Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Read online

  In Peter Hebblethwaite’s Paul VI: The First Modern Pope we find a different take on the proceedings. In the morning of his last day, the Pope is sleeping. He awakes and asks the time and is told it’s 11 a.m. “Paul opens his eyes and looks at his Polish alarm clock: it shows 10:45. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘my little old clock is as tired as me.’ Macchi tries to wind it up but confuses the alarm with the winder.” By this version, the alarm went off at the moment the Pope died because Monsignor Macchi had accidentally set it for that moment.

  I am inclined to side with Hebblethwaite, because (a) his book is studiously footnoted and (b) Hebblethwaite doesn’t gild his renderings of papal life. For instance, we have the scene in the final chapter wherein Pope Paul VI is lying in bed watching TV. Not only is the earth’s highest-ranking Catholic, the Holy of Holies, watching a B-grade western, he is having trouble following it. Hebblethwaite quotes Father Magee, who was there at the time: “Paul VI did not understand anything about the plot, and he asked me every so often, ‘Who is the good guy? Who is the bad guy?’ He became enthusiastic only when there were scenes of horses.” Hebblethwaite tells it like it is.

  Just to be certain, I decided to track down the man who either did or didn’t mess with the winder: Pasquale Macchi. I called up the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American mouthpiece of the Catholic Church, and was put through to the organization’s then librarian, Anne LeVeque. Anne is an accommodating wellspring of Catholic-related trivia, including the stupendously odd fact that freshly dead popes are struck thrice on the forehead with a special silver hammer. LeVeque knew someone in the organization who had spoken with a group of priests who had met with Macchi shortly after Paul VI’s death, and she gave me his number. He agreed to tell me the story, but he would not reveal his name. “I’m better as your Deep Throat,” he said, forever linking in my head the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops with porn movies, a link they really and truly don’t need.

  Deep Throat confirmed the basic story. “It was described to me as not instantaneous, but more of a five, four, three, two, one…and the alarm went off.” He was told that despite what others had said, the clock had not been set for the time at which Paul died. “The feeling,” he said, “was that what it suggested was the departure of Paul VI’s soul from his body.” Then he looked up Macchi’s address for me, in what he called the Pontifical Phone Book. I wanted to ask if it included a Pontifical Yellow Pages, with pontifical upholstery cleaners and pontifical escort services, but managed not to.

  Macchi is a retired archbishop now. With the help of a friend’s friend from Italy, I drafted a note asking about the alarm clock incident. Archbishop Macchi wrote back promptly and courteously, addressing me as “Gentle Scholar,” despite my having addressed him as Your Eminence (suggesting mere cardinalhood) when in fact he is either a Your Excellency or a Your Grace, depending on whose etiquette book you consult. (Your Holiness, reserved for the Pope himself, trumps all, except possibly, in my hometown anyway, Your San Francisco Giants.) Macchi included a copy of his own biography of Paul VI, with a bookmark at page 363. “In the morning of that day,” he wrote, “having noticed that the clock was stopped, I wanted to wind it up and inadvertently I had moved the alarm hand setting to 9:40 p.m.” Deep Throat’s deep throats, it seems, had led him astray.

  Annoyingly, I came across yet a third version of the alarm clock incident, this one by a priest with a grudge against Paul VI. This man held that the clock story had been fabricated by the Vatican as evidence for a false time of death, part of an effort to cover up some breach of papal duty that would have made the Pope seem impious.

  The moral of the story is that proof is an elusive quarry, and all the more so when you are trying to prove an intangible. Even had I managed to establish that the alarm clock had indeed gone off for no obvious mechanical reason at the moment the pontiff died, it wouldn’t have proved that his departing soul had triggered it. But I couldn’t even get the clock to stand and deliver.

  The deeper you investigate a topic like this, the harder it becomes to stand on unshifting ground. In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.

  And also, I hold, the more interesting. Will I find the evidence I’m looking for? We’ll just see. But I promise you a diverting journey, wherever it is we end up.

