The Reincarnationist Papers Read online

  D. Eric Maikranz

  A memoir of past lives: the account of Evan Michaels

  The Reincarnationist Papers

  ~~~

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 2013 by D. Eric Maikranz. All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  Author’s Explanatory Note

  Foreword

  THE REINCARNATIONIST PAPERS

  1st NOTEBOOK

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  2nd NOTEBOOK

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  3rd NOTEBOOK

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  About the Author

  Endnotes

  Author’s Explanatory Note

  The Reincarnationist Papers came into my possession while living in Rome in the late 1990’s. I titled the compiled and translated work myself as the original notebooks came with no title and were only numbered one, two and three. I noticed the three plain notebooks in an antique shop on the medieval via dei Coronari, just off Piazza Navona. At the time I was conducting research for my first book, Insider’s Rome, Marshall Cavendish - publisher, a travel guide to some of the city’s more obscure but interesting sites. They seemed out of place in an antique store, weathered but not quite old enough. Idly picking up the first notebook, I was surprised to find it filled with Cyrillic handwriting. Being a Russian speaker, the pages intrigued me; I purchased them for a meager 20,000 lire, about $10 US at that time.

  Despite lengthy efforts, I could not fully translate the text of the notebooks and eventually determined that they were Serbian, Bulgarian or Ukrainian, but definitely not Russian.

  Following a hunch, I first went to the Bulgarian Embassy on Via Pietro Rubens north of the Borghese. I struck up a conversation with a receptionist and she confirmed the handwriting was Bulgarian. Intrigued by the first few pages, she agreed to help me translate it. Over the summer Marina Lizhiva and I set to work, she translating aloud to my typing accompaniment. We became enthralled as the story unfolded in those summer evenings in my apartment on Caio Mario near the Vatican. When the translation was finished, I set to work to verify what I could of Evan’s claim. This research is detailed as footnotes to the text, the only editorial work required after translation.

  D. Eric Maikranz

  Foreword

  The entirety of my academic career, and majority of my life, has been dedicated to searching for, examining and providing scientific proof of the survival of the individual personality after death. This field of endeavor has afforded me hundreds of blinded and controlled past life memory experiments in Europe, in South Asia, and in the Americas. In this multitude of case studies I have found a majority of false or imagined accounts, a number of cases that could be neither verified nor discounted and a smaller number of cases offering conclusive and scientific proof of a subject remembering facts, skills, experiences and relationships back beyond their own [current] lives. It is into this last category that one must file The Reincarnationist Papers: a memoir of Evan Michaels. This work first came to my attention in early 2008 at a past life research conference in India and became a windfall to my ongoing research in two specific areas: the possibility of subjects remembering more than one additional lifetimes of experiences, which is very rare, and the possibility that such unique individuals might seek out one another and fraternize collectively.

  I was skeptical upon hearing of a detailed chronicle of a man claiming to remember two past lives, but Maikranz’s research to verify facts from the work offered evidence meriting further investigation. The memoir, while interesting from a clinical perspective, takes a back seat in my mind to Evan’s detailed description of the Cognomina*, the Zürich-based clandestine collective for individuals like Evan who remember many past lives. . The principal utility in such a collective ostensibly being the ability to associate with similar members; Subjects with past life memories often skew toward dissociative disorders, depression and misanthropy, associating with one another might mitigate these feelings. A second benefit would be the ability to bequeath acquired wealth to the collective, which the individual could claim as inherited property from him/herself upon a successful verification of claim to the peerage in a successive incarnation. Another interesting fact about the members of this collective is their adoption, in each new body, of a distinctive black tattoo on the back of the right hand. This tattoo was a key clue in pushing verification of his claim forward.

  The first question posed by this book is do these individuals, and when I say individuals I mean their surviving personalities, exist as a collective group associating with one another lifetime after lifetime? I believe the answer to this question is yes. My answer to this question, even before seeing the evidence of Mr. Evan Michaels, was yes and this is due to tangible (though scarce) evidence of the existence of the Cognomina back to the Middle Ages.

  The first mention of a group resembling the Cognomina, tattooed hands, secrecy, non adherence to traditional religious views, dates to the 15th century in the Konstanz Codex. Konrad Grünenberg’s largely heraldic work contains a brief but interesting reference to a Zurich-based guild with a distinctive crossed-flail tattoo ever present on the right hand. Additional reference comes in the early 19th century from Ludwig Meyer von Knonau, noted Swiss statesman and historian, in his Handbuch Geschichte der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft, which contains a short passage in his 1826 edition (the entry was curiously removed from the 1829 two volume rerelease) about a secretive group of landed nobles in Zurich described as auslanders, who all carried the same crossed mark on their hands as if a brand.

