This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 4, from 1990.
Carl Jung wrote: ‘With a free and open mind I listen attentively to the Indian doctrine of rebirth and look around in the world of my own experience to see whether somewhere and somehow there is some authentic sign pointing towards reincarnation.’ For many thousands in the Western world the signs have arrived. For them, hypnotic regressions have lifted the heavy veil that once shrouded the subject, and the domestic tape-recorder has become the great ally of Truth by capturing ‘authentic accounts’ of long-forgotten life-cycles.
It all began with the Bridey Murphy case in 1952. The Search for Bridey Murphy, by Morey Bernstein, topped the best-seller lists in the United States and was translated into five languages. It spawned a motion picture; a disc from one of the recordings sold tens of thousands of copies; and all over the United States tape-recorders began purring away at innumerable regression sessions.
Twenty years after the Bridey Murphy sensation, a much more impressive case of past-lives startled the public. The Bloxham tapes were first presented as a BBC television documentary produced by Jeffrey Iverson. Then they were included and enlarged on in Iverson’s book More Lives Than One? The tapes were regarded as ‘the most staggering evidence for reincarnation ever recorded… amazingly detailed accounts of past lives – accounts so authentic that they can only be explained by the certainty of reincarnation.’ Inevitably they achieved international renown.
The tapes themselves had been accumulated for years by an elderly Cardiff-based hypnotherapist named Arnll Bloxham. Bloxham had been unable to study as a doctor and had turned to hypnotherapy. He was a life-long believer in reincarnation, but his interest in past-life regressions did not emerge until quite late in his career. Despite that, he managed to accumulate a cupboard full of tapes of his experiments with more than four hundred people.
Jeffrey Iverson first heard about this collection at a party. As a producer with the BBC in Cardiff, he was constantly on the outlook for programme ideas; and, in October 1974, he called the Bloxhams’ house. After listening to the calm old man’s claims, Iverson concluded that, if his claims were true, the recordings could represent the largest investigation ever undertaken into regression. Iverson thought that, if Bloxham’s tapes could be verified, ‘then that single famous case… The Search for Bridey Murphy, was just a tune on an Irish fiddle compared to his symphony of voices.’
Iverson began listening to the tapes and discarding those he felt could not be researched and proven. Gradually, he came to concentrate on a limited number that seemed to contain information that ‘coincided remarkably with known but quite obscure periods of history… in which people talked about cities and countries that they apparently never visited in their present lives.’
Two outstanding cases emerged from this weeding process. In one, Graham Huxtable, a Swansea man, regressed to a squalid life aboard a Royal Navy frigate engaged in action against the French some two hundred years before. But the most important case involved a Welsh housewife named Jane Evans.
Jane Evans
Mrs Evans described six past lives. They were remarkable not so much for their number and diversity as for the sheer, almost overwhelming amount of detail that was packed into her account of three of them. In her three minor lives she was first a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon in the 1500s, then a London sewing girl named Anne Tasker living about 1702, and finally Sister Grace, a nun living in Des Moines, Iowa, who died in the 1920s.
Of Mrs Evans’ three major lives, two centred around the town of York. The earliest was set in the third century during the rebellion of Carausius, the Roman admiral who seized power in Britain and declared himself emperor. Jane Evans was then Livonia, the wife of Titus, tutor to the young son of Constantius (governor of Britain) and his wife, Helena.
As Livonia, Mrs Evans describes how Constantius has to return to Rome and how the rebellion is engineered in his absence. As a consequence, Livonia, Titus, and the rest of Constantius’s household flee from Eboracum (York) to Verulam (St Albans), where they live apprehensively until the rebel regime is overthrown by an army led by Constantius. Yet her husband’s triumphant return brings only sadness for Lady Helena. Roman power-struggles dictate that her husband has to divorce her and contract a new marriage with Theodora, daughter of Emperor Maximinus. Helena, therefore, decides to stay in Verulam with Livonia and Titus. There they are influenced by the Christian wood-carver Albanus, and Titus becomes so zealous in his new faith that he volunteers for the priesthood. On the eve of Titus’s induction as a priest, Roman troops swoop down on Christian houses and burn them. Titus dies in the melee, and Livonia apparently dies in some terror a short while afterward.
