Reincarnation

A year or two ago, a London Sunday newspaper read mainly by English working people published a questionnaire in which the editor asked whether they believed (a) in heaven and hell, (b) in reincarnation or (c) did not know. To his surprise, the yes answers for reincarnation led handsomely over those for heaven and hell. Of these readers, except in agricultural areas, hardly one in 20 attended religious services, even irregularly; and if large numbers sent their children to Sunday school, this was mainly to get them clear of the house on an afternoon traditionally sacred to marital rites. The American attendance rate, on the contrary, has risen spectacularly in the past two generations and is now claimed to have reached more like 11 citizens in every 20. Reincarnation, in fact, has not made much head-way in the States, heaven and hell still being an unalterable dogma in church, chapel, synagogue and mosque--with, of course, such generous modifications as purgatory and limbo. American orthodoxy has been encouraged by a gentleman's agreement between business and religion; for most institutions and organizations hold that such beliefs produce a more reliable type of worker in all grades. A small minority of America's reincarnationists, mostly converted by theosophists trading as popular astrologers, were given a boost in 1956 by the publication of The Search for Bridey Murphy. This, you will perhaps remember, was the story of how "Ruth Simmons," a young Colorado housewife, gave a hypnotist named Morey Bernstein many verifiable details of her previous incarnation as a Belfast Irishwoman living about 150 years before.

A correspondent of The Christian Century commented at the time: "I met a man in a Des Moines beanery who had a copy of The Search for Bridey Murphy under his arm. I looked up from my plate of beans and asked how he liked the book. He answered, without much enthusiasm: 'All right.' When I asked him if he thought there was any truth in it, he said: 'Well, I don't know,' but added: 'I'd rather believe in it than nothing. Hell, I don't want just to die. I'd like to have a second chance.' In that, I am sure he spoke for a lot of people and came close to the Christian Gospel and its teaching of eternal life. The interest in Bridey Murphy is an outward reach for a spiritual world of some sort."

And yet this correspondent greatly understated the case. Admittedly, reincarnation is not a familiar part of Hebrew belief in the hereafter; but a notable exception was made in the case of the prophet Elijah, who, according to The Second Book of Kings, had been carried off by a celestial chariot and who, according to The Book of Malachi IV: 5, would reappear on earth just before the coming of the Messiah. Hence Jesus, himself, quotes the Malachi text, in Matthew XI: 10--11, while identifying John the Baptist with Elijah. The crucial importance of this point has seldom been stressed. When Jesus was asked by the captain of the temple guard, shortly before the crucifixion (Mark XI: 28), "By (continued on page 233)Reincarnation(continued from page 177) what authority doest thou these things?" he replied with a counter question: "The baptism of John, was it from heaven or of men?" He meant: "Was my installation by John as the Messiah, in a lustral ceremony at which the traditional coronation psalm was recited (Mark IX: 1--11), divinely inspired or not?" Had the captain denied John's inspiration, he would have infuriated the pilgrim crowds who identified this martyred hero with Elijah. They knew that none but a prophet was entitled to perform the coronation ceremony; they also knew that the acceptance of any new prophet, apart from Elijah's reappearance in the last days, had been banned by an edict of the Sanhedrin some 200 years previously. Jesus was now claiming a right to purge the temple courts in accordance with Zechariah's Messianic prophecy (Zechariah III: 7 and XIV: 21); but the genuineness of his Messiahship depended on Elijah's reincarnation as John the Baptist--another lonely and persecuted prophet. No honest theologian can therefore deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation--in Elijah's case, at least.

The English masses have fallen away spectacularly from their 19th Century Protestantism and prefer to believe in some form of reincarnation. This is partly because the "upper classes" have long used religion to keep the "lower classes" in their proper places, as in the popular hymn:

The rich man in his castle,The poor man at his gate,

God made them, high or lowly,And ordered their estate.