  SPOOK

  1

  You Again

  A visit to the reincarnation nation

  I DON’T RECALL my mood the morning I was born, but I imagine I felt a bit out of sorts. Nothing I looked at was familiar. People were staring at me and making odd sounds and wearing incomprehensible items. Everything seemed too loud, and nothing made the slightest amount of sense.

  This is more or less how I feel right now. My life as a comfortable, middle-class American ended two nights ago at Indira Gandhi International Airport. Today I am reborn: the clueless, flailing thing who cannot navigate a meal or figure out the bathrooms.

  I am in India spending a week in the field with Kirti S. Rawat, director of the International Centre for Survival (as in survival of the soul) and Reincarnation Researches. Dr. Rawat is a retired philosophy professor from the University of Rajasthan, and one of a handful of academics who think of reincarnation as something beyond the realm of metaphor and religious precept. These six or seven researchers take seriously the claims of small children who talk about people and events from a previous life. They travel to the child’s home—both in this life and, when possible, the alleged past life—interview family members and witnesses, catalogue the evidence and the discrepancies, and generally try to get a grip on the phenomenon. For their trouble, they are at best ignored by the scientific community and, at worst, pilloried.

  I would have been inclined more toward the latter, had my introduction to the field not been in the form of a journal article by an American M.D. named Ian Stevenson. Stevenson has investigated some eight hundred cases over the past thirty years, during which time he served as a tenured professor at the University of Virginia and a contributor to peer-reviewed publications such as JAMA and Psychological Reports. The University of Virginia Press has published four volumes of Stevenson’s reincarnation case studies and the academic publisher Praeger recently put out Stevenson’s two-thousand-page opus Biology and Reincarnation. I was seduced both by the man’s credentials and by the magnitude of his output. If Ian Stevenson thinks the transmigration of the soul is worth investigating, I thought, then perhaps there’s something afoot.

  Stevenson is in his eighties and rarely does fieldwork now. When I contacted him, he referred me to a colleague in Bangalore, India, but warned me that she would not agree to anything without meeting me in person first—presumably in Bangalore, which is a hell of a long way to go for a get-acquainted chat. A series of unreturned e-mails seemed to confirm this fact. At around the same time, I had e-mailed Kirti Rawat, whom Stevenson worked with on many of his Indian cases in the 1970s. Dr. Rawat happened to be in California, an hour’s drive from me, visiting his son and daughter-in-law. I drove down and had coffee with the family. We had a lovely time, and Dr. Rawat and I agreed to get together in India for a week or two while he investigated whatever case next presented itself.

  The Kirti Rawat who met me at the airport was in a less contented state. He had been arguing with management over the room service at the hotel where I had booked us. The next morning, we packed up our bags and moved across Delhi to the Hotel Alka (“The Best Alternative to Luxury”), where he and Stevenson used to stay. The carpets are clammy, and the toilet seat slaps you on the rear as you get up. The elevator is the size of a telephone booth. But Dr. Rawat likes the vegetarian dinners, and the service is attentive to the point of preposterousness. Bellhops in glittery jackets and curly-uppy-toed slippers flank the front doors, opening them wide as we pass, as though we’re foreign dignitaries or
Paris Hilton on a shopping break.

  It is 9 a.m. on the first day of our travels. A driver waits outside. This is less extravagant than it sounds. The car is a 1965 Ambassador with one functioning windshield wiper. Dr. Rawat seems not to mind. The most I could get out of him on the subject of aged Ambassadors was that they are “beginning to be outmoded.” What he likes best about this particular car is the driver. “He is submissive,” Dr. Rawat says to me as we pull away from the curb. “Generally, I like people who are submissive.”

  Oh, dear.

