Customer Reviews

The Cathars and Reincarnation: The Record of a Past Life in 13th Century France (A Quest Book)

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If you are looking for a book dealing with the history or beliefs of the Cathars, look elsewhere. I have the horrible feeling that this book would have been wonderful if only the author had simply told the story instead of explaining every thought along the way and using a sort of daily entry or diary format. The story is fascinating, about a woman who has a rememberance of being a Cathar during the 1300's. Unfortunately, the writing style is so poor that the story is all but lost and the reader spends much time just trying to remember who all the characters are. Keeping track of the story line is all but impossible. Too bad. It could have been a good book but I wouldn't recommend it as it is.

This is a clear and lucid description of events written by a doctor and psychiatrist involving a subject that has so often been weighed down by generalizations and cliches. The fascinating details develop into a lively, convincing and extremely well researched work. Dr. Guirdham is one of the few authors to have done so thorough a job of detective work as to have passed a threshold of proof for the truth of reincarnation. His research has even taken him into the archives of the inquisition for corroboration. This book is certainly a classic.

The Cathars were a Christian sect which flourished in parts of southern France and northern Italy in the 12th and 13th Centuries. They were spawned by, or at least heavily influenced by, previous movements such as Manichaesm and Bogomilism. The Cathars believed in a dualism in which God had originally created all spiritual beings. One of these beings, Satanael, rebelled and was thrown from heaven. The rebel proceeded to build the material world and imprison angels in physical bodies. In other words, we humans are all meat puppets with divine sparks trapped in our bodies. These sparks are small pieces of God which yearn for release. The Cathars believed that Christ was sent by God to teach humans the route to liberation. If people fail to reach liberation in one lifetime, they continue to be reincarnated until they do. Another version of this dualism says that the evil creator of the world was actually God's eternal enemy, rather than a rebellious creation. The Cathars, understandably, rejected material wealth and worldly pleasures, reasoning that these were traps set to keep them locked in their material bodies. When the populace looked at the message and deportment of the Cathars and compared it to the avarice, hypocrisy, and sloth being modeled by the Roman Catholic church, many of them chose to follow the Cathars. So, even though the Cathars followed many of the ideals of the Christian church, and would have been welcomed as a healthy influence in an egalitarian and truly spiritual organization, the Roman Catholic church viewed them as a deadly threat and set about creating the Inquisition to exterminate them. Add to this the political threat they posed to Northern France as it was in the midst of consolidating control over the whole region, and the fate of the Cathars was sealed. It took about 100 years to eradicate them, with the key battle taking place at the Cathar fortress of Montsegur in 1244. After holding out for 10 months, the Cathars surrendered, but refused to embrace the Roman Catholic faith. After the Catholics lit huge bonfires in the fields below the castle, the Cathars marched down into the flames, singing.

The Cathars and Reincarnation was written by a psychiatrist who gradually became convinced that he had known a patient of his (Mrs Smith) in another life. Mrs Smith would describe dreams and insights in which she would display such a knowledge of 13th Century life that Guirdham felt she could not have done so unless she were tapping into actual memory. She initially came to Guirdham because of a disturbing recurrent dream in which she thought she awoke to have a dark, evil seeming man standing over her. Mrs Smith immediately recognized Guirdham as having been a high ranking Cathar in a previous life and that he took her in after she was thrown out of her home by her father. Guirdham himself describes dreams and experiences which convinced him that he and Mrs Smith had been linked in a previous life. Guirdham has chosen to tell this story in an incremental, letter by letter way that gets tedious very quickly. He also does not give much in the way of general history about the Cathars, perhaps reasoning that anyone who would be reading his book would have some knowledge of the history of the movement. While I found Guirdham to be too easily influenced by coincidences and to be overly credulous in regard to psychic phenomena in general, I found myself being impressed by the change in Mrs Smith over the years of her meetings and correspondences with Guirdham. She seemed to evolve from a somewhat hysterical and narcissistic flake into a self-confident, spiritually developed person. Whether this had to do with her incremental remembering of her past life and spiritual experiences or was just a natural phenomenon of aging and life experience is, of course, a moot point. According to Guirdham, some of the information passed on to him by Mrs Smith was initially rejected by historians, only to be later corroborated as a result of new historical material being found. The two historians that Guirdham principally consulted with were, in the end, very impressed with the material Mrs Smith supplied them with via the author.

My general response to any kind of New Age testimonial is usually one of extreme scepticism tempered with scorn and vitriol. Occasionally I will sit down and read the latest New Age sensation just to make sure I am not missing something. For example, a few years ago I read The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield, and found it to be the worst example of brainless, illiterate, preposterous pabulum imaginable. The Cathars and Reincarnation deserves much more respect. Both Mrs Smith and the author impress me as being entirely sincere and quite intelligent. While the ideas they are promoting -reincarnation, telepathy, meaningful coincidences, communication over centuries of time -seem fantastic, I have remind myself of a Jamaican friend I worked with years ago. We were hired on by the Army as part of a student make-work project in 1972 to flood and clean outdoor skating rinks. It was cold that winter. My friend told me that he had telephoned his family in Jamaica and told them that, although the sun was out and shining hard, it was still so cold outside that he had to wear a heavy parka, gloves, boots, and a toque. They didn't believe him. In their experience, if the sun was out and shining hard it couldn't be cold. It made more sense for them to disbelieve their family member rather than change their understanding of how the world worked. They were, of course, wrong, but short of putting them on an airplane to Calgary in January, how could one convince them? I will continue to try to keep my mind open in regards to experiences that I have never had, in the hope that some day I might stumble on to something as wonderful and mysterious as proof of a past life.

I found this book a bit difficult to read, but very well worth the trouble. That's because, assuming the author did his homework honestly and accurately (as I do), this is a record of spontaneous (not hypnosis-induced) memories, recorded by a credentialed psychiatrist, for which there are corresponding detailed historical records (records she was very unlikely to have known of, especially when she wrote down her memories as a school-girl). Not one historically-recorded person only, but several people mentioned in the patient's recollections are verified as having actually existed, along with places. This has been done before, but rarely so completely.

The book also gives a very good sense of what the Cathars were like, and it brings up an interesting question--which group was the more "heretical"--the Cathars, or the politically dominant Catholic Church which persecuted them?

And its companion question: does might always make right?

I think this book is well worth checking out for anyone interested in reincarnation. AG was my grandfather and I knew "mrs smith" well. She was the most sincere, un-fake, and down-to-earth person possible. much though i sometimes doubted my grandfather - i'm not a spiritual person at all - I could never believe that she would be part of anything fraudulent.

I bought this book, being a believer in reincarnation and a follower of the Cathar tragedy - I even read the authors other book - with difficulty - but I would like to know who edited this??? i was so lost with 'the former' and 'the latter' phrases that I found myself going back to reread passages so I could figure out what he was talking about. I thought the story could have been good had it followed an sensical order. I put it down and did not finish it - sadly to say.