Partly, also, because the Christian concept of heaven had been frozen too early by the ecstatic Revelation of the other St. John. His paradise was not, as the Essenes held, a terrestrial park well supplied with rivers, fruit trees and gentle winds; it was a First Century A.D. Oriental court perpetually engaged in ritual homage to a potentate sitting in judgment over countless trembling souls. These were allowed no choice between eternal fires of hell and eternal choral singing--neither of which tempts the average British citizen. By the way, our pagan ancestors, taught to believe in a chilly, barren, homeless hell lying to the far north, were delighted by the first Christian missionaries' description of hell as an enormous bonfire. "We will keep warm," they are said to have cried joyfully. And (by the way, again) Gehenna, the original Hebrew hell, was not at first preached about as if it were a real place. The prophets used it as a metaphor taken from Jerusalem's perpetually smoking municipal rubbish dump in the valley of Hinnom.

Reincarnation rarely came up in England as an alternative to heaven and hell until Tudor times, when Shakespeare's fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe, put it into the mouth of Dr. Faustus. Faustus, you remember, had sold his immortal soul to the Devil in exchange for all that he most desired in this world. The final scene in the play shows Faustus' last night on earth. He hears the clock strike 11 and, knowing that the Devil is due to claim his fee at midnight, appeals in vain for God's last-minute pardon--for a shortening of his eternal sentence even to 100,000 years. Then he laments that the Christian faith allows him no hope of reincarnation. As a scholar, he has read about Pythagoras, the Greek mystic who preached the gospel of "metempsychosis," or reincarnation, to the Sicilians of Crotona.

Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis! were that true,

This soul should fly from me and I be changed

Into some brutish beast: all beasts are happy.

For when they die

Their souls are soon dissolved in elements,

But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.

Pythagoras, surnamed Mnesarchides ("one who remembers his origins"), was born about 582 B.C. on the Aegean island of Samos and seems to have belonged to the Pelasgian Orphic cult, which flourished thereabouts. He announced himself as a reincarnation of the Trojan hero Euphorbus. This choice has long puzzled scholars. It may have been merely metaphorical, because Euphorbus, meaning "he who eats the right food" (Pythagoras is known to have been a food faddist), was the son of Panthus, meaning "loving thought," and won fame as the Trojan who drew first blood when the Greeks landed at Troy. Euphorbus also dealt Achilles' comrade, Patroclus, his mortal wound--Hector merely gave him the coup de grâce--which was the turning point in the Trojan War. As a Pelasgian from Samos. Pythagoras' sympathies would have been pro-Trojan; the city of Troy claimed Pelasgian founding fathers. He, it seems, believed that reincarnations took place at regular intervals, such as 207, 216, 440 and 462 years--mathematical attempts to regularize the unpredictable. But later, Pythagorean metempsychotics settled for 1000 years, or 3000, or some other round number.

Most moderns aspire high in their preincarnations. Queen Elizabeth, Napoleon, Joan of Arc. Julius Caesar, St. Theresa and Shakespeare are common choices--claims which, if made persistently enough, condemn many harmless, overimaginative people with practical relatives to the funny farm. A friend of mine, an English psychiatrist, recently had under his charge two patients, each of whom claimed to be the Virgin Mary. One was quite young and the other middle-aged. He introduced them to each other to see what would happen. The elder reacted instantly: "Hail Mary, my spotless daughter! I am your mother, St. Anne, who bore you immaculately." The younger embraced her new mother with enthusiasm.

Fervent belief in reincarnation, when a symptom of mental unbalance, is caused, as a rule, by the patient's dissatisfaction with the dull routine of life. A visitor once asked an inmate in an English institution:

"How goes it?"

"Thank you, sir; I suppose I'll get through my present struggle in the end. But this week has been almost as bad as Waterloo. That was a deuce of a battle, if you like! We English couldn't trust our Belgian allies, and Old Nap had veteran troops with him. If Field Marshal Blücher hadn't arrived just in time with his Prussians, I think we'd have been knocked out. I happen to remember that day very well, indeed. You see, I am Lord Wellington."

"But it was touch and go for the French, too, wasn't it?"

"Oh, yes, mon Dieu! Our luck was out that day and I wasn't feeling any too good myself--ate too many fried pommes de terre the night before. Stupid of me. As you may have guessed, I happen to be Napoleon."

