Alexander The Great and Thomas More

I had never really been serious about past lives or regression until August 17, 2000. The day before, my then-partner and I had visited an old cottage mansion that had such features as a massive stone fireplace and a long antique dining room table. These surroundings seemed to reach something deeper in me that I wasn't aware of, to have some sort of message for me.

The next morning, I woke up with the distinct impression of being someone other than myself: a man, English, from a long time ago, who had been beheaded by some king, for somehow sticking to my principles, and because I had a prominent position. My then-partner, who is a shiatsu therapist, sensed extreme pain in the back of my neck. She also had the name "Thomas More" come repeatedly and intrusively into her mind, and she asked me, hadn't something like this happened to him? I didn't know; the name was vaguely familiar to me, and I was embarrassed that I needed reminding that he had been the author of the book Utopia. In the encyclopedia we learned that More, an author, lawyer, judge, statesman, and Lord Chancellor of England (the King's right-hand man) for three years, had been beheaded for refusing to accede to Henry VIII's changing of England's religion from Catholicism to Protestantism. Had he been obscure, the king wouldn't have been inclined to make an example of him.

Stunned, I began studying Thomas More, and was struck by a multitude of parallels and connections between his life and mine, his published writing and mine.

About a month later, my partner noticed that, whenever I made fun of people who thought they had famous past lives, I always used the same example: "people who think they were Alexander the Great in a past life." That, an intuition, and a feeling that this would explain much about me made her inquire by muscle-testing whether I had been him. She got a very firm "Yes." The evidence was stronger still. I had published three novels about a character who was very similar to Alexander, and an "alter ego" for me, despite a life-long aversion to Alexander; I'd always been fascinated with power and politics; I had obsessively drawn sword and spear battles as a child. When I mentioned remembering that I'd drawn a very distinctive-looking city from that life, my partner -- before I described it to her -- recalled my mother's identical description of the same drawing. Like Alexander and his lover/best friend Hephaistion, who married sisters so that their children would be related, my partner and I had each had a child by the same father, for the same reason (before any past lives emerged). Though I've never seen any academic discussion of a connection between Thomas More and Alexander, More was a leading proponent of the idea that ancient Greek ideas could and should inform his own time, and the book Utopia is full of implicit Alexander connections, from name similarities to Utopian military tactics to its mysterious conqueror Utopus -- to the fact that the mythical ideal nation is a fusion of Greek and Persian culture, a fusion which only Alexander attempted in real life.

While I got only a handful of Thomas More memories, and no urge to write about that life, there seemed to be a great deal of healing and expressive work that needed doing with Alexander. I have been doing it ever since, have retrieved many memories, and record everything in writing.

My past lives have been key to life-changing healing; having been raised by atheists I was taught that my obsessive urge to draw bloody battles was wrong and sick. Because it was in truth so central to me, I grew up with my belief in myself and my sense of self-worth shattered. It is only by learning that my drawings were expressions of memory that I have been able to rediscover self-esteem.