Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp.

789–820, 2011 0892-3310/11

ESSAY REVIEW

Ian Stevenson’s Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation:

An Historical Review and Assessment

Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation by Ian Stevenson.

University Press of Virginia, 1980 (second edition). 396 pp. $25.93,
ISBN 9780813908724.

Introduction
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (first published in 1966) is a classic
of 20th-century parapsychology that can still be read with profit.1 Along with
Children Who Remember Previous Lives (2001),2 it is an ideal introduction to
Stevenson. The latter work, intended for the educated general reader, provides
an overview of 40 years of research and includes capsule summaries of several
cases, but Twenty Cases contains detailed reports that illustrate reincarnation-
type cases much more fully.
The cases reported in Twenty Cases come from India, Ceylon (now Sri
Lanka), Lebanon, Brazil, and the United States (the Tlingit Indians of Alaska).
They were selected from about 200 personally investigated by Stevenson in
order to show the variety of features this type of case presents. The subjects
of all were young children at the time they claimed to have lived before.
Collectively these twenty cases help define “cases of the reincarnation type,” as
Stevenson came to call them, though they vary substantially in detail.
The book includes both evidentially strong and weak cases, cases among
strangers and in the same family, cases with strong behavioral features, cases
with birthmarks and congenital deformities related to the previous person,3 a
case with a change of sex between the previous person and the subject, and a
case in which the previous person died after the birth of the subject. The last
type is extremely rare. Stevenson worked for years on a volume that was to
include “anomalous date” cases, but it remained incomplete at his death in 2007
and has not been published. He also did not live to complete a planned volume
on non-tribal American cases, although he analyzed a series of 79 of them in
an article published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in 1983
(Stevenson, 1983b).
The Canadian-born Stevenson was already a tenured professor and
Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical
Center when he turned his attention to reincarnation-type cases. From 1960

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on, he enjoyed the financial support of Chester Carlson, inventor of the Xerox
process. Carlson endowed a Chair and Stevenson became Carlson Professor
of Psychiatry in 1964. In 1967, he resigned as chairman of the Department of
Psychiatry and established a Division of Parapsychology (later renamed the
Division of Personality Studies)4 within it. From then on, he devoted all of his
efforts to psychical research. Carlson continued to give annual donations, and
on his death in 1968 left a $1,000,000 bequest to the University of Virginia in
support of the work (Stevenson, 2006).
Twenty Cases was first published in 1966 in the Proceedings of the
American Society for Psychical Research, and reprinted with additional material
that included followup information on the subjects by the University Press
of Virginia in 1974 (Stevenson, 1974b). In this historical review, I describe
reincarnation studies in Anglo–American psychical research before Twenty
Cases appeared, the reception that book received, and the influence it has had. I
also assess it from the vantage of current research. If nothing else, Twenty Cases
brought a new type of spontaneous case5 to the attention of parapsychologists
and the world, although some scholars, like Almeder (1996), believe that it
(together with the works that succeeded it) accomplished much more and that it
would now be “irrational” to deny that reincarnation occurs.

Reincarnation in Psychical Research Before 1960

Phenomena related to survival of death were a core subject matter of
parapsychology from the outset. Indeed, the Society for Psychical Research
(SPR) was founded in 1882 partly to look into the claims of Spiritualism (Gauld,
1968). The earliest work centered on mediumship, apparitions, and other
spontaneous cases. Investigations in these areas furnished the main empirical
support for and against survival, and were debated back and forth for decades,
stalemated by questions about the limits of ESP and the possibility that some
form of “super-ESP”6 could dispose of the evidence (Gauld, 1961, Hart, 1959).
In his landmark Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, F.
W. H. Myers carefully considered two cases often discussed in the context of
reincarnation. One was that of Lurancy Vennum (Stevens, 1887), who took on
the personality of a dead girl, Mary Roff, for about four months, during which
time she recognized people from Mary’s life, but not her own (Myers, 1903,
Vol. 1:360–368). Lurancy returned to herself, however, and this case is better
regarded as one of possession than of reincarnation. The other case was that of
Hélène Smith, the pseudonym of a trance medium who claimed to have had
several previous lives, among other places in India and on Mars (Flournoy,
1900). This case was persuasive to many in French spiritualist circles, but
psychologist Theodore Flournoy demonstrated how the “past-life” personas
were produced by the medium’s subconscious (Myers, 1903, Vol. 2:130–144).
Book Reviews 791

Myers agreed and understandably concluded that “for reincarnation there is as

yet no valid evidence” (1903, Vol. 2:134).7
Reincarnation was not a tenet of Anglo–American Spiritualism,8 but
Theosophy embraced it and promoted it heavily (Besant, 1897, Cooper, 1920,
Walker, 1888).9 Psychical research took little interest in it,10 though a few
workers did comment on it. Sir Oliver Lodge believed that individual spirits
emanated from a common “larger self” and accepted pre-existence but not
reincarnation in the ordinary sense (1907:85–87). James Hyslop of the American
Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) was skeptical, in the absence of good
evidence that previous lives could be recalled (1906, 1919). Sir William Barrett,
who was not troubled by the memory problem, found the prospect attractive
(1917:287–291). Hereward Carrington thought that its plausibility rested on
survival of death in general being proved (1930:57).
The official Spiritualist position notwithstanding, mediumistic communi-
cators not infrequently spoke about reincarnation, and at times asserted links
to the mediums in past lives they said they had shared. Frederick Bligh Bond
(1924) employed an automatist (an automatic writer) in his psychic archaeology
at Glastonbury Abbey and she transmitted communications from a monk who
claimed to have known both Bond and her in previous lives there. J. Arthur
Hill (1929) reported on a series of automatic scripts in which communicators
claimed to be successive reincarnations of a man in love with a previous
incarnation of the automatist. Lady Nona, the communicator in the Rosemary
case of apparent Egyptian xenoglossy11 (Hulme & Wood, 1936, Wood, 1935),
claimed to have known Rosemary, the medium, in an earlier life three thousand
years before.
These cases and others like them are more properly ones of mediumship
than of reincarnation, in that the mediums do not themselves claim to remember
previous lives (unless we want to take the position that the communicators,
rather than being independent entities, are parts of the mediums’ personalities).
The story of Nyria (Soul of Nyria, Praed,12 1931) is different. It was initiated in
an hypnotic session with the hypnotist suggesting a return to a life in ancient
Rome and continued in trances of which the subject, a young English woman,
had no conscious awareness. Nyria purported to be a slave-girl and gave an
account full of verified names and other period detail well beyond the normal
knowledge of the subject, although the existence of Nyria herself was never
confirmed.
Soul of Nyria is not the only example of supposed past-life memory cast as
fiction. Beginning in 1937 with the best-selling Winged Pharaoh, Joan Grant
published a series of historical novels told in the first person which in 1956
she said were based on memories of previous lives. From an early age, Grant
experienced dreams with what she believed were fragmentary memories. In
792 Book Reviews

