 
## Alchemical Journey

## An account of my previous lives

## Candy Ray

Copyright © 2015 Candy Ray

All rights reserved

Smashwords edition 2019

Cover painting by Justin Kingsley Pitonak

Self-published by Frond

# Table of Contents

Foreword

The Original Introduction

Chapter 1 Ancient Times

Chapter 2 India

Chapter 3 Egypt

Chapter 4 Heaven

Chapter 5 Medieval England

Chapter 6 The Seventeenth Century

Chapter 7 Hell, and the Planes Near Earth

Chapter 8 The Nineteenth Century

Chapter 9 Summerland

End Notes

Fiction Books by Candy Ray

# Foreword

This text has been available as a free PDF since 2015 and it has been quite popular, after being recommended on an occult forum as a document of outstanding value. I have decided to make it into a book now.

There wouldn't be much point in adding a lot of commentary, as I so scrupulously removed all the comments and speculations from my original hand-written manuscript. It had been lying in a drawer for many years before I published it and I had considerably changed my opinions, which was why I left in only the narrative.

As I said in my original introduction, when I included my present life there were too many occult secrets and too much sensitive personal information about living people. However, I think it would be useful to have a little more information, particularly about how the karmic effects worked out in the present day. So I have added some brief notes relating to each chapter, at the end of the book.

Candy Ray 2019

# The Original Introduction

All my life I have come into contact with people who remember previous lifetimes. It seems that I keep being drawn to them. Eventually I developed a passion for studying my own reincarnation memories, and tracing what I see as karmic links that have affected me in the present day. The memories came back in a variety of ways: dreams, feelings of déjà vu in particular places, regression meditations, games I played when I was a child, and once when I was given a blended flower remedy by a healer. I have never had actual hypnotic regression because I am not a good subject for hypnosis, and I doubt that it would be possible for a regression therapist to put me into a trance.

In some ways it was like living in flashbacks, because later memories came back before earlier ones and the very beginning of the story came last of all. When the beginning did come back it turned out that I had been a demon. If this information had come at the start of my research I would have been pretty upset about it. I have always been very religious, although in what is called an eclectic way. I've been through a series of different religions, and nearly all of them are ones that treat other religions as equal alternative paths.

As it was I found out when I had been studying the occult for over twenty years, and it was fine because it cleared up some mysteries and answered many questions. The foremost question it answered was why I kept ending up involved with demons, seemingly against my own wishes, and why no-one came to rescue me as I had been brought up to believe that they would. I have had a few traumas in life as everyone does, but I was not harmed by contact with my own people. Indeed this is still going on now, at the time of writing which is 2015. I thought I had got away from them when I recently spent four years in Pagan religions with the Pagan gods. But then some other entities showed up......

At earlier times when I have written drafts of my autobiography I included my present life, but this time I have elected not to because I always end up relating a lot that is supposed to be secret, and then I start thinking that I cannot publish it after all and I will have to leave it to some esoteric organization in my will. So I am only going to tell what I remember of my previous lives. I have actually greatly shortened my original account, to leave out unproven speculation about the nature of the cosmos and focus only on what I believe actually happened.

Unlike some of the people I have met, I do not have a visual memory. I cannot remember people's faces, or what everyday objects looked like. All my memories have a storybook texture, as if I read them somewhere. I believe the reason for this texture is that the last time I lived on the astral plane I had a hobby of going to the symbolic library where the akashic records are kept, and reading the records. In spite of this activity I was not born with past life memories, but when the memories did come back gradually they were like a written narrative: one which highlights significant events and describes only the details necessary to understand them.

# 1. Ancient Times

The first time I was born was as a succubus, a daughter of Lilith the dark moon. She gives birth to the succubi in a symbolic sense only, to enable them to transmigrate into her species. One time in meditation I saw a point even earlier than that, before I had ever been born, and what I saw was a wispy, wafer-thin creature that looked like a moonbeam, and in some sense WAS a moonbeam. This creature was female with long, flowing hair that constantly changed colour, and she belonged to a colony of similar lunar spirits that all lived together. It is almost impossible to imagine what an existence like that would be like, and it seems strange to me that I was lunar because my physical metabolism today is very solar. I feel widest awake at noon and most tired at midnight. But that is what I saw. My impression was that there was no conditioning: no-one had taught us that lunar meant evil or subordinate. That concept did however appear when I was born to Lilith. The Zohar describes how Lilith originated in the moon's reluctance to diminish herself and be subordinate to the light of the sun. She is a lunar goddess, the dark aspect of the moon.

Actually Lilith has many hundreds of daughters. The nearest equivalent on Earth is ant and bee colonies in which one queen is the mother of all of them, and to a certain extent they have a collective consciousness. So I was not a princess, I was one of a species who are all sisters and all daughters of the queen. However, when I was young I didn't see them as sisters; I saw them as hundreds of aunts who were all looking after me, all keeping me safe.

Young angels and demons belong to a vast race which is sometimes called the Deva kingdom- that is the name I like to use. This race consists of nature spirits, which feature strongly in folklore as fairies, elves and so forth, and angelic beings which belong to the same species but are more developed. The main difference between Devas and mankind is that Devas have no physical bodies and live in an astral body. They reproduce in the same way as man except that they can choose when they have children, so they have them deliberately in order to help someone to transmigrate into a new form. The females, the Devis, are only pregnant for twenty-four hours because it is symbolic, an initiation and not real birth. When the children are born they can already walk and talk.

Of course they do not need physical care in the way human children do, but they require an extended period of training. In the twentieth century I remembered my favourite 'aunt' Loraleen, the one who played the most part in bringing me up and training me. Her name is a variation of Lobaban, an anagram of Babalon which is sometimes used, and I believe she was the goddess- like being who appeared to John Dee. She often appears in novels and films, as many demons and angels do because they are archetypes. I once saw her on television with her correct name, but that wasn't where I first found her name. I wrote it on a piece of paper when I was only ten years old, along with the name of another 'aunt' who later also appeared in fiction on television. Loraleen usually casts an enchantment on a knight or prince in her stories, and tries to take over his kingdom.

The first place where I lived was a large indoor chamber in Hell, dark and full of hard slabs of stone. I remembered it in a regression meditation. In about 2001 I used to attend a meditation group, and one week we did regression, with great success. I immediately repeated it at home, looking for Loraleen who I still loved, and that is my main source of information for this chapter. There is another source as well which I will acknowledge when I come to it.

Hell is an extreme polarity, an expression of the Pillar of Severity. I accepted it because I didn't know anything else- I was unaware that most environments are a combination of mixed elements, not entirely positive or negative but somewhere in between. I shared the place with various exotic-looking monsters as well as my much-loved aunts. Loraleen was the one I saw as a mother and she was keeping an eye on me, but only a cursory eye because she was more interested in appearing elegant and sophisticated to the human beings she hoped to influence. I do not remember what I learnt while I was in this place, but I know that after my training I left Hell and went to Earth. I was roaming around looking for victims in some ancient civilization that looked similar to modern places, with many large buildings, and it was always bathed in brilliant sunshine. My victims were not men, they were pregnant women, and I was causing miscarriages.

This may sound horrific, but remember that being a succubus is very similar to being a germ: the harm you cause is an expression of a force of nature. Miscarriages occur naturally and sometimes prevent babies being born with deformities, and in primitive times they were not usually induced deliberately. It did look rather as if I wrenched the babies out, but I skipped past that every time during the regression and did not watch it. Most people would rather be associated with healing; however medicine is the solar side of the equation and it has to have a lunar side as well otherwise it could not exist in our dualistic world. This is the origin of the great divide Sol and Luna in alchemy, the solar and lunar forces that lie behind material nature.

Quite early on in history human beings began to develop defences against incubi and succubi. Amber repels them, in fact when I see amber crystals or amber colour now I still feel like I am being pushed away. A common protection for mothers and babies was to write the names Sanvi, Sansavi and Semangaloff in the place where the mother and child were sleeping. Those were the three angels who tried to persuade Lilith to go back to Adam, in the Jewish legends about her. She refused to go back, and yet the names of the three angels still became a charm against her powers. Another defence that developed was the use of a talisman in the shape of a black knife. The black knife is the origin of the athame. It also explains why I was attacking pregnant women instead of raping men. I received these teachings from a male entity who is a composite form of the female Three Furies, all about the knife symbolism that is used by incubi and succubi.

Incubi play an important part in the natural world because they cause the mating seasons of animals to start. When the correct season comes an incubus approaches the animal's nature spirit guardian and raises a black knife to show that it is now his time of ascendancy. The guardian has to relinquish power and go away until the season is over. It occurred to human magicians to make a replica knife and raise it at times when they believed they had the upper hand over the incubi and succubi. This would have to be calculated astrologically because human beings do not have mating seasons, and it would be dangerous to be wrong, but provided the dates were right they would be protected.

The symbol does not end with a black knife: it is a threefold symbol of a black blade, a green blade and a red blade. There is a connection with the original kind of electrical plugs which used to be wired red, black and green. The black blade is physical and means sexual energy. The green blade is astral and has two aspects, romantic love and selfish love, which corresponds with the astral plane being divided into Heaven and Hell. It is represented by a blade of grass. The green blade as romantic love has the power to drive Lilith away, while the green blade as selfish love expresses Lilith's energy. A few years after I received these teachings I found out that there is in fact a Jewish legend about a blade of grass being used as a weapon against Lilith. The red blade is mental and is more deadly than the others, for it means slander and war and is represented by a tongue.

