History and Cases of Reincarnation Past Lives of Taylor Caldwell Part 1

About the history of reincarnation in the case of Taylor Caldwell a writer who discovered past lives while attempting to disprove them.

SECOND TIME AROUND--REINCARNATION

Taylor Caldwell Meets Her Other Selves

The Revelation

I shudder at the very thought of being born again into this world. Life to me . . . has been a monstrous, painful, agonizing affair, and the idea of repeating such an existence--even if better in a way--is horrifying to me. . . . I gratefully look forward to oblivion, but I must be sure of it.

--Taylor Caldwell in The Search for a soul by Jess Stearn

And so world-famous novelist Taylor Caldwell had set out to disprove the theory of serial lives. She enlisted the aid of her friend Jess Stearn, researcher in occult subjects and author of Yoga, Youth and Reincarnation and other works. Stearn was delighted to help, for he had his own theory that Miss Caldwell's vividly written and richly detailed novels--many historical and many on subjects she had little "acquired" knowledge of--were developed in large part from subconscious memories of past lives.

The two decided to use hypnosis to regress Miss Caldwell back beyond the memories that were verifiably part of her present life in order to seek those of ostensibly past lives. Stearn felt it best to perform the experiments in California: "If they can't do it in California, it can't be done anywhere. . . . The atmosphere is so electric out there that even the people think they're spirits." Caldwell and Stearn agreed to begin in December, 1971, and so Taylor Caldwell left her home in Buffalo, N.Y., for southern California to prove that death provided the total release from consciousness that she believed it promised.

Unfortunately, under hypnosis, Miss Caldwell managed to describe 11 divergent personalities who had lived on earth in different eras as though they were all her previous incarnations. She also wove into her narrative a description of her life between incarnations and indicated that her present-life husband was one of two recurring souls who had appeared throughout her stays on earth.

Who Was Who

When she was under hypnosis, Taylor Caldwell's memory spanned thousands of years. Her most remote life was that as Felida, a girl living on the seacoast of Lemuria, the lost continent and a counterpart to Atlantis. Next she saw herself as Helena in 5th-century Greece. During the Age of Pericles, this woman had disguised herself as a man in order to learn medicine and had taught surgery in the school of Hippocrates. In the beginning of the Common Era, she remembered herself as being the mother of the woman the world now knows as Mary Magdalene.

Twice she was a South American Indian, once an Incan empress and once an Aztec woman who sold dried onions and peppers. She remembered the Spaniards killing Montezuma, as well as her own death at their hands, in her Aztec incarnation.

Twice she was a nun. Her name was Sister Maria Theresa in Barcelona, Spain, in the early 15th century. In medieval Florence, she was Sister Mary Bernard, a follower of Savonarola. When this monk was executed, she was arrested and thrown into prison. There she committed suicide, preferring death to torture.

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