Afterlife (33 page)

But the most impressive ‘incarnation’ was as a Jewess, Rebecca, in twelfth-century York.
Shortly before Richard the Lion Heart rode off to the Third Crusade, in 1189, there were anti-Jewish riots in London; the English had worked themselves up into a frenzy about ‘infidels’, and the Jews seemed to qualify as much as the Muslims.
In 1190, there were riots in York; Jews took refuge in the castle, and most of them killed
their families, then themselves, to avoid the vengeance of the mob.
Rebecca and her family escaped the massacre, and took refuge in the crypt of a Christian church, ‘just outside the big gates’.
But the mob found them and killed them.

Iverson decided to consult an expert on the massacre, Professor Barrie Dobson, of the University of York.
Dobson was impressed by her reconstruction of the massacre — particularly since ‘Jane Evans’ professed to be totally ignorant of any such thing.
He decided that the church that answered her description was St Mary’s, Castlegate.
There was only one problem — this had no crypt.
But six months later, workmen renovating the church discovered the remains of ‘something that seems to have been a crypt’ — a room with round stone arches and vaults, under the chancel.

Ian Wilson, while admitting that this ‘regression’ is impressive, has a number of criticisms.
There were, he points out, forty churches in York; how can Professor Dobson be sure that St Mary’s is the right one?
Rebecca described the murder of an old Jew in ‘Coney Street’.
But in twelfth-century York, Coney Street was still called Cuninga (King) Street.
Rebecca refers to the ‘big copper gate of York’, when, in fact, the Coppergate was a street.
These objections lose much of their force when we discover that Professor Dobson had already raised them — and answered them.
The street where the old Jew was murdered may have been Cuninga Street, but it is probable that it was actually pronounced Coney Street.
The English have a habit of changing foreign pronunciations.
(In my home town, Leicester, Belvoir Street is pronounced Beaver Street.) The street called Coppergate existed in York in 1190, and at the end of it was one of the gates leading to the castle.
No doubt most of the residents of York believed that ‘Coppergate’ referred to this gate.

All this also answers the third objection: how Professor Dobson could identify the church when there were thirty-nine others; Rebecca describes it specifically as being ‘just outside the big gates’.
This makes sense, since she says they had just escaped from the castle …

Ian Wilson’s criticisms make it clear that the case against reincarnation is fundamentally the same as the case against ‘spirit communication’ via mediums.
Anything that can be explained in terms of cryptomnesia, telepathy or possible fraud must be regarded as unproven.
If we are to prove spirit communication, then we have to demonstrate that the ‘spirit’ has
communicated something that could
not have been known
to the medium or to anyone else present.
A number of cases — such as the Cross Correspondences — have satisfied this criterion.
If we are to ‘prove’ reincarnation, the same thing applies.
It has to be demonstrated that the ‘reincarnated’ person knows things that could only have been learned in a ‘previous existence’.
So in the case of Graham Huxtable, it makes no difference that a naval historian finds his account wholly convincing.
We need to know beyond all possible doubt that Huxtable never saw a film or read a book that might have provided the material for the battle scene.

But in the case of ‘Jane Evans’, it is almost impossible to see how this type of explanation could apply.
If it is true that she is no great reader, and that her only knowledge of history comes from elementary school, then there is apparently no way in which she would have learned about the life of a Roman matron in Colchester or a Jewess in York.
At the same time, her ‘incarnations’ lack one important element: proof that Livonia and Rebecca and the rest actually existed.
Without such proof, we can never be quite certain that they were not another amazing creation of the ‘subjective mind’.

Another English hypnotist, Joe Keeton, who lives in the Wirral, has also specialised in regressions, and has formed a group whose aim is to try to find documentary evidence for ‘past lives’.
Ironically, Keeton himself does not believe that he is dealing with cases of reincarnation.
He prefers to believe that he may be dealing with some purely mental faculty, with some unknown form of access to the memory of the human race, something similar to Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’.