  If these were the only references to the Cognomina and their distinctive tattoo, the research might have stalled but for the recent discovery of individuals from this collective that have been seen by this researcher and staffers in the present day. Attempts to interview these subjects has been futile to this point as, per the text, they do prize their privacy above all things. A comprehensive examination of both historical references and contemporary sightings will be published in a forthcoming paper in 2009.

  The second question to be answered is: if these people exist and their personalities survive what we believe to be the annihilation of the personality at physical death then what are they exactly? These questions are raised in Evan Michaels’ memoir but are not satisfactorily answered. This may be because in his short [first] tenure with the other members of the Cognomina that he did not find the answer to this question of what they are. It could also be because the answer to this question is not known even among the larger fraternity of Cognomina members. There is some evidence in the text that this second possibility is more likely, as one of the oldest members of the collective seems to have been able to find no conclusive answer to this question in his many incarnations. Therefore, a researcher is left to his own speculations about the true nature of these unique and transcending individuals.


  The two immediate schools of thought are: 1) that these individuals are like us but that the palimpsest of their previous lifes’ memories are not completely erased upon a successive incarnation; this of course presupposes the fact that we are all incarnated in a succession of fleshly vessels and that they are unique in remembering it. 2) that these individuals are unique in that they reincarnate and remember previous incarnations while the remainder of us are here but for a single lifetime per the tenants of monotheistic western religious dogmas.

  After a 35 year search for evidence of the survival, in some measure, of the personality after bodily death, I subscribe to the former option: that these members of the Cognomina are unique only in that they are able to recall the facts, skills, experiences and relationships from their pasts.

  As an academic, I am compelled by this book, compelled to continue researching specifically into the Cognomina. Having seen their members in the present day, I believe they have the ability to clarify many facts not only about themselves and their nature, but of us and our nature that they could at long last deliver the definite proof of the transcending personality, proving that reincarnation is real.

  Dr. Fritz Carlton,

  Department of Personality Studies

  [Psychology] University of Königsberg

  THE REINCARNATIONIST PAPERS

  1st NOTEBOOK

  "As the stars looked to me when I was a shepherd in Assyria, they look to me now a New Englander."

  Henry David Thoreau, 1853

  1

  The noose looked ridiculous. Fashioned from a braided extension cord, it was likely too stiff to be an effective neck breaker anyway and I would end up strangling in a flailing, pantomimed panic. The asymmetrical loop at the end was misshapen and hanging off to the right like an elongated number six, and the bright orange color of the cord lent a circus air about the entire endeavor. Would it even hold my weight, wrapped around the cheap light fixture like it was?

  It’s easy to write about it now, that I’d often thought about killing myself, thought specifically about how I might do it: drowning, overdose, asphyxiation; immolation is a personal favorite. I’ve even talked about the virtues and pitfalls of different methods with strangers on the bus.

  “Why would you do such a thing?” was always a popular response. But I think that is the wrong way to look at it. I’ve always thought the better question was “Why not do such a thing?”

  So ‘Why not do such a thing’ was the question I began to ask these strangers in return.

  “What prevents you from doing such a thing? Do you like it here that much? Are you in love? Do people depend on you being here? Did it never occur to you? Are you afraid?”

  I am not afraid.

  If you knew you would come back, knew you would live again, not just believed it, but knew it, why would you not do such a thing?

  But I didn’t put my neck into the noose, not out of fear but out of courtesy really, because this place, this type of desperate end would be too horrible to remember. That’s the trouble with having a perfect memory. Its benefit is that you remember everything that has ever happened to you. Its drawback is that you can never forget anything that has ever happened to you. The former imparts wisdom; the latter robs you of hope. I decided to write down this story with the certainty that I will look on it again with different eyes in a different time and remember who I'd been.

  I left Minnesota eight years ago, because I started to remember. I left to find myself, only to find myself here, in Los Angeles. Nobody's exactly what they seem in L. A. Everyone has an ulterior motive for leading their everyday lives. No one's just a doctor, or a student, or a salesman; they’re a doctor and an art collector, a student with an audition next week, a salesman with a screenplay. In this place more than any other I've found, there is anonymity in being more than you seem. And that, more than anything else, explains why I landed here.

  It was still in the low nineties outside when I left for the club. When it's hot at night and there's no wind, all of downtown LA’s visceral smells hang thick in the air, assaulting as you pass. But still, it felt good to be outside, even on a muggy night like this.