her 20s, she trained herself to access this “far memory” and began dictating,
in trance, her seven novels, set in ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and
contemporary Rome, Renaissance Italy, and among American Indians in pre-
contact times (Grant, 1956, Kelsey & Grant, 1967).
Some have credited the impressive output of Pearl Curran writing as
Patience Worth to past-life memory, although Patience herself repeatedly
denied reincarnation. She identified herself as a 17th-century English woman
who had emigrated to the American colonies and been killed by Indians there.
She dictated through a Ouija board and then through automatic writing six
long novels and an array of other literary works. Most of the novels are set in
17th-century England, but one is set in Victorian England (two hundred years
after Patience is supposed to have lived) and another in Biblical-era Palestine.
Like Soul of Nyria and the far-memory novels of Joan Grant, these works are
replete with recondite period detail and language that Curran did not know or
use normally (Prince, 1927, Yost, 1916), and their source remains a mystery
(Braude, 2003).
Thanks to the Spiritism of Alan Kardec (1875), which like Theosophy
endorsed the idea, reincarnation was taken more seriously in continental Europe
than in Great Britain and the United States, and European psychical researchers
took more interest in it than did their American and British counterparts.
Albert de Rochas (1911) is well-known for his pioneering exploration of
hypnotic age regression to previous lives, but perhaps because his book has
not been translated into English it is not generally realized that the regressions
compose only a small part of the presentation. It is a wide-ranging discussion of
reincarnation that includes a review of spontaneous cases culled from a variety
of sources, including Fielding (1898). Even less well-known is a book by de
Rochas’s countryman and colleague Charles Lancelin (1922), who described
the important Italian child case of Alessandrina (Alexandrina) Samona, one of
the earliest European cases on record. This case has the interesting feature that
the rebirth was heralded in multiple ways (in dreams, séance communications,
and poltergeist raps). There are striking physical and behavioral similarities
with the previous person, and Alessandrina apparently recalled an incident from
that person’s previous life.
In 1924, R. B. S. Sunderlal reported four Indian cases in the Revue
Métapsychique.13 That same year, Gabriel Delanne (1924), a follower of Allan
Kardec, released another general study of reincarnation. In addition to survey-
ing spontaneous child cases, child prodigies, and déjà vu experiences, Delanne
examined cases of retrocognition and reviewed cases in which rebirths had
been announced in mediumistic communications. Again, because his book has
not been translated into English, it has had little influence on Anglo–American
psychical research. Other French Spiritists, such as Geléy (1920, 1930) and
Book Reviews 793

Flammarion (1923), whose works have been translat-

ed, are better-known, but unfortunately, although they
endorse reincarnation, they do not mention the many
spontaneous cases documented by Rochas, Lancelin,
and Delanne.
The publisher Ralph Shirley (1936) produced
the first well-rounded analysis of the evidence for
reincarnation in English. He discussed the strengths
and weaknesses of automatic writing, hypnotic age
regression, and spontaneous memories, including
many of those assembled by the French writers. He
briefly mentioned Shanti Devi, based on an Indian newspaper story.14 Yeats-
Brown (1936) summarized many of the same cases. The following year, Arthur
Osborn (1937) treated reincarnation as an aspect of the human experience in
The Superphysical. This book contains descriptions of several British cases,
gathered in response to Osborn’s own surveys. Osborn’s cases are less evidential
than those of Shirley and Yeats-Brown, but they give a sense of the quotidian
ground from which the better cases spring.
Age regression to previous lives under hypnosis was largely a parlor game
of mesmerists and amateur hypnotists before the researches of de Rochas (1911),
and after him there are no significant reports until Bernstein’s The Search for
Bridey Murphy exploded into public awareness as a newspaper serial in 1954
and a best-selling book in 1956 (Bernstein, 1956). Bridey Murphy purported to
be a 19th-century Irish woman, and Bernstein’s book convinced many people
that reincarnation had occurred. Although her account of herself included
obscure details that were verified, the case was attacked on various grounds,
and the public lost faith in Bridey as quickly as it had fallen for her (Ducasse,
1960). Another veridical hypnotic regression case, that of Naomi Henry (Blythe,
1956), passed almost unnoticed in the wake of the Bridey Murphy controversy,
and after Zolik (1958) showed how easy it was to construct fantasies under
hypnosis, psychical research all but abandoned age regression as a reliable
doorway to previous lives.
The “life readings” of the psychic Edgar Cayce began as an inadvertent
offshoot of his health or “physical readings” (Cerminara, 1950, Sugrue, 1942),
but quickly became part of a post–world-war cult craze that continues to this
day. Many of Cayce’s physical readings and prescriptions were uncannily
accurate, so there was a presumption of authenticity for the life readings as
well. He attributed not one but a series of lives to each petitioner, with links
between lives explained through various types of karma. Many readings had
the same sequence of settings for the lives, such as “Atlantis, Egypt, Rome,
the Crusades period, and the Early [American] Colonial period,” explained
794 Book Reviews

on the theory that period-cohorts tended to reincarnate together (Cerminara,

1950:43). The entranced Cayce said that he drew information partly from the
subconscious of petitioners and partly from the “Akashic Records” (Cerminara,
1950:45). Although it was possible to verify information given for the more
recent lives in a few instances, earlier lives were not amenable to checking, and
psychical researchers discounted Cayce’s readings further by pointing out that
they came from a sensitive rather than from the subjects themselves.
In a well-received book published in 1953, the Australian physicist Raynor
Johnson tied together psi, survival, and mystical experience in a grand portrait
of human nature reminiscent of Myers. He argued for reincarnation and karma,
which like other authors he considered to go hand in hand, and pointed to child
prodigies, déjà vu experiences, and occasional memory claims (citing Shirley,
1936) as evidence of pre-existence and reincarnation.
Among philosophers, J. M. E. McTaggart (1906) advanced a reasoned
argument for what he called the “plurality of lives,” avoiding the word
reincarnation, perhaps because of its occult associations. He found support in
love at first sight (the lovers had known each other in earlier lives) and innate
character traits, arguing at length that the self might persist through a series of
lives while having memories only of the present one. James Ward (1911), in
his Gifford Lectures of 1907–1910, considered reincarnation to be consonant
with the economy of nature and superior to the Christian concept of bodily
resurrection as a theory of immortality.
C. J. Ducasse (1948, 1951), who was well-acquainted with psychical
research and served for years on the ASPR Board of Trustees, wrote at length
on reincarnation or, as he termed it, transmigration. Ducasse (1951) cited the
Japanese case of Katsugoro (Hearn, 1897), in which a seven-year-old boy made
verified statements about a child who had died in another place several years
before, as an example of a memory claim, and considered various objections
to the idea of reincarnation. C. D. Broad (1958), who like Ducasse was well-
acquainted with psychical research, conceptualized reincarnation in terms of
his theory of Ψ-components. He regarded reincarnation as the most likely form
survival might take, but offered no evidence of it.
Paul Siwek (1953) contributed what appears to be the first thoroughgoing
skeptical treatment of reincarnation,15 although it was directed not to psychical
research but to Theosophy, which continued to be the most prominent promoter
of the idea in England and America. Siwek addressed déjà vu and apparent
memories arising in dreams and under hypnosis, as well as the claims of
children. He was skeptical of the last because of children’s tendency to fantasize
and suggested that Indian cases might be prompted by cultural expectations.
Book Reviews 795

Enter Ian Stevenson

In 1960, Stevenson published a literature review that ushered in a new chapter
in the study of reincarnation. He reported having found 44 apparently credible
accounts of persons who claimed to remember having lived before. In 28 of
these cases, the subjects had made at least six statements relating to the previous
life and the two families were unknown to each other before the previous
person was identified and the statements were confirmed. The majority of
the subjects were young children, like Katsugoro, Alessandrina Samona, and
Shanti Devi. The cases came from 13 countries, including India, Burma, Italy,
England, Belgium, Greece, Cuba, Mauritius, Japan, France, Syria, Canada, and
the United States (Stevenson, 1960).
The previous lives in these cases all occurred close by the subjects and not
long in the past, very different from what Western occult traditions, cases like
Rosemary and Nyria, the far-memory novels of Joan Grant, and the life readings
of Edgar Cayce, had led one to expect.16 Moreover, the memories were veridical,
long the gold standard of spontaneous cases in parapsychology. No one since
Shirley (1936), Yeats-Brown (1936), and Osborn (1937) had brought cases
like these together and they were little-known. Most writers on reincarnation
appealed to logical argument and quoted cultural luminaries who believed in
it. Their evidence consisted largely of child prodigies and déjà vu experiences,
and many took pains to explain why previous lives were not normally recalled
(e.g., Johnson, 1953:385–388). No one seems to have realized there were so
many spontaneous cases on record, or that they shared such a class similarity.
In their last major works, Ducasse (1961) and Broad (1962) referenced
Stevenson’s paper, although it appeared too late for them to consider at
length. Ducasse, who had been in contact with Stevenson and received from
him complete reports of several cases, analyzed some of the more impressive
(1961:241–247) and concluded that they provided “the best conceivable kind of
evidence” for reincarnation (1961:306). Broad concurred that the best of them
were “strongly suggestive” of reincarnation (1962:411). A. J. Ayer also may
have had Stevenson’s paper in mind when he wrote: “I think it would be open
to us to admit the logical possibility of reincarnation merely by laying down
the rule that if a person who is physically identified as living at a later time
does have the ostensible memories and character of a person who is physically
identified as living at an earlier time, they are to be counted as one person and
not two” (1963:127).17
A dissonant note was sounded by C. T. K. Chari, a professor at the
Madras Christian College in South India. He pointed to similarities among
mediumship, possession, reincarnation, and multiple personality, arguing that
what seem to be past-life memories are fantasies produced in altered states of
796 Book Reviews

consciousness (Chari, 1961–1962a, 1961–1962b, cf. Stevenson, 1961–1962).

