I am thine invisible sister, I am thy divine soul, and this is the book of thy life. Within it are the pages filled with thy past existences and the white pages of thy future lives.

(The Book of the Dead) Funeral Ritual of the Egyptians.

The soul is an entity distinct from the body: it accompanies the essential part of the human being in the course of the numerous incarnations necessary to our evolution. From the time of Plato the majority of men have lived in the knowledge of this truth, and to-morrow they will dwell in the scientific certainty that this ancient philosophy has not deceived them.

It is magnetism which is destined to reveal to us the fact that we have lived in the past. The labors of M. de Rochas, upon the regression of memory, have opened new vistas, of which we will speak briefly.

We knew already that a subject, transported by magnetic passes into a former state - to childhood, for instance - would appear tractable to this suggestion. But this was generally believed to be the hackneyed phenomenon which induces a hypnotized subject to accept the part proposed, as that of an old man, a priest, a general, etc. Yet along with these fictitious roles, are realities: thus it is well known that hypnotism may be misused to draw true revelations from a subject, or force him to confide his secrets. Not everything is false in the hypnotic condition, and the subject who returns to his childhood is playing a part that is a true repetition of states formerly lived.

Colonel de Rochas, a remarkable experimenter, has introduced an innovation by submitting different subjects to methodical tests of memory regression, and by showing the fidelity of the pictures thus reconstructed.

For example, a young girl of eighteen is progressively carried back: she passes always through the same phases: then slowly, by the same ways, she is returned to her real age before being awakened. At seven years of age she is going to school and is only beginning to write: at five years she can no longer read, and carried back to the cradle, she sucks. We can even go beyond, and the subject takes the position of the foetus in its mother's womb.

With an orphan, who had been reared in Beyrout and whose father had been an engineer in the Orient, M. de Rochas attempted regression. At ten years of age she thought herself in Marseilles, where she had indeed been at that age, and M. de Rochas was unaware of this. At eight she was in Beyrout and spoke of her father and friends who came to the house. Asked how "good morning" is said in Turkish, she answered, "Salamalec," a word which in her waking state she had forgotten. At two years she was at Cuges in Provence, which was correct: at one year she could no longer speak and replied by signs of the head.

But here is where the operation becomes curious. In order to obtain these regressive states, M. de Rochas made longitudinal passes over his subject: and to recall her, transversal passes. In the course of these experiments, he perceived that if he continued the transversal passes, the subject would go beyond her actual age - in other words, was able to see herself in time to come. Here we must beware of the somnambulistic dream, the tendency which a subject always has to satisfy her observer, and the possibility of a change of personality; the pictures thus obtained are rarely correct. However, in 1904, a subject who had been urged into the future, gave a successful result.

I cite textually the case of Eugenie.1

Thus I made her grow older, little by little: at thirty-seven years of age (she was then really thirty-five) she manifested all the symptoms of child birth and the shame of this event, because she was not remarried. This was to take place in 1906. Several months afterward she seemed to be drowning herself. I caused her to grow older by two years - new symptoms of birth. I asked her where she was at that time, and she answered, "Upon the water." This strange reply caused me to suppose that she was wandering, and I brought her back to her normal state.

Everything that she had predicted came true. She took for her lover a glove-maker, by whom she had a child in 1906. Shortly afterward, grown despondent, she threw herself into the Isere and was saved by being seized by the leg. Finally, in January, 1909, another child was born, upon a bridge of the Isere, where she was taken suddenly with the birth-pangs in returning from her work.

1 Les Vies successives, by Albert de Rochas, Chacorne, 1911, p. 96.

This is a curious fact and should be recorded, though there must be many added before we can pronounce upon it. The cases of regression are more interesting and we will return to them.

It is, indeed, strange, but every subject describes in identically the same manner his or her going back to the past. They are transported back to six months of age, two months, into the body of the mother, where they take the position of the foetus: the regression is continued and they are in space. A brief lethargy and we are present at a new scene, the death of an old person. It is the beginning of the life which preceded the present incarnation, manifesting itself backwards, and continuing back to a still older incarnation.

We will consider only the moment of birth: whether the subject be educated or not, the vision is always the same. First, before birth, the subject sees himself in space in the form of a ball, or as a slightly luminous mist, wandering about the organs of the mother: each sees, in the mother's womb, the body in which he is to be incarnated. Thus conception precedes the taking possession of the foetus by the spiritual body, which enters little by little - "by puffs," as one subject said - into the tiny body. Until then the subject sees himself as though he were placed upon the outside.

Another subject, Josephine, depicts herself thus surrounding the body of her mother, only entering rather late, and little by little, into the child's body. All agree that the complete incorporation occurs at about seven years of age.

This is in accord with the lucid descriptions of the "sensitives," who also see the astral bodies of the dying leave their physical bodies, and seemingly float above them.

Mayo, carried back before her birth, said that she was nothing, she felt that she existed and that was all, but she remembered having had another life. When led back to the world, she said that something had urged her to be reincarnated, and she had descended to her mother, when the latter was already pregnant, and had entered her physical body shortly before her birth and then but partially.

As for material concerning former lives, it is almost impossible to classify the declarations of the subjects, since they contain elements of error and truth. But have we the right to be exacting in such a matter? If a single existence represented the entirety of being, we should have the right, in evoking this being, to require that a faithful report be given us. But when we have several successive existences unconnected, since they are separated by death, what may be the nature of the unity that obtains outside of the time lived?