During my time at Goldsmiths, heads of department did not occupy that stressful role on a permanent basis, presumably on the assumption that no sane person would put themselves forward for the position if that were the case. Instead, eligible staff members would each serve a three-year term in office, and then the next victim would have their turn. I had my turn from 1997 to 2000.
One afternoon during this period, as I was working in my office, the phone rang and a voice at the other end said, “What I am about to propose to you is going to sound very strange.” It was indeed a rather unusual request. I was being invited to take part in a documentary investigating reincarnation claims among the Druse people in Lebanon. This would involve me spending a few weeks in Lebanon with a film crew, so I was unsure if my employer would be willing to allow me to go. Fortunately, senior management at Goldsmiths approved my request, and so I began to prepare for the adventure.
I was feeling both excited and nervous. Although I had read around the topic of reincarnation, I had never done any fieldwork investigation of the subject. I really did not know what to expect. I had my wife’s blessing for the trip. Any doubts she had had evaporated the moment I told her the fee I would be getting. Even so, I did not relish the prospect of being away from her and my kids in the company of complete strangers for what struck me as a very long time. My feelings of guilt at leaving her at home with all the domestic responsibilities, supported only by our trusty nanny, Morag, were exacerbated when, a few days before I was due to depart, our three-year-old, Alice, broke her arm while playing.
As the taxi drove me to the airport in the early hours of the morning, it was still dark and, if my memory can be trusted, raining heavily. I regretted having agreed to take part, but it was too late to back out. Once I got to the airport and met the crew, most of my anxiety disappeared. They were a nice bunch of guys and immediately made me feel very welcome. And so began one of the most interesting investigations that I have ever taken part in.1
Before discussing the specific version of reincarnation espoused by the Druse, let us consider some general aspects of this widely believed concept.2 Reincarnation is defined as follows in Michael Thalbourne’s Glossary of Terms Used in Parapsychology: “A form of survival in which the human soul, or some aspects of self, is, after the death of the body, reborn into a new body, this process being repeated throughout many lives.”3
Worldwide, a large proportion of the population believes in reincarnation. It is a central tenet of the Indian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism), which together account for over a fifth of the world’s population, and large proportions of the population in Nordic countries and Western and Eastern Europe also endorse this belief.4 Erlendur Haraldsson collated data assessing levels of belief in reincarnation across thirty-five countries. The average endorsement rate across five Nordic countries was found to be 22.6 percent, ranging from a low of 15 percent in Norway to a high of 41 percent in Iceland.5 Among fifteen Western European countries, 22.2 percent expressed belief in reincarnation, with the Maltese having the lowest rate of endorsement (12 percent) and Switzerland having the highest (36 percent).6 Both the United Kingdom and Portugal also had quite high rates of endorsement (29 percent in both cases). The average rate of endorsement was higher across fifteen Eastern European countries, at 27 percent.7 The lowest endorsement rates in Eastern Europe were found to be in East Germany (12 percent) and the highest in Lithuania (44 percent).
By definition, all versions of belief in reincarnation hold that the soul is reborn into a new body following the physical death of the old body, but beyond that there is a lot of variation across cultures. Some cultures maintain that the soul is always reborn into a body of the same sex, and others believe that cross-sex reincarnation can occur. Some hold that humans are always reborn as humans, whereas some hold that one may be reborn as an animal or even an inanimate object. Some believe the soul enters the new body at the point of conception, others believe that it occurs at the point of birth.
Many different arguments have been put forward in support of the reality of reincarnation. One of the most common is that it accounts for apparent injustice in the world. Why is it that some are born into wealth and live long, healthy lives in luxury whereas others are born into extreme poverty and live short lives full of pain and misery? According to those who believe in the law of karma, the circumstances of our current lives reflect our behavior in previous lives. Therefore, if one lives a virtuous life this time around, one can expect to be rewarded with greater wealth and happiness in one’s next incarnation. Similarly, if one lives an immoral life this time, one can expect to be punished with poverty and poor health in the next life. Some people find comfort in this belief insofar as it reassures them that, overall, the world is a just place. Personally, I find it an abhorrent idea, providing as it does an excuse to hold back from trying to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. After all, the argument goes, surely they deserve their current misery given their sins in previous lives?