These papers were quickly followed by others that offered explanations in
terms of cryptomnesia (Chari, 1962a), paramnesia (Chari, 1962b), and
psychometry allied with GESP (general extra-sensory perception) (Chari,
1962c).
Stevenson’s paper caught the attention of two other people who were to have
a profound influence on his life. One was Chester Carlson, whose importance
has already been noted. The other was Eileen Garrett of the Parapsychology
Foundation. At the beginning of 1961, she told Stevenson that she had heard of
a child case in India and offered him funds to investigate it. By the time he left
for India and Ceylon later that year, he knew of a few other cases, but he went
expecting to find children who only spoke about having lived before. He should
have been prepared by the accounts he had reviewed for behaviors, physical
traits, and birthmarks related to the previous persons as well, but these latter
features of the cases caught him by surprise, and he was slow to appreciate their
significance. He was surprised also by the large number of additional cases he
learned about. Later, with Carlson’s support, he went to Lebanon, Brazil, and
Alaska. He returned to several of these places more than once. The result was
Twenty Cases (Stevenson, 2006).

Twenty Cases and the Cultural Conformance Theory

Twenty Cases introduced terminology that has been adopted by other researchers,
and it set the standard for investigating and reporting reincarnation-type cases.
Stevenson’s methods were modeled on the investigations of spontaneous cases
by the early SPR and emphasized the careful recording and consideration of
facts, aimed at establishing paranormality. The great majority of cases were
some years old and the two families had met by the time Stevenson arrived,
so his research centered on interviews with first-hand witnesses and the
scrutiny of what written documents were available. Only rarely did he reach
a case before it was “solved,” allowing him to make a record of the subject’s
statements and behaviors before attempting to verify them, and to observe the
initial meeting of the subject and the family of the previous person, if the latter
could be identified. Solved cases with records made before verification are ideal
because the investigator can reduce the chance of informants misremembering
or forgetting key details, but they are rare (Keil & Tucker, 2005).
The twenty case studies are grouped by country or culture with each
section prefaced by a resume of the reincarnation beliefs of that region or
people. Most reports include tabulations of statements and behaviors along with
brief comments that are expanded upon as appropriate in the general discussion.
Each report describes how the case was investigated and assesses possibilities
such as fraud, malobservation, tricks of memory, and so forth, as well as sundry
Book Reviews 797

paranormal explanations, before deciding that the case is best interpreted as one
of reincarnation. The arguments are summarized and reconsidered in a chapter
at the end of the volume.
Neither in that chapter nor elsewhere does Stevenson assert that the
cases prove that reincarnation occurs—only that the best of them are highly
suggestive of it. Of the book’s reviewers, Beloff (1966) and McHarg (1969)
accepted this conclusion, with McHarg pointing out that what reincarnated
appeared to be something less than a full personality. Chari (1967) proposed
various alternative explanations, including ESP. Louisa Rhine (1966) suggested
that the cases might be the result of parents unconsciously shaping the behavior
of their children to conform to cultural expectations about reincarnation, a
position anticipated by Siwek (1953) and assumed by many later critics.
The fullest and most oft-cited expression of the psycho-cultural (or socio-
psychological) theory was made by Brody (1979) in a review of a later book by
Stevenson. Pasricha (1992), however, found that parental guidance could not
account for cases in North India, and Schouten and Stevenson (1998) tested the
possibility by comparing cases with and without written records made before
verification. On the psycho-cultural theory, cases with written records would be
expected to have many fewer verified statements than cases without them. The
test did not support this theory. Children in the group with written records made
more statements, an average of 25.5 as against an average of 18.5, a statistically
significant difference (p < 0.01), while the percentage of correct statements was
roughly the same in both groups—76.7% in the cases with written records and
78.4% in the cases without them.
Mills (1990a, 1990b) studied several Indian cases with differences of religion
(Hinduism and Buddhism) between the previous person and the subject and
wondered why religious parents would choose to impose another religious
identity on their children. We could ask a similar question about the large num-
ber of Indian cases with differences of caste. Also, many parents attempt to stop
their children from talking about their memories, believing that they will suffer
from them in some way.18 Suppression attempts are seldom successful (Steven-
son & Chadha, 1990), but if the parents are responsible for the cases, why do
they seek to quash them once they have brought them into being? Is it because
they have taken on lives of their own, so to speak? Many children insist they
have other families and demand to be taken to their previous homes, and this
must not be pleasant for their parents to hear.
The psychological and interpersonal conflicts necessary to produce
reincarnation-type cases in the psycho-cultural theory led Rhine (1966) and
Brody (1979) to call for explorations of the children’s psychologies. This has
now been done by Haraldsson and his colleagues in Sri Lanka (Haraldsson,
1995, 1997, Haraldsson, Fowler, & Periyannanpillai, 2000) and Lebanon
798 Book Reviews

(Haraldsson, 2003) and Mills (2003) in India. Children with past-life memories
are viewed by their parents as being more highly strung, more tense, more
argumentative, and more anxious and fearful than children in matched control
groups (though teachers do not report behavioral problems, and in fact the
children perform better in school than their peers). They score higher on
dissociation scales but are no more suggestible than their peers. In Lebanon,
where 80% recalled violent deaths, they seemed to suffer from a mild PTSD.
On the whole, differences between the groups appear to be attributable to
effects of the memories and do not explain them. Braude (2003), however,
wants more information on what psychological needs the memories fulfill in a
particular case. He regards the statements of Stevenson and others on this point
as superficial (as they often are), but it is not at all clear that further probing
would turn up anything of consequence.
Cultural conformance theories (of which psycho-cultural theories are a
variety) are challenged by the veridical aspects of the cases, the birthmarks
and other physical features of many, and the strong emotions and personations
exhibited by the children, forcing critics to include super-psi (as super-ESP is
now called) in their explanatory paradigms. Braude (1989, 1992, 2003) believes
that super-psi has not been properly appreciated and suggests that the children
may be accessing it in psi-conducive dissociated states (2003:24). There is little
doubt that, given sufficient ingenuity, super-psi can be stretched to cover any
eventuality, and therefore in a strict sense it cannot be ruled out, no matter how
crippling its complexity becomes. However, not everyone finds it as plausible
as Braude does. Griffin (1997) introduces what he calls retroprehensive
inclusion, essentially a new type of psi, to account for survival cases in general,
but regards even that as failing to explain the better reincarnation-type cases.
In any event, super-psi would operate within cultural confines and be
dependent upon the cultural conformance theory, so any evidence against the
latter would count also against the former.19 With this in mind, let us examine
some of the cases in the book.