I met Joe Keeton for the first time in 1978, when he came to Westward Television in Plymouth.
He had been ‘regressing’ a pretty nurse named Pauline McKay, who also came from the Wirral, and Pauline had ‘become’ a West Country servant girl called Kitty Jay, who said she had committed suicide near Chagford in the late-eighteenth century.
Joe had written to the head librarian in Exeter to ask whether he knew of a Kitty Jay, and was surprised to learn that ‘Jay’s Grave’ lies on the edge of Dartmoor, and that she had hanged herself in Canna Farm.
As a suicide, she had not been allowed burial in a graveyard.

In the television studio, Keeton hypnotised Pauline McKay, then took her back to her own past life, then finally to her life as Kitty Jay.
‘Kitty’ described how she had gone to work at Ford Farm, Manaton, as a maid, and had allowed herself to be
seduced by a man named Rob, who worked at nearby Canna Farm.
Although Pauline had never been to the West Country, she seemed to know the area, and correctly named a bridge where she and Rob stood on their walks.
She told of how Rob had deserted her, then described her suicide — at this point she became obviously distressed, and gasped for breath.
It was an impressive performance.
Yet it was obviously open to the interpretation of cryptomnesia.
Pauline may have read the story of Kitty Jay in some volume on ghosts, such as Peter Underwood’s
Gazetteer of British Ghosts
.

Since that meeting in 1978, Joe Keeton has kept me abreast of his latest cases, and some of these have been very impressive.
Yet until 1983, none of them could be regarded as watertight cases of reincarnation — or racial memory.
And then, finally, two of his investigators — Andrew and Marguerite Selby — were able to produce documentary evidence for the existence of a ‘past incarnation’.

The subject of the regression was a journalist, Ray Bryant, who works as a features writer for the Reading
Evening Post
.
In 1980, he was asked to write a series on hypnotic regression.
As a result of this series, he became interested in the subject, but found his own attempts at regression disappointing.
However, he had become a member of a group, which met in London, and so he persevered.
And during the twelfth hypnotic session, he heard himself describing an occasion when ‘he’ had fallen ill on a railway station.
(Ray Bryant describes his sensations during these sessions as being like watching a television programme and simultaneously taking part in it.) It slowly emerged that ‘he’ was a farm labourer named Robert Sawyer, who had lived at Ongar, Essex, at the turn of the twentieth century.
(Ray was born in 1938.) And for the next three sessions he described his life as a farm worker, questioned by all the other members of the group.
Then Joe Keeton decided it was time to go further back.
Ray Bryant was taken beyond Robert Sawyer’s birth.
This time he became a soldier called Reuben.
When asked his second name, he could only get out the first letters: ‘St …’ But it was clear that Reuben’s life had been rather more eventful than that of Robert Sawyer.
He had been a sergeant in the 47th Lancashire Regiment of Foot, had been wounded in the Crimean war — where he saw Florence Nightingale — and eventually died in London — probably a suicide — in 1879, at the age of fifty-seven.

Other details emerged.
He had been wounded at the ‘Battle
of the Quarries’ — of which no one in the group had heard.
But a check with a reference book showed that this had actually taken place, in June 1855.
(Even so, it is one of the more obscure battles of the war, which took place during the siege of Sevastopol — my own search through half a dozen books in my library has failed to find a reference to it.) He had left the army after twenty-one years’ service, in 1865, and had returned for a time to live in his home town, Ormskirk, Lancashire.
His wife Mary — whom he had married when he was a corporal — had died, and he decided to follow his son — also called Reuben — to London.
There he had worked as a boatman at Millwall Docks, but had been lonely and unhappy.
His army career had been exceptionally happy; he loved being a soldier.
Ending his life in a strange city, living alone in lodgings, depressed him — Ray Bryant said that the change that came over his personality when he changed from soldier to Thames boatman was pathetic.
And he had died in 1865.