"But you just said that you were Wellington!"

"Yes, of course, but that was by another mother."

Memories of incarnation are seldom any more to be trusted than these. The saddest case I knew personally was a woman who believed that she had once won the Kentucky Derby and was, indeed, still a race horse. One morning, she fell down some steps and got water on the knee, but hastily went to bed, concealed the injury by complaining of toothache and even made a dentist's appointment for having all her teeth extracted. The fact was that she had read somewhere that trainers always shoot race horses with water on their knees. I do not offer these cases as an argument against the theory of reincarnation, but only against a confusion of past with present. One practical problem that reincarnationists have to face is that the recent enormous increase of population means a shortage of well-traveled ancient souls for new infants to house. The problem of finding enough that date from 207, or 462, or even 100 years ago is already insoluble--unless a human soul can be reincarnated in the animal kingdom. Or unless souls like those of Napoleon, Joan of Arc, St. Peter, Queen Elizabeth and the rest are capable of several contemporary rebirths--a concept that seemed illogical even to those two Virgin Marys.

The primitive belief in animal preincarnations seems to have been caused less by a man's vague facial resemblance to some bird or beast than by the institution of totem clans. These can be studied even now in Africa, Central Australia and elsewhere; and we know that clan members often impersonate their totem animal at changes of the moon. It is still a schizophrenic habit in West Africa to leave the kraal and prowl about as a leopard or snake or crocodile, convinced that after death the soul enters the body of one's totem animal. Relics of such totemism appear in early Greek mythology. We can trace the goddess Athene's sacred owl to the owl totem of a primitive Pelasgian clan that survived near Athens until classical times. The Pelasgian goddess Hera--Juno in Latin--had a peacock sacred to her and was said to have been born either at Argus, mythically connected with Hundred-Eyed Argos, apparently a Pelasgian peacock totem, or on the island of Samos, where Pythagoras was born. This may explain Pythagoras' reputed claim to have once been a peacock. The Latin poet Ennius later declared that Homer, born on nearby Chios, had made the same claim. Both Homer and Pythagoras may have been "mindful of their origins" as peacock totemists, though using the peacock in the metaphorical sense still current among the Arabo-Persian Sufis. The peacock, which has the ugliest feet and the most beautiful head feathers of any known bird, is for them an emblem of perfectible man battling against his earthly nature. This is perhaps why the peacock is also said to have been a favorite preincarnation of Pythagoras' close contemporary, Buddha. It is likely that the Pelasgians took their name from a totem clan of storks--pelargos in Greek--birds that enjoyed the same sanctity as now preserves them in Holland. In northern Greece, stork killing carried the same penalty as homicide.

What happens to souls after death is a question that has puzzled man ever since he first became capable of conscious thought. Conscious thought implies a desire to survive as long as possible and, therefore, a fear of death and, therefore, because one can dream vividly about people long dead, the conjecture of spiritual survival. Much the same after-world is described in all five continents, and contrastive paradises and hells derive, it seems, from visions produced either by hallucinogenic drugs or by nearly drowning, or by starvation, or by severe illnesses, or by other causes that temporarily deprive the brain of oxygen and allow dream fantasy full play. Many ancient peoples, however, have believed that the answer to "Where do we go from here?" is closely linked with the complementary question, "From where do we come?" Thus, any genetic peculiarity in a child, such as a large nose, red hair or a particular aptitude for some craft or skill, will suggest that he is the reincarnation of an ancestor remembered as having the same traits. Moreover, families that have for centuries specialized in, say, flint knapping, or wood carving, or drumming, or medical diagnosis, tend to bequeath craft memories to their children in a way that rules out merely environmental explanation. This evidence of particular, as opposed to racial, inherited memory naturally buttresses a belief in reincarnation. I read in a scientific report recently that when planarian worms have been given pieces of other worms to eat, particular memories of the defunct are transferred to them. I wonder if that is why, in certain West African kingdoms, every new king is made to eat a piece of his predecessor's heart: to digest the royal tradition, as it were?