Seven Cases
A Lebanese Druse boy, Imad Elawar, expressed over and over again his joy at
being able to walk. He gave many names and other details that pertained to a
man from another town who had been bedridden, probably with tuberculosis
of the spine, for two months before he died. Imad also had a pronounced fear
of large motor vehicles. The man whose life he recalled had been involved in
a bus accident and had had a cousin who had died following a truck accident.20
He had spoken French well and Imad learned that language quickly, although
no one else in his family could speak or understand it. This case was unsolved
when Stevenson reached it and he was able to record much of what Imad said
Book Reviews 799

and how he behaved before searching for and identifying the previous person,
and thus it cannot easily be attributed to cultural construction (which may be
why Angel, 1994a, 1994b, attacks Stevenson’s research methods instead, cf.
Stevenson, 1995).
An Indian boy named Ravi Shankar was born with a long, linear mark,
closely resembling the scar of a knife wound, across his neck. He spoke about
having been murdered, named the killers, and gave other details of the crime,
in which the head had been severed from the body. Ravi’s birthmark is typical
of birthmarks in reincarnation-type cases. Few are of the common types but
rather are congenital marks matching wounds and other marks on the bodies of
the deceased persons whose lives the children recall (Stevenson, 1997a). The
men Ravi named as the murderers lived in his town, and he was afraid of them
whenever he saw them. His fear remained with him as he grew older, even as
his imaged memories faded.
The case of Mallika, an Indian girl, is strikingly different. Imad was
between one and a half and two and Ravi between two and three years old
when they made their first statements, apparently spontaneously. Mallika was
four when her family moved to a new city, where they rented the ground floor
of a house. The first time she visited her landlord’s apartment, upstairs from her
own, she noticed some embroidered cushions, and said that she had made them.
She later commented on several other things in the apartment that identified
her with the landlord’s wife’s deceased sister. She exhibited some striking
behavioral similarities to this woman, but she made no statements that were not
recognitions.
Younger children, many of whom make their first statements as soon as
they begin to speak, are more likely to make them spontaneously, while subjects
of Mallika’s age or older are more likely to make them in response to something
they have seen (Matlock, 1988, 1989). It is as if the images have increasing
difficulty breaking into consciousness as the children age.21 Pratomwan Inthanu,
a Thai woman, was 20 when veridical memories of two different lives came to
her while meditating (Stevenson, 1983b). Uttara Huddar was 32 when she met
a man she believed to be the reincarnation of her past-life husband and began to
enter periodic fugue states, in which she behaved and spoke like an early 19th-
century Bangali woman called Sharada (Akolkar, 1992, Stevenson, 1984).22
Not only was Mallika relatively old (for a child subject) when she made
her recognitions, her case is a rare South Indian case, the only one among seven
Indian cases in Twenty Cases. The population of South India is largely Dravidian
or descended from Dravidian tribes, the most prominent of India’s indigenous
peoples. The Indo-European speaking Aryans arrived in North India around
1500 BC and their religion, Hinduism, adopted the belief in reincarnation from
the peoples they encountered there (Fürer-Haimendorf, 1953, Obeyesekere,
800 Book Reviews

1980). Belief in reincarnation is as strong today in South India as it is in the

rest of the country. If beliefs sufficed to produce the cases, we would expect to
find as many in the south as in the north, yet there are few cases in South India
(Chari, 1967, Pasricha, 2001).
The comparative lack of cases in South India again shows the cultural
conformance theory to be too facile, issues of veridicality aside. Moreover,
reincarnation is not a single monolithic belief but a general term that designates
a set of kindred beliefs and sub-beliefs. The exact beliefs and sub-beliefs vary
from tradition to tradition (Neufeld, 1986, O’Flaherty, 1980). If the cultural
conformance theory were correct, cases should reflect not only the general
belief in reincarnation, but the local beliefs also (or in particular). However, at
least in North India, this is not so. People unacquainted with actual cases expect
them to develop in ways they do not (Pasricha, 1990).
Still, we can find traces of cultural influences on reincarnation-type cases,
if we step back a little. Let us take the example of intermission length, the
duration of the interval between lives. Intermission length varies across cultures
more or less in line with cultural expectations, though it does not match them
closely (Matlock, 1990b:225–226). For instance, the Druse expect the deceased
to reincarnate in a newborn immediately upon death. The median intermission
length for 79 of Stevenson’s Druse cases was eight months, the second shortest
of all the cultures in which he had studied cases (Stevenson, 1986:212),23 but
longer than the expectation.
If the cases are produced in conformance with cultural demands, it is hard to
understand why the Druse would create this awkward situation for themselves.
They hypothesize brief intermediate lives to make up the extra time (Stevenson,
2001:176), thereby bringing their belief into conformance with the cases, but
would it not be easier to imagine fully culturally compliant cases from the start?
From a reincarnation perspective, the tendency for intermission length to vary
by culture can be explained if a person’s beliefs can influence the circumstances
of his or her rebirth (Matlock, 1990b:238). This may seem improbable, but I
will give other examples of its possible occurrence later.24
The North Indian case of Swarnlata is instructive for very different reasons.
Swarnlata was three and a half when she drove with her family through a town
unknown to her and said they were near her old house. Thereafter she described
what were evidently spontaneous memories of an earlier life. Her father and
an outside investigator made notes of her statements, which the investigator
then matched to a woman from the designated town who had died several years
before Swarnlata’s birth. When Swarnlata was taken to meet this woman’s
family, she recognized numerous people and places from her life, even passing
tests intended to mislead her.
Swarnlata also performed dances and songs she said were from another
Book Reviews 801

life, intermediate between the life she recalled best and her own. She sang
the songs in Bengali, the language of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). This
intermediate life was never confirmed, but in the 1974 second edition of Twenty
Cases, Stevenson reported that the songs had been identified as traditional
ones from the Bengal region. Although Swarnlata was unable to converse in
Bengali, as Uttara Huddar did, her singing is a form of recitative xenoglossy.
If the intermediate life was real, Swarnlata’s main memories may have been
stimulated by her environment, even though the life to which they related was
not the most recent one.
Another noteworthy Indian case in the collection is that of Jasbir, who at
the age of five suffered a serious illness and seemed to die, but revived and after
he had recuperated claimed to be a different person, named Sobha Ram. This
case is similar to the case of Lurancy Vennum, except that Lurancy’s possession
by Mary Roff lasted less than four months, whereas Sobha Ram came to
occupy Jasbir’s body permanently. In this respect, it is like the Sumitra case
(Stevenson, Pasricha, & McLean-Rice, 1989), also one of permanent possession
or “replacement reincarnation,” to coin a term.25 It is different from the Uttara
Huddar case in that Sharada was not an invading entity but was connected to
Uttara as a past-life personality whose initial emergence was triggered by a
highly emotional encounter. The revitalized Jasbir gradually came to accept his
new circumstances and developed normally in them, even accepting the name
Jasbir, which he at first resisted.
The Ceylonese case of Wijeratne is the only case in Twenty Cases to feature
a birth defect related to the previous person. Wijeratne claimed to recall the
life of a man who had killed his arranged bride when she refused to move
from her parents’ house after their civil wedding but before this was publicly
celebrated in a marriage feast. He had been tried for the crime, convicted, and
hung. Wijeratne was born with a shrunken left arm, the same arm the previous
person had used to wield the murder weapon.
Wijeratne attributed his deformity to karma, but reincarnation-type cases
provide scant evidence of karma as a moral system of rewards and punishments,
much less as conceived in this coercive, cause-and-effect way. Although
there are many Asian cases in which the social and economic situation of the
subject varies greatly from that of the previous person, there is no discernable
correlation with what is known about the previous person. Because the karmic
reason for the shifts in social status is not apparent, the assumption is that there
must be something that is not known, perhaps something from an anterior or
intermediate life, that has resulted in the present circumstances (Stevenson,
2001). Again, beliefs are adjusted to fit the cases, not the other way around, as
advocates of the cultural conformance theory would have it.
Karma is considered moral because it is derived from one’s actions (and
802 Book Reviews

