What is happening to Christianity? Millions of Americans, Europeans and Canadians believe in reincarnation. Many of them call themselves Christians, yet they persist in a belief that the Church rejected fifteen hundred years ago.

By conservative estimates, over one-fifth of American adults believe in reincarnation—and that includes a fifth of all Christians. The figures are similar for Europe and Canada. Another 22 percent of Americans say they are "not sure" about reincarnation, indicating that they are at least open to the belief.

The percentage of Christians in America who believe in reincarnation is about the same as the percentage of believers in the general population, according to a 1990 Gallup poll. An earlier poll gave the breakdown by denomination. It found that 21 percent of Protestants (including Methodists, Baptists and Lutherans) and 25 percent of Catholics held the belief. For clergy who got out their calculators, that comes out to an eye-popping 28 million Christian reincarnationists!

Reincarnation is starting to rival some of the fundamental tenets of Christianity. In Denmark, a 1992 survey found that 14 percent of the country's Lutherans believed in reincarnation, while only 20 percent believed in the Christian doctrine of resurrection. Younger Lutherans were even less inclined to believe in the resurrection. In the eighteen to thirty age bracket, only 15 percent believed in the resurrection, while 18 percent believed in reincarnation.

These shifts in Christian beliefs mark a trend toward what some scholars are calling a post-Christian religion in the West. It's a shift away from traditional Church authority and toward a more personal faith based on contacting the God within.

Like the Protestant Reformation, it emphasizes personal contact with God over church membership. But unlike Protestantism, it discards some of the principles that have characterized Christianity since the fourth century— things like hell, the bodily resurrection and the idea that we have only one life to live on earth. Some Christian denominations are trying to make room inside of Christianity for reincarnation and related beliefs. Others remain opposed to the concept.

What most Christians don't know, however, is that reincarnation isn't new to Christianity. Today, the majority of denominations would answer no to the question: "Can you believe in reincarnation and still be a Christian?" But in the second century, the answer would have been yes. During the first three centuries after Christ, numerous Christian sects flourished, some of which taught reincarnation. Although orthodox theologians attacked the belief from the second century on, the reincarnation controversy continued through the mid-sixth century.

Among the reincarnationist Christians were the Gnostics, who claimed to possess Christ's inner, more spiritual teachings, which had been hidden from the general population and reserved for those who could understand them. The Gnostics' religious practice centered around enlightened spiritual teachers and the personal experience of God rather than membership in an organized church.

The orthodox, however, taught that salvation could be granted only through the Church. This
tenet gave their views strength and longevity. When the Roman emperor Constantine became a supporter of Christianity in 312, he backed the orthodox view, perhaps because he thought it would lead to a stronger, more organized society.

Between the third and sixth centuries, the authorities of church and state gradually eliminated the reincarnationist Christians. But their beliefs returned to the features of Christianity like a stubborn wart. Reincarnation beliefs traveled to the areas of present-day Bosnia and Bulgaria, where they surfaced in the seventh century with the Paulicians and in the tenth century with the Bogomils. The beliefs also traveled to medieval France and Italy, where they formed a central part of the Cathar sect.

After the Church wiped out Catharism with a thirteenth-century crusade followed by a campaign of inquisition, torture and burnings, belief in reincarnation was kept alive through the nineteenth century in the secret traditions of the alchemists, Rosicrucians, Kabbalists, Hermeticists and Freemasons. Reincarnation continued to crop up inside the Church as well. In nineteenth-century Poland, a Catholic archbishop, Monsignor Passavalli (1820-97), grafted reincarnation onto his faith and openly embraced it. He influenced other Polish and Italian priests, who also took up reincarnation.

The idea that 25 percent of Catholics in America today believe in reincarnation might raise Vatican eyebrows. But there is anecdotal evidence of a silent minority of reincarnationist Catholics to back up the statistics. I have met many Catholics who accept the belief. And one former Catholic pastor in a major Midwestern city told me, "I know many, many Catholics and Christians of other denominations who believe in reincarnation."


Christianity's Fundamental Problem

Why do some Christians believe in reincarnation?