So we come to India, where Brahmin priests use the doctrine of metempsychosis to control public morals as successfully as their Western colleagues use heaven and hell, and where the dark, primitive Dravidians of the south have gradually converted their northern conquerors to a belief in animal reincarnation. Nevertheless, these Brahmins carefully combine it with their original Day of Judgment view, preaching that whoever breaks their moral code will be sentenced, after death, to be reborn as an ass, pig, dog, monkey or as some even less esteemed creature. The general Brahmin theory is that one is whirled continuously around on the wheel of necessity, passing through a huge variety of forms before returning to the divine source. The later Indian theologians estimate their number as 8,400,000.

The theory of metempsychosis intrigued many British soldiers, engineers, planters and civil servants who had worked in India under the British raj, though it had already reached the professional classes at home through the compulsory reading of Greek classics at the universities--especially of Plato, who accepted Pythagoras' faith in Dionysus, god of the hallucinogenic mysteries at Samothrace, Eleusis, Corinth and elsewhere. Dionysus was worshiped as a redeemer who persuaded men to purify their lives: so that their souls might rise, each time, a little higher on the divine scale and eventually be freed from the same wheel of necessity and return forever to the mystic goddess, Persephone. Plato's Republic contains the vision of Er, son of Armenius, who fell sick, was mourned for dead and, on recovery, described his visit to the infernal place of judgment, where souls reassemble after a stay in hell or purgatory and there choose new human or animal forms for rebirth. Er saw Orpheus changing into a swan and Thamyris, a blind Thracian bard, into a nightingale. All these souls then drank of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and shot away, like stars, into their new bodies. Er had not, evidently, learned of an alternative to Lethe that has recently been found inscribed on certain gold Orphic tablets from Samothrace, tied around the necks of Sicilian corpses. This alternative was to give a secret password to the guardians of a secluded well in the underworld--probably overhung by the hazel tree of wisdom--at the same time, attesting their purity of heart and demanding to be made heroes in Persephone's paradisal court.

A Brahmin friend of mine from south India, who is now Westernized enough to take an objective view of metempsychosis, wrote to me recently:

For us Brahmins, Brahman is the supreme principle, like the Western "God." Today the central core of Hinduism is how a man can liberate his soul from the bondage of human birth and death, and unite with Brahman. Buddha, after his enlightenment, recalls his previous existences:

One, two, three--a hundred thousand births, many an aeon of the world's disintegration, many an aeon of its reintegration.... In my varied former existences, I remembered such and such was my name, my sept, my class ... and my term of life. When I passed thence, I experienced other existences, wherein such and such was my name. Thence I passed to my present life, in which I recall my diverse past existences in all their details and features.

Once, when I was 12 years old, I lay exhausted on a coir cot after days of fever. It was a hot afternoon and our large family sat in the cool of the veranda after the meal, the younger men dozing, the women falling into lazy rhythms of mechanical household tasks and the children playing draughts nearby, half listening to the women's talk. At this hour, very old people would wander from house to house and exchange gossip. As they talked about legendary figures or told stories of their younger days, the persuasive lilt of voices drew us into a world of magic. The sun helped the enchantment by making us drowsy and suggestible.

A beautiful young woman named Kamala had shyly joined us. She was a new arrival in our village, having recently married the schoolmaster. The sadness of Kamala's eyes attracted me. She always talked softly and slowly, as if trying to recall forgotten memories. That afternoon, she told my grandmother how happily married she now was. She stressed the word "now" because of having had a cruel husband in her last incarnation. He had beaten her daily, and though she adored their child, one day she could stand his behavior no longer. Hugging the infant to her breast, she had walked to a deep well and drowned them both. Kamala shuddered as her story ended. She was worried that she might not have a child in her new incarnation--a child by an affectionate husband, for a change. After studying her face closely, I believed her story. A year or two later, I decided to test it by making secret inquiries in the distant village that she had named. There I found that the suicide story was true and that the husband had recently died. Kamala had never tried to meet him again since her death.