sometimes one’s thoughts, intentions, etc.), good and bad. It has been taken
by many writers as a corollary of reincarnation and advanced as an ethically
appealing aspect of the belief (e.g., by Osborn, 1937, and by Johnson, 1953). But
there is nothing about reincarnation that logically entails karma, and in small-
scale or tribal societies like the Dravidian and Tlingit, reincarnation beliefs
do not include it (Matlock, 1993, Obeyesekere, 2002).26 Karma is a Sanskrit
word that originally denoted ritual action but came to be linked to reincarnation
and took on its moral coloring in Hinduism and Buddhism after they had
acquired the belief in rebirth from Indian tribal peoples (Fürer-Haimendorf,
1953, Obeyesekere, 1980, 2002). I return to this issue in my discussion of
Stevenson’s Tlingit cases, below. If not evidence of karma, Wijeratne’s case
can be explained as due to the previous person’s belief that his conduct would
have this result, and thus is another example of a person’s beliefs influencing
the reincarnation process.27
The case of Paulo Lorenz, one of two Brazilian cases28 in the book, has
several interesting features, not least of which is that Paulo recalled the life of
his deceased sister, Emilia, who had poisoned and killed herself, saying that
she wished to be reborn a boy. Paulo did not start speaking until he was three
and a half. The first thing he said was to tell another child, who was about to
put something in his mouth, that it was dangerous to do that. He identified with
Emilia, and until he was four or five refused to wear boy’s clothes. He only
accepted trousers when an old skirt of Emilia’s was used to make him a pair.
Neither Paulo nor Emilia showed any interest in cooking and both disliked
milk and had the habit of breaking corners off bread. Most importantly, both
were skilled at sewing, the only members of a family of fifteen who showed
any aptitude for it. Paulo recognized and demonstrated how to thread and use
Emilia’s sewing machine when he was younger than four years old.
Sex change is one of the features of reincarnation-type cases that varies
according to cultural expectation, being found most often in places with
traditions that allow for it, and seldom or not at all where it is believed not to
happen (Matlock, 1990b:226–227). This sometimes is held to be a telling point
in favor of the cases as cultural constructions, but it could just as well be that in
places that sex change is thought impossible, people do not consider it an option
for themselves, and so return as members of the same sex.
In the majority of sex-change cases, the subjects adjust to their new
anatomical sex, but in some cases, gender confusion persists for years (Mills,
2004, Stevenson, 1977b, Tucker & Keil, 2001). Paulo began to lose his intense
feminine traits when he was about six but was effeminate even in adulthood.
He never married and, Stevenson tells us in the second edition of Twenty
Cases, he killed himself when he was 43. Most of the other subjects in Twenty
Cases moved beyond their childhood memories and developed normally, but
Book Reviews 803

Wijeratne also experienced difficulties. He suffered a series of psychotic breaks

triggered by imagined rejections by women he liked and was several years late
in qualifying for university studies. Such severe adjustment problems are rare,
but less extreme ones have been reported on occasion. Mills (2006) describes
memories that impeded arranged marriages in two Indian cases because the
subjects, then in their twenties, still had strong attachments to the persons they
considered their past-life spouses. Shanti Devi provides another example of the
same (Lönnerstrand, 1998:84–85).

Animistic Reincarnation
We turn now to the Tlingit cases. These are divergent from the other cases in
some respects, although they share many features with them. The Tlingit are an
Alaskan Indian tribe whose reincarnation beliefs are rooted in a long Amerindian
(Jefferson, 2009, Mills & Slobodin, 1994) and global (Matlock, 1993) tradition
that includes the Dravidians and others. This is the tradition called animism, a
collection of beliefs about souls and spirits and their operation in the natural and
supernatural worlds (Tylor, 1871).29 Belief in postmortem survival is universal
in animistic societies and reincarnation beliefs are more common than might be
thought. Half of the world’s tribal peoples in cross-cultural samples have or at
one time had them (Matlock, 1993, 1995).30
In discussions of reincarnation beliefs, a contrast is often made between
Hindu and Buddhist ideas. This is an important distinction, because Buddhists
do not recognize an eternal soul but imagine rebirth propelled by attachments
to the material world (with karma playing a central role), whereas Hindus
conceive of a personal soul that continues to evolve through a succession of
lives (O’Flaherty, 1980). However, there is another contrast to be made, and
that is between reincarnation beliefs that incorporate karma and those that do
not. I believe this latter distinction to be the more basic and so group Hindu
and Buddhist beliefs together in opposition to animistic ones (Matlock, 1996).
Because reincarnation-type cases provide little evidence of karma, regardless of
the culture from which they are reported (Stevenson, 2001:251–253), they fall
under the heading of Animistic reincarnation.
Without the concept of karma,31 the Tlingit and other tribal peoples are
free to believe that they may exercise some control over the reincarnation
process, and in two of the Tlingit cases in Twenty Cases (Corliss Chortkin,
Jr., and William George, Jr.), the previous persons stated their intentions to be
reborn to the mothers of the subjects. Planned returns were expressed in the two
Brazilian cases in Twenty Cases, but they are unusual under Indic belief systems
(including Jainism and Sikhism along with Hinduism and Buddhism),32 where
karma is thought to govern the rebirth process.33 Planned returns are distinctly
animistic in implying a discarnate agency, and Stevenson (2001:39) regarded
804 Book Reviews

them as the only variety of reincarnation belief for which there is empirical
evidence.
However, the Tlingit cases are weaker evidentially than those of Southeast
Asia, and Stevenson evinced relatively little interest in them. He published
papers on the Tlingit (1966a) and neighboring Haida (1975a), but never
produced a volume of case reports about them, as he did for other cultures
(1975b, 1977a, 1980, 1983b). The weaknesses stem in part from the planned
returns, which set up the expectation of the rebirth, thereby opening the cases
to charges of parental and societal shaping in accordance to the expectation.
Another reason is that in most Tlingit cases (including all seven in Twenty Cases),
the previous person and the subject are related, so that the subject in theory
could have learned about the previous person normally or paranormally from
relatives. These cases are also often less well-developed, with fewer statements
and recognitions attributed to the subjects, than are the better Southeast Asian
cases (though rich cases may occur also among tribal peoples; see Mills, 2010).
A striking feature of the Tlingit cases in Twenty Cases is the birthmarks.
Six of the seven have birthmarks, but elsewhere in the collection they appear
only in the case of Ravi Shankar (Wijeratne’s birth defect is of a different
order). Along with planned returns, announcing dreams,34 and physical and
behavioral similarities, birthmarks are signs that allow the Tlingit to identify
a child with a particular deceased person even before he or she begins to talk
(de Laguna, 1972, Matlock, 1990a). These signs, which have become well-
known as recurrent features of reincarnation-type cases, have been reported
by ethnographers and other observers in relation to animistic reincarnation
beliefs for many years. They were noted by Tylor (1871:3–5), who assumed
that they had occurred from time immemorial and suggested that they were the
foundation of the belief in reincarnation, as seems very possible.
In small-scale tribal societies, a premium typically is placed on returning
in the same lineage or kin grouping, allowing for an almost literal “social
reproduction.” When signs suggest a child is a returning relative, he or she
may be given that person’s name and grow up to take on or to qualify to take
on that person’s rights and responsibilities and even to inherit his tangible and
intangible property (Matlock, 1990a, 1993, Mills, 1988). However, when signs
suggest that the child is the reincarnation of someone outside the kin grouping,
this also is accepted, and reincarnation thereby promotes social cohesion (Mills
& Champion, 1996). In the much more populous Indic societies, the pattern
is reversed, with the majority of cases occurring between non-relatives, often
strangers. This is because, as Obeyesekere puts it, “karma theory produces
dislocation and the dispersal of kin” in rebirth (2002:344). It does so by de-
emphasizing personal relationships and ascribing rebirth to an impersonal
moral force.
Book Reviews 805