Mrs Evans’s next life in York also ended tragically. It unfolded in the year 1189 in the north of the city, where ‘most of the wealthy Jews live.’ She was then Rebecca, wife of Joseph, a rich Jewish moneylender. The times were troubled for Jews. Anti-Jewish uprisings had occurred in ‘Lincoln, London and Chester.’ In York Jews were subject to abuse and threats. One member of their community, Isaac of Coney Street, was even murdered by a mob.
By the spring of the next year it was obvious that violence was inevitable. Rebecca and her family prepared to leave the city, but they were too late. An armed band broke into the next-door house, killed the inhabitants, looted the place, and then set fire to it. Joseph, Rebecca, and their two children were able to run only as far as the castle of York. But even there they were unable to find safe shelter. They finally found refuge of a sort when they entered a church, took the priest and his clerk captive, and hid in the cellar. Later, from the safety of the church roof, they could see flames and hear distant mobs screaming ‘Burn the Jews, burn the Jews!’
Rebecca’s family’s respite was short-lived. Their captives escaped and alerted soldiers, who came to the church. At this point in the story, Jane Evans became ‘…almost incoherent with terror’ as the soldiers took her daughter; then, whispering ‘Dark… dark’, she presumably died.
Evan’s other major life was in medieval France around 1450. At that time she was apparently a young Egyptian servant named Alison in the household of Jacques Coeur – the outstanding merchant prince of that period. She was able to talk at length and knowledgeably about Coeur’s intrigues, about the King’s mistress Agnes Sorel, and about the clash between the Dauphin Louis and King Charles VII. She knew a great deal about Coeur’s possessions and his extraordinary house at Bourges. Her knowledge of the clothes worn by her
master was accurate: ‘tunic edged with miniver, redhose… shoes of red Cordovan leather… a jewelled belt around his waist and a chain around his neck.’
She was again accurate when she related Jacques Coeur’s fall from favour. He was once close to the king, but after the death of Agnes Sorel a rumour spread that Coeur had poisoned her. Coeur was indeed arrested, tried on a number of charges, and imprisoned. But Alison knew only of his arrest. According to her, when the soldiers came for her master he gave her a poisoned drink, and she ended her life by accepting it.
When television viewers saw Jane Evans under hypnosis and heard her astonishing stories, they were understandably impressed. She did not seem to be acting. When fear and anguish came into her voice, it was clear that she was racked with real emotions. And her easy grasp of often difficult names of people and places made it seem that she was indeed remembering things that she’d once known intimately. But Jane Evans in her unhypnotised state was adamant that she knew nothing of Jacques Coeur, nothing of Carausius and his times, and nothing of the massacre of the Jews of York.
Iverson concluded: ‘The Bloxham Tapes have been researched and there is no evidence that they are fantasies. In our present state of knowledge about them, they appear to convey exactly what they claim: a genuine knowledge and experience of the past.’ But were these tapes ever researched as painstakingly as they should have been? Is it possible that quite another phenomenon rather than reincarnation can account for these rich narratives?
Cryptomnesia
Are past-life regressions really evidence for reincarnation? Or could they be glimpses of ancestral memories? Both theories have their followers. Yet rigorous research provides a distinctly different answer. These regressions are fascinating examples of cryptomnesia.
To understand cryptomnesia we must think of the subconscious mind as a vast, muddled storehouse of information. This information comes from books, newspapers, and magazines; from lectures, television, and radio; from direct observation and even from overheard scraps of conversation. Under normal circumstances most of this knowledge is not subject to recall, but sometimes these deeply buried memories are spontaneously revived. They may re-emerge in a baffling form, since their origins are completely forgotten. This is cryptomnesia proper.
Because its origin is forgotten the information can seem to have no ancestry and can be mistaken for something newly created. The late Helen Keller was tragically deceived by such a cryptomnesic caprice. In 1892, she wrote a charming tale called ‘The Forest King’. It was published and applauded, but within a few months it was revealed that Helen’s piece was simply a modified version of Margaret Canby’s story ‘The Frost Fairies’, published twenty-nine years earlier. Other authors have fallen into the same trap.
In a similar fashion a number of cases of automatic writings, supposedly from discarnate spirits, have been traced to published works. For example, the famous Oscar Wilde scripts of the 1920s were gradually shown to be derived from many printed sources, including Wilde’s De Profundis and The Decay of Lying.
But could such unconscious plagiarism account for Bridey Murphy and her offspring? Were these past existences nothing but subconscious fantasies yielded up in order to please the hypnotists? Were they simply a pastiche of buried memories made gripping by the sincerity that accompanies cryptomnesia? In 1956, Dr Edwin S Zolik of Marquette University set out to answer these questions.