When an animal is influenced by the black blade it makes a division of its peers into two: all those of the same sex are enemies and all those of the opposite sex are potential mates, potential lovers. The species that was formerly all one to the animal is cleaved in two by the blade. Similarly when a human being is influenced by the red blade they divide everyone into two: friends of the cause and enemies. The enemies are first slandered and criticised, and the next stage is full- scale war. Words are so important and should be guarded carefully because they are the first step in this process that leads to war. Also, if you try to live the ideal 'make love and not war' you will find it very difficult, because the violent and passionate part of you would have to be squashed into one quarter of the space it occupies, the romantic half of the green blade, and it rebels against this.

Among the incubi and succubi, the red blade is associated with seniority. Loraleen's interest in war and political power marks her out as a powerful dark goddess only a little below Lilith in status. Incubi and succubi of less power work with the green blade (their half of it), while the junior and inexperienced ones stay on the level of the black blade. I was still only the equivalent of a child and was confined to the black blade, so I wandered from place to place seeking out women who were vulnerable in a physical sense, prone to miscarriage. I wasn't raping men because I was still too young.

For children in the Deva kingdom development is at first more rapid than that of a human being: a Deva of one or two years old is like a human of six or seven. Later it slows down and the opposite principle applies- they grow up very slowly over a period of several hundred years. That was how long I would have wandered around the Earth looking for victims, if nothing had changed. I used to call myself Sherry Zahd, a deliberate pun on Scheherazade, the woman who got the better of her murderous husband. You may think the story of the Arabian Nights did not exist at this early period in history, but it must have done.

When I reached the equivalent of twelve or thirteen, I started to have daydreams about having relationships in the near future. This is where something went wrong, because instead of daydreaming about human men, I preferred my own species and wanted my partner to be an incubus protector who would look after me the way my aunts had done. Telepathic communication is the norm among angels, and I knew others could read my thoughts, but I was hoping to get away with it. No-one reprimanded me, but one day Lilith came to see me and announced that she was sending me to Earth. "We have to find a large group of people to send to Earth quickly," she said. "You will have to go because you prefer your own kind to men. It is only possible to have what you want in human life."

There was no possibility of argument, I had to go. In a sense Lilith killed me at the age of only thirteen. It was to be a very long time before I met Lilith and her people again; I did not become a human being and immediately start having relationships with incubi. What happened was that I became only a partial human being the first time, and I did not have any sexual feelings at all because I hadn't finished growing up. Some people dispute what I remember because they say angelic beings do not have puberty, but according to what I remember they must have something equivalent to it.

# 2. India

The place I went to was India, to the House of Kuru. The events that I was involved in are told in the famous epic poem the Mahabharata. At one time in my present life this scripture became a consuming interest of mine, although I had no idea that I had been in it and only remembered this much later on. According to traditional Hindu belief these events happened five thousand years ago, although some scholars disagree with this date and say it must have been much more recent than that. I have always preferred to believe the Hindus who see their religion from the inside.

The Mahabharata states that one hundred sons were born to the blind king Dhritarashtra and his queen Gandhari. At first they were all joined together in a giant ball of flesh, but this was separated into a hundred pieces and each one was put into a large jar. They were incubated in the jars until they emerged as warrior children. When we read this today we try to make sense of it in scientific terms, and to begin with it appears to be pure fiction. The Mahabharata is full of symbolic stories of people being born in strange ways: for example one character, Satyavati, is born from the belly of a fish. This appears to be a similar type of account.

There is something special, however, about the story of Dhritarashtra's sons. It can be readily identified as a description of an experiment to make clones or homunculi. This is something that has always been done, in every generation. Although the idea of cloning may appear to be modern it was well-known to the ancients; clones and homunculi are actually quite similar to one another and are two distinct types of human that are lunar rather than solar. They belong to Lilith's lunar creation instead of God's solar creation. The solar creation is the original one, and lunar creation depends on it and makes use of materials derived from it, just as the moon reflects the light of the sun. For lunar creation you take bodies and souls that God has already made and combine them in new ways.

I believe the brothers of the House of Kuru, the Kauravas as they came to be called, were clones of Prince Duryodhana. The Mahabharata always speaks of Duryodhana as the leader and heir to the throne even though we were all supposed to be the same age. In fact only a few of the brothers are ever mentioned by name, most often Duhsasana who was particularly evil. I was never mentioned. Every time we come into the story we are just a number, 'Duryodhana and his ninety-nine brothers.' It sounds like the ultimate totalitarian nightmare! What we were intended to be was the archetypal robot army of clones that is impossible to defeat, an idea which nowadays appears in science fiction and computer games. Duryodhana was greedy for wealth and territory and he had deliberately planned the cloning experiment at an earlier date before his birth; he wanted to ensure that he would be the conqueror in any wars that he had with the surrounding tribes.

The Mahabharata tells the story of the feud and civil war that took place in our family as a result of Duryodhana's tyrannical behaviour. It tells this story at great length and with many diversions into mythical stories, sermons and spiritual allegories, including the most influential of all Indian scriptures the Bhagavad Gita. Much of Hinduism and many of the branches of Yoga base their teachings on the Bhagavad Gita. The Mahabharata is still immensely popular in India and is constantly retold in the form of poetry, dance dramas and films, and people feel that the moral and political lessons are still relevant.

It appears from what I have found out since that stags were somehow involved in our creation: a stag totem and a large group of succubi (even though we ended up as male.) We were primitive people with powerful emotions, and we covered ourselves from head to foot in paints, powders and ornaments which were meant to look attractive, to protect us from the heat and to indicate rank and position. We looked nothing at all like modern men, for there must have been hardly any skin visible under all the paint. Perhaps that is why Krishna is always shown as blue in paintings. Pious Hindus believe he was blue because he was a divine incarnation: I am not saying he wasn't divine, but I would like to point out that it is very likely his people the tribe of Yadu painted themselves blue.

Krishna appears in other Hindu scriptures as well as the Mahabharata, and he is described as an incarnation of God who came to Earth to defeat demons and tyrants. He was on the side of our cousins the Pandavas in the great feud that led in the end to civil war. The Mahabharata declares that the Pandavas were children of the gods, and we were demons. The stag totem was somehow involved in their creation as well, because their story begins with a curse from a stag.

King Pandu the brother of Dhritarashtra was out hunting one day, and he killed a stag and a doe that were mating. The stag cursed him that the next time he had sex he would die. This meant that he could not father any children, and so his two wives Kunti and Madri had children who were fathered by the gods. Kunti had been given a mantra by a sage that could be used to call down the gods from Heaven, so Kunti and Madri called down gods and spent the night with them, and each time they did this they were pregnant for twenty-four hours, just like the Devis, and then gave birth to sons. These sons became the five Pandava brothers.

As you can see it is rather difficult to separate reality from legend all this time later. Whatever the origin of the Pandavas and Kauravas may have been, they were enemies and it started with Duryodhana being jealous of his cousins and wanting to steal their land and property. My reason for hating the Pandavas was different from Duryodhana's. Although I was a clone of him I had my own personality and I was more gentle than him- I wasn't interested in conquering land or taking land away from our relatives.

I had two sisters who I idolised. Don't ask me where those sisters came from- they were probably ordinary people, not clones. We all belonged to the Kshatriya caste, the caste of warriors, and among our people it was customary not to feel too much attachment for the men in the family. Our father, brothers and sons could be killed at any time in battle, and we were taught that to be too close to them would cause needless sorrow when they were killed. But with women it was different. We were encouraged to lavish all our most tender feelings on our mother, wife, sisters and daughters, and the constant restraint that we had to apply with male relatives could be relaxed when we were with them. Because I didn't have any sexual feelings I did not marry, and my two sisters were everything to me- I loved them in an extreme and overwhelming way. Unfortunately they both married men from the rival Pandava side of the family.

This broke my heart. I did not care about the issues of political power that were so important to Duryodhana, I only cared about my sisters. In the years leading up to the war it became a childish, spiteful kind of feud in which we were forbidden to speak to the Pandavas or acknowledge their presence. This meant that I was never allowed to see or speak to my sisters again, and I had to live with the knowledge that if it came to war they would be on their husbands' side, not ours. Human beings will continue with this kind of thing for a ridiculously long time. In the twentieth century before I remembered this lifetime, I met one of the Pandavas and eagerly made friends with her. She introduced me to another of her friends who ignored me completely, which I found puzzling.

I remember Krishna coming to us as a teacher; he taught us what would nowadays be called martial arts, and he treated all his pupils equally whether they were Kauravas or Pandavas. We all regarded him as our guru. It can be seen from the Bhagavad Gita that Krishna advised the warriors to be self-controlled and dispassionate, unmoved by joy or sorrow, victory or defeat. According to this doctrine an attachment to political power would be wrong, and so would be an excessive attachment to one's sisters. Most of the warriors liked to pick and choose, taking only the parts that related to good co-ordination in battle and neglecting the spiritual core of the teachings, the meditation and philosophy. In the present century it seems there are more people who understand how the two are inter-related.

I had nothing against Krishna's pure and esoteric teachings, but I found it too difficult to achieve the dispassionate state. I wanted revenge against the Pandavas for taking my sisters away from me. That's how it happened that our weapons teacher Drona became my hero instead of Krishna. Krishna taught the doctrine of dharma which meant sticking to the duties of your caste, and Drona wanted to defy that.

You must understand that in those days, caste was not something oppressive. It had not yet become the system that Gandhi was opposed to. At this early time it was more like astrological signs than anything else: four types of person each with certain personalities and abilities. The priests and teachers were Brahmins, the warriors and administrators were Kshatriyas, the merchants and traders were Vaisyas and the manual workers were Sudras. There were no other sub-divisions and no untouchables, and everyone was treated with respect.