Reincarnation is sometimes put forward as an explanation for puzzling phenomena such as the existence of child prodigies. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart famously composed his first pieces before the age of five and performed all over Europe as a child. Mathematician, philosopher, and physicist Blaise Pascal completed a treatise on the subject of vibrating bodies at the tender age of nine, followed by his first proof at the age of eleven. Is it possible that these prodigies, along with many others, actually benefited from the transfer of skills obtained in previous lives?
It has also been argued that reincarnation explains the common anomalous experience of déjà vu. Most people have had the strange feeling that they have experienced something before—be it a place, an object, or an event—even though they know that they cannot have done so. Is it possible that this feeling of familiarity occurs because one really has had the experience before—in a past life?
We cannot claim to have definitive explanations for either the existence of child prodigies or the phenomenon of déjà vu, but promising lines of research within psychology and neuroscience provide valuable insights.8 Mainstream scientists generally do not view reincarnation as a promising explanation for either phenomenon.
For some people, reincarnation provides an answer to a potential problem that arises with other versions of life after death: where does the soul go after the physical body dies? On reflection, though, the answer provided by reincarnation—that it simply inhabits a new body—raises more questions than it answers. Is there a gap between leaving a body at the point of death and entering a new one? If so, where is the soul during that period? What possible mechanism could allow a nonphysical soul to exit from one body while retaining certain memories, attitudes, and abilities, and then enter a new body and imprint those same memories, attitudes, and abilities into the physical brain of a developing embryo? No supporter of reincarnation has ever come close to answering these questions.
The strongest evidence in support of reincarnation comes from individuals who claim to remember aspects of their previous lives. Such memories fall into two general categories: those allegedly recovered through the use of hypnotic regression, and those that occur spontaneously, without any type of memory recovery technique. Memories of apparent past lives are the focus of the rest of this chapter.
Past-life memories are usually sought through the use of hypnotic regression for one of two main reasons. The first is that of spiritual enlightenment. Many New Agers are keen to find out who they were in past lives as part of their ongoing spiritual journey. The use of hypnotic past-life regression is quite likely to recover rich and detailed memories of many fascinating former lives in which they were important historical figures (but rarely those accused of war crimes).
The second main reason for being hypnotically regressed into a past life is in a misguided attempt to deal with current psychological problems. A small minority of psychotherapists believe that psychological problems in this life may be caused by trauma experienced in a past life.9 For example, they might argue that a phobia of dogs was caused by being torn to pieces by a pack of wolves in a past life or that a fear of flying is due to having been a fighter pilot in World War II who was shot down. Such claims are generally rejected by mental health experts as indicated by the results of a poll of over a hundred such experts who rated fifty-nine questionable treatments on a continuum from 1 (not at all discredited) to 5 (certainly discredited).10 Past-life therapy was rated as 4.92 on this scale of shame with only crystal healing, orgone therapy, the use of pyramids for restoration of energy, and angel therapy being rated as more discredited.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who read the previous chapter that the available evidence strongly supports the claim that the apparent memories of past lives “recovered” by the use of hypnosis are, in fact, false memories based on a mix of expectation, fantasy, fragments of real memories, and suggestions from the hypnotist.11 Past-life regression typically only works well on people scoring at the high end of hypnotic susceptibility. Most people either fail completely or “recover” only the most sketchy and vague “memories.” But the highly susceptible individual may well experience detailed and vivid imagery, as well as strong emotional reactions, and may appear to be reliving their past-life experiences in the same way that those recovering memories of alien abduction appear to do. However, detailed analysis of the narratives produced reveals conclusively that they are typically describing the Hollywood version of the time and place they claim to be aware of, not the historically accurate version. Furthermore, they are typically unable to answer questions about that era that one might expect someone living at the time to be capable of answering, such as the name of the currency or the then current ruler and whether the country was at war.