  I'd been cooped up in my room for three days straight, knowing the management wouldn't put a padlock on the outside of the door if there was still someone inside. I had lived, if you can call it that, in the Ohio Hotel[1] for five months, and every time I was even a day late with the weekly rent, those bastards put that same blue, spray-painted padlock on my door. If you didn't pay the rent by the end of that week they would remove the lock along with all your possessions. That hadn't happened to me yet, but was only four days away. They were already scurrying through the lock drawer in search of the blue one when I passed by the front desk on my way out.

  There was a line outside the Necropolis Club. It seemed there was always a line. Thankfully the bouncer on the door let me in without waiting. I was supposed to meet Martin at midnight; it was 10:45 when I arrived.

  The once quiet Necropolis had been my bar of choice for the past two years. But with one write up in the LA Weekly[2] the amateurs started pouring in from as far away as Simi Valley and Chino. But for all its newfound popularity, the bar itself hadn't changed. The Egyptian themed club sat in an old movie theater, and all they did to modernize it was to remove the seats, level the floor, put bars along the front and back walls, and build a stage in front of the large silver movie screen, which showed black and white films without sound behind the bands. The bar tops along each wall were lit by blue-white neon underneath thick frosted glass, making it look as if they served nothing but iridescent blue liquors to the patrons. The walls had been stripped clean, painted black, and covered in twenty foot tall, white bas-relief portraits of strange-looking Egyptian gods.

  "Hello Evan," a familiar voice said from behind the bar.

  "Henry," I said, smiling at him as I took the last empty seat at the back bar.

  "What can I get for you?"

  "Give me a beer."

  "That'll be two bucks," he said, nodding to someone holding up an empty glass at the other end of the bar.

  I had less than a dollar on me. "Run me a tab will you Henry? I'm going be here for awhile," I said, lighting a cigarette. Henry smiled and went down toward the man with the glass.

  By midnight the place was buzzing. The second band of the night was The Gomer Pylons. Dressed in olive drab military fatigues with bright orange road construction cones strapped onto their heads, they played punk and country covers, bouncing on stage while an angry Godzilla silently destroyed 1958 Tokyo on the screen behind them. The dance floor seethed with motion that appeared in stop frames from the overhead strobe lights. I could see the door from my seat at the back bar. The doorman was still letting people in at 12:30.

  I had given Martin directions to the Necropolis and told him to be there early because of the increasing crowds; told him to mention my name at the door, and to tip the man at the door. I told him to look for a six foot tall, twenty-five year old, white man with blue eyes, short blond straight hair wearing a black shirt. Looking around now, there were three dozen of us matching the description. Martin had started to describe himself over the pay phone, but I told him I would know who he was; I would, and he wasn't there.

  Henry came back with another beer in hand just as the Pylons finished their first set. "Here you go," he said, placing the glass on a fresh napkin. "Hey, check out the mark." He pointed over my shoulder into the crowd to a middle aged, balding man in a camel hair sport coat and cream colored khakis. He was apologizing as he made his way through the crowd.

  "Oh," I chuckled, "he's with me."

  "Yeah right," said Henry, turning away.

  I walked straight up to Martin.

  "Evan?" he asked gasping, a dazed look on his face.

  "Yes Martin, you're late." I led him to the back bar.

  "I know, I had trouble at the door."

  I looked him up and down, from his balding head to his
penny loafers. "I can't imagine why."

  "This place is different all right, just like you said. Pretty cool. Why did you have me meet you here?" he said, looking around.

  "Because if you were a cop, a wire would be useless in a place like this," I shouted as I reached inside his sport coat to run my hand over the sweater vest feeling for a recording device. "Right?" He squirmed at my touch.

  He regained his composure and ran a comforting hand over his lapels as I took my seat again. "Is this an old movie theater?" he asked.

  "Yes. How did you hear about me again?" I took a long draw off my beer.

  "Preston. He said you could help me."

  I nodded.

  "Can you, help me?" he asked, raising his eyebrows in an attempt to solicit a response.

  “Yes, I can. Did you bring the money?"

  He reached inside his sport coat and produced a white, unsealed envelope, which he placed on the luminescent bar next to my beer. "I'm glad to get rid of it, I get nervous carrying that kind of cash in this end of town."

  I didn’t acknowledge his remark as I looked at the envelope. It lay on the frosted glass, half an inch thick. I picked it up carefully, as if it might break. Fanning through it, I found twenty-five one hundred dollar bills, a handwritten address, and a key. "I get the other half when it's done."

  "Yes, I know. Preston told me," he said.

  Henry came over again and shot me a curious look, then sized up Martin. "Another?"

  I nodded.

  "And what'll you have, Dad?" Henry asked sarcastically.

  Martin looked at me. "What, is he making fun of me?"