The Mahabharata relates how Drona was born a Brahmin, yet he wanted to become a warrior. He succeeded in becoming one of the best fighters of his generation, and a teacher of fighting skills to Kshatriyas. Like Krishna he was a teacher to all of us at first, but later he began to favour Duryodhana's side in the feud. When that happened his opposition to dharma took on a new meaning for me. Dharma was Krishna's ideal, and Krishna supported the Pandavas. They had split my family, so they deserved to have their social order split that was founded on the four castes. Drona treated dharma as an enemy, and now I started to as well. In Hinduism dharma means righteousness as well as caste duty, and this was where the role of demons as Kauravas came into it.

As the war drew nearer, Duryodhana made a threefold plan for victory. First learn the martial arts thoroughly with the spiritual parts left out, second raise an invincible army, which mainly meant us, and third never accept defeat. When it came to battle we did fight like a robot army; we were unlikely either to be unusually brave or to run away, we just carried on mechanically until we were told to stop. The rest of the time however, we were like normal human beings.

The Battle of Kurukshetra is described in minute detail in the Mahabharata. It is in the same style as the Iliad, an almost blow by blow account of each day's fighting. The Mahabharata recounts the many atrocities which took place when the warriors failed to keep to their Kshatriya code of honour. The Kshatriya code was very important to me; I never broke it and it influenced me in future lifetimes. Whenever I have studied magic I don't curse people because it means fighting with a weapon the other person does not possess, which is against the Kshatriya code. If your enemy is armed with only a sword you too must be armed with only a sword.

Something else that made a big impression on me was the brahmastra. The Mahabharata describes this as a kind of nuclear weapon operated by the mind which could have burnt up and destroyed our civilization. The only reason it was not used was because there were warriors on both sides who knew how to launch it, and that is the same situation that occurred in later centuries with nuclear weapons. In future lifetimes I was inclined to be a pacifist because I had been so horrified by the brahmastra.

All I remember about the battle itself is that I survived it. This is in contrast to what it says in most versions of the Mahabharata, which is that the five Pandavas survived and were the only ones who were left alive at the end. They won certainly, but there were others too still alive, a handful of the original hundred warriors.

This was a very uncomfortable situation for us for we had been taught by Duryodhana that defeat was unthinkable, and we must never accept it, we must find a way of coming back and winning at whatever cost. That must be why the Mahabharata records a massacre of younger people after the battle, but I was not involved in that. The group I was with decided that we would each take a vow to get revenge in a future life .Vows like that were quite common among my people, like the vow of Amba by which she managed to kill Bhishma the grandsire of the family. I don't think it's a coincidence that her name is the same word as amber crystal in English. We thought that if we took a vow like Amba's we could come back in a future life within one generation and defeat the Pandavas, and this would qualify as carrying out Duryodhana's orders that we must never accept defeat.

We filled a large ditch with red paint of the same kind that we daubed on our bodies, except that this paint was particularly associated with war and in later times with sacrifices to Kali. One by one each of us jumped in the ditch and immersed ourselves up to our necks in the paint, then took our vows of revenge. Each person chose their own vow, and we all bound ourselves by the solemn oaths of the Kshatriyas to carry them out. I don't remember what the other warriors said, but I remember what I said. "When in a future life I become a Brahmin, I shall part my two sisters violently." They had always been inseparable, so I thought that would upset them the most. "Then I shall live my life as a Kshatriya like Drona did, in defiance of dharma. Finally I won't find out what has happened until it is too late to change it."

This was actually more self-destructive than harmful to the Pandavas; however I didn't realize that at the time, I just expressed my feelings. I also made a big mistake about what a Brahmin is. I thought I could just be born by chance into a family where they invested their children with what they called the sacred thread, a few years later in the next generation. In fact Brahmin means something esoteric: I always used to say it means Zelator in the Golden Dawn system, but I'm not in the Golden Dawn and neither are most of the people I describe it to, so I ought to find another word for it. The result was that I carried out this instruction to myself in the twentieth century and it caused a lot of trouble, but in accordance with that nasty end part I didn't find out what was going on until it was too late. I also didn't remember how I was connected with my Pandava friend even though at the time I was studying Hinduism and communicating with Krishna, and Krishna didn't tell me as I had vowed not to find out. He hinted, after the incident when the stranger ignored me, but I didn't understand what he meant. Imagine how bizarre that ditch of tribal red paint looked, when I at last saw a mental picture of it.

# 3. Egypt.

My next memory is of being one of the sacred cats in an Egyptian temple. I don't remember much about the time in between- two thousand years if we go by the Hindu dates. I know that I felt like a freak because I hadn't been a proper human being, I had been part of a robot army, and that had a lot to do with my going back to the animal kingdom, but I don't know whether there were other animal lives. I think probably there were not, because I entered the human stream of evolution from the succubi and not from the animals.

I do know that the other demons told me I must not feel like a freak, I must seek to enter into a human temple and be worshipped because that is the correct path for us. At least half of the Egyptian temples of the day were left hand, and I decided to go to one and be worshipped by my very own congregation, as the angelic beings had advised me to do. There was a difference in that they could just walk into one of the temples and do that, whereas I was on the wheel of rebirth, so I had to be born in one.

I do not remember plunging down to Earth; it is rare to remember that, though I have met one person who claims he does and interestingly enough he had a previous life in Egypt. All I remember is being there in the temple.

My first impression is of a dark, gloomy place. The shrine room had no windows and was only dimly lit. Behind it, out of view of the visitors to the temple, was a row of cages like those in a zoo, and quarters for the priests who lived on the premises. I was in one of the cages among a group of kittens. I had forgotten why I was there, forgotten about the demons; all I knew was that a priest was coming to instruct us in our first lesson. I would have no trouble understanding because I had learnt to speak before, and anyway many cats (possibly all cats) are psychic and can follow the line of thought at least vaguely when someone speaks.

The priest arrived, and sat us all in a circle as if we were in some strange kind of kindergarten. His manner was authoritative, yet casual, as if he knew the outcome was already assured. He was addressing a hand-picked audience who would be receptive to his teachings and would obey, even with the minimum of effort on his part. It would be difficult for anyone today to summon up such faith- they would be struck by what a ludicrous situation it was to believe a group of animals would understand them, but this priest did it without difficulty.

"I expect you would like to explore outside now," he said. "You can't. When I explain why, you will see that the reason for it is the most wonderful thing in the world, the greatest treasure you could possibly possess."

He explained what this great treasure was: we were superior to other cats. We were not to run around and play or hunt for prey, because only inferior cats did that. We must stay here in the temple and learn our lessons, and when we had learnt we must serve. He did not say who we were to serve, so I assumed it must be the priests like himself and the congregation. When he had said enough to raise our curiosity and our expectations to the highest pitch, he went away.

After that the lessons continued at the same time every day. As we grew up we discovered that each cat was to be kept in a separate cage and we would not be neutered, we would be used as batteries of sexual energy. The priests wanted the energy to be in equilibrium, so the cats were hypnotised not to feel frustrated. Normal methods of training would not be enough to over-ride an animal's natural instincts, but this form of hypnosis did work. Each suggestion would be repeated numerous times until it felt as if we were breathing it in and out, and after several months of this none of us felt any sexual desires. The most frequently repeated suggestion was that any time we started to feel discontented in any way we must immediately concentrate all our thoughts on how important and superior we were. We were told to be proud of our superiority, and that because we were so special the people would worship us.

The suggestions about pride did not work on me as well as the ones about celibacy, because they clashed with the system of Kshatriya moral values that I had learnt before. Kshatriyas were taught that the self-important kind of pride is wrong, and you should only be proud of your warrior tradition and the achievements of your race. The priests did not know I had learnt the Kshatriya code, so they did not give me any hypnotic suggestions to weaken my allegiance to it. Although I didn't remember being a Kshatriya I knew I had certain beliefs that were ingrained, and those were the beliefs of that code which still meant a lot to me. I liked the idea of being worshipped, but I believed it would be a way of helping my congregation rather than something that was automatically my due. I decided that my aim would be at all times to help and benefit them.

The lessons were always rounded off with an instruction to remember. We were told that one day we must remember all our incarnations including this one. I believe this may have been a widespread practice in Egypt, and could be why people often remember previous lives in Egypt before they remember any others; memories of Egypt were certainly the first to come back to me.

After a while the priests began to prepare me to go into the shrine room and assist during the services. They didn't tell me I was Bast or mention Bast at all, they just said that because I was female I was the people's goddess. It was then that they first mentioned 'the others.'

"When you go into the shrine room," they said, "you will meet the others. They are superior beings like yourself, and because they are superior they too seek to be worshipped. They come to the services to minister to the needs of the congregation."

I felt that they were being a little evasive about my role. If I was the goddess, I wondered why there needed to be others. The priests couldn't literally answer questions from the cats, but they expanded on areas where there might reasonably be doubt. I listened carefully to their explanations on the subject of 'the others', and all they seemed to be saying was that it had always been the same: the god or goddess sits at the front of the temple, and the others are there as well. I was still no wiser than before about it.

The great day finally came, and for the first time I was taken into the shrine room and seated at the front in the position of the Deity. I was disappointed that it was even darker than the quarters where we lived, for I had always wondered what bright places looked like. The people at least were interesting; they came in and stood facing me, and led by the priests they began to go through various chants and prayers. It was a good feeling to think I was responsible for their welfare, that I was helping them just by being there.