I suggest that personal agency always plays a role, but different sets of
expectations (on the part of the previous persons), generated by different
cultural ideals (discarnate agency vs. karma), produce the different outcomes
(same-family cases in animistic societies vs. non-relative and stranger cases
in Indic societies). Beliefs about the reincarnation process influence the cases
from the inside, as it were, carried by dying persons into their postmortem state.
Discarnate actors are involved in selecting their new births, unconsciously if not
consciously.35 This accords with animistic thinking and is what I call Animistic
reincarnation.
Keil (1996) called cases in which the child makes no or very few
statements “silent” and “near-silent” cases. His data suggest that these account
for a relatively small percentage of cases among the Turkish Alevi, whereas
the impression one receives from the ethnographic literature is that silent and
near-silent cases are in the majority in tribal societies. The less well-developed
tribal cases are like cases from Europe and non-tribal North America (Harrison
& Harrison, 1991, Jacobson, 1974, Osborn, 1937, Rivas, 2003, 2004, Stemman,
2005, Stevenson, 1960, 2003, Tucker, 2005) in being notably underdeveloped
and often unsolved. Moreover, solved cases similar to those from other places,
have been reported from Europe and non-tribal North America (Cockell, 1994,
Leininger & Leininger, 2009, Stevenson, 1960, 1983a, 1983b, 2003, Tucker,
2005). There is no correlation between the strength of reincarnation beliefs and
the strength or even the appearance of cases. Both strong and weak cases may
occur where the belief is weak or absent as well as where it is strongly present,
and cases where the belief is strongly present are not always strong as we saw in
the instance of South India36 and see again with the cases from tribal societies.
We must therefore seek explanations for these cases in terms of something other
than the belief in reincarnation.37
The same year the revised edition of Twenty Cases appeared, Stevenson
introduced the idea of a psychophore to explain how reincarnation might operate.
He described the psychophore as an “intermediate ‘non-physical’ body which
acts as the carrier of . . . attributes between one life and another” (1974a:406).
He returned to this idea in Children Who Remember Previous Lives, where he
speculated at greater length about processes (2001:233–254). The psychophore
would not simply convey characteristics, but would have will and intention at
its disposal. It might exercise some initiative, such as waiting for a body of the
desired sex to be available, if it did not operate on the developing zygote directly.
The psychophore sounds very much like an astral body—perhaps a “minded”
astral body, to borrow a term from Wheatley (1979)—and it harmonizes well
with my concept of Animistic reincarnation.38
If reincarnation happens for some, does it happen for all? Griffin assumes
that the only people who have reincarnated are those who remember having
806 Book Reviews

lived before (1997:186), but silent cases suggest that reincarnation may occur
without imaged memories, and it is possible that a person might reincarnate
without having any indication of it whatsoever. And if we all reincarnate, we
may all have past-life memories accessible to us. They may enter consciousness
on occasion, and perhaps be retrievable under hypnosis, trance, and other
dissociative states, as we find with adults such as Pratomwan Inthanu and
Uttara Huddar. They may also lie in the background of fictional productions
such as those of Pearl Curran and Joan Grant. I believe the assumption that we
all reincarnate handles the data better than the assumption that only some of
us do, but as Stevenson observed (2001:216), we may never be certain on this
point.

Stevenson’s Legacy
Twenty Cases depicted reincarnation very differently than had been imagined
before Stevenson’s 1960 paper, and it more than confirmed the findings
and fulfilled the promise of that paper. All the major recurrent features of
reincarnation-type cases appear in the book.39 Indeed, it is remarkable how
well it lays out the parameters of this type of case. Subsequent work has
added details but has not changed our understanding in any substantial way.
Moreover, as I have shown, the twenty cases collectively provide the basis of a
theoretical conception of reincarnation in terms of an Animistic as opposed to
an Indic model, a way of thinking about reincarnation radically different from
that assumed before 1960.
Twenty Cases did much to pull reincarnation studies out of the realm of
speculation and to provide it a scientific footing. However, Stevenson’s fellow
parapsychologists were slow to recognize its significance, and the larger world
of science, to which Stevenson appealed constantly, has yet to come to grips
with it (Edelstein, 2008). Attitudes may be changing, however. Astronomer and
science writer Carl Sagan, a skeptic about most things parapsychological, wrote
in his last book that he regarded reincarnation-type cases to be one of the few
promising areas of research in the field (Sagan, 1997:302).
One reason for Stevenson’s early difficulty in parapsychology was
his adherence to the old SPR style of field investigation at a time when the
gravitational center of the discipline had moved from spontaneous cases and
survival questions to laboratory studies of ESP under the influence of J. B. Rhine
(Alvarado & Zingrone, 2008). Stevenson was out of step with the majority of
his colleagues, especially in the United States. It was widely believed that he
was the only researcher turning up reincarnation-type cases, something easily
disproved (Matlock, 1990b). Similar cases had been reported by many people
over many years, and other investigators, such as Brazilian parapsychologist
Hernani Andrade, were finding them also. However, because Andrade published
Book Reviews 807

in Portuguese (e.g., 1988), he was and still is not as well-known in the English-
speaking world as he should be (but see Playfair, 1975, 2006, and Andrade,
Rossi, Playfair, & Lima, 2010, for English-language summaries of his cases.)
Of those Stevenson trained to assist him in the field, Satwant Pasricha
has made the most significant contributions, but she is not the only one. K.
S. Rawat has recently co-authored an article and a book with newcomer Titus
Rivas (Rawat & Rivas, 2005, 2007). Stevenson’s research has attracted others
as well. Anthropologist Antonia Mills was acquainted with the reincarnation
beliefs of the Indians of British Columbia when she met Stevenson in 1984
and became interested in cases (Mills, 1994). Stevenson underwrote her work
with the Gitksan and Beaver, reported in 1988, as well as her first field trips to
India, in 1987 and 1988, in an attempt to “replicate” his findings (Mills, 1989).
Later, she joined Erlendur Haraldsson and Jürgen Keil in a larger replication of
Stevenson’s research (Mills, Haraldsson, & Keil, 1994).40
As readers of this Journal know, Pasricha, Mills, Haraldsson, and Keil
have continued to report reincarnation-type cases and have carried the research
in new directions. Haraldsson (1995, 2000, 2003) has studied the psychology
of the child subjects, Mills (2001, 2006, 2010) is demonstrating the power of
combining anthropological and parapsychological approaches, and Keil (1996,
2010) is drawing attention to unusual and problematical cases. Meanwhile,
Tucker (2005) has been working with non-tribal American cases, Rivas (2000,
2003, 2004) has reported cases from The Netherlands, and an increasing
number of original accounts are appearing in popular publications (Bowman,
1997, 2001, Cockell, 1994, Harrison & Harrison, 1991, Leininger & Leininger,
2009). Important new voices are also emerging on the side of commentary
and critique (Edelman & Bernet, 2007, Moura Visoni, 2010, Nahm & Hassler,
2011). Stevenson’s passing has not brought an end to serious reincarnation
studies, as some may have expected.
I have focused on the professional reception of Twenty Cases because
that is where Stevenson placed his emphasis, but I cannot altogether ignore
the popular sphere, for it is there that the book has had its greatest impact. By
1990, Twenty Cases had been translated into seven languages and sold some
50,000 copies (Stevenson, 1990), astonishing for a university press offering.
It is difficult to find a book on reincarnation published after 1966 that does not
refer to it. Many popular books summarize its cases and conclusions, making
them more accessible to a wide audience. Angel identifies it as “one of the most
influential sources of empirical evidence for reincarnation” (1994a:481) and
says that his students in the philosophy of religion routinely cite authors who
have been persuaded by it.
As of 1990, Stevenson’s research had received little attention from
academia (see Matlock, 1990b). Since that date, it has been addressed by several
808 Book Reviews