The general public became aware of the idea of hypnotic past-life regression as a result of one particular case back in the 1950s: that of Bridey Murphy. In 1952, Morey Bernstein hypnotically regressed Colorado housewife Virginia Tighe on several occasions. While in the regressed state, Virginia spoke with an Irish accent. She claimed that her name was Bridey Murphy and that she lived in Cork in the early nineteenth century. She sang Irish songs and told detailed stories about her life in Ireland. This intriguing story was the subject of a bestselling book by Bernstein as well as newspaper and magazine articles (see plate 8) and a popular film.12 The story also featured in two pop records and inspired a brief craze of “come as you were” parties. Unfortunately, subsequent investigations revealed that neither Bridey Murphy nor any of the people of whom she spoke had ever existed.13 Furthermore, it turned out that in her younger days Virginia had been a talented amateur actor with a particular fondness for playing Irish characters. She had an Irish aunt and an Irish neighbor. The neighbor’s name? Bridey Murphy Corkell.
There are a few other exceptional cases in which detailed and largely accurate historical accounts were given. I can still recall watching a documentary called The Bloxham Tapes on the BBC back in the 1970s and presented by one of the United Kingdom’s most respected broadcasters of the time, Magnus Magnusson. The documentary investigated the work of Cardiff-based hypnotherapist Arnall Bloxham. Bloxham had made over 400 recordings of hypnotic regression sessions in which individuals had apparently been regressed into past lives. It was claimed that when these reports, sometimes packed with rich detail, were checked against the historical record, the only reasonable conclusion that could be drawn was that they provided incontrovertible proof of the reality of reincarnation. This was also the conclusion of a bestselling book written by the program’s producer, Jeffrey Iverson.14
Probably the most impressive case from Bloxham’s collection was a thirty-year-old Welsh housewife whom he referred to as Jane Evans. Jane had rich memories of no fewer than six past lives. Among them were memories of her life in York as Livonia, wife of the tutor to the family of the Roman governor Constantius during the Roman occupation of Britain. She gave the correct names of the governor’s family members and others close to the family, as well as details of their daily lives.
She also recalled her life as Rebecca, the wife of a wealthy Jewish moneylender in 1189, also living in York. She described in detail how the Jewish community was persecuted by the Christians, culminating in her hiding in a crypt in a church where she was found and murdered. This revelation was particularly striking because it was not thought that any churches in York had crypts. To his astonishment, Iverson was then contacted by one Professor Barrie Dobson and informed that a crypt, believed to predate the little-known massacre of the Jews, had been discovered in St. Mary’s Church in the city. Understandably, this was taken as irrefutable proof that Jane had indeed once lived the life of Rebecca.
Jane gave another detailed and generally accurate account of her life as Alison, the Egyptian maid of Jacques Coeur, a wealthy French businessman and financier living in Bourges in 1450. She appeared to know a great deal about Coeur’s life and business affairs and could even accurately describe his house down to the level of ornaments on his mantlepiece.
How could Jane possibly know so much about these lives and others unless she really was reincarnated, as Iverson claimed? The answers were revealed by subsequent investigations by Melvin Harris.15 He hypothesized that the details recalled during the regression sessions may have come from works of historical fiction. Sure enough, he discovered that in 1947 a novel, The Living Wood, had been published about the life of Constantius. It contained all of the historically accurate details recounted by Jane—but, more tellingly, it also included fictional characters that the author had simply invented. These fictional characters also popped up in Jane’s narrative.
It is not entirely clear where the details of Jane’s Rebecca account came from, but Ian Wilson traced three individuals who claim that they recall a radio play from the 1950s telling the story of this historical massacre of the Jews in York. Professor Dobson had second thoughts about what had been originally described as a “crypt.” It turned out to be a vault, built after the era of the Jewish massacre.