Then I saw the others. They were fallen angels who I recognised, Astaroth and Abaddon and a couple of minor ones, all of them male demons, and I could see them as clearly as I saw the people. They were in temporary forms that they held for the duration of the service. I noticed that they did not stand at the front of the room with me, but in the main body of the room with the congregation, and they approached the worshippers and tried to exert various kinds of influence on them. I assumed they were there to help the people the same as I was, because that is what the priests had said.

From then on I attended the services regularly, whenever it was my turn. I grew fond of Astaroth and Abaddon and greeted them affectionately whenever I saw them, and the other cats did too. We all loved Abaddon's locust face because to us he was looking like that to show that he sympathised with animals like us, and that he was a friend. I thought the Egyptians were making an admirable effort to integrate with the animal kingdom that was around them. Sometimes there were other fallen angels at the services; the numbers varied, and certain angels came only occasionally, but I got to know them all and loved them all.

I cannot be sure how long this life went on without any significant incident or change. Probably it was several years. But eventually we began to hear news of trouble outside the temple walls. This was the time of Moses, and the priests began to talk about how their people's slaves had risen up against them under the leadership of Moses, who was threatening to destroy the Egyptians and take the slaves away. In some ways it was the same situation as India all over again, for an enemy was ranged against us who said they were good and we were evil, and the outcome of the conflict would affect all the religions of the future. In karmic terms I was being given the chance to deal with this situation again, to see if this time I would handle it better. Subconsciously I recognized these similarities, and it was the last thing I wanted. Up till that point my life had been happy, but now a feeling of oppression settled over me. I tried to ignore what was happening and carry on as normal, but as time went on this became more and more difficult, because it began to encroach on our life at the temple. We were not allowed out to see what was happening for ourselves, but the priests talked of nothing else.

What jarred on me was that the priests would insist on calling it the war. "How is the war going?" they would ask. "Are we winning the war?" The word implied that their opponents were armed and equipped like themselves, but if they were slaves this could not possibly be the case. I knew that human beings do not give weapons to their slaves. I believed that my congregation must be fighting with weapons against unarmed men, and although I didn't remember the Kshatriya code I felt that the rule they had broken was very important to me, a principle I believed in with all my heart. That made them oppressors in my eyes, and if it came to taking sides I would have to support the slaves.

To be in such violent disagreement with people I was trying to help was extremely uncomfortable. For a while I managed to continue my duties as usual. I put aside my disapproval and concentrated on doing what I had always done for my congregation, sending out feelings of strength and support when they stood before me in the temple. Then a new factor entered the picture which made it impossible to be neutral any more.

One of the priests began treating me as his personal familiar. He took me away from the other cats for special training. This was not at all unusual; quite a few of the priests did it, and provided they did not remove the animal from the temple precinct there was no objection to it. I don't know how long our relationship lasted- it could have been months, or it could have been several years; I am hazy about the timescale of the conflict. Anyway he soon revealed the task he had chosen me for: he wanted me to ask my friends the angels, the 'others' who joined me in the temple during the services, for strategies to win the war, and try to repeat the information telepathically to him.

The priest was treating me as his pet and showing me a lot of affection, and this made me have an experience which is sometimes called 'individualization'. In which you acquire a human ego for the first time. That was why I had gone back to the animal kingdom in the first place, to individualize. Although I knew his motives I was unable to stop myself becoming attached to him as any pet animal does to its owner, and that made it very difficult to choose whether or not to do what he wanted. As the situation progressed my support for the slaves grew even stronger than it had been at the beginning. The initial sympathy that I felt because I thought they were unarmed developed into a full-blown belief that slavery is wrong, and one human being has no right to keep another as his slave. It was difficult because this was an abstract principle while the priest was a person who I loved, but I still felt my loyalty to the principle was stronger.

As I struggled with my difficult choice I several times appealed to Astaroth and Abaddon and their companions. They have a role as tempters, at least in the monotheistic religions, but this only applies to human beings and not to animals. They ignored my requests, and after giving the customary greeting they turned to the human beings and began working with them as usual. I saw these angels every time I went into the temple and could easily have asked them the priest's questions about strategy, yet each day passed, and I did not ask, because in my heart I wanted the slaves to win. I was aware that they wanted to pass on strategies to the priests, and may have been doing so through informants other than me, but I did not volunteer to join in.

The priest waited at first quite patiently for the tactical information. When it still wasn't forthcoming he finally began to suspect that I wasn't on his side, and then his manner changed, and he became suspicious and hostile. Not long afterwards, when I was alone in some part of the temple precinct, I looked round and saw a large swarm of giant bees coming towards me. As stated in the Bible these people frequently fought by inducing insects to swarm, and it was clear that my priest was directing them. The bees settled on me and stung me to death.

Obviously the priest intended this to be a horrible experience for me, but it was not. Cats are predators and they are not traumatized by a clash with another species: it feels perfectly natural to them whether they win or whether the other species does. Human beings usually do not remember dying because they repress the memory, and I don't remember the moment of dying in any of my human lives, but I remember this incident without feeling any disquiet about it.

Immediately afterwards I found myself in a large room where a conference was taking place. I was on a gallery that ran around the outside of the room and looked down on it, and in the middle were all the angels I knew from the temple, the Egyptians from my congregation and many other Egyptians, who looked very angry. The Egyptians spoke first and announced that they had been defeated, that the enemy had found a way of drowning them all so there was no-one left to fight. They complained bitterly about the defeat, and said they wanted to make a plan to get revenge at some future date. It really was India all over again now; I didn't remember that I had been in this situation before, but I listened carefully to what was going on.

The angels spoke next and went on a great deal about fairness and democracy, making it sound as if that was their only concern. "You work out your plan for revenge," the chairman of the conference said, "and at the end we will have a vote, to see if we can approve it." At this the Egyptians went quite wild, suggesting more and more extreme forms of revenge. Gradually it all began to cohere into plans for the Nazi movement in the future, although they didn't use that name for it then.

As I sat listening in the gallery I felt thoroughly ashamed of my congregation. I had been their goddess and had hoped to see them improve, but instead they had turned into savages. "Still", I thought, "at least my friends the angels will correct them and vote against it."

At last the debate reached its end and the vote was taken. I can't remember how the participants were to vote, whether they raised different hands for yes or no, or walked to a different side for yes or no, or some other way. I made a move to vote against the proposal, but found that I was paralysed. I couldn't move or speak. Then, to my absolute horror, all the angels and all the Egyptians voted in favour. The decision was unanimous. As I was still reeling from the shock, the scene changed suddenly as it does in a dream, and I was no longer in the hall.

# 4. Heaven.

Someone was holding me in their arms- a little angel girl who was the equivalent of six or seven in human years. "You can be my pet cat now," she said.

I soon found out her identity: she was Gabriel's daughter and the name I knew her by was Rosebud. I don't know who her mother is. The adult angels around her were talking about what had just happened, and much to my surprise the solar angels too were calling it 'the war.' They were saying that they had won, and now they were taking trophies. I was a trophy, and they were giving me to Rosebud because she wanted a cat. "But your cat must not be allowed indoors, Rosebud", they said. "If she was to come in she would hear our conversations, and someone would try again to bribe her to repeat the conversations of angels."

Rosebud placed me in a garden. It was the kind of garden cats love, with long grass, tall shady trees and many small insects. The environment was pretty and sunny, the complete opposite of the gloomy places I was used to at the temple, but I wasn't to be a goddess any more, just a household pet. Rosebud came to visit me and play with me often, and although I was alone the rest of the time I didn't feel lonely or bored; I was always contented and spent most of the time lying under a tree.

I found out that Rosebud was a muse, one of the young girl angels who inspires the creative arts. The Greeks fixed their number as nine, which is perhaps too rigid as I believe there are many more than that, but they were right to attribute each muse to only one of the arts. Rosebud is a comedy muse; she is linked to the wise fool archetype and the jester. She keeps a long way away from the Earth because she dislikes gross vibrations; this is quite ironic as a lot of comedy is very gross, but she specializes in influencing from a distance and does not look very closely at the comedy sketches themselves. You may notice that in modern times there have been quite a few famous Jewish comedians, and these people are connected with Rosebud from this time of the Exodus.

It seems amazing to me now how long I spent as Rosebud's pet. Centuries rolled by, and by the time I left that place it was the Middle Ages, the eleventh or twelfth century. She must have been grown-up by then; as I said previously, children in the Deva kingdom grow up slowly over a period of several centuries, but I still see her as a little girl.

# 5. Medieval England

My next life was in Medieval England. I don't remember my parents or family and I don't remember being a man, but I must have been because I spent all my adult life as a scholar at a university, and women were not admitted to universities in those days. I still didn't have any sexual feelings and I don't know why not; maybe it had been hypnotised out of me at the Egyptian temple, or maybe I still hadn't finished my angelic growing up because I had left the angel kingdom and been in two other species. Anyway I liked to be alone, to study and to write poetry, and all I was interested in was the life of the mind.

I don't recall teaching or doing administration; it seems I was in a privileged position and was able to spend all my time at the university on research. I was very happy there; it was a perfect environment for me in which everything I was most interested in was to be found, and I applied myself with great enthusiasm to everything I did. I would love to be in such an ideal environment again. When Rosebud finally had to let me go she sent me to a place that was directly connected with the work she does. The university had engaged me to study aesthetics, the philosophy of art, through Greek and other classical sources.

