Psience Quest

Warning - Sexual assault mentioned once in an offensive context.

Antonia (reincarnation case study analysis)

Odd case because the story sounds like one of those old "bodice ripper" romance novels:

Quote:Antonia lost her virginity around the age of 29, when a man took her by force in the torture chamber. The eroticism of this assault a­roused all her passions and revealed her masochistic tendencies. She had secretly adored this man before, and now she fell madly in love with him and eventually bore him a son. Their relationship evolved from lust­ful self-indulgence to a deep and all-consuming physical and spiritual union. (This romantic and erotic aspect of Antonia’s life was unlike any­thing reported during Dilmen’s other past-life regressions.) Together, they traveled wide­ly and enjoyed many adventures, including encounters with Satanists and pirates, and culminating in a visit to Peru, where Anton­ia met her previously unknown uncle, Inquisitor Juan Ruiz de Pra­do. On their return voyage, Antonia drowned near a small Caribbean island. Her lover tried desperately to save her, nearly drowning in the process.

However:

Quote:Because Antonia’s story was an erotically-charged romantic adven­ture, Tarazi initially believed that Dilmen’s regression was a fantasy, root­ed in cryptomne­sia and the demand characteristics of the hypnotic ex­periment. And indeed, Tara­zi at first found most of the facts Dilmen pro­vided by consulting history books and encyclopedias, ‘albeit with diffi­culty’.7 But Dilmen also mentioned names and events that Tarazi was unable to trace at the time, and as her investiga­tion pro­gressed, she discovered that Dilmen was providing an astonishing amount of detailed and exceptionally obscure information about the appropriate period and locale of Antonia’s alleged life. Occasionally, that information even conflicted with authoritative sources, but Tarazi later confirmed Antonia’s claims by diligently tracking down even more obscure and reliable sources. Interestingly, she was never able to find evidence of a person matching Antonia’s description and alleged history. However, if Anton­ia’s story is true, that fact would not be especially re­markable.

Quote:A few more details are worth mentioning. To emphasize the difficulty of learning the relevant information by normal means, Tarazi writes,

Quote:Even some material from American libraries would have been difficult for her to obtain. Not only were the books old, rare, highly specialized, and in a language which L.D. did not read, but they contained many quotes from 16th-century Spanish that present a problem to the average native Spanish speaker and even for the Spanish teachers whom I contacted. Nor were there only a few such books; rather, about 30 each contribute new facts.16

And even this admission from Braude, the major Super Psi guy:

Quote:Despite reasonable concerns about the unreliability and creative potential of apparent past-life regressions, the Antonia case at least poses problems for sceptics of survival. It may not conclusively rule out appeals to living-agent psi, but it comes as close as perhaps any case in the survival literature to stretching the living-agent psi alternative to the breaking point.