As for the life of Jacques Coeur, that was the subject of another historical novel: The Moneyman by Thomas B. Costain, published in 1948. The big giveaway this time was that Alison claimed that Coeur was unmarried, as indeed he was in the novel. But the historical record showed conclusively that he was not only married, he had five children. His house is one of the most photographed in France, appearing, for example, in Joan Evans’s Life in Medieval France.16
The question naturally arises of whether Virginia Tighe, Jane Evans, and others who apparently recover memories of past lives are knowingly attempting to deceive others or whether they believe in the veracity of the narratives produced. Opinion is somewhat divided, but many commentators believe that their stories may be examples of cryptomnesia (literally, “hidden memories”). We know that sometimes we store information in memory but forget the source of that information. This is known as a source attribution error. Thus, the images that are perceived in the mind’s eye during a hypnotic regression session may be based on books read, films and documentaries watched, and so on, combined with fantasy, expectation, and fragments of personal memory. The end result may be a detailed and vivid memory that feels as real to the individual as any of their memories of events that they have experienced firsthand.
This explanation of past-life memories is supported by the results of a series of studies by Nicholas Spanos and colleagues.17 Results revealed that volunteers who reported memories of a past life in response to hypnotic suggestions had higher levels of fantasy-proneness and hypnotic susceptibility compared to those who did not, but the groups did not differ in terms of levels of psychopathological tendencies. In other words, the typical personality profile of those in the former group was the same as that found for those reporting alien abduction.
The influence of expectation on the content of the “recovered” memories was clearly demonstrated in these studies. Some volunteers were informed before the regression that the memories reported during such sessions often appear to be from identities of a different race and gender to those of the volunteers, and that they were often from exotic cultures. This was reflected in the content of the narratives produced compared to the narratives produced by volunteers who were not primed in this way. In another study, some volunteers were told before the session that child abuse was common in the past, and others were not primed in this way. Once again, the priming affected the content of the reported memories. Whether or not the volunteers accepted their apparent memories as genuine evidence for reincarnation depended primarily on their preexisting beliefs about reincarnation and whether they had been led to believe by the experimenters that reincarnation was a scientifically plausible concept.
Evidence supporting the idea that those reporting past-life memories are more susceptible to false memories was reported by Cynthia Meyersburg and colleagues.18 Fifteen people reporting memories of past lives were compared to a control group in terms of their scores on the DRM task described in the previous chapter. Six of the former group had recovered their memories via hypnotic regression with the rest basing their claims on the experience of déjà vu, recurrent dreams, “flashbacks,” and so on, emphasizing once more that hypnotic regression is not the only way to produce false memories. As expected, the past-life group scored higher in terms of propensity to false memories as assessed on this task. On the positive side, those reporting past-life memories report enhanced meaning in life and lower levels of fear of death.19
Within the field of reincarnation research, even those who are sympathetic to the possibility that reincarnation may be a genuine phenomenon have expressed strong skepticism toward accounts based on the use of hypnotic regression. For example, the world’s leading researcher on cases of spontaneous past-life memories, the late Professor Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, referred to them as examples of “the psychotherapist’s fallacy.”20 Although apparent past-life memories produced by hypnotic regression are of considerable interest in their own right for the light that they shed on the processes involved in the formation of false memories, there is little doubt that spontaneous past-life memories pose a greater challenge to skeptics. In the remainder of this chapter, I will describe my own thoughts and observations regarding such cases among the Druse in Lebanon.21 Many, but not all, of the observations made would apply to spontaneous cases in general.22
In the weeks before I flew to Lebanon, I spent many hours learning about the Druse and reading as much relevant literature as I could find regarding previous investigations of this type of claim. I could see why many people found such cases compelling. The ones that were written up in books and journals strongly supported the idea that children around the world, but especially in cultures where belief in reincarnation was prevalent, sometimes spontaneously described details of the life of someone who had died whom they had never met. It was claimed that, when checked, these details generally turned out to be correct and that, furthermore, there was no obvious way, other than reincarnation, in which the child could have learned them. It was not just autobiographical details that appeared to be passed on but also skills, preferences, fears, and so on.