In scholarly matters it has always been necessary to adopt and champion some theory; this is still the case in universities of the present day. As soon as you progress beyond the undergraduate stage you are supposed to be partisan to one particular school of thought. Accordingly I looked for a theory of art to favour in my writings. I chose the theory that beauty is purely subjective and depends on the individual. Because different things are beautiful to each person, you cannot set an absolute standard of beauty in art. The opposing theory is the one taught by Plato that somewhere there exists a perfect state called Beauty in the world of form, and the creative artist has to strive to express it. The more closely he approximates the ideal the more beautiful is his work of art. I did not like Plato's theory because I thought the artists in it constituted an elite, and I believed all men were equal in the sight of God.

Plenty had been written on both sides of the argument in the classical sources, enough to keep me busy for quite some time. However, as I progressed with my studies and wrote learned papers on my preferred theory of art, I began to form the opinion that the discipline of artistic and literary criticism is too dry and takes itself too seriously. It was no use, I felt, for scholars to criticise creative artists unless they had tried producing art themselves, because without experience it is impossible to understand what the artist is trying to express. I decided to become both an artist and an art critic, because if I remained only an art critic I would miss the whole point of the art.

After reaching this conclusion I broadened my studies to include metre, and began writing poetry. In classical writings metre is a very detailed and precise science, almost as large a field as aesthetics. The style of poetry I liked best and usually wrote in was epic poetry, telling stories about the gods and their deeds among men. In the Middle Ages the whole world of intellectual thought was vastly different, and everyone believed in gods. Everyone knew the ways of the Devic and angelic kingdom that is next above our own, and to write about them was as easy and commonplace as it would be today to write poems about dogs. I loved these beings very much, though in some of my poems I criticised them for being vain and using human beings for their own ulterior purposes. I could not imagine ever wanting to write about anything else.

The mood of the times is brilliantly captured in Goethe's 'Faust'; the universities in Europe were all centres of enquiry into matters concerning spirits, against the background of a society that believed in spirts completely. Simple magical techniques for contacting spirits were common knowledge and were freely passed around in the intellectual circles in which I moved, and I learnt a few of these rudimentary techniques from other scholars. It was ostensibly forbidden to contact the Devil as Doctor Faust is supposed to have done, for the church reigned supreme over every level of society, including the universities. At my university we were all Christians and none of us wanted to contact the Devil. Our Christianity was modified to some extent by the admiration we felt for classical scholars, but we did not feel there was any contradiction between the two. To study knowledge from the ancient world was seen by the scholars as a way of enriching our own Christian belief.

I decided to divide my studies into three stages: first aesthetics, second metre and poetry writing, and third would be summoning an angelic being connected with my field of study who could give me knowledge about it. In this way I would have started with theory and progressed to an approach that was more and more practical. The poetry writing had got me inside the minds of the artists I was writing about, so that I was one of them and experienced the world as they did. Now I was going to speak with one of the beings who inspired the artists, and find out directly from the source the meaning and purpose of the creative arts. Subconsciously I must have missed my muse Rosebud and intended to call her up.

The magic I had learnt from other scholars was quite sketchy and basic and had been passed on by word of mouth to avoid arousing the suspicion of the church. I had been told to ask only for knowledge and not for power, because it was dangerous to ask for power and you would need additional methods of protection from books that were not available. That was all right because I only wanted knowledge anyway, for the third stage of my studies. I went ahead confidently and did the summoning, though I cannot remember the method I used.

It was highly effective, and a female being appeared straight away in my room. I am not sure whether I saw her clairvoyantly or whether she materialised. She was certainly a muse, but not Rosebud; because of Rosebud's habit of keeping as far away from the Earth as possible I hadn't been able to reach her. Instead I reached a troubled muse who deliberately dwelt on Earth.

She looked like a young, very beautiful girl with long light brown hair, barefoot and wearing a simple gown that seemed to denote a street-dweller or a wandering gypsy. That was how she saw herself, as a wild, abandoned nymph who lived in the streets. My first reaction was to wonder how she was connected with my field of study, and I spoke to her to try to ascertain this. She did not seem surprised that I was only interested in intellectual matters and not in how beautiful she was, and she replied to my inquiries for a little while. Then she said she had to go because there were other places that attracted her more strongly.

I let her go, but I persisted with my plan and summoned her again, many times. She did not appear to mind and eventually she came voluntarily without being called, but she always seemed anxious to leave early and go somewhere else that meant a great deal more to her. During the course of these visits I leant as much as possible about her. She used a symbol of entwined fruits to represent herself, and because of this I called her Cherry.

Cherry was a music muse of a very extreme kind. The effect she had on people was to make them give up everything for music and treat it as more important than eating and drinking. She would frequently stand in the street with a stringed instrument in her hand, tossing back her long hair and projecting the feeling that nothing else mattered in the world except for music. Cherry's dream was to inspire a new kind of music that would make people free. Her superiors had told her she could do it, but not yet; first she must learn to concentrate better as well as just being exuberant. Cherry was restless and discontented and didn't want to wait; she wanted to do it now and also to incarnate on Earth, although she had been told many times that she could not incarnate.

In the distant future Cherry's new music did come to Earth: it was pop music of the kind that started with the Beatles. The mass hysteria that their music caused, and the tremendous social changes that were associated with it, can be traced directly to Cherry's influence. I knew Cherry was making an effort to concentrate better in preparation for her future work, but I also found out that she was a rebel, and was experimenting in other directions that were considered evil by her superiors. This aroused my curiosity about where she went when she was not with me. She did not mind if I knew, so there was no danger in this line of enquiry.

I found there were two places she went to, or more specifically, two people. One was a wandering minstrel who played the lute and sang songs he had written himself; they were rebellious songs which poked fun at the King and other authorities. It seemed that Cherry was having a passionate love affair with this minstrel, an affair that I presumed must have been conducted when he was asleep. With my background of Greek scholarship I did not find this particularly shocking- she was a nymph-like creature and this was normal behaviour for someone like her, so I decided to ignore it.

The other person she visited was more sinister. It was a magician living in another part of England who wanted to draw on her power and promised that in return she would be able to incarnate. I knew this was more serious than her association with the minstrel, yet I was inclined to play down the threat just as I did the other one, and concluded it was just some stranger risking himself who had nothing to do with me. It was actually far more serious than I realized, for the magician was the priest I had known in Egypt. He lived a long way away from me, but both of us had been drawn to Cherry. He still considered me his familiar, but he could not find me, and Cherry was volunteering to work with him, so he accepted her instead.

Despite the time and energy Cherry was putting into her rebellion, she somehow managed to teach me what I wanted to know about the creative arts, especially as it related to my field of poetry. I learnt that poems can be magic spells through what is loosely called the power of the Word, though there are no set rules as there are with grammar and metre. You have to feel the intent you want to achieve, with all the accompanying emotions, and then write the poem using double meanings that resonate with your intent. The double meanings have to be in individual words, not the whole sentence.

I created a fourth stage for my studies and plunged happily into it. This was applying knowledge I had learnt from Cherry to the poetry I produced, which meant that I effectively made everything I wrote into magic spells. I made sure that all the spells were white magic, written with the intent to improve people's circumstances or promote optimism. I chose as my motto a line from the Iliad which is repeated many times: "the gods came down and put new heart into the soldiers."

The priest from Egypt constructed a kind of magic triangle between myself, himself and Cherry, and made me work with him as his opponent. Every time I wrote a beneficial spell he responded with a harmful one. I was blissfully unaware of this, and I believe it carried on for many years. I don't remember the circumstances of finding out that he had done this, only that it was later on after I had died.

Eventually the university authorities became a little suspicious; they began to notice that when I wrote, things happened. Technically they were empowered to report such matters to the church and call in inquisitors, but luckily for me they were liberal and would only have done that if the magic being practised there was harmful. Everyone believed in magic in those days, and classical scholars in particular used to turn a blind eye to white magic. Many of them were quite glad to see it flourish.

However they felt some form of control was in order, if only to show that they were the ones in charge. They sent for me, and told me that in future the amount of paper I was allotted for my studies would be severely rationed. They were careful not to mention magic, in case they were accused at a later date of knowing about heretics in their midst and doing nothing. They simply said they must make economies, and it reflects badly on a university if the scholars are too long-winded, because it means they have not trained them to express themselves properly. I found it frustrating to have my paper reduced, but it was the only annoyance in an otherwise idyllic life. I carried on studying and writing until I was quite old.

Cherry never did manage to incarnate on Earth, and she was sorry about it, but she was pleased that her music did eventually appear. I met Cherry's minstrel in my present life and also the Egyptian Priest and had relationships with both of them for a time, but obviously there was trouble -more and more trouble from the past! Cherry's minstrel looks a bit like John Lennon and has some of the same attitudes; he is a musician (though not professional) and he remembers his medieval life. But of course he was not the one who carried out the mission to bring Cherry's music into being: John Lennon did it, helped by the other three Beatles.

# 6. The Seventeenth Century

During my years at the university I had come to feel thoroughly English, and I found myself in England again. I believe many people reincarnate a number of times in the same country and that this is one of the causes of excessive nationalism. I was in very different circumstances this time; it was the time of the Civil War and I was an illiterate woman living deep in the Suffolk countryside. I think the reason I had to be illiterate was that I had taken the scholarly life as far as it was possible to take it and had been very successful, and now I had to move on and develop another side of myself. It was almost as if I fulfilled the possibilities too well and exhausted them.

Once again I do not remember my childhood or family. I have an idea that my mother was a vet who was called upon to attend to injured human beings as well when the war was at its height, and I was probably illegitimate. I don't know what happened to my mother, but I ended up as a young woman living alone, while the war still continued.

