STRANGE DIMENSIONS NEWSLETTER
Rosemary Ellen Guiley
August 2011
In this issue: REINCARNATION is in the news with the Kindle release of one of my books… adventures On the Paranormal Road… upcoming events… Article on author Michael Talbot’s past-life recall that inspired his vampire novel.
I’m back in New England after an extended summer stay in the Pacific Northwest. Just before I departed, I paid a visit to the ECETI Ranch (Enlightened Contact with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) near Mt. Adams, located in a paranormal hot zone. My report on that, and my interview with owner James Gilliland, will be in a future issue of Strange Dimensions.
NEW BOOK RELEASES
I have updated my book on reincarnation and republished it as an e-book titled Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s Soul Journeys: Past Lives & Reincarnation. It is available in Kindle format only at http://amzn.to/p5sIev
The original title was Tales of Reincarnation. Robert Michael Place designed the smashing new cover from one of his spectacular Tarot cards in his Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery.
The book has many dramatic reincarnation stories, including quite a few original ones given to me in exclusive interviews. In addition, it provides a comprehensive, thorough examination of beliefs about reincarnation, scientific investigations, the karmic holdovers of past lives, and how the past can help us lead better lives today and build better lives for the future. I added a new chapter on spirit communications and psychophysical research to document reincarnation.
Of particular note are Marion Zimmer Bradley’s past lives in ancient and medieval times and World War I, and her visionary LSD experiences that led to her most famous novel, The Mists of Avalon. Michael Talbot, the author of The Holographic Universe, talks about several of his past lives, including one that inspired his vampire novel, The Delicate Dependency. Danny Sugerman was involved with Jim Morrison and The Doors, and describes a past life in a Buddhist monastery with Morrison. Author Barbara Hand Clow talks about her lifetimes in ancient Assyria and in Victorian times. Pagan leader Selena Fox describes her past lives with the Aztalan mound builders in Wisconsin, the Maya in the Yucatan, and the ancient Egyptians.
If you’ve ever explored your own past lives, or have been curious about doing so, you will enjoy Soul Journeys!
VAMPIRE BOOK NEWS
John Edgar Browning’s critical edition of The Vampyre: His Kith and Kin by Montague Summers is just out. I wrote the introduction to this classic, and it is exciting to see this important new edition in print from Apocryphile Press. Available on Amazon at http://amzn.to/nC5Sii
My second edition of The Encyclopedia of Vampires & Werewolves is out, with color illustrations and a completely new look. Available signed at my bookshop, www.visionaryliving.com/shop
UPCOMING EVENTS
Full details on my calendar page at www.visionaryliving.com/calendar/
Aug. 12-13 Michigan Paracon, Kewadin Casino, Saulte Ste. Marie, MI. On Saturday afternoon, John Zaffis and I will give a joint presentation on demons and Djinn.
Sept. 1-5 Dragon*Con in Atlanta. I will be on the Paranormal and Dark Goth tracks, speaking about the Djinn, vampires, werewolves, and paranormal investigations. Schedule TBA.
FEATURE ARTICLE
Michael Talbot, Past Lives and Vampires
By Rosemary Ellen Guiley
Copyright Visionary Living, Inc.
I met Michael Talbot in the 1980s at the library of the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City, where I spent many a day buried in the stacks for various book projects. Usually I had the library to myself, but one day Michael came in to do some research, and we struck up a conversation, both of us familiar with the other’s works.
Michael had authored a book on reincarnation called Your Past Lives: A Reincarnation Handbook, in addition to his best-known work, The Holographic Universe. I asked him for an interview for my own book in progress, and he invited me to come to his Manhattan apartment for a chat. During the interview, poltergeist phenomena manifested, much to the amusement of Michael, who had a long and entangled history with the paranormal. He was marked early in life to know the Unknown, and he was a fascinating man.
It was with great sorrow that I read of his death in 1992 at the young age of 38 of lymphocystic leukemia. He was bright, inquisitive and gifted, and passed on way too early.
Michael had explored a number of his past lives through various forms of recall, including one he developed himself called the Resonance Method. His past lives inspired his work, especially his fiction, and he described to me how one past life became part of his vampire novel, The Delicate Dependency:
Frequently when I write, I think past-life material channels through. I don’t go into a trance, but somehow I tap into the past. I think this is true of writers in general. We draw upon what we know although we think it is imagination.
I wrote a book called The Delicate Dependency, a vampire horror novel which takes place in the 1890s. I wrote a lot of stuff I thought was purely out of my imagination. It turned out to be taken from past life memories.
One character is a monk who is a wandering troubadour. I discovered later that this comes from a past life I had in the 1500s in which I was a troubadour, a mountebank like Cagliostro who knew mystical things. I courted a beautiful woman, whom I also know in this life. She saw through me, that I was a bit of a charlatan. Through gossip she destroyed me and I was imprisoned and died of a lung infection. All of those things have resonance for me: being a troubadour, being in prison, dying of a lung infection.
In the novel, I made the troubadour monk a vampire. The reason I wanted to write a vampire novel is because I wanted to write about immortality and how being immortal would change consciousness… When I assess anything in this life, I find I’m always looking at other lives. I think it gives me a real odd take on life in general. I don’t feel either young or old, but in a way I’ve always felt really old. My family has always commented on it. My parents have always said I was never a little boy, I was always a little man. So, I thought that if you really had lived for centuries it would change you; a nine-hundred-year-old is not the same intellectually or emotionally as a thirty-year-old person.
[In the book] the vampires are very respectful of life. They have a coterie of humans that they feed on, but they loathe killing because a brutal and violent act is the only thing that can bring an end to their own lives… The thing they’re most intrigued by is knowledge. Because they live for so long, they have the opportunity to study things in the way few humans can.
I seem to have drawn on my past life as the troubadour to make the monk vampire like the Illuminati or an alchemist… In one place he says there is a secret language written into the doors of Notre Dame. I thought I was making it up. Later I read that it was believed that alchemists had put a secret language on the original doors of Notre Dame… These vampires knew to meet under the rose window of Notre Dame. I thought I was making that up, too. One day I was looking through the dictionary and saw the term subrosa, which in Latin means ‘under the rose,’ and which means a meeting held in secret.
The main character is a British virologist who forms a hypothesis after he encounters a vampire that they may be a victim of some sort of virus. In the course of his searching, he is incarcerated in a hall on the Isle St. Louis by this nine-hundred-year-old vampire. The vampire says that he can’t let the neurologist go now that he has broken into the vampire’s home, because the vampire’s life depends on people not knowing about him. He guards the neurologist with a trained falcon. The doctor knows that if he gets ripped by the talons he will die. Later in going through some of my old stories and poems, I found I had written about a falcon ripping someone several times before… My hypothesis is that in some past life this had a meaning. One past life which has left a powerful resonance on me is a life in ancient Persia, where falconry was important.
Michael had lucid, unusual dreams, including visions of the between-state, where people await reincarnation; out-of-body journeys to other planes of existence; and, prophetically, encounters with Death and Anubis, the Egyptian god of death who leads souls to the underworld. I describe those in my book Dreamwork for the Soul.
Michael, wherever you are, I hope the Quest for knowledge continues.
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