For one thing, it provides an alternative to the all-or-nothing view of heaven or hell. Although 95 percent of Americans believe in God and 70 percent believe in life after death, only 53 percent believe in hell. The 17 percent who believe in life after death but don't believe in hell probably can't accept that God would cause anyone to burn forever or would even, as the current Catholic catechism defines it, exclude someone from his presence eternally.

Those who don't believe in hell must ask themselves, "Does everybody go to heaven, then? What about murderers?" To many, reincarnation seems a better solution than hell. For Christianity has had difficulty answering the question "What happens to someone who dies neither good enough for heaven nor bad enough for hell?"

We often read stories in the newspaper that seem to defy standard Christian explanations. For example, stories about seemingly decent people who commit murders in the heat of passion and then take their own lives. According to many Christians, including Catholics, they would go to hell. Although murder is a serious crime, do those who commit it really deserve eternal punishment?

Here's a recent example. James Cooke, an employee of the city of Los Angeles, retired to rural Minnesota with his wife, Lois, and their two adopted teenage daughters. He got along well with his neighbors and took a job milking cows.

In September 1994, sixty-three-year-old James discovered that Lois had told the police that he was molesting their daughters. James killed all three—shooting Lois in the back and the two girls, Holly and Nicole, as they slept in their beds. He then shot himself. In his suicide note he apologized for the killings but did not admit to molesting the girls.

Where does the soul of Mr. Cooke go when he gets to the other side? Hell or heaven? Will God really send him to burn in hell for all time? Will he ever get a chance to make up for his final desperate acts?

If there is no hell or if God doesn't put him there, will he go to heaven? Assuming Holly, Nicole and Lois went to heaven, will they have to share their lives with their murderer for all eternity?
The first alternative lacks mercy; the second lacks justice. Only reincarnation offers a satisfactory solution: Mr. Cooke must return and give life to those he deprived of life. They must reembody to complete their life plans and he must serve them to make up for the pain he caused them.

All four need further opportunity on earth. So do many others who die prematurely. Christianity draws a blank on some questions like: "Why does God allow babies and children to die? What about teenagers killed by drunken drivers? Why do they live at all if their lives are so brief?" "Why, God—why did you give me Johnny, only to allow him to be taken by leukemia?"

What are priests and ministers to say? Their training offers such bland answers as "It must be part of God's plan" or "We cannot understand His purposes." They may suggest that Johnny or Mary was here to teach us about love and has now gone to be with Jesus in heaven.

Reincarnation is an attractive solution. But the Church's continued opposition to it has forced many Christians to carve out their own faith. They are left in a kind of spiritual limbo—between beliefs that satisfy a soul need and a Church that still refuses to consider them.

Take actor Glenn Ford, who, under hypnosis, recalled lives as a cowboy named Charlie and as a member of King Louis XIV's cavalry. "It [reincarnation] conflicts with all my religious beliefs,"
he fretted. "I'm a God-fearing man and proud of it, but this has got me mixed up."

The United States is a country of God-fearing people, many of whom call themselves Christians. Yet the conflicts embedded in Christianity don't go away. While Christianity may motivate and inspire many people, there are an equal number of people who are disenchanted. They can't understand a Christianity that says non-Christians will burn in hell and a God who "lets" our loved ones die.

Reincarnation is an appealing option for people who have asked themselves searching questions about God's justice. And it has appealed to many of our great minds.

Our Reincarnationist Heritage

The list of Western thinkers who accepted or thought seriously about reincarnation reads like Who's Who. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it included French philosopher François Voltaire, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, American statesman Benjamin Franklin, German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, French novelist Honoré de Balzac, American transcendentalist and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In the twentieth century it included British novelist Aldous Huxley, Irish poet W. B. Yeats and British author Rudyard Kipling. Spanish painter Salvador Dali claimed he remembered living as Saint John of the Cross.

Other Western greats have given credence to reincarnation by writing about it or having their characters express reincarnationist ideas. They include British poets William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, German poet Friedrich Schiller, French novelist Victor Hugo, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and American author J. D. Salinger.