After Dr Zolik hypnotized his subjects, he instructed them to ‘remember previous existences’, and they obliged by providing convincing accounts of past lives. In a waking state they assured him that they knew nothing about these previous lifetimes. But, when rehypnotized and reexamined, the subjects were able to remember the sources used in constructing their past-life adventures. In brief, Zolik’s detailed analysis showed that past-life memories could easily be nothing but a mixture of remembered tales and strong, symbolically coloured emotions.
Zolik recommended his method of probing for real-life origins of reincarnationist material to anyone seriously interested in the truth. Unfortunately, few, if any, of the enthusiastic hypnoregressionists took any notice of his advice, and session after session was committed to tape and marvelled over, without any effort being made to verify the origins or meaning of this material. Hypnotherapist Arnall Bloxham, for one, recorded more than four hundred past-life regressions without ever once digging for the possibly mundane origins of these alleged lives. On the other hand, the Finnish psychiatrist Dr Reima Kampman devoted years to the systematic investigation of the cryptomnesic origins of past-life accounts.
Dr Kampman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oulu, Finland, began his work in the 1960s. He found his subjects among large groups of volunteers drawn from the three highest grades of the secondary schools of Oulu. All who were able to enter a deep hypnotic state were selected for closer study. Kampman found it relatively easy to induce past-life recall as a response to his instruction: ‘Go back to an age before your birth, when you are somebody else, somewhere else.’
His most amazing subject was as a girl who conjured up eight past-lives. Her lives took place in ancient Babylonia, in Nankin, in Paris, in England, and finally in revolutionary Russia. Her thirteenth-century life – as Dorothy, an innkeeper’s daughter – brought to light ‘a very explicit account of contemporary happenings’. And she astonished everyone by singing a song that none of the listeners was familiar with – she called it ‘the summer song’. The language of the song was later studied by a student ‘with high honours in the English language’. He had no difficulty in identifying the words as examples of an old-style English, possibly Middle English. But the girl had no memory of ever having heard the words or the music of the song before.
The solution to this riddle came during a later experiment. She was asked to go back to a time when she might have seen the words and music of the song or even heard it sung. She then regressed to the age of thirteen and remembered taking a book from the shelf in a library. It was a casual choice, and she merely flicked through the pages; yet she not only remembered its title but was able to state just where in the book her ‘summer song’ could be found. The book was Musiikin Vaiheet, a Finnish translation of The History of Music by Benjamin Britten and Imogen Hoist. And the mystery music was, of all things, the famous ‘Summer Is Icumen In’ with the words rendered in a simplified medieval English.
A spate of similar successes led Kampman to conclude that he had demonstrated ‘that the experiences of the present personality were reflected in the secondary personalities both in the form of realistic details and as emotional experiences. The recording of a song from a book simply by turning over the leaves of the book at the age of 13 is an outstanding example of how very detailed information can be stored in our brain without any idea whatever of it in the conscious mind, and how it can be retrieved in deep hypnosis’. These findings allow us to look at Bloxham cases with more understanding.
But the case is very different with the Bloxham tapes. Graham Huxtable proved unable to help in an investigation, and Jane Evans flatly refused to cooperate. As a result, the only course was to scrutinize the texts and laboriously search for the probable origins of their ‘previous lives’. The extravagant claims made for these tapes led me to undertake the search. I decided to concentrate on the six past-lives of Jane Evans, since Iverson considered them to constitute ‘the most consistently astonishing case in Bloxham ‘s collection’. My investigation soon showed that the claims made for the tapes were false and the result of misdirected and inadequate research. For example, one of Jane Evan’s minor lives, as a handmaiden to Catherine of Aragon, could easily have been based, sequence for sequence, on Jean Plaidy’s historical novel Katherine, The Virgin Widow.
But Evans’ three major lives proved to have the most illuminating ancestries. Her recital as Alison, a teenage servant to Jacques Coeur, the fifteenth-century French merchant- prince, was said to prove that she ‘knew a remarkable amount about French medieval history’. Yet in her waking state she said, ‘I have never read about Jacques Coeur. I have never even heard the name.’