The chances of learning anything about an ex-sergeant in the Crimean war seemed remote, but Andrew and Marguerite Selby, who lived in South Harrow, offered to undertake the task.
Andrew Selby is a civil engineer who became interested in regression when he heard Joe Keeton broadcasting on LBC, asking for subjects who would agree to be hypnotised.
But where did one begin?
A good starting point seemed to be the Guildhall Library, in the City of London, and there they had an unbelievable stroke of luck.
There was a book containing the casualty roll of the Crimean war, and looking under ‘St’ — the only letters of the surname Reuben had been able to pronounce — they found a Sergeant Reuben Stafford who had been wounded in the hand at the Battle of the Quarries.
He had won medals, and had been promoted; the record gave the dates.
Now they had the means to find out whether Reuben St … 
was
Sergeant Reuben Stafford (later colour-sergeant).
At this next regression, they asked Ray Bryant to go back to these dates and asked him what had happened.
He was right every time.

This was not the end of the research.
The Selbys checked the Public Record Office in Kew and the General Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages in what used to be Somerset House (now St Catherine’s House).
They found Reuben’s death certificate that showed that he died by drowning, and gave an address in Gravesend.
Reuben had been very poor when he died, and they discovered that his grave was a ‘communal’ one in the cemetery at East Ham.
Ray Bryant has
recorded how deeply moved he felt as he stood on the spot where the records showed Reuben’s grave had been.
Reuben’s bones had vanished long ago — in these communal burial plots, room was made for someone else after twenty years or so.

In a case like this, the cryptomnesia theory is no longer tenable.
Reuben ‘checked out’ both ways: the dates
he
gave proved to be accurate; the dates in the records produced the correct response from Reuben.
It could be argued that Ray Bryant, under hypnosis, read the minds of his questioners and gave them the answers they knew to be correct; but that fails to explain Ray Bryant’s accurate knowledge about a Reuben St … who was wounded in the hand at the Battle of the Quarries before Sevastopol.
(When Reuben was regressed to dates
after
this wound, be held his paralysed hand in a stiff and awkward manner; as soon as he was regressed further back, the paralysis disappeared.) There seems to be no way of explaining this case except to accept that Ray Bryant was Sergeant Reuben Stafford of Ormskirk in a previous existence, or that he was in some way in touch with the mind of Reuben Stafford.
Andrew Selby is inclined to the ‘collective unconscious’ hypothesis; Ray Bryant, on the whole, prefers the simpler explanation of reincarnation.

If he is correct, the implications are interesting.
To begin with, we must also assume that after dying in the Thames in 1865, Reuben was reincarnated as a farm labourer named Robert Sawyer a few years later, and that he died before Ray Bryant was born in 1938.
And if we can accept that Robert Sawyer and Reuben Stafford were real people, then it seems highly likely that four other earlier ‘incarnations’ who have appeared under hypnosis are also real: Wilfred Anderton, a coachman of the eighteenth century, a girl called Winifred, who died quite young, a housemaid named Elizabeth who rose to become a governess in the late-seventeenth century, and an unnamed character who does not appear to understand English, and who lived about a century earlier.

This also raises in a new form the basic question of what, if anything, survives death.
Clearly, not sexual differentiation, since Ray Bryant was both male and female in past incarnations.
Then what is the basic ‘substratum’ of personality that was common to all seven people?
When I fired this question at him, Ray Bryant admitted that he had no idea.
But he felt that all the previous six incarnations had contributed something to what he is now.
In Preston, where the 47th had its barracks
(and where Ray Bryant was able to examine the regimental records), he had a strong feeling of déjà-vu.
His knowledge of Reuben seemed to him to explain his recurrent nightmare of falling out of a boat, and the sense of peace he has always experienced in or beside water — whether river, sea, stream or pond.
It seems, then, that something can be carried over from one ‘lifetime’ to another — and this, of course, seems to strengthen the possibility that something of the personality survives death.
But it also implies that
what
survives death — ‘Myers’, ‘Gurney’, and so on — is not in itself permanent, but that it will in turn evolve to something else.
This seems, in fact, to be one of the most consistent factors in all ‘spirit teachings’, from Kardec and Stainton Moses to Geraldine Cummins.