This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 7, Issue 1, from 1993.
Some time ago, I was browsing through John Grant’s 1984 work Dreamers: A Geography of Dreamland, and came across a fascinating aside about the historical novelist Joan Grant (to whom Mr Grant is not related). Joan Grant claimed that all of her books were actually straightforward biographies of her many previous lives, which she had been remembering since childhood. According to John Grant, she was so ignorant about sex that for much of her life she believed it was some sort of disembodied etheric process that took place while both parties were asleep. Why, he asked, didn’t she remember anything about love-making from her previous lifetimes?
This story brought to mind a TV programme about reincarnation that I had seen around 1984, and which featured a London man who claimed to be a reincarnated Lancashire farm-worker who had fought in the Napoleonic wars. The programme-makers brought this man to his (claimed) regiment’s HQ in Preston and presented him to a bunch of regimental historians who were amazed at the amount of detailed historical knowledge he displayed. I, on the other hand, was amazed at the credulity.
For a start, the man’s ‘Lancashire’ accent was clearly derived from watching many episodes of Coronation Street, where the prevailing accent is a sort of modified Mancunian. Lancashire labourers would have been about as intelligible to modern Southern ears as Glaswegian Scottish is today. This at least proves that the man wasn’t a conscious fake, as ‘Lanky’ dialect dictionaries are fairly easy to find.
Finally, why didn’t the historians invite the man to prove his military credentials by taking up one of the antique muskets on display and demonstrating how it was loaded, fired and cleaned?
At the moment, anybody who claims to have clear memories of previous lifetimes is required to prove it merely by reciting large amounts of facts, figures and anecdotes. Nobody concerned seems to realise that any archives that are available to historians are also available to writers of historical fiction, which is where most ‘reincamators’ undoubtedly pick up their knowledge. My proposal is that such people should be required to demonstrate practical skills which they would have used in their previous lifetime, but not in this.
For instance, somebody claiming to be a Victorian seamstress would be handed a roll of linen, scissors, needles and thread and asked to produce a hand-sewn Victorian-style shirt, somebody claiming to have been a 10th century Saxon farmer would be handed a live pig and requested to turn it into sausages and cured ham; a ‘medieval musician’ would have to convincingly play some medieval tune on a sackbut. And so on.
An obvious drawback to this plan is that many ‘reincamators’ claim to have been queens, emperors, chief high priests etc. And for that sort of job you don’t really need much in the way of practical qualifications. You would, I suppose, put the ‘monarch’ on to a horse, get them to lead a cavalry charge and see how well they resemble Charlton Heston. And a Chief High Wotsit could be put into funny robes and told to proceed in a stately manner whilst simultaneously chanting and swinging a thurible.
None of that would be terribly convincing as proof – anybody who really wanted to could think themselves into behaving like Charlton Heston or the Archbishop of Canterbury. But I think I have the answer to that problem. One of my hobbies is home-brewing, and I am especially interested in old brewing recipes – the older the better. Every civilisation from the year dot seems to have evolved some sort of mindblowing hooch from any local grains, pulses or fruits available. In most historical periods, virtually every household brewed its own ale or wine. Brewing was so commonplace that even emperors and High Chief Wotsits would have witnessed the procedure.
So, an infallible proof of reincarnation would be for the reincarnator to provide the recipe for whatever their local brew had been then make a few gallons of the stuff. If an expert is needed to supervise the results, I shall be delighted to take on the task. Cheers!