I needed to learn as much about Druse culture as I could.23 I learned that the Druse (also spelled Druze) are a religious sect found mainly in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel but also in many other countries around the world. In 1042, the sect broke away from the Ismaili doctrines of Islam and, from then on, no new members were allowed to join this closed religion. The Druse are not supposed to marry outside their own religion, and therefore their communities are tightly knit.
As stated previously, cultures vary with respect to the details of their reincarnation beliefs, and the Druse version is unique in holding that reincarnation occurs at the exact moment of death. The last breath of the old body is immediately followed by the first breath in a baby as it is being born. In other words, the soul enters the new body at the moment of birth not, as in many other versions of reincarnation, at the moment of conception. Furthermore, the Druse hold that humans always reincarnate as humans of the same sex, never as animals or inanimate objects. Druse will always reincarnate as Druse, Christians as Christians, and so on. I was reassured by a most eminent Druse religious leader during our visit that everyone reincarnates, even skeptics. However, not everyone will remember their past lives. This only happens if the previous life ended violently, an occurrence that was sadly all too frequent during the Lebanese civil war that ran from 1975 to 1990 and cost an estimated 120,000 lives.
It may seem strange to Western eyes, but the Druse adopt a very matter-of-fact attitude toward reincarnation. It is not seen as any kind of big deal, it is just something that happens to everyone. Their word for reincarnation, taqamus, literally translates as “changing one’s shirt.” One simply takes off the old body and puts on a new one.
The Druse believe that souls cannot be created or destroyed. They do not believe in karma, instead believing that the quality of one’s current life is not related to one’s preceding life. They maintain that each soul must experience a wide range of different lives, from the most unbearable misery to utmost happiness, in preparation for meeting God on Judgment Day.
Of course, one can only learn so much from books. Obviously, I would never learn as much about the Druse culture from books as someone who had grown up immersed in it. I hatched a cunning plan. I would make it a top priority when I reached Lebanon to find a member of the Druse community who did not believe in reincarnation—a Druse skeptic! If I could find such a person, they would surely be able to provide me with insights into the process by which these claims arose.
With my background in experimental psychology, I was keen to come up with a way to investigate reincarnation claims empirically, ideally to obtain results that I could analyze statistically. I came up with a second cunning plan. What we would need to find, I decided, was a Druse child who claimed to remember quite a lot about their previous life but had not yet made direct contact with their past-life family. We could then formulate questions to probe the child’s memory. For example, we could show the child pictures of, say, five male adults and ask, “Which one of these men was your uncle in your past life?” We would need to ensure that the child had no way of knowing the correct answer by normal means and control for such things as family resemblance and so on, but I thought it should be possible to come up with a suitable series of questions. For the example question given, the child would have one chance in five of giving the right answer purely by guessing. Given a series of such questions, we could work out an exact overall probability that the child was simply guessing. If that probability was very low, it would strongly indicate that they really did possess accurate knowledge of the past-life family.
The idea for the documentary that I was taking part in was that I would investigate various Druse cases alongside Roy Stemmen, a firm believer in reincarnation and the editor of Reincarnation International. The program was made by Granite Productions and broadcast on Channel 4 in the series To the Ends of the Earth. We all benefited greatly from the background research done in advance of our arrival, particularly that done by producer Chris Ledger and Tima Khalil Majdalani, a journalist who worked with us as a translator. Our guide was Jad Al Younis, himself a Druse and also a strong believer in reincarnation. I was not surprised that Jad was a believer in reincarnation, but it soon became obvious that Cunning Plan No. 1 was doomed to fail—because every Druse I met believed in reincarnation!
One thing had already struck me about the specifically Druse version of reincarnation before I arrived in Lebanon: their belief that the instant of death of the past-life identity should correspond exactly to the time of birth of the new incarnation provided an obvious empirical test. In fact, this is hardly ever (well, okay, to my knowledge, never) found to be the case, the difference typically ranging from a few months to a few years. Some, including Ian Stevenson, have tried to explain this discrepancy as being partly due to poor record-keeping in Lebanon, but this is an unconvincing explanation.