philosophers, who have raised the level of discourse on the subject considerably.
Angel (1994b) limits himself to the case of Imad Elawar, but Almeder (1992),
Becker (1993), Paterson (1995), Edwards (1996), Griffin (1997), Braude
(2003), Grosso (2004), and Lund (2009) treat Stevenson’s work generally.
Edwards, a humanist, ridicules much of the data. Almeder, as already noted, is
convinced. The others fall somewhere in between. Most contrast reincarnation
with super-psi and psycho-cultural explanations. Griffin, Becker, Lund, Paterson,
and Grosso lean toward reincarnation, but Braude favors super-psi.
Stevenson had high hopes for Reincarnation and Biology, his massive
two-volume examination of birthmarks and birth defects (1997a, 1997b).
This “medical monograph” includes detailed reports of 225 cases, together
with supporting photographs and citations from autopsy reports, and he was
very disheartened when it was met with silence. Edelstein (2008) suggests
that this non-reaction was due in part to Stevenson having done little to show
how reincarnation could be integrated with biology. His psychophore concept
was not well-enough articulated to serve the purpose. I agree with this, but I
think there may be other large obstacles also. One is Stevenson’s steadfastly
parapsychological presentation. He was very much a psychical researcher of
the old school and was not good at communicating with scientists of other
disciplines, despite his many publications in mainstream journals. Another part
of the problem may lie with the word reincarnation.
Do the cases Stevenson studied suggest or support reincarnation? Not if we
define it in the Indic sense, as involving karma. If we want to say that these cases
suggest reincarnation, we must be clear that we mean Animistic reincarnation,
and we would do well to point out that the evidence we have suggests that it
occurs most often in the same community or region and that there typically are
very few years between lives.41 There is no hint in the spontaneous cases of
past lives centuries before in distant foreign lands, as was commonly envisaged
before 1960. Nor is there much evidence of past lives spent as animals, as is
allowed under Hinduism and Buddhism (and in some societies with animistic
beliefs). In other words, we must distinguish an empirically based, scientific
understanding of reincarnation from a religious or occult one. We may also
want to follow McTaggart’s lead and come up with a new name for the process.
Stevenson’s most important legacy arguably lies in making reincarnation
a problem for science, not merely religion and philosophy, but we must now
take the next steps. It is good to show that reincarnation is logically coherent
and that it makes better sense of the data than other theories do, but until we
can demonstrate its relation to established concepts in biology and psychology,
we will not have advanced much beyond where we were in 1960, as far as
the majority of scientists are concerned.42 Moreover, although I think that
current data point in the direction of reincarnation, we must be cautious in our
Book Reviews 809

conclusions, since it may turn out that our present ideas are not quite right and
that another solution, which we cannot yet see, is the correct one. Regardless,
reincarnation-type cases without a doubt present a problem for science, one that
we will always be indebted to Stevenson and Twenty Cases for having brought
to our attention.

Acknowledgments
I owe many thanks to Antonia Mills for email discussions of the theoretical issues
addressed in this paper, which helped me to clarify both my ideas and their expression.
I would like to thank her also for reading the paper in draft and making many useful
editorial suggestions. Carlos Alvarado read it at a late stage and also made useful
suggestions. Finally, I want to thank Nivedita Nadkarni, M.D., a Resident in Psychiatry at
the University of Virginia, for helping me to understand Hindu concepts of reincarnation
and karma.

Notes
1
Twenty Cases remains in press in its 1980 paperback edition.
2
The 2001 publication is a updated edition of the book of the same title published in
1987.
3
Stevenson referred to the person of the previous life as the “previous personality,” but
persons and personalities are not at all the same thing. The individuals concerned were
more than personalities, and I prefer the term “previous person” (Matlock, 1990b).
4
The current name is Division of Perceptual Studies.
5
I use the term “spontaneous case” as it used in parapsychology, to denote paranormal
experiences. Spontaneous past-life memories resemble what psychologists call in-
voluntary memories and flashbulb memories, except that many have behavioral and
physical components.
6
Super-ESP is ESP of a nature and range not otherwise observed.
7
There was, however, more evidence than Myers realized. The earliest recorded rein-
carnation-type cases presently known are Chinese cases dating from the 3rd to the 10th
centuries AD (De Groot, 1901:143–145, and Paton, 1921:26–27, per Gauld, 2008:33,
Note 7). Nineteenth-century cases are described by Wortabet (1860:308–309n; retold
by Oliphant, 1880:322–323), Hearn (1897:267–290), and Fielding (1898:335–353).
Signs of the sort now recognized to be recurrent features of cases appear in the reports
of travelers, missionaries, and government functionaries from the 17th through the
19th centuries (Tylor, 1871:3–5). Besterman (1930) cites 19th-century examples from
sub-Saharan Africa, and Matlock and Mills (1994) have several 19th-century refer-
ences for North American native societies.
8
Many Spiritualists were opposed to reincarnation because they thought that it was
contradicted by mediumistic communication and because mediums were said not to
hear about it from deceased communicators. This was not the case in continental
Europe, where Kardec’s Spiritism and, later, Steiner’s Anthroposophy were popular
(see Note 9), leading to tensions between adherents of the different spiritualist schools
(see Alvarado, 2003:83–84, for examples of the Victorian Spiritualist attitude toward
Spiritism).
810 Book Reviews

9
Other occult systems, including Spiritism (Kardec, 1875), Anthroposophy (Steiner,
1914), and Rosicrucianism (Heindel, 1909), also taught reincarnation, but Theosophy
was by far the most prominent in the earlier part of the 20th century in the United
States and Great Britain. On reincarnation and 19th-century Spiritism in France, see a
recent book by Sharp (2006).
10
Rogo (1985:17–18) suggested that the SPR’s lack of interest in reincarnation may
have stemmed from their dislike of the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, whom they had
investigated and found a fraud (Hodgson, Netherclift, & Sidgwick, 1885). Another
factor may have been doubts raised by the different positions taken by Spiritualism
and Spiritism (Sudre, 1930).
11
Xenoglossy is the correct use of an unlearned language. It may be either recitative
(use of words or expressions only without the ability to converse) or responsive (use
of language in an interactive way, showing the ability to understand as well as speak).
12
This author has generally been cited in psychical research as Campbell-Praed (e.g.,
by Rogo, 1985, and Stevenson, 1960), probably because Shirley (1936) hyphenated
the name. However, the name is not hyphenated on the title pages of her books and
appears as Praed in the catalog of the Library of Congress, the authority followed by
most libraries.
13
Sunderlal submitted this paper first to the ASPR Journal, but the editors thought it
possibly a hoax because similar cases were unknown to them (documents in the ASPR
archives).
14
The case of Shanti Devi began to develop in the early 1930s and led to a formal
investigation in the middle of that decade (Gupta, Sharma, & Mathur, 1936). Shanti
retained her memories into adulthood, which permitted other investigators to interview
her as well (Bose, 1952, Lönnerstrand, 1998, Rawat, 1997). Today it is one of the
best-known Indian child cases but this was not so in the period before 1960. Ducasse
(1961) appears to have been the first after Shirley (1936) to comment on it in English.
Tenhaeff (1958) dealt with it, but in Dutch, and an English translation of his book was
not published until 1972.
15
Objections were raised earlier by Pringle-Pattison (1922), whose concept of reincar-
nation was informed mainly by Hindu and Buddhist teachings. Siwek’s treatment is,
so far as I know, the first skeptical one to deal extensively with memory claims.
16
Indeed, Ducasse doubted the regressions of de Rochas (1911) not only because they
were not veridical but because the lives ostensibly recalled were located in France
rather than in distant locales (Ducasse, 1961:274).
17
However, Ayer made the same point a few years earlier (1956:193–194), so this pas-
sage may be no more than a coincidence of timing.
18
Stevenson has found this idea in various parts of the world, among the Alaskan Tlingit
and Nigerian Igbo as well as throughout South Asia (2001:96).
19
I do not have space to consider other ESP models, such as Murphy’s application
of Carington’s psychon theory (Murphy, 1973), Roll’s long body (1982), or Keil’s
thought bundles (2010), but as none transcend culture, the same general consider-
ations apply to them also. See Matlock (1990b) on the earlier theories and Nahm and
Hassler (2011) on Keil.
20
Stevenson learned about another man who as a child claimed to remember the life of
the cousin who had been killed in the truck accident. Because both he and Imad spoke
about the same accident, albeit from different points of view, this case has been por-
Book Reviews 811