Many similar stories came my way, always about unhappy previous lives. Some were factually verifiable, but in no case did anyone claim to have reached old age or died a natural death. Though I could not mistake the sincerity of the narrators, who always spoke of the past with detachment, neither could I persuade myself that they had been personally active in the scenes they described.

My Brahmin friend has here, unwittingly, perhaps, accounted for the widespread Indian belief in metempsychosis. As a child, Kamala may have been half asleep one day at the village gossip hour and overheard the suicide story from a visitor. Which brings up the famous case--I think it was reported by Jung--of the ignorant servant girl who talked Hebrew in a hypnotic trance. She was discovered to have been formerly employed by a rabbi, who had recited the Talmud aloud at night in his study downstairs. Her drowsy mind had acted like a tape recorder and she remembered reams of rabbinical comment, though not in the least knowing what the words meant. Kamala's mind may have acted similarly, except that the story was told in her own language, so that the meaning had impressed itself on her. And just as American or English children will cast themselves imaginatively as the heroes or heroines of fairy tales, so Kamala had identified herself with the drowned woman and used the reincarnation theory to support her claim.

So we return to Bridey Murphy, whose story was obviously not fiction invented by Ruth Simmons. My guess is that she had overheard in childhood some old woman, perhaps her grandmother, retelling what she had heard from some other old woman. The tape recording made by Morey Bernstein points clearly in this direction, because though, under hypnotism, she talked with a brogue in describing her supposed preincarnation, the language she used was of too late a date to have come from Bridey herself. My eye balked at the words "camisoles" and "candy" in the year 1806, the date that Ruth gave, which was far too early for camisoles, especially in Northern Ireland--the first recorded mention of them appears in The Gentleman's Magazine, published in London ten years later; and "candy" as a general term for sweetstuffs is an American, not an early Irish, usage. Which means that we are hearing her story at second or third hand. So I am not surprised to learn that St. Theresa's Church at Belfast, where Bridey claimed to have been married, was not built until 1911; and that Queen's University, where her husband is said to have taught, was still Queen's College in his day, not having been raised to university status until 1908. Morey Bernstein wrote The Search for Bridey Murphy as an exposition of the paranormal powers of the mind under hypnotism, but succeeded in proving only what was already known; namely, that hypnotism can uncover lost memories--among them, casual conversations overheard in sleep.

The receptive mind, of course, is occasionally granted visions of the past, as many well-attested ghost stories have proved. But these phenomena seem to depend on the so-called "gramophone theory" of ghosts, meaning that any excessive emotion of terror or grief can be impressed on a building and reawakened years later in the mind of a sensitive visitor, especially if the weather and the hour correspond with the original occasion.

In 1926, I wrote a poem called The Castle, which recorded a childhood nightmare of being unable to escape from a ruined castle court.

Walls, mounds, enclosing corrugations

Of darkness, moonlight on dry grass.

Walking this courtyard, sleepless, in fever;

Planning to use--but by definition

There's no way out, no way out--

Rope ladders, balks of timber, pulleys,

A rocket whizzing over the walls and moat--

Machines easy to improvise. No escape,

No such thing; to dream of new dimensions,

Cheating checkmate by painting the king's robe

So that he slides like a queen;

Or to cry, "Nightmare, nightmare!"

Like a corpse in the cholerapit

Under a load of corpses;

Or to run the head against these blind walls,

Enter the dungeon, torment the eyes

With apparitions chained two and two,

And go frantic with fear--

To die and wake up sweating by moonlight

In the same courtyard, sleepless as before.

One afternoon, 16 years later, I visited Berry Pomeroy Castle in Devonshire. This was during the Second World War, and I found it closed to visitors, except in the mornings; but a worn track ran under the main gate and I wriggled in. Though overcome by a nameless horror, I resolutely visited the dungeons, until I could stand the strain no longer and hared back to safety. Two days later, my wife and I were visited by Mr. Beer, husband of my local typist. We gave him tea and he casually asked whether I knew the Berry Pomeroy Castle. Yes, indeed I did. "Well, what do you make of this?" he asked, showing me a photograph, and added: "I don't know how this woman came into the picture. I didn't see anyone around at the time. It looks like she's leading a dog on a string. I was there last Sunday morning with the wife. Would you like to keep it as a curiosity?"