The place where I lived was a hamlet on the border of Essex and Suffolk consisting of three tiny cottages standing close together, with countryside and thick woodland all around them. In each of the cottages there was one woman living alone and I think we were all unmarried; anyway it was accepted that most of the local women were single because the men were all away fighting in the war. Naturally the three of us had a great deal to do with one another, and we could not very well have avoided it in such an isolated place. Life would have been very hard unless we three neighbours had been friends, so we tried hard to get along and made girly pledges to support one another at all times. I will call the other two women Mary and Suzanne which are their names in the present day, because I cannot remember what their names were then. As with other people from the past I came in contact with them at one particular stage in my life, (although I only met Mary and heard about Suzanne at second hand from her.)

I still retained my low sex drive in this seventeenth century life, and this time, surprisingly, I wasn't alone: I shared the condition with nearly all the local women. Occasionally when we talked with other women from nearby villages we would meet one who said she was lonely and longed for the men to return. But I did not understand what they meant, neither did Mary or Suzanne, and neither did most of the women we knew. The majority of the women did not miss the men and were quite content to live alone. Women in the present day are far more sexually aware; whether it was our diet or some other environmental factor I do not know, but our unawakened state was a strong contributing factor to what happened in our community.

During the Civil War the women had to keep their communities going in the men's absence, and this coupled with the fact that they did not miss the men made them extremely independent and self-sufficient. As time went on a kind of rampant feminism developed in our district- it was quite unbalanced. The women began to believe that they were well rid of the men and could actually run society far better themselves. A civil war is the ideal circumstance to make men look like irresponsible despoilers of their own country, and that was how we regarded them.

Although the three of us lived in that isolated place we were well-informed about local affairs because we frequently visited the market town nearby and the surrounding villages. Transport was scarce but we became expert at cutting across country, sometimes alone and sometimes together. We saw the local women assume leadership in the town and village halls which were the centres of local government. They pretended just to be stewards for the men while they were away fighting, but really they were taking power for themselves. We joined in with this and took administrative jobs at the town hall, walking in to work each day and helping to run the town. At first it was simply a feminist political movement which seemed unstoppable, gathering momentum all the time. Then the whispered rumours started of a religion connected with it that was especially for women, where we could at last claim the supremacy that was rightfully ours.

Vague rumour became firm invitation, even though it was still being whispered behind closed doors; we were told that some people were opening a temple of Lilith which would meet in the woodlands at night, and asked if we would like to join. The leaders of the temple were a small, mysterious group which included some men. Knowing what I do now about the position of the temple I would say they came from the manor house. In my present life I found the site of the temple, and visited it many times, and the manor house is very near it- the thickness of the woodland in those days would have disguised just how near.

Mary, Suzanne and myself had never heard of Lilith. Jewish mythology was very little known in the seventeenth century; it was still the church that was dominant everywhere, though it now had more denominations than in the Middle Ages. We asked for clarification, and the leaders recounted the stories of how Lilith had rebelled against Adam and refused to obey him. They emphasized the feminist aspect of the stories which was relevant for our community.

Mary rapidly became suspicious. Although she had no learning, her countrywoman's sharp instincts told her Lilith meant the Devil. She asked the recruiters if it did mean the Devil, and they answered, "what does it matter who she is so long as she is a champion of women?"

Suzanne and I were both intrigued. I had always been interested in religion, and there had been many times when I wished for an opportunity to study another religion or an alternative approach to Christianity. With no access to books the only way to do this would have been to go to a different kind of church, and so far I had never come across any. We both agreed to give it a try. During the time before the meetings at the Lilith temple began there was the chance to find out more, and we soon learnt that Lilith was the wife of Lucifer and the women who followed her were witches. Lilith was known as the queen of all the witches in the world.

We told Mary straight away, because she was our friend and we did not want her to join something that was against her conscience. Mary said she was having nothing more to do with it, and she thought we were both very wicked for wanting to go along. But she was too frightened to go to the authorities, because if she did she too would be accused of being a witch. When faced with three women living together in an isolated place, no- one in those times would have believed that one of them was innocent, even if she was the one who had informed.

It seems to me that in the present day we have a very lurid view of witch persecutions. In stories such as 'Witchfinder General' which is a film actually set in Suffolk during the Civil War, it is made to look as if life was one constant round of hangings, torture and burnings. You have to remember that in those days there were no mass media like there are today, and it was impossible to know what was going on in other parts of the country. Unless something affected you it was simply not real to you. I never saw any torture or public executions. It was just a threat hanging over us, an abstract idea of what would happen if you became a witch and got caught. Certainly it was enough to frighten the three of us into silence so that we did not talk to anyone else about what was going on. But there was no catalogue of horrors in full public view, and life went on the same as before in our community.

There were other kinds of witches operating at this time, followers of the Wiccan religion, but the three of us did not know much about them. In modern times many people insist that Wicca was only invented in the 1950's. However their predecessors had a religion so similar that I believe it should be counted as the same. We actually were Satanists, the ones the church was after, and these people had a different religion from ours.

At first when I remembered this lifetime I thought Mary, Suzanne and myself had no contact at all with those whose religion was more like Wicca, and did not know of their existence. At a much later date I was sorry to discover that we did work with some of them at the town hall, and did put curses on them. It took me a long time to remember this because I didn't want to accept that I would join in with curses.

Suzanne and I soon began to leave our cottages at night and travel to meetings of the Lilith temple, which were held in a large clearing in the wood. Though it was rather more daunting to negotiate the country lanes and wooded areas at night, we soon became as good at it as we were during the day. I am almost certain we were drugged when we arrived which blurred our memories of what the rituals were, and I can only remember bits and pieces. We worshipped Lilith as our goddess and as an archangel of the same rank as Michael and Lucifer. We used to walk around the outside of the temple reverently, circumambulation as it is called in the East. Before we left we used to pick a blade of the sacred grass in the clearing and place it in our bosom, over our heart. Remembering those teachings I received about the green blade, we gave our hearts to the green blade, to Lilith's half of it which means selfish love.

There were two levels at the temple, an outer circle and an inner circle, and initially Suzanne and myself were enrolled in the outer circle. We made the journey to the woodland clearing what seemed like an endless number of times, and we felt it had become the most important part of our lives.

At first it was exciting to belong to a secret temple, but gradually a situation developed between myself, Mary and Suzanne that was increasingly stressful. Suzanne went completely overboard. She was obsessively devoted to Lilith, and wanted to do everything possible to please her. Mary clung more and more closely to her Christianity, saying that she hated Lilith and Lilith was her enemy. That of course made us her enemy too. She would never have hurt Suzanne but quarrelled with her constantly, calling her a fool and shouting at her many times, "mend your ways!" Suzanne too would never have hurt Mary, but she became so obsessed with her new religion that she began to appear mentally unstable. She joined the inner circle, and that made her even worse.

As for me I felt torn between the two of them because I could see both sides. By now I had studied the difference between the right hand path and the left hand path, and I didn't want to give up the right hand path completely. It felt like the same triangle of force that I had been associated with in the Middle Ages, though this time with me on the middle apex point that had been occupied by Cherry before. Cherry may have been able to take that, but I couldn't, I felt as if I was being ripped in half. It was like some great weight pressing on me, and our geographical isolation meant there was no possibility of escape. I could not tell anyone my troubles because of the threat of torture and execution, and had to suffer in silence. It was actually very brave of Mary to make the stand she did because to her it must have looked like two against one, though had she known it there were times when I sympathised with her as much as with Suzanne.

If we had told the leaders of the temple what was happening they would have attacked Mary. Out of loyalty we did not- instead of telling them that she hated them, we said Mary was not yet ready to join and we would let them know when she was.

I carried on going to every meeting, but I told the leaders of the temple that I did not want to take the final initiation and join the inner circle. I did not want Lilith to gain complete control over my life like she had over Suzanne's; I preferred to keep my freedom. The leaders said that was acceptable, and they would still like me to be involved in everything they were doing, including the project they were about to start which was to accomplish the Great Work in alchemy.

On the right hand path the Great Work in alchemy means becoming enlightened, and on the left hand path it means producing an Antichrist. The alchemical texts which have survived till the present day are quite confusing because they are a mixture of right hand alchemy, left hand alchemy, laboratory alchemy which was the earliest form of scientific experiments, and allegories with a hidden meaning. Sometimes all of these are next to one another in the same text. I remember this better than the other work we did and on earlier occasions when I've written an account of this lifetime I have tried to explain it, but I always run into a lot of forbidden knowledge. So I will leave that out and simply say that the leaders of our temple were confident they understood what they had to do, and went ahead with creating their Antichrist using one of the women from the inner circle. It worked well and she was soon pregnant.

We were all happy and excited about this, but then another person came into the story. In our district there was a holy man who lived alone in a tiny makeshift house out in the countryside, and devoted all his time to prayer and meditation. Everyone had heard of him and people used to call him 'The Sage.' We regarded him as an eccentric and had never thought of him as any kind of threat. The holy man saw himself as a real Christian like the early church fathers who lived in the desert, and his constant prayers and penances had made him very psychic, so that he realized what we had done.

He was strongly opposed to the barbarities of the church of his day, especially the torture and murder of so-called witches and children of the Devil. He decided that having found some real witches and a real child of the Devil, he would deal with them himself instead of reporting them to the church. He didn't want us to be tortured, he wanted us to be killed quickly and as painlessly as possible.