Yeats referred to reincarnation in "Under Ben Bulben," a poem he wrote the year before he died:

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers' toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

When he was twenty-two, Ben Franklin drafted an epitaph for himself predicting that he would reincarnate. He compared his body to the worn-out cover of a book with "its contents torn out." He predicted that the contents would "not be lost" but would "appear once more in a new and more elegant edition revised and corrected by the Author."


The Stream Resurfaces

These thinkers reflected a new openness to reincarnation that had begun with the Enlightenment. During the late nineteenth century, reincarnation gained increased popularity in the West through the Russian-born mystic Helena P. Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society. While she emphasized Eastern religion and philosophy, Blavatsky also embraced esoteric Christianity. William Q. Judge, one of the society's cofounders, was fond of calling reincarnation "the lost chord of Christianity."

Theosophy opened the door for a number of other groups to teach reincarnation in a Christian context. Among them are Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical Society and Charles and Myrtle Fillmore's Unity School of Christianity.

Edgar Cayce, the "sleeping prophet," was a devout Christian who came to believe in reincarnation and popularized it for millions of people. He started out as a psychic diagnostician who gave health readings while in a self-induced hypnotic sleep. Although Cayce had never studied medicine, his readings proved accurate and his remedies effective. The cures included everything from drugs and surgery to vitamins and massage.

Cayce first mentioned reincarnation in a 1923 reading. Referring to the subject of the reading, Arthur Lammers, he said, "He was once a monk." Cayce never remembered what he said in his trances, so when his stenographer read those words back to him, they plunged him into turmoil. Didn't reincarnation conflict with scripture? he wondered.

Cayce had accepted a literal interpretation of the Bible, which, by 1923, he had read once for each of his forty-six years. He knew about reincarnation but considered it a Hindu superstition. After the Lammers reading, Cayce read the Bible straight through again to see if it condemned the idea. He decided it didn't and continued his past-life readings. Ultimately he came to accept reincarnation and predicted his own reincarnation in twenty-second-century Nebraska. Cayce's work has influenced millions of Americans, many of whom will never go back to the orthodox Christian view of life.

Sandbox Recollections

Like Cayce, I came to my belief in reincarnation through an unconventional experience. When I was four I remembered a past life. It happened one spring day while I was playing in my sandbox in the picket-fenced play yard my father had built for me. It was my own little world inside the larger world of our backyard in Red Bank, New Jersey.

On that day I was alone, letting the sand slip through my fingers and watching fluffy clouds roll by. Then gradually, gently, the scene began to change. As though someone had turned the dial on a radio, I was on another frequency—playing in the sand along the Nile River in Egypt.

It was just as real as my play yard in Red Bank and just as familiar. I was idling away the hours, splashing in the water and feeling the warm sand on my body. My Egyptian mother was nearby. Somehow this too was my world. I had known that river forever. And the fluffy clouds were there too.

How did I know it was Egypt? How did I know the Nile? Knowing it was part of the experience. Perhaps my conscious mind made the connection because my parents had put a map of the world over my toy chest and I already knew the names of most of the countries.

After some time (I don't know how long), it was as though the dial turned again and I was back at home in my little play yard. I wasn't dizzy or dazed. I was back in the present, very much aware that I had been somewhere else.

So I jumped up and ran to find my mother. She was standing at the kitchen stove cooking. I blurted out my story, then asked, "What happened?"

She sat me down and looked at me and said, "You have remembered a past life." With those words she opened another dimension. The picket-fenced play yard now included the whole world. Instead of ridiculing or denying what I had experienced, she spoke to me in terms that a child could understand: "Our body is like a coat we wear. It gets worn out before we finish what we have to do. So God gives us a new mommy and a new daddy and we are born again so we can finish the work God sent us to do and finally return to our home of light in heaven. Even though we get a new body, we are still the same soul. And the soul remembers the past even though we do not."

As she spoke, I felt as if she was reawakening my soul memory. It was as though I had always known these things. I told her that I knew I had lived forever.

Over the years she was to point out to me children who were born maimed or blind, others who were gifted, some who were born into wealthy homes and some into poverty. She believed their past actions had led to their present inequalities. She said that there could be no such thing as divine or human justice if we had but one life, that we could know God's justice only if we had the chance to experience many lives in which we could see the consequences of past actions returning to us in our present circumstances.

