Reincarnation is a popular idea in some circles. I've written about past life regression before, most recently back in July and further back in 2006.
Just a brief reminder: I read Tarot cards. One of the things I can do in a reading is explore who you were in previous incarnations. I've done this for others and myself, coming up with stories of lives lived in other bodies and places. We can change gender and culture and time periods.
We break away an essence of ourselves from the collective soul or spirit when we need a certain experience. We manifest a body, test our fortitude and then go back from whence we came.
Unlike so many people I've met, I was never Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth or King Arthur. People like to think they are special. It seems I've never been famous or important although I have thrown a wrench in other people's plans.
In dark age Britain, serfs were tied to the land. They were born, lived and died in the same small place. A serf's role in life was fixed and ridged and people knew where they stood. You did what your father and his father before him did. If your grand-father tilled the soil, you tilled the soil. Very few people broke the mold.
Around the year 900 AD, in Saxon England, I was a male serf born to a family of cow herders. While my grandfather and my father milked cows, father flaunted tradition by naming me Nod. Even so, I milked cows. I herded them to their pastures. I followed the plan until I saw the falconer at work when I was eight. From that point on, I got in trouble for ignoring my tasks in favor of watching the falconer. I even managed to assist him on occasion. I had a gift, a talent, with the birds.
Our Lord loved falcon hunting so much, that when the falconer died unexpectedly of a fever, leaving no son or apprentice, the Overlord raised me up. I was thirteen. I was in heaven.
Until three years later when I met the Lord's daughter, Leofflaed and we fell in love.
She, like most daughters of the time, was betrothed to an older man in furtherance of her father's ambitions. I was drunk on my success in rising above my station. I could do anything. I could save her.
We made plans to run away. Neither of us knew where exactly we would go as we had never been beyond the borders of our manor. We packed food and clothing and prepared to escape on foot. We left one dark night in June. We were quickly caught.
Since she was defiled, she was purged, then sent to a cloistered convent where she died in childbirth. My son became a rather important priest.
I was dragged back to the manor, strapped to a large log with a hawk caged on my stomach. I was pecked to death over the period of four days as an example to my fellow man.
* * *
LEOFFLÆD - f (Anglo-Saxon) Beloved beauty.
NOÐ - m (Anglo-Saxon) Bold, daring.
I've had some pretty rough past lives. In my most recent one before this one, I was living in one of the Axis countries, I believe Poland. I helped hide refugees from the Nazis. I was caught and imprisoned, raped and tortured, and eventually hanged.
ReplyDeleteI can remember dreaming about this lifetime, watching myself as I was then trying to get to a train, walking quickly but trying not to look panicked or like anything was out of place. I the observer kept saying "no, no, no" because I knew what was going to happen. There was no escape. Sure enough, they were waiting for me at the train, and it was the beginning of the end.
I've often wondered why I felt such powerful connections to certain people that I've never met while seeming very removed emotionally from my family. It's like I didn't really belong with them.