First of all he managed somehow to poison the pregnant girl, using a poison in some apples. Then he cast a spell which he called 'scatter them', and it resulted in something happening which killed us all. I can't remember what it was, but it was probably to do with the war. I haven't studied the Civil War very much, but I once read that the armies consisted of savage, unwashed hordes of men who swept into places and burnt them to the ground and destroyed everything. Anyway, it all happened very quickly. We were aware of his gesture of making sure we weren't tortured but the churchmen, who he particularly wanted to notice it as well, were too gross and heavy in their nature to notice that anything out of the ordinary had even happened.

# 7. Hell, and the Planes Near Earth

Those of us who belonged to the temple found ourselves standing all together, with Lilith. She looked very beautiful, with long, straight golden hair, a soft, innocent-looking face and long legs like a model. "How could they dare murder that baby," she said angrily. "I thought their religion was supposed to teach them to be kind to little children."

We were all in agreement- Lilith was the one who was supposed to murder children, and now the Sage had made himself as bad as her.

She told us she was going to go to Heaven and make a complaint, and demand a replacement. Then she weaved an enchantment so that more left hand alchemy could be done in the future; the enchantment was mostly to do with Snow White symbolism, because of the poisoned apple. As soon as she had finished and departed for the higher realm, we all went to Hell- quite voluntarily, so that we would be there waiting for our goddess when she returned.

Most of the next two hundred years are a blank. It's as if Lilith put a blackout curtain over it, perhaps to keep her secrets safe. I did remember one incident but only in the last few years: this was another memory that took a long time to come back.

While I was back living with Lilith, sometime during the eighteenth century, I went up to the Earth and attacked a tribe of Wiccans who lived in the south-east part of Ireland. It was all some kind of blood magic which I don't understand very well now, and I used to appear to them as a vampire and a werewolf. I put a lot of pressure on the High Priest to become my sexual partner, but he managed to resist. It looks like my very slow process of growing up was completed at last, and Lilith was finally successful in interesting me in a human partner. I wasn't fully human myself at this time because I had reverted to being her daughter, and I think I even raised the black blade to signal the start of having a human victim as a mate. I was annoyed with the High Priest for resisting me so effectively, and I bit him.

It wasn't even a real bite, it was just a visualization of one, but the priest believed it was real. This meant that I was able in some strange way to get into his bloodstream, and from there into the bloodline of his tribe which was by matriarchal descent. The priest didn't want to be possessed by me so with the High Priestess he carried out various additional rituals to get rid of me. I am pretty sure that because they were carrying out so many extra rituals they were caught and murdered, and for all I know they might even have been tortured, unlike the people from my temple who had escaped that.

In the twentieth century I met some of the people from this tribe around 1990 and studied some introductory Wicca with them. Although I didn't become an initiated Wiccan I eventually took up some aspects of their religion about twenty years later, principally Wiccan meditation and celebrating the seasonal festivals, and it was very enjoyable and inspiring. While I was doing the Wiccan meditation I sometimes saw visions of the past, including these events from the eighteenth century. I made an abject apology which the god and goddess were very pleased with; even though the original events were deeply serious and caused harm to people, they were cheerful and jolly about my apology for what I had done.

Returning to the narrative, in the same way that Rosebud had to let go of me so I could reincarnate after I had been many centuries in her household, Lilith had to do the same after only two centuries. I found myself wandering on the part of the astral plane nearest to Earth and I felt bewildered and directionless, drifting like a rudderless boat. It was a horrible feeling and I quickly tried to find some people I could attach myself to who might help me. I was drawn to Loki and the large group of humans and Devic beings who surrounded him. At this time he was being worshipped by Africans, yet I never knew him by his African name, he was always Loki to me and has been ever since.

Loki was very understanding; he explained that Lilith could only keep me for the prescribed time, and unfortunately the effect is to make the person feel like a piece of driftwood because they are used to being held onto tightly and the hold is suddenly released. I felt reassured, and I decided to stay and attached myself to his retinue. Soon Loki began a love affair with me. It was probably partly because he noticed that I had just matured, but it was also because that was what he did with everyone. He surrounds himself with lovers who he changes frequently, and they are of all types: some are astral beings, some have been witches like I was, and others are ordinary girls who look up to him. It was my first sexual relationship, and I fell in love with him and wanted it to be serious. But Loki treated it very casually, and I felt pressurised into pretending to treat it lightly the way he did.

He looked so attractive in his fair-skinned, blue-eyed Scandinavian form. Women adored him, and they seemed to like him even better because he looked untidy and tattered like a wild warrior man. I felt jealous of the numerous more attractive women who swarmed around him, and did not expect our relationship to last very long. I thought he would soon end it and ask me to leave, and treat me as an ex-girlfriend who he no longer liked.

What he actually did was the last thing I expected. After some months Loki did wind down the relationship, but he didn't drop me, he became a teacher and guide to me, making helpful suggestions about the new life I would soon be living. We still had sex occasionally, and he treated this as normal between a guide and his pupil. When I got over the initial shock of this approach I began to accept it and admire him for it.

Loki explained to me that now the Vikings were gone he was working with Africans and had become a god of the bush, summoned to ceremonies by certain beats of the drum. His account was illustrated by visits to Africa during which he showed me the people and ceremonies, and talked about how much he cared for the Africans and wanted to help them and to stop racism from white people. It was almost as if he was taking notes about me, observing my reactions to see how far I had moved away from the state of mind I had been in when I was in Hell for all that time. He described his compassionate feelings for Africans in trouble, and watched how I responded. My response was a gushing, school-girlish kind of admiration for him- he was my hero. He seemed satisfied with that and moved on to talking about my personality. "You've become too witchy," he said. "What about the other side of your nature that loves peace? You need to develop that in your new life. Find a place where you can work for peace."

The idea of working for peace inspired me, and I also loved the fact that he was encouraging me to choose a place to reincarnate. I didn't think I would ever be allowed to do that. I started to look around, though I only looked within England because I still felt that I was 'English.'

"There is no need to go yet," Loki said. "You have a couple of years. Why not spend that time working with me, helping African slaves in America? That will be suitable for you as you hate slavery, and you can join in with my work with these people." So that is what I did.

I began going to Voodoo ceremonies, held by slaves who were appealing in desperation for help from their gods. There was a group of us involved, women drawn from Loki's harem of casual lovers and men who were his followers too. When we heard the specific drumbeat that summoned Loki we all hurried over to the place- I wasn't aware what name they called him because we responded only to the rhythm, which was infallible in connecting straight to him. Loki instructed us to dance. When the worshippers became intoxicated by the ceremony they would see us, and then we had to dance and entice them.

"Don't touch them," he said. "Keep a distance away. Just dance and excite them, and raise power. Then pass the power to me." So we did this. I cultivated a style of dancing similar to modern disco dancing, with special additional arm movements. Soon I came to really love these ceremonies: the exhilaration and the sense of helping people in trouble. It felt like the topmost peak, the best thing I had ever done.

I was a little worried about how Loki was using the power. The slaves made numerous requests and not all of them were for positive things; some of them naturally wanted to curse the people who had chained them down in the hold of a ship, beaten them and starved them. Loki told us it was not our concern what he did with the power we raised – we must simply pass it to him, and he would decide how to use it.

I also felt a slight frustration because however many times we did this, the suffering if the slaves still continued. I wanted a perfect world where the slaves were freed. This was more like supply and demand: people were suffering, so they needed our ceremonies, and it was a cruel social order that was keeping us in a job. However, I trusted Loki and enjoyed being with these people, 'one of the Loa' as the worshippers would have called me.

I carried on with my leisurely search for a place to be born in England. Eventually I settled on the Quaker community because 'work for peace' was one of the slogans they used, and they really meant it which was good enough for me. This brings us to the turbulent nineteenth century.

# 8. The Nineteenth Century

I was born into a pious Quaker family who saw themselves as one of the pillars of Victorian society. We lived in East London, in Bethnal Green, although we were in an affluent part of the area because my father was quite rich. He had strong connections with the Quaker Peace Movement, which worked for what they termed the betterment of society; this meant helping vagrants and the poor overseas, and trying to bring about peace between nations. They were a charity funded by the successful Quaker businesses. My father's connections were what had attracted me to his family, because I wanted to work for the Quaker Peace Movement.

My mother was strict and conventional, and rather unimaginative. She wanted me to be prim and proper and to have a clear understanding of the difference between right and wrong. Everything had to be black or white, there were no grey areas, and this was very much in keeping with the mood of the times. I do not recall my parents' names, but mine was Mary.

Because my mother was wealthy she soon passed me over to a governess who had charge of several children; presumably they were my brothers and sisters and cousins. This governess was even stricter than my mother. We had to walk slowly, talk quietly, and were not allowed to run around screaming or even play roughly with our dog. My senses were very sharp in that lifetime, much keener than they are now. If I was standing in a heated greenhouse I could actually feel the flowers absorbing the heat. That just intensified the feeling of rigid self-control; it seemed a shame to keep my senses in check and not use them to their full potential when they were as strong as that.

I was not naturally contemplative and would have liked to run around more. Although I joined in with the hour of silent meditation that Quakers have instead of a church service, and found it inspiring and relaxing, I could never have done it more than once a week. Some Quakers took to extending it and spending a couple of hours in silent meditation whenever they had a free evening- they said it helped them to work better for God during their active times.

I did however enjoy studying, which was also considered essential to the Quaker way of life. From an early age I was an avid reader, and sought both knowledge and inspiration from the books I read. I was very much in agreement with the Quaker religion and philosophy, which is broad and tolerant towards other religious faiths and sees them all as paths to the same God. In this it is similar to Hinduism.

