About the book
Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory is a survey of reincarnation research by the anthropologist and parapsychologist James G Matlock, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2019. It runs to just over 400 pages, with a foreword by Jeffrey Mishlove, an afterword by the biologist Michael Nahm, a glossary of technical terms and an extensive reference list.13
The book grew out of a semester-long master’s-level course on reincarnation that Matlock wrote for Atlantic University at the request of the parapsychologist Nancy Zingrone, and later taught online through the Alvarado Zingrone Institute. He wrote the lectures with a book in mind, and the book now serves as the course textbook. He aimed it at college-level readers and at the wider academic community, hoping to bring students into the field and to engage other parapsychologists with his ideas about survival.2
Contents
The book opens with the case of Rylann O’Bannion, an American girl whose memories Matlock investigated himself and matched to Jennifer Schultz, an eleven-year-old killed on the ground when a Pan Am airliner crashed near New Orleans in 1982. The opening chapter then asks what reincarnation is and why it challenges the view that the brain produces the mind.13
The book has seven chapters, each in three sections. The second surveys belief in reincarnation: its signs and customs in animistic cultures, its history in the West and East, and ideas of karma. The third covers research methods, from accounts of past-life memory recorded before 1960 to Ian Stevenson’s fieldwork and its critics and the frames used to interpret cases. The fourth and fifth deal with children’s cases: the main signs (involuntary memories, behaviour that matches the previous person, and birthmarks) and secondary ones such as signs of discarnate agency, recurring patterns and the psychological effects of past-life memory. The sixth turns to past-life recall in adults, hypnotic regression, and information from shamans, psychics and mediums.1
In his afterword Nahm considers what the cases might mean for biology, arguing that birthmark cases in particular suggest a factor beyond genes and environment in how a person’s body and personality form.3
The processual soul theory
The final chapter sets out Matlock’s own account of how reincarnation might work. Drawing on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, he rejects the idea of a soul as a separate substance and proposes instead that what survives death is a continuing stream of consciousness. At rebirth the conscious, everyday part of this stream breaks off as it engages with a new brain, so each life starts as a blank slate, while the deeper, subconscious part carries over and surfaces in involuntary memories and dispositions. He calls this the processual soul theory and describes reincarnation as a kind of possession of the developing body.123
Matlock argues that, after reviewing the evidence from more than 2,500 investigated cases, no alternative interpretation fits as well as reincarnation, and that accepting it requires giving up the idea that the brain generates consciousness but no radically new concepts beyond that. The chapter also takes up stranger reports, such as claims of animal rebirth, group reincarnation and concurrent lives.23
Reception
The book received the Parapsychological Association’s book award.5 It also drew two long critical reviews in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2021. Peter Mulacz admired its command of the subject and its references, and thought it might replace a small library for readers wanting an overview, but found the material repetitive in its arrangement, some topics treated superficially and the processual soul theory unconvincing. The philosopher Michael Sudduth praised its survey of beliefs and its case accounts, and called the theory a commendable attempt, but judged the book seriously flawed in scholarship, concepts and argument.34