, less concrete but equally encouraging, form of confirmation is the impression-records kept by friends who may have been involved in the same incarnation. Here again, written records, made before discussion, prove their worth, because they greatly reduce the danger of wishful thinking or unconscious ‘alteration to fit’. (Though with friends so likely to be psychically in tune with each other, always bear in mind the possibility of involuntary telepathy. This can usually be diagnosed, or ruled out, by examining the ‘feel’ of the records, by seeing if the common material is viewed from convincingly personal viewpoints instead of one ‘parroting’ the other, and by seeing if each contains its own material so that they overlap instead of merely coinciding.)

One of the most unexpected pieces of confirmation in our own experience came from a five-year-old boy, when we met him and his parents for the first time since he was newborn. He looked at Janet and said at once: ‘I know you.’ Janet replied: ‘I saw you when you were a little baby,’ but he interrupted impatiently: ‘Oh, not then — I mean the other time — when you used to have those clicky things in your hands’ (imitating castanets). ‘But your hair ought to be black … Where’s the other man?’ ‘What other man?’ He brushed it aside and went on: ‘You were my Mummy. But you weren’t Daddy’s wife, you were his friend.’ Everything he came out with — quite spontaneously, Janet deliberately avoiding prompting — tallied with what we already believed we knew of Janet’s incarnation as a courtesan in Segovia around 1500; it also identified one of her ‘missing’ children. He seemed to take it all quite naturally and went on to talk of other things as though he had already forgotten it; but he stayed very close to Janet until it was time for the family to go. There was no way that he, or even his parents, could have known anything about Janet’s conviction that she had had a Segovian incarnation.

The most startlingly impressive material on reincarnation has been obtained by hypnotic regression. In many cases, professional psychiatrists have stumbled upon the phenomenon quite by accident and have then gone on to study it systematically. Regressing a patient under hypnosis, to relive childhood experiences and unearth traumas which can then be appropriately dealt with, is a normal psychiatric technique. But many psychiatrists, in regressing patients to an earlier and earlier stage, have been astonished to find the patients going back not merely to birth or to uterine impressions but apparently to the recall of earlier lives. And many of these doctors, examining the unexpected data with a healthy professional scepticism, have probed further, finally becoming convinced themselves.

Arthur Guirdham’s book The Cathars and Reincarnation, Joan Grant and Denys Kelsey’s Many Lifetimes and Dr Edith Fiore’s You Have Been Here Before are all fascinating descriptions of this process of professional discovery. The collaboration of Grant and Kelsey has been particularly fruitful. She was gifted with apparently total recall of past lives, which she put into book form in such novels (or autobiographies) as Winged Pharaoh and Life as Carola; he was a psychiatrist who happened upon evidence of reincarnation in the way we have described. They began working together in 1958, and in due course were married. Many Lifetimes is a classic in the field.12

Another interesting book on the subject is Encounters with the Past, by Peter Moss with Joe Keeton; it includes two discs recorded during actual regression sessions. More Lives than One, by Jeffrey Iverson, describes the famous Bloxham Tapes, recorded over two decades of work by hypnotherapist Arnall Bloxham.

The case which has attracted the most publicity (although many others are even more convincing) is described in Morey Bernstein’s The Search for Bridey Murphy.

Hypnotism, then, is perhaps the most powerful of all methods of incarnation recall. The snag is that it can also be the most dangerous in the hands of amateurs. Traumas can surface which the operator does not have the knowledge or experience to deal with. Post-hypnotic suggestions can be unwittingly planted which may have damaging results. These and other risks are the reason why every professional hypnotherapist we have spoken to strongly disapproves of stage or television hypnotism; these professionals may often be called upon to undo the harm which a stage hypnotist has done, and of which he was doubtless quite unaware.

There is another danger, in the occult field — that of deliberate manipulation. Janet’s first recall of our joint Egyptian life was obtained under hypnosis by a highly skilled occultist whom we (being then very inexperienced) both trusted. We later realized that he was unscrupulously ‘black’. The recall was genuine enough, but he warped the interpretation of it for his own purposes, and the trouble he caused to both of us took a year or more to clear up. It taught us a bitter lesson.

Hypnotism — particularly deep hypnosis — should only be used for recall or any other purpose when the hypnotist is properly experienced, preferably a professional (though Bloxham, for example, is a skilled amateur), and when his responsibility is beyond question.