Jeffrey Iverson even concluded that she could not have picked up her many facts from standard sources. After all, she knew so much, including inside knowledge of the intrigues surrounding the king’s mistress Agnes Sorel. Among other things, Evans was able to fully describe the exteriors and interiors of Coeur’s magnificent house – she even gave details of the carvings over the fireplace in his main banquet hall. Even more surprising, she spoke of the carved tomb of Agnes Sorel that was housed in a church. According to Iverson, this tomb ‘had been cast away by French revolutionaries and spent a hundred and sixty-five years, until its rediscovery in 1970, out of sight in a cellar’. But like a number of observations in the book More Lives Than One? this claim does not stand up to scrutiny.
The truth is that the Sorel tomb was placed in its present setting no later than 1809. It has been a tourist attraction for the whole of this century, and it is described in detail in HD Sedgwick’s A Short History of France published in 1930. The book was popular for decades and often found in public and school libraries. Apart from that, the tomb has been referred to in many other books and photographed frequently.
The circumstances are very much the same with Jacques Coeur’s house. It is one of the most photographed houses in all of France. Fine, explicit photographs of it are included in Dame Joan Evans’s book Life in Medieval France. There once can see the stone carvings over his fireplace and gain a sound idea of how the place looked, both inside and out. There is little doubt that Jane Evans has seen these or similar pictures. And there is overwhelmingly strong evidence that the rest of Jane’s material was drawn from a source not known to Iverson, the 1947 novel The Moneyman by C B Costain. The booked is based on Coeur ‘s life and provides almost all the flourishes and authentic-sounding touches included in Evans’s ‘past-life’ memory.
In particular, the novel very neatly answers an important question raised by Iverson and other commentators: Why doesn’t Alison know that her master is married? As Iverson puts it: ‘How is it that this girl can know Coeur had an Egyptian bodyslave and not be aware that he was married with five children? – a published fact in every historical account of Coeur’s life? …If the explanation for the entire regression is a reading of history books in the twentieth century, then I cannot explain how Bloxham ‘s subject would not know of the marriage’.
Costain’s short introduction to his novel clears up the mystery. He writes: ‘I have made no mention of Jacques Coeur’s family for the reason that they played no real part in the events which brought his career to its climax… When I attempted to introduce them into the story they got so much in the way that I decided finally it would be better to do without them’.
The view that Evans’s tapes were simply the result of cryptomnesia could still be contested if it were not for the confirmation provided by the vetting of her remaining two major lives. As Rebecca, the Jewess of York, Evans was supposed to have met her death during the massacre of 1190. At that time, most of the Jewish community died in the York Castle Keep, but Rebecca ‘s death came in the cellar episode and a formidable legend has grown up. It is now asserted that the church is St Mary’s of Castlegate and the crypt was actually discovered after Jane’s regression.
The truth is that the original television programme script stated that there were three possible churches that could qualify as the place of refuge. St Mary’s was chosen to film simply because it was the most convenient, since it was being converted into a museum. And it was this conversion that led to the uncovering of an aperture under the chancel. For believers, this was naturally a medieval crypt and proof of Rebecca’s story. A very different view is presented by a report of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. On York (vol. 5, 1981) it says, ‘Beneath the East end of the charnel vault with a barrel-vault of stone rubble, probably a later insertion and now inaccessible’.
For all that, the furore over the crypt is meaningless, since the Rebecca regression is clearly a fantasy. It is an amalgamation of at least two different stories of persecution taken from widely separated centuries.
Historical absurdities
The proof that we are dealing with a fantasy lies in the historical absurdities found in the tale. Rebecca repeats four times that members of the Jewish community in York were forced to wear yellow badges, which she described as ‘circles over our hearts’. But the Jewish badge was not introduced until the following century, and then the English pattern consisted of two oblong white strips of cloth that represented the tablets of Moses. The yellow circle was, in fact, the badge worn by Jews in France and Germany after 1215. This is one aspect of Jewish history over which there are no legitimate doubts.
Further absurdities were discovered in passages from the tapes that were excluded from both the book and the film. In these revealing passages, Rebecca repeatedly speaks of living in the ghetto at the north of York. This ghetto was a quarter without street names in which only the rich Jews lived and she pointedly mentioned a poor Jew who had lived in ‘the middle of York in a street called Coney Street’.
Now there never was a special Jewish quarter in York. The Jews lived scattered among the Christians in Micklegate, Fosgate, Bretgate, Feltergayle, and near the centre of town in Jewbury. The idea that a Jew would live on Coney Street because of his poverty is ludicrous. Coney Street was, in truth, the choice place for many of the rich Jews to settle, including Josce, the head of the Jewish community!