  This week’s case centers on a boy from the village of Chandner, three hours’ drive from Delhi. Dr. Rawat is using the drive time to fill me in on the particulars of the case, but I’m finding it hard to pay attention. We are stuck in traffic just outside Delhi. There are no real lanes, just opposing currents of vehicles, chaotic and random, as though they’d been scooped up in a Yahtzee cup and tossed haphazardly onto the asphalt. Every few feet, a cluster of cows has seemingly been Photoshopped into the mix: sauntering mid-lane or lying down in improbably calm, sleepy-eyed pajama parties on the median strips. We enter a lurching, kaleidoscopic roundabout. In the eye of the maelstrom, a traffic cop stands in a concrete gazebo, waving his hand. I cannot tell whether he is directing traffic or merely fanning himself.

  I wonder aloud where all these people are going. “Everyone is going to his own destination,” comes the reply. This is a highly Dr. Rawat thing to say. One of Rawat’s two master’s degrees and his doctorate are in philosophy, and it remains one of his passions—along with Indian devotional music and poetry. He is the dreamiest of scientists. Last night, in the midst of a noisy, hot, polluted cab drive, he leaned over and said, “Are you in a mood to hear one of my poems?”

  Dr. Rawat is telling me that the case we are investigating is fairly typical. The child, Aishwary, began talking about people from a previous existence when he was around three. Ninety-five percent of the children in Stevenson’s cases began talking about a previous existence between the ages of two and four, and started to forget about it all by age five.

  “Also typical is the sudden, violent death of the P.P.”

  “Sorry—the what?”

  “The previous personality.” The deceased individual thought to be reincarnated. “We say ‘P.P.’ for short.” Possibly they shouldn’t.

  Aishwary is thought by his family to be the reincarnation of a factory worker named Veerpal, several villages distant, who accidently electrocuted himself not long before Aishwary was born. Dr. Rawat opens his briefcase and takes out an envelope of snapshots from last month, when he began this investigation. “Here is the boy Aishwary at the birthday party of his ‘son.’” Aishwary is four in the photograph. His “son” has just turned ten. Just in case the age business isn’t sufficiently topsy-turvy, the elastic strap on the “son’s” birthday hat has been inexplicably outfitted with a long, white beard. This morning, while leafing through a file of Dr. Rawat’s correspondences, I came across a letter that included the line: “I am so glad you were able to marry your daughter.” I am reasonably, but not entirely, sure that the correspondent meant “marry off.”

  “Now, here is the boy with Rani.” Rani is the dead factory worker’s widow. She is twenty-six years old. In the photo, the boy stares fondly—lustfully, one might almost say, were one to spend too much time in India with reincarnation researchers—at his alleged past-life wife. This strikes me as the most improbable, chimerical thing I’ve ever seen, and then I look out the car window, where an elephant plods down a busy Delhi motorway.

  Living in California, where alleged reincarnations tend to spring from royalty and aristocracy, a reincarnated laborer is something of a novelty for me. Dr. Rawat says that this is typical here: “These are ordinary people remembering ordinary lives.” Though there are exceptions. At last count, he has met six bogus Nehru reincarnates and eight wannabe Gandhis.*

  In the case of the boy Aishwary, the alleged previous personality hails from a family just as poor as his own. In Dr. Rawat’s estimation, this strengthens the case, as financial gain wouldn’t be a motive for fraud. Poor families have been known to fabricate a rebirth story in the hope that the “previous personality’s” family—they’ll target a wealthy one—will feel financially beholden to their dead relative’s new family. Dr. Rawat told me about another creative application of ersatz reincarnation: escaping an unpleasant marriage. Years back, he investigated the case of a woman who fell ill and claimed to have momentarily died—and then been revived with a different soul. Now that she had been reborn as someone new, she argued, she couldn’t possibly be expected to live or sleep with her old husband. (Divorce retains a weighty social stigma in India.) Dr. Rawat interviewed the doctor who examined her. “He wasn’t a doctor at all. He was a compounder.” A bone-setter. And she wasn’t dead. “He told me, ‘Well, her pulse was down.’”