trayed as one of “merged and divided” rebirth by Roll (1977, 1982) and Rogo (1985).
There would seem little basis for this reading (Matlock, 1992). Apart from the truck
accident, the memories of the two subjects were entirely distinct.
21
Adult spontaneous past-life memory cases have received relatively little attention.
In adults, apparent memories (much less-developed and less often veridical than in
young children) tend to arise in dreams, trances, and other altered states (Jacobson,
1974, Lenz, 1979, Osborn, 1937, Pasricha, 1990:109–112, Rogo, 1985, 1991).
22
This case is commonly known by the name of the previous person, Sharada. It has
been analyzed as one of possession rather than reincarnation by Griffin (1997) and
Braude (2003), but both Stevenson (1984) and Akolkar (1992), who investigated it,
treat it as one of reincarnation. The key is appreciating that Uttara was relatively old
at case onset. She was practiced in meditation and this may have played an important
role in the way her memories presented (Matlock, 1988).
23
The median intermission was four months among the Haida of Alaska. The longest
median intermission of ten societies compared was 141 months in a series of 25 non-
tribal U.S. cases (Stevenson, 1986:212).
24
I am suggesting something more than the idea that thoughts at the point of death have
an influence on the new birth, as one finds in Tibetan and other forms of Buddhism. I
mean long-held, firmly established beliefs that may be largely unconscious and may
persist after death in the “mind” of a discarnate actor who brings about his or her own
reincarnation.
25
Only a few other cases of this sort have been reported (Barrington, Mulacz, & Rivas,
2005, Pasricha, 1990:104–109, Stevenson, 1983b:171–190). However, although rare,
the phenomenon is common enough in India to be recognized by a special name in
Hindu religious thought—parakaya pravesh, which refers to the entry of a wandering
soul into a physical body, replacing the soul with which the body was born (Nivedita
Nadkarni, personal communication). Parakaya pravesh generally is glossed as “pos-
session” in English, though this obscures the fact that it covers both temporary and
permanent forms of possession.
26
Karma is also missing from ancient Greek and other reincarnation concepts, as
Obeyesekere (2002) shows in some detail. It is found only in the Indic religions and
occult systems such as Theosophy that are derived from them.
27
It is interesting that Wijeratne did not have a birthmark related to the hanging. I
suggest that he did not because the previous person was more concerned (perhaps
preoccupied) with the murder he had committed. I do not think that birthmarks are
automatically produced but rather that they are conditioned by the previous person’s
focus of attention and emotional attachments. This hypothesis allows us to explain
why not all death wounds produce birthmarks and why some represent marks made to
the body after death, as well as why some represent wounds or marks from earlier in
life (Stevenson, 1997a, 2001).
28
Despite opposition from the Catholic Church, reincarnation is widely accepted in Bra-
zil, with beliefs derived from the West African culture of former slaves, reinforced by
the Spiritism of Allan Kardec.
29
The animistic worldview is fundamentally empirical. Tylor (1871), who introduced
animism, argued that concepts of the soul and its survival of death were suggested by
observations and experiences such as paranormal dreams, apparitions, and what we
now call out-of-body and near-death experiences. Tylor believed that the soul was
812 Book Reviews

then generalized to lower animals and in some situations to plants and to natural force
and even to words and names, although these last are by no means universal features
of animism as it appears in the ethnographic record (Matlock, 1993, 1995).
30
Animistic peoples do not necessarily see a conflict between ancestral spirits and rein-
carnation. In a cross-cultural study (Matlock, 1995), I found a statistically significant
relationship (p =.003) between beliefs in reincarnation and active ancestral spirits,
those thought to interact with the living in some way. In another study, I found a sig-
nificant relationship (p =.035) between beliefs in reincarnation and the fragmentation
of the soul upon death (Matlock, 1993:128–129). Typically, the soul is thought to split
three ways upon death, one part staying with the corpse, another part going on to the
land of the dead, and a third part reincarnating.
31
In the introduction to the Tlingit cases in Twenty Cases, Stevenson described what he
thought were indications of karma in Tlingit beliefs and speculated that these were
influenced by contact with Buddhism. However, the examples he gives of karma are
of no more than a belief in the continuity of identity from one life to another and have
no reference to the moral qualities of actions with which karma is concerned. He does
not repeat this assertion on other occasions.
32
This classification of Hindu with Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh beliefs as Indic is problem-
atical because in Hinduism, unlike in the other religions, there has long been debate
about whether karma is the result of individual action alone or whether it is imple-
mented or adjusted by God (O’Flaherty, 1980). In modern Hinduism, God is involved
in the mediation of karma to such an extent that modern Hinduism is better assigned
to a Theistic category (Nivedita Nadkarni, personal communication). In Theistic re-
incarnation, God determines how a new birth is assigned. Other examples of Theistic
reincarnation beliefs are the Druse and Alevi (see Stevenson, 2001:38).
33
Obeyesekere (2002) compares planned returns in animistic societies to the “rebirth
wishes” that often are a part of Buddhist merit-making rituals. The latter may
include desires to be reborn to certain people, especially in the same family, but
Obeyesekere—I think correctly—reads these as survivals of earlier animistic beliefs
because they are fundamentally at odds with karma (2002:344).
34
Announcing dreams are dreams in which a deceased person appears and “announces”
his or her intention to be reborn, usually to a certain woman.
35
This brings us to the “selection problem” (the problem of how the new parents are
selected), but I do not have space here to go further into the issue. For a longer dis-
cussion, see Stevenson (2001:236–244), and see also the literature on intermission
memories (Rawat & Rivas, 2005, Sharma & Tucker, 2005, Story, 1975:191–199).
36
Chari (1967) observed that there are few cases not only in South India, but in most
of North India also. It appears that reincarnation-type cases occur more frequently in
some places than others. The reasons for this variation would seem to have little to do
with belief but are not yet understood.
37
This conclusion would be stronger if it were more than impressionistic. Tucker’s
(2000) Strength of Case Scale could be used to rate the strength of cases, which could
then be compared to the strength of reincarnation beliefs in different cultures, if this
could be assessed in some way.
38
Many religious traditions and occult systems have similar concepts, but Stevenson
introduced his neologism, which means “soul bearing,” to avoid their connotations
(2001:309). Elsewhere he suggested that the psychophore might be composed of mor-
Book Reviews 813

phogenetic fields (1997b:2086–2088). However, he left the idea undeveloped, and as

Gauld points out, it “seems to be simply a dummy concept filling (pending further
information) a vital gap in an explanatory system” (2008:31).
39
This includes intermission memories (see Note 35). The second Jasbir said that after
his death as Sobha Ram he met a holy man who told him to take refuge in the first
Jasbir’s body. This is an example of what we may call “assisted reincarnation,” an
exception to the rule that discarnate actors take the initiative in Animistic reincarna-
tion.
40
These replication studies were aimed at seeing if different persons, working with
the same methods, would find similar cases and come to similar conclusions regard-
ing them. All three found it easy to discover similar cases. Mills and Haraldsson
agreed with Stevenson’s conclusions, but Keil preferred an ESP interpretation (Mills,
Haraldsson, & Keil, 1994).
41
According to Stevenson, all but a few cases have intermissions of less than three years
(2001:120). There are solved spontaneous cases with longer intermissions, but not
on the order of centuries, and long-distance or international cases are also rare. Even
when these do occur, we cannot be sure that there have not been intervening lives in-
termediate in distance as well as time. This issue relates to the selection problem and
a fuller discussion will have to await another occasion.
42
One way would be to link the psychophore or minded astral body concepts to Shel-
drake’s (1981, 2009) morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance (Matlock, 1988,
1990b). Stevenson (1977b:2086–2088) saw this, but, as Edelstein (2008:98) points
out, Sheldrake has had little success in getting his own ideas accepted.

JAMES G. MATLOCK
jim.matlock@atlanticuniv.edu

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