The Druse themselves sometimes claim that the discrepancy occurs because the child is not actually remembering events from the life that immediately preceded their current one but the life before that. In other words, an individual died, their soul immediately entered a new body at the moment of birth, but this child died shortly afterward, having lived only a brief and unmemorable life. Its soul then entered the current body (at the moment of birth), and this child now recalled events not from the brief unmemorable life but from the one before that. Such an explanation is both implausible and untestable.
Another issue is their belief that the number of Druse souls has remained constant since their religion became closed in 1042, although no one knows what this number is. Clearly, the size of the population of Druse has not remained constant since the eleventh century, so how do the Druse account for this? The nonfalsifiable explanation favored by many Druse is that members of their sect are found in many locations, including such far-flung places as China—some even speculate that Druse might exist on other planets! In which case, the argument goes, any increase or decrease in, say, the size of the Druse population in Lebanon may be compensated for by decreases or increases in these remote locations. It is worth noting, however, that the past-life memories reported by Lebanese Druse children are typically those of someone who died within a fairly close distance, often a neighboring village, not some exotic foreign land or distant planet.
It is clear that the specific details of the Druse version of reincarnation cannot be based on empirical data but instead are culturally transmitted from one generation to the next. For many researchers in this area, however, it does not matter that the specific details of the Druse version cannot be objectively true. For them, the important thing is to find cases that show that reincarnation in some form really does sometimes take place, regardless of the specific details. Thus, it is to the investigation of individual cases that we now turn.
When Druse recount details of past lives, they often appear to follow a standard pattern. It is typically reported that, when the child is first learning to speak, they will sometimes come out with utterances that make little sense to their parents. As the child gets older and their language skills improve, it gradually becomes clear that they are referring to their memories of a previous life. For example, the child will insist that they have another family and will provide the names and other details of the members of this family. They may describe the house they used to live in and refer to their occupation in their past life. If the child was, say, a mechanic in their past life, they may show a precocious interest in and knowledge of engines. Disturbingly, they may even report memories of how they died. On the basis of the child’s utterances, their parents will recognize their past-life identity.
As the child grows older, they often express the wish to visit their past-life family. At first, their biological parents may refuse such requests, but eventually the child’s insistence will become so strong that a meeting is arranged. Members of the past-life family will not immediately accept the child as the genuine reincarnation of their deceased loved one. Instead, they will probe the child’s knowledge by asking questions, taking great care not to give anything away. In fact, they may even try to trick the child. For example, they may point to a bedroom door in the family home and ask, “Do you remember your old bedroom?” The child may then reply, “That was not my room. This was my room,” pointing to the door that was, in fact, the entrance to the deceased’s room. Sometimes the proof that they are indeed the genuine reincarnation may be even more dramatic. For example, the child may recover some valuable object or document that had been hidden away, the whereabouts of which was not known to any living family member. Eventually, the sheer weight of evidence will convince both families that the child really is the reincarnation of the deceased loved one. Of course, no objective record typically exists of what took place when the child first made contact with the past-life family, so it is impossible to know how accurate such accounts are.
It is understandable that researchers who are focused on trying to establish whether genuine reincarnation occurs will concentrate on the most convincing cases that they can find. But it is also somewhat misleading. It is like trying to judge whether a psychic really does have the ability to foresee future events by only looking at predictions that appear to have been accurate. Would you be willing to conclude that such a psychic really did have paranormal ability if you realized that five successful predictions had been extracted from a set that also contained a thousand times as many unsuccessful predictions?
This was brought home to me when we visited a school in the Chouf mountains, a short drive away from Beirut. Of the 900 or so pupils, twenty-one reported that they had past-life memories. Clearly, the total number of Druse children reporting such memories across the whole of Lebanon and beyond must be very large indeed. Given that, how representative of the complete set are the impressive cases that are written up for publication? If our experiences are anything to go by, the answer to that is “not very.”
We did not have the time and resources to interview all of children who claimed to remember past lives, but the most promising cases were selected for us. Even with these cases, the memories were often so vague that there was no possibility of checking their veracity. Once those cases had been filtered out, we were left with only a handful of cases where the reported memories included specific, checkable details.