  While Dr. Rawat catnaps, I page through a copy of his book Reincarnation: How Strong Is the Scientific Evidence? Let’s set aside “strong” for a minute and talk about “scientific.” Like most psychological and philosophical theories, reincarnation can’t be proved in a lab. You can’t see it happen, and no biological framework exists to explain how it might work. The techniques of reincarnation researchers most closely match those of police detectives. It’s an exhausting, exacting search for independently verifiable facts. Researchers contact the parents of the child and then travel to the village or town. They ask the parents to recall exactly what happened: word for word, detail by detail, what the child said when he first began speaking about people or places from a past that clearly didn’t correspond to the life he now lives. They look for credible witnesses to the child’s utterances, and they interview them, too.

  By the time the researcher arrives on the scene, the family has usually found a likely candidate for the child’s former incarnation. Most Indian villagers accept reincarnation as fact, and word of a child remembering a past life travels quickly to neighboring villages. The previous personality can’t be interviewed, because he’s dead, but his family members can. If the child is said to have recognized his home from his past life or features of the town or members of his past-life family, the researcher interviews witnesses who saw the meetings and the purported recognitions.

  The strongest cases are those in which the parents have written down the child’s statements when he or she first began talking about a past life—before they’ve met any family or friends from that life. (These are rare: Among Stevenson’s cases, only about twenty include any written record.) Without a written record, researchers must work from the parents’ memories of what the child said. This makes for wobbly evidence—not because villagers are dishonest, but because human memory is deeply fallible. It’s unreliable and easily tweaked by its owner’s beliefs and desires. Did the boy say what he said about electrocution before his parents began talking about Veerpal’s death, or did he perhaps overhear them talking about it first? Did he really say he was killed by an electrical current, or has his mom, once she learned the facts, reinterpreted something ambiguous? Perhaps the boy referred to a cord. He meant a rope, but the mother, having heard about the accident, pictures an electrical cord. That sort of thing.

  Most of Ian Stevenson’s case write-ups include a chart summarizing the allegedly reborn child’s statements about a past life and about people he or she recognizes. For each of these statements and recognitions, Stevenson lists a witness, if there is one, and the comment of the witness. Typically the chart marches on for eight or ten pages, wearing down your skepticism with the grinding accumulation of names and tiny type. If you take the work of Ian Stevenson at face value, it would be hard to reach any conclusion other than this: Reincarnation happens.

  The skeptics tend to dismiss Stevenson’s work a priori; few have taken him on case by case. One who tried was Leonard Angel, then a humanities professor at Douglas College in British Columbia. He chose the case of a Druze boy from Lebanon, Imad Elawar, a case Stevenson has referred
to as one of his strongest. Of all the cases in which there is written documentation from the time before the suspected previous personality was located, this is the only one in which Stevenson himself wrote the statements down—thus precluding a fraudulent after-the-fact jotting. Angel complains that Stevenson nowhere sets forth these statements as they were worded by the boy or the parents. Stevenson simply writes that the parents “believed [the boy] to have been one Mahmoud Bouhamzy of Khriby who had a wife called Jamilah [Mahmoud and Jamilah were the names the boy spoke first and most often] and who had been fatally injured by a truck after a quarrel with the driver.”

  Stevenson traveled with the family for their first visit to Khriby. He couldn’t find a suitable Mahmoud Bouhamzy; however, upon asking around, he found an Ibrahim Bouhamzy with a mistress named Jamilah. Ibrahim was not run over by a truck, but his relative Said was, though no quarrel was involved. Stevenson concludes that the boy’s parents had made wrong inferences based on his words—though since his write-up does not give the boy’s exact words, it’s hard to know what to think. There’s no explanation of why the name most commonly uttered by the boy would be Mahmoud. The glass slipper fit Ibrahim, and Stevenson proceeded from there.

  But I was never in Khriby, and neither was Leonard Angel. Something served to convince Stevenson that the case of Imad Elawar strongly suggested reincarnation. Whether it was the facts of the case or a blind eye born of bias, I can’t say.

  So I’ve come to India for answers. I want to get inside one of these cases, meet the families involved, hear the things they say, watch them interact.

  In India, I’m finding, the answers do not always fit the questions. This morning at the hotel, I asked the waiter what kind of cheese is in the masala omelette.