The period between 1226 and 1860 has yet to yield anything in the way of a memory I can trace.
At least the life I lived between ca. 1810 and ca. 1875 has some verisimilitude. I was able to confirm at least a few bits and pieces of that life were plausible even if the specific life proves elusive. I cannot, for example, find any record of a Clyde Starr or a Clive Sparks or any similar name that yields useful information but small snippets of that life fit with the sundry details of the 19th century when I do a bit of research into them. All I can say for sure is that it was very likely that I traveled to the Americas and I was probably English, and spent my later years as a stagehand at an opera house which probably influenced my love of music and theatre later on.
But what about the other snippets I’ve recalled? I’ve gone back and forth over whether the 14th century clothes I recall wearing in that church with black columns were significant or whether that was an aesthetic detail my mind colored in later out of expectation.
As for the fragment of a Tudor life (or perhaps in Regency times; the hair and clothing styles were inconsistent in the memory) as a lady in love with a dark-haired man who was called a “Spaniard” for his complexion but probably was English… I can find nothing there either. The man I saw was young and handsome though and reminded me in his shy and moody demeanor of my current life’s fiance.
And was I a ne’er-do-well transported for life from England only to become an itinerant preacher in the American colonies in the mid-18th century? I don’t know. It seems unlikely I’ll ever trace it. Even the name that came to me, “Jackson,” is such a common name among early settlers as to prove entirely useless.
Then there are the intuitions that come without any sort of memories. I have a very strong intuition that I was a monk or a nun (or perhaps both) at various times throughout the medieval period and it certainly seems entirely in-character for me. But where are the memories? Buried somewhere deep where even now I cannot dislodge them.
Or perhaps I did not live any lives in this period. Perhaps Phil was right and there was an ellipsis between the time of the Apostles and 1974 (or WWI, depending on which part of his writings you focus on). Perhaps I have not lived any lives in this span yet; that raises some interesting questions about non-linear time. Maybe my next life will be in the time of Henry VIII or the French Revolution and this whole conceit of the “future” is a useless idea.
And how do the weird coincidences between John’s life and Longespee’s life stack up? Was William Longespee merely a Platonic “accident” thrown into the ellipsis to make it seem as if time had passed, when in fact I did not live at all between 45 AD and 1877? Were John and Count William essentially the same person, the way Phil imagined he and Thomas were the same person, bound in similarity by groups of “accidents?” Or is the narrowing gap between Roman times and Phil’s life a sure indication that Phil was wrong about the ellipsis altogether? Once again the more elegant hypothesis is simply that I lived many lives in that space and simply don’t remember them but the more enticing possibility is that something very complicated is going on here.
Severe Deja Vu 