Once we began to investigate these cases, it immediately became apparent that most of the details did not check out. For example, one child reported that in his past life he had been named Ramiz Haidar and had worked as a truck driver in the Pepsi depot in Beirut. However, when we visited the depot, no one remembered anyone of that name, including a supervisor who had worked there for two decades.
Mehdi Hibous recalled quite a lot of details of his alleged past life, some of which did check out. For example, he claimed that in his past life he was called Melhem Melerb and had been killed by a shell while working on his tractor. On checking, it turned out that there really had been a Melhem Melerb who had been killed in this manner. However, Mehdi also provided us with the names of his past-life wife and five children—and these names were all incorrect. The clincher came when we approached the past-life family directly to inform them that Mehdi claimed to be the reincarnation of their lost loved one. They patiently explained that this could not possibly be true, as they already knew the identity of the reincarnated Melhem Melerb. Clearly, if two boys are both claiming to be the reincarnation of the same person, at least one of them must be basing their claims on false memories.
It is understandable that researchers who are sympathetic toward the possibility that some cases of alleged reincarnation may be genuine will tend not to write up cases where the alleged past-life memories are too vague to check out or are proven to be inaccurate. But the result is that the published cases are in no way representative of cases in general. Those few cases that involve a reasonable number of specific past-life memories, most of which appear to check out, are the exception rather than the rule. Furthermore, it is noticeable that such cases are typically reported many years after the current family and the past-life family first made contact and the past-life family accepted the child as a genuine reincarnation. If we accept the accounts given of what did and did not happen all of those years ago, it would be hard to explain the events in nonparanormal terms. But is it wise to do so? A huge amount of psychological research into the unreliability of memory would suggest not, no matter how sincere the claimants are.
Much of the final documentary focused on the case of Rabih Abu-Dyab. Rabih was a very likable twelve-year-old who claimed to be the reincarnation of someone who was not only an international football player but also a successful pop singer. I must admit that my first reaction was essentially, “Yeah, right!” After all, surely this would be the fantasy of many young boys? However, it turned out that my cynicism was misplaced. There really had been an individual who fitted that description. Saad Halawi was a national hero who lost his life in an explosion during the civil war. That meant, of course, that most people in Lebanon would know a lot about Halawi’s life as he had been the focus of much media attention during his life and following his tragic death. Rabih’s mother was a huge fan of Halawi before Rabih was even born. Rabih did not appear to know anything about Halawi’s life that was not generally known by most Lebanese.
For one scene in the documentary we took Rabih to the trophy room at the stadium where his team played. If any location should prompt a flood of emotional memories, surely this was it. Rabih recognized the image of Saad Halawi in a large framed picture on the wall, but no specific memories of any matches he had played in appeared to come back to him. Even handling the ball that his past-life self had allegedly kicked to score a goal in a cup final, signed by all members of the team, did not do the trick.
I was beginning to realize just how naive my Cunning Plan No. 2 had been. I had arrived in Lebanon expecting to be faced by numerous children all providing copious detailed past-life memories, but the reality was far from this. To remind you, I had hoped that we could find a child who had not yet made contact with their past-life family. We could arrange a carefully controlled initial meeting and administer a questionnaire to allow us to probe the child’s past-life memories. In this way, we could statistically assess the accuracy of those memories. I could now see that this plan was never going to work.
It still struck me that it was important to know what really happened when a child claiming past-life memories was first introduced to their past-life family. Were the family members careful not to give anything away, to possibly even attempt to trick the child, as they assessed the credibility of the claim? Unfortunately, no one, including veteran researchers like Ian Stevenson, has managed to record what really happens on such occasions.
The closest we got to being able to do so was by arranging a meeting between Rabih and his past-life sister. At that stage, some members of Rabih’s alleged past-life family had already accepted him as a genuine reincarnation of Saad Halawi, and others remained unconvinced (and it is worth noting that Rabih was not the only child claiming to be the reincarnation of Halawi). Rabih’s past-life sister was keen to meet him in order to make up her own mind. Some days after Rabih had said that he would welcome such a meeting, it was set up—but Rabih was simply told that he would have a visitor that day without being told her identity.
