Content area
Full Text
WHERE REINCARNATION AND BIOLOGY INTERSECT by Ian Stevenson.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Pp. xviii + 203. $17.95, softcover, ISBN 0-275-95189-8.
The night before the birth of Cemil Fahrici in Turkey, Cemil's father dreamed that a distant relative, Cemil Hayik, entered the home. Hayik, a folk hero and bandit, had committed suicide during a shoot-out with the police. He had placed the muzzle of his gun to his chin and had set off the trigger with a toe. When the parents of the newborn boy found a birthmark under his chin, which actually bled and required stitching, they thought he was the reincarnation of Cemil Hayik and named him Cemil. Their impression was reinforced when the boy began to speak and described events from the life of his namesake. Ian Stevenson, who investigated the case, discovered that the fatal bullet had exited at the top of the skull, lifting out part of the bone. He therefore asked Cemil Fahrici if he had another birthmark. "Without hesitating," said Stevenson, "he pointed to the top of his head, and we quickly discovered a linear area of hairlessness on the left side of the top of his head" (p. 75).
The scientific study of reincarnation is almost entirely due to Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist who has established a parapsychology center at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. If it were not for his investigations, it would be impossible to evaluate the claim that after death, human personality may be transferred to a new body. The present volume not only adds to the mountain of data compiled by Stevenson, it also throws new light on it.
The book is a condensation of a two-part monograph which amounts to no less than 3436 pages: Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997). Of the 225 cases in the monograph, 112 are summarized here; all but nine have been personally investigated by Stevenson. Some cases are "unsolved," that is, no deceased person has been found to match the birthmarks and memories of the subject. Without the unsolved cases and without birthmark cases that Stevenson considers questionable, about 90 cases remain where birthmarks or birth defects on a newborn child correspond to wounds or marks...