As for the notion of the ghetto itself, this involved a leap in time of over three hundred years, since the first ghetto was not set up until 1516 in Venice. It was established on an old foundry site. The very name is derived from the Italian geto, or foundry.
This means, inevitably, that Jane Evans has the ability to store vivid stories in her subconscious and creatively combine and edit them to the point where she becomes one of the characters involved. The clinching proof that this is so is provided by the Livonia regression. It is the purest regression of all, as it is based on one source only.
This particular life involves a turbulent period in Britain’s history: a time of rebellion and instability. The name of the Roman governor of Britain during this period is unrecorded in existing historical records. Evans’s past-life memories seem to fill this gap for us by stating that Constantius, father of Constantine the Great, was in charge. After consulting his reference books, Iverson happily concluded: ‘Nor can the regression be dismissed as a fiction built around a blank area of history. Livonia knows a considerable number of verifiable historical facts that fit perfectly into her vision of the missing years. No modem student of history could contradict the names and events she describes… After hearing the tape, Professor Brian Hartley, an authority of Roman Britain, seemed to agree, since he commented: ‘She knew some quite remarkable historical facts, and numerous published works would have to be consulted if anyone tried to prepare the outline of such a story’.
Professor Hartley was right, much painstaking research went into the making of Jane’s story; but the research was undertaken by the late Louis De Wohl. In 1947, he wrote the best-selling novel The Living Wood, and Jane’s life as Livonia is taken directly from that novel. Brief comparisons will show how.
Livonia’s tale opens in Britain during 286 AD. She describes the garden of a house owned by the Legate Constantius. His wife is Lady Helena, his son Constantine. The son is pictured as being taught the use of shield, sword, and armor by his military tutor Marcus Favonius Facilis. This entire sequence is taken from Book 2, Chapter 2, of the novel, in which Constantine trains in the use of arms and armour under his military tutor Marcus Favonius, called ‘Facilis… because every-thing was easy to him’. De Wohl based this character on a real-life centurion whose tombstone is now in Colchester Castle Museum. But his account of this centurion’s life is pure fiction, since Facilis died in the first century AD.
Livonia then describes a visit by the historical character Allectus. He brings Constantius an urgent message from Rome, but despite its urgency Constantius ‘stopped at Gessoriacum to see Carausius who is in charge of the fleet’. This section is drawn from the same part of the novel as the above, in which the visit leads to the takeover of Britain by the rebellious Carausius, who is aided by Allectus. Iverson writes: ‘Livonia gives a basically accurate picture of this quite obscure historical event’. Quite so, but only because the whole of the material rests on De Wohl’s research.
In the same way, every single piece of information given by Jane Evans can be traced to De Wohl’s fictional account. She uses his fictional sequences in exactly the same order and she even speaks of his fictional characters, such as Curio and Velerius, as if they were real people.
There are two minor differences worth noticing, since these involve her editing faculty. In the first instance, Evans takes a minor character, Titus Albus, a Christian soldier willing to die for his faith, and recasts him as a tutor to Constantine. But only the name itself is taken from De Wohl, for all of Titus’s feelings and actions are those of De Wohl’s character Hilary. Hilary is converted to Christianity by Albanus, ordained as a priest of Osius, and killed during a violent campaign against his faith. All these things happen in turn to Jane Evans’s Titus.
In the second instance she takes another insignificant character, Livonia, who is described as ‘a charming creature with pouting lips and smouldering eyes’, and amalgamates her with Helena. A composite character is able to act as both an observer and as someone who voices Helena’s sentiments, thus making the story that much fuller and far easier to relate.
This feat of editing reveals a little of the psychology behind these fantasies. Hilary is an eminently desirable male in the novel described as having ‘a beautiful honest face with eyes of a dreamer’. He is also secretly in love with Helena. As Titus he becomes the lover of Livonia of the pouting lips and smouldering eyes – in other words, of Jane Evans herself. And there we have all the combustible material that fuelled a young girl’s daydreams. And all inspired by an exciting historical novel.
In conclusion, I should emphasize that in investigating regressionist claims, I chose the most difficult and best-known cases available. They had remained unchallenged for years and were regarded as impregnable. A BBC documentary team had checked them out in every detail. They were triumphantly marketed as ‘the most staggering evidence for reincarnation ever recorded… accounts so authentic that they can only be explained by the certainty of reincarnation…’ Yet in the end they turned out to be nothing but fantasies, pure and simple.