A much safer method, which can be very fruitful, for amateur use is what may be called guided meditation. The guide takes an individual or group on a symbolic journey, down a staircase, through a door, onto a high plateau — any calm and conscious exercising of the imagination which stills the linear-logical (left-brain-function) control of the flow of thought and taps the intuitive (right-brain-function) mode of awareness. This may trigger off light, or even deep, trance; if that happens, the guide converses with the person in trance, but merely to elicit information and to reassure — not to implant ideas or suggestions. One of the essential qualities of an experienced High Priestess or High Priest is to know when and how to bring people out of trance gently, at the first sign of distress or exhaustion. (Janet is a trance medium, and Stewart had to learn very early how to watch over her and when to bring her out of it.)

An excellent form for guided meditation of this kind is known as the Christos Experience and is described in Windows of the Mind by G.M. Glaskin. We have used it many times, with interesting results, and have found it quite harmless. Similar techniques are described in Marcia Moore’s Hypersentience.

As an added insurance, it is a good idea to conduct such experiments within a properly cast and strongly envisaged Circle. (See Section XIV for more thoughts on the protective function of the Circle.)

Dreams can be another source of incarnation information. But to make proper and reliable use of it, one should get in the habit of recording dreams — even if only onto tape — immediately on waking, and carefully adhering to Rules 1, 2 and 3 which we have already described. It is also useful to learn something of the basic mechanism of dreams; for example, to learn to distinguish what Freud calls the ‘manifest content’ (the obvious material of the dream, often drawn from events of the day before)¹³ from the ‘latent content’ (what the dream is really trying to say). But on the understanding of dreams, as of many other things, for witches and occultists it is Carl Jung who towers head and shoulders above all other psychological teachers; and several of his school, such as Esther Harding (Woman’s Mysteries) and Erich Neumann (The Great Mother), have followed nobly in his footsteps. The best introduction to Jungian thinking is Man and His Symbols, an anthology edited by Jung himself.

Once you develop the habit of recording dreams, they surface more readily into consciousness, and it is our experience that three kinds of dream soon emerge as being in a class of their own. First, the dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming. Most people know this kind, but few deliberately take charge of them and study them while they are going on — which can be a very revealing experiment.

Second, the dream in which you are astrally projecting. With increasing control, this becomes a special case of the first kind. More about it in Section XX.

And third, the incarnation-recall dream. With experience, you come to recognize the special quality of such a dream; but you still would be wise to apply your knowledge of dream-mechanism to its content. (Was such-and-such a person in the dream a genuine character from the past life? Or a personalized archetype? Or my own animus or anima? Or a screen for someone I don’t want to recognize? … and so on.) Even a genuine recall-dream may be contaminated by other elements.

Incarnation recall in dreams (apart from any telepathic dream-contact, on which again more in Section XX) is a solo process; and the highest development of deliberate solo recall is what Christine Hartley calls ‘conscious mediumship’. She writes, ‘The state is acquired by discipline, silence and perseverance. It is in some aspects the technique applied by various schools of deep meditation, only in this sense one is not retiring from the outward world but in one way reversing the process and going back into it.’ She describes the technique in her book A Case for Reincarnation, page 85 onwards. And although in its operation it is a solo technique, she strongly advises (pp. 87-9) having a second person with you, ‘preferably someone also familiar with the technique, though not necessarily a seer', at least ‘until you are very fully aware of what you can or cannot or should not do’.

The most famous of all American clairvoyants, the late Edgar Cayce, used a rather different technique — self-imposed hypnotic sleep — to give psychic readings to more than six thousand people over forty-three years. He discovered the gift by accident in 1923, and it was a great shock to him as an orthodox fundamentalist Protestant, but it convinced him of the truth of reincarnation. His achievements are summarized in Hans Stefan Santesson’s Reincarnation, p. 126 onwards, and described in depth in Noel Langley’s Edgar Cayce on Reincarnation.

As one becomes more skilled at recall, one finds that one can not only remember one’s own past lives; one can ‘read the records’ for other people as well. The bulk of Edgar Cayce’s work was of this kind, and Many Lifetimes gives repeated examples of Joan Grant’s use of the gift — often successfully called upon by herself and Kelsey in the diagnosis of patients’ problems. Janet has this ability too, though it usually arises spontaneously; at the time of writing, she has not yet reached the stage where she can always exercise it at will.

For a compact guide to various methods of incarnation recall, J.H. Brennan’s little book Five Keys to Past Lives is well worth readingthough we think he under-emphasizes the dangers of amateur hypnosis. The past few pages may seem overloaded with book references; but the plain fact is that the various techniques of recall are too complex for a single chapter to do more than outline them. To make full use of them, you would be well advised either to find an experienced teacher or to read the specialized books. Or preferably both.

But however you proceed — never forget Rules 1, 2 and 3.