This part of the documentary was handled very sensitively. Emotions would be running high. How would Rabih react if his past-life sister was not convinced that he was the reincarnation of the brother whom she had loved so dearly? Only the people who were essential to the filming of the scene, such as the cameraman and the soundman, were allowed to be present, meaning that yours truly was one of those excluded. I only got to see what happened later.
Was Rabih’s past-life sister careful to not give any clues regarding her identity? Quite the opposite. Short of actually having her name tattooed on her forehead, she could not have provided more clues. Under the circumstances, given that just a few days before Rabih had agreed to this meeting, he was extremely slow to figure out who his “surprise visitor” was—but he got there eventually. In a genuinely moving scene, just after this happened, Rabih was embraced by his past-life sister. She had accepted him purely on the basis of her emotional reaction toward him—he really was a very appealing child—but there had been absolutely no attempt to rigorously test Rabih’s supposed memories of his past life. Obviously, this was only a single case, and we should be cautious in generalizing from a sample of n = 1, but I suspect that it may be typical of other such meetings.
Given that serious researchers into reincarnation claims generally accept that past-life memories produced by hypnotic regression are likely to be false, it is surprising that they rarely give this explanation much consideration when it comes to spontaneous past-life memories. How might false memories of a past life develop in such cases? Given the impossibility of tracking every interaction that a child has from the moment of birth to the point where they claim to have such memories, any explanation must be to some extent speculative, but I would suggest that the following is a plausible account for the cases I encountered in Lebanon.24
When a child is first learning to talk, they will sometimes come out with utterances that make little sense to those around them. In a culture where reincarnation is almost universally accepted, it would be natural for parents and others to wonder whether some of these utterances are the child’s attempts to talk about past-life memories. This would be particularly likely to happen if the child says things that to Western ears would be interpreted as referring to an imaginary friend. If some of the utterances were taken as suggesting a specific deceased individual as a possible reincarnation candidate, it would be natural for the parents to probe further in an attempt to test their hypothesis. They may, for example, ask questions such as, “Was your mother’s name X?” or “Did you live in the town of Y?” They may ask the child if they remember significant events in the life of the deceased, perhaps showing the child photographs in the process. No one would expect the child to have a perfect memory of the past life, so any errors in what they said would be disregarded.
The unintended consequence of such interactions may well be the formation of false memories on the part of the child. It should be kept in mind that among the Druse, all deaths are publicly announced in the area where the deceased had lived. There is also a high level of interconnectedness between families as a result of the prohibition against Druse marrying non-Druse. Thus, there are many possible pathways by which information regarding a deceased individual may reach the child or the child’s carers. If the child is then introduced to the past-life family and accepted as a genuine reincarnation of their lost loved one, this process could continue with even richer sources of information about the life of the deceased.
If reincarnation is not possible, why has belief in reincarnation persisted for centuries among the Druse? The answer may well be that the belief itself confers certain advantages among believers.25 It is reasonable to suggest that a belief in reincarnation can help the bereaved to cope with the pain of loss as well as reducing the fear of death itself. The Druse have a reputation for bravery in battle that has no doubt helped them to survive centuries of persecution. They are said to have a battle cry of “Tonight my mother’s womb,” reflecting their belief that if they are cut down, they will be immediately reborn.
In terms of social cohesion, it has already been mentioned that the prohibition against marrying non-Druse leads to a high level of interconnectedness within Druse society. This is strengthened further by the belief in reincarnation, as there are links between families based not only on biological relationships but also on reincarnation. In all cultures where reincarnation is said to occur, the past-life family is typically of a higher social class than the biological family of the claimant. Thus, belief in reincarnation can play a role in providing social support for the poor. If the past-life family accepts a claimant from a poorer background as a genuine reincarnation of their lost loved one, they are likely to use their influence to help take care of the claimant. Even if reincarnation is not real, there are real advantages to the Druse in living their lives as though it were real.