The photograph showed a tall, thin woman in 14th Century costume, walking past the gate that I had wriggled under--and leading a small ape on a chain. When Mr. Beer had gone, I burned the photograph. It was too horrible. But, fortunately, my wife will testify to the woman and the ape. I recalled the Elizabethan phrase: "To lead apes in hell." Shakespeare used it in Much Ado About Nothing--meaning to be a passionate woman cheated of her sex life. And I concluded that Mr. Beer, a simple soul, had felt the presence of that unhappy woman in the castle court and somehow impressed the picture on his sensitive camera plate. But, if so, who was she? She had nothing to do with me.

Years later, I read that Isabella of France, Edward II's widow, had spent some years at Berry Pomeroy. As a young woman, after providing the throne with an heir apparent, she had been neglected by her homosexual husband in favor of his boyfriend, Piers Gaveston. Eventually, she deposed him with French help, procured his murder and put her son, Edward III, on the throne. He did not, however, prove grateful and sent her off, under guard, to various castle keeps remote from London; until, after many years of "leading apes in hell," she took the veil of the Order of St. Clara. Had I been an Indian, I might well have claimed a preincarnation as Isabella. But being myself, I accounted otherwise for my feelings of fear at Berry Pomeroy and for The Castle poem. As a child, I had spent most of my summer holidays in north Wales, near Harlech Castle, which had been built in the 13th Century by Edward II's father: an immense, scary, moated pile, closely resembling Berry Pomeroy. We children were always afraid of getting locked up there at nightfall by the deaf old castle-keeper, Mr. Richard Jones, while we were playing hide-and-seek in its towers and dungeons. In fact, Mr. Beer's photograph had been no more than a strange coincidence.

A story: A devout widow once got in touch with her dead husband at a spiritistic séance. A loose liver, he had finally been shot by a jealous husband. The widow at once recognized his voice and said anxiously: "Oh, darling, how are you? I've been so worried. That dreadful hell...." "I'm fine!" he answered. "I'm in clover--literally. My! You'd love it here. Beautiful blue river, glorious green meadows, sun blazing down and me surrounded by the most beautiful cows you've ever seen in your life--so sleek and graceful and charming!" She gasped and ventured doubtfully: "Oh, I am so relieved, Charles! But, honestly, I hadn't realized that there were any cows in heaven."

"Who told you that I was in heaven, stupid? I'm stud bull at a farm of pedigree Jerseys beside the old Mississippi. Having a whale of a time, too."

The simplest and most obvious argument against metempsychosis is that memories of preincarnation depend on the human mind, that the mind depends on its brain, that the brain depends on its body and that the body depends on its racial history and genes. It is difficult to accept that Pythagoras actually remembered having been, as he claimed, a merchant and a prostitute; or that Empedocles, the Fifth Century B.C. Sicilian, remembered having been a simple village girl at one time, a mindless fish at another and a bodiless bush at a third. But Pythagoras may easily at some time or other have imagined himself a merchant or a prostitute by feeling a sudden flash of sympathy for members of those unmystical callings. And Empedocles may have stood still in a forest one day, rooted to the spot by meditation, and felt like a bush; or have swum thoughtlessly in the sea and felt like a fish.

Human reactions to danger are often archaic instincts, meaning inherited memories, as when a bomb falls through the roof of a building and explodes and the shocked survivors absurdly try to scratch a hole through the tiles with their nails--because their remote ancestors would have acted like that in some stage of the human evolution from three-eyed lizard to hominoid. Nevertheless, the common flying dream is no proof that the dreamer was ever a bird; or, indeed, that any of his ancestors were, since paleontologists deny this link in our evolutionary chain. It seems to be either metaphorical of a wish to fly away from our present circumstances or else--since time is only a convention and memory works both ways: either as reminiscence or as prophetic anticipation--of a future age when human beings will develop wings, as birds once did, and dispense with balloons, planes and rockets.