My experience in the sandbox brought me to a new level of awareness and I began to have
many questions about God and the world. I begged to be taken to church. Mother, a native of Switzerland, had been brought up in the National Protestant Church and Father was reared a Lutheran in Germany, but they seldom went to church. Mother made me wait until I was five—I think the year between four and five was the longest year of my life!

Finally, Mother started me in the Methodist Sunday school. After coloring Easter bunnies and putting money in the collection plate, I was disappointed. I wanted someone who could answer my questions about Jesus. "Take me to another church," I said. My mother (or the neighbors) took me to services at almost every Protestant church in town. I also convinced her to take me to St. James Catholic Church whenever we were downtown.

As I continued my pilgrimage through the churches, I felt dissatisfied with the sermons I heard from the pulpit. I asked Jesus to explain to me the true meaning of his message and I began to receive answers in a clear and unmistakable voice I heard in my mind. Thus began a lifelong mystical communion with Jesus.

I came to believe that the ministers did not have the keys to the mysteries of God and of his kingdom because Jesus' teachings had not come down to us as he had originally taught them. I decided that I wanted to help people to understand his message.

To prepare myself, I studied the Bible and continued my search for a teacher. When I was nine, my best friend's mother began taking me to Christian Science Sunday school. I was immediately convinced that I had found the most advanced teaching on Jesus' message available in my hometown.

Unfortunately, Christian Science didn't allow room for reincarnation either. Although I eventually joined the church, I never let go of that belief. I stayed in the church until I was twenty-two, even becoming a Sunday school teacher and usher in the Mother Church. I also worked for the Christian Science Monitor while I studied political science at Boston University. However, I kept searching for deeper answers.

In 1961, in Boston, I met Mark Prophet, a teacher whose mystical Christianity included an intricate understanding of reincarnation. He became my teacher and husband. Together we built The Summit Lighthouse, the spiritual organization he had founded in 1958, which admitted both Eastern and Western ideas. One of the central concepts of our teaching is that Jesus was a mystic who taught reincarnation.

A New Perspective

Back in the sixties, who would have expected that our ideas would be corroborated by ancient manuscripts dating from the second century or earlier? These texts, discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, say that they preserve Jesus' secret teachings— among them, reincarnation.

When they were published in English in 1977, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts touched off a storm of controversy among scholars and clergy. I first began interpreting them in 1986. But Mark and I had been teaching some of their central themes for decades.

In this book, we will explore the mystical teachings of the Christian reincarnationists along with ancient manuscripts and new archaeological discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. First we'll examine what reincarnation means and how it provides the missing link in Christianity. Then we will look at the different kinds of reincarnation beliefs in Jesus' world, a world ruled by the Romans but dominated by Greek ideas, a world in which the Judaism of Jesus' parents mingled with the philosophy of Plato. We will see that Jesus could easily have picked up reincarnation from his environment if he had not already derived it from his own communion with God.

We will examine what the Bible says, and doesn't say, about reincarnation—who believed in reincarnation in Jesus' world and why they believed in it.

Then we will look at some early Christians who believed in reincarnation—Gnostics and others —and ask why the Church rejected their beliefs. To do this, we will examine the councils at which the Church decided that for all time to come reincarnation was not an acceptable belief for Christians. We'll also live through the stories of reincarnationist Christians in medieval France who were willing to die for their beliefs.

Finally, we will look at the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other scriptures and see how some scholars today are reaching the conclusion that Jesus may indeed have been a mystic who taught both reincarnation and the path of developing our relationship with the God within.

We will reach a new perspective on the meaning of Christianity. Until now, many Christians
have believed that the purpose of their faith is to ensure their place in the resurrection, often seen as a world-ending event. The Church teaches that those who die outside of God's good graces are forever excluded from the kingdom of God.

In this book, you will learn about another view. One that provides a mystical interpretation of the resurrection and gives everyone—from James Cooke and Marvin Baker to a child who died yesterday—another chance to live Jesus' message.