Quakers are committed to pacifism, and equal rights for everyone in the world under a just system of government. If anything it all seemed too obvious to me; the truths were self-evident and there was no need even to discuss them. Somewhere in my subconscious mind I knew I was undertaking the strict Quaker discipline voluntarily, and because of this I responded to it well and derived a great deal of benefit from it. I was preparing for a lifetime of service which I thought would well suit my idealistic temperament.

In many ways we led a very sheltered life. We were never let out anywhere alone and had no idea what was going on in the East End of London outside our door. Our days were spent in study or in outings with the governess, and in the evenings we read or sang songs around the piano.

When I was eleven I was sent to study in a small schoolroom with girls from several different Quaker families, and it happened that one of the other girls fell in love with me. She was a small, intense-looking girl with tufty hair and piercing eyes, and her name was Pamela. Usually I don't remember what people looked like, but I do in this case because I first remembered Pamela after meeting her in a dream. At first I was not very interested, but she was completely obsessed with me and in the end she persuaded me to have a lesbian affair. I don't know how old we were then, very likely older than eleven by that time, twelve or thirteen.

Lesbianism was very common in Victorian times. Ladies were chaperoned everywhere they went and were never left alone with a man, only with other women. It was just as common among servant girls as well because for them it provided one of the few means of escape from the strict rules of Victorian morality. Maids were employed on condition that they did not marry, and as a result many of them became pregnant and were disgraced. Only lesbians could have affairs that never led to pregnancy, and could be easily concealed. Pamela had not been forced into it because she was too young for that. She was just born that way, and she loved me and wanted us to be together forever. I didn't feel that I was naturally a lesbian and I was quite annoyed with Pamela for not letting me grow up at my own pace and find out what my real feelings were.

My mother soon suspected something was going on and made strenuous efforts to keep us apart, though she never openly said why. I was ready to accept this and move on to other interests, but poor Pamela was heartbroken. She was always trying to get past the obstacles my mother put in the way so she could see me again, until at last it became impossible because she was sent away (I think to a boarding school.)

My experience with Pamela set a pattern, and during my teens I had several other lesbian affairs. Some of the girls were maids, but the Quakers taught that you shouldn't treat other people as below your station, so at least I was following them in that way even if they would have been most displeased by that interpretation of equality. Apart from these relationships I was doing everything I could to be a model Quaker. The elders appeared satisfied with me except that they called me 'headstrong' because I was independent and keen to get my own way. I had always been like that and couldn't change my personality, so I had to ignore their attitude that it was inappropriate for a woman.

As the years passed I continued to read and study a great deal, and through my reading I came to know about the Negro slaves in America. At once I became very indignant that slavery should still exist in the civilized days of the nineteenth century, and I vowed to work for its abolition through the Quaker Peace Movement. The Quaker leaders were already campaigning against slavery at every opportunity, but their political opponents called them pacifist weaklings and told them that if they ever got to be in charge Negro slaves would rape and trample on their wives and daughters. One day I read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and from that day onwards it became my new Bible. It is written as a novel, and it describes a series of incidents in such a way as to highlight one by one the evils of slavery, in the clearest possible language. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' became the standard by which I measured everything to see if it truly tended towards social reform.

At last I reached the age of majority, twenty-one. I went immediately and presented myself to join the Quaker Peace Movement. Then, to my horror, it became evident that there was going to be a problem because I was a lesbian. Officially lesbianism did not exist in Victorian times, and anything that was considered to be an indelicate subject was never mentioned. The committee to which I had applied consisted mainly of men, and they found it distinctly embarrassing to have to tell me about my 'misdemeanour.' All they would say was that it was unladylike conduct, or conduct unbecoming to a Quaker.

I became extremely upset, and begged them to reconsider. "You can't do this," I said. "Don't you understand that it is my entire life's mission to join the Quaker Peace Movement?"

They were quite adamant. Whatever I said they refused to be moved. "It is most unfortunate," they said, "but those who have committed your misdemeanour are barred from the Quaker Peace Movement for life."

At this I became absolutely furious. I told everyone in my family that no-one was going to stop me going to America to help the Negro slaves. "All I need" I declared, "is two dresses and my copy of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. I'll pack those in my suitcase, and I'll go." They paid little attention. They said it was just Mary being headstrong as usual, and soon I would settle down to the quiet life of an English lady.

I started making enquires through my father's contacts in America, and asked them to arrange a passage for me. Then they began to realize I was serious, and changed their tune. There was a thriving Quaker community in America, and they agreed that it might do me good to spend some time there. Before long I embarked on a ship for the United States. I took only two dresses with me as I had promised, but I found it was necessary to take other items such as underwear and toiletries as well, and that annoyed me because I was in no mood to be practical. As the journey progressed my angry mood became stronger, and I spent most of it sitting in a corner of the deck with a grim determination, reading 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' for hour after hour.

At the end of the novel there is a reference to a community of slaves who have been freed, and I knew that was one of the passages that is based on fact .I resolved to find out where this community was and to go there as soon as possible after reaching America. I did not want to stay in the American Quaker community because it was too tame, too far away from where the reforms were actually taking place.

My suspicions were confirmed when I arrived and was received into a Quaker village. It was just like being in England- there was the same Victorian veneer of decorum. I rested for a few days with my hosts because I thought politeness demanded it, but then I asked firmly to be taken to the community for slaves who had been freed. "It is my intention to reside there for a while," I said.

My hosts seemed disappointed, but I had some kind of influence because of my father and they felt they had to accede to my request, so they arranged transport to the commune. I began a journey through some of the most beautiful unspoilt countryside and mountain regions of North America. Although I appreciated the scenery and the chance to experience a different way of life, my mind was mainly on my plans for when I reached the commune. I was intending to stay there for the rest of my life, and do all I could to arrange for more slaves to be freed and sent on to live there. "Our Loa will never desert us. When we are in need they will come and stand beside us." These words from one of the Voodoo ceremonies echoed somewhere in my subconscious mind, and I went to stand beside the slaves and show that I considered them equal to myself.

When I reached the commune I found that it consisted of many small shacks. I explained my purpose to the black people there, and they welcomed me warmly and installed me in one of the shacks at the far end. I must admit I was a little worried about the propaganda I had read which suggested they would rape and trample on white women. But I soon found that the men left me alone; some of them preferred their own women and the rest liked all women well enough but wanted to show self-respect and respect for visitors like me. The women in the commune saw me as a neighbour to chat to. They would come out of their shacks every morning and start chatting with one another and with me, and to them that was far more important than politics.

I was very interested in the political side of it, and at first I kept suggesting that we should go on expeditions to free more slaves and bring them back to the settlement. But they all shook their heads worriedly and assured me this was very unwise. You would come into conflict with the landowners who had the power, they said, and it was best to leave it to others who had power to match that of the landowners. It pained me that if the Quaker Peace Movement had only accepted me, I could have been that person with power and influence. The Quaker Peace Movement was wealthy, but I had no money of my own and had to share in the food that the people in the commune grew from seed donated to them by benefactors. I was using up some of the charitable resources instead of donating more to them.

I stayed for some time, but I found that life in the commune was simple and undemanding to the point of being banal. Many of the people had been through great hardship while they were slaves, and now it was over they settled back with relief into a routine existence. The women changed their clothes and washed clothes every day, which must have been their habit in the hotter climate of Africa, and I remember endless lines of washing stretching as far as the eye could see. It seemed to me that every day was the same: the chats outside the front door, lines of washing, and the clatter of cooking utensils. My ideals seemed to have been buried under a relentless tide of washing, pots and pans.

This was not the life I had imagined at all, and when I had been in the commune for a little while ( it must have been between six months and a year) I planned a visit to England to see my family and think things over. Perhaps I could stay there and come up with a better way of putting the Quaker beliefs into practice. So I set off for England. But I remember nothing about the voyage, probably due to shock and trauma. The ship was wrecked off the coast of Normandy, and everyone on board was lost. The year must have been approximately 1860 and I was only twenty-two years old.

# 9. Summerland

I have managed to get back the memory of being in the sea after I drowned. When a shipwreck happens the people are quickly scattered so far apart that that it feels like you are the only one in the vast sea, all alone. This particular kind of loneliness felt like something sinking in the pit of my stomach. I looked around desperately for people: it was similar to the way I had looked around before finding Loki and his followers, though I didn't remember that.

I found some people, but they were not human; they were water spirits, undines as they are sometimes called, and I thought of them as mermaids and mermen. They looked sympathetic when I began to cry and told them, "I've lost everything." Suddenly all I could think about was that my father was rich; I could have been a lady, and now I had lost the chance and my money and possessions would go to someone else.

"Never mind," said one of the creatures kindly. "Why not come and work with us? We look after fish-you'll like it." They turned and moved away in a great shoal, and I followed them because I was afraid of being left alone again. They were doing something which benefits fish, but I cannot describe it because it doesn't translate into earthly terms, and I watched them. They stopped for a while and I rested, feeling exhausted. I lost consciousness, and when I regained my awareness it was the next day. I still had the gnawing feeling in my stomach, and at once I began to lament again, "I've lost everything."

The creatures stared at me, and several of them drew back with distaste. "You said that yesterday", one of them remarked. "How can you say it again today? You haven't lost ANYTHING today." They looked genuinely puzzled, and irritated with me, and I realized their feelings were only momentary ones, unlike ours which keep recurring. I saw that I was in danger of losing them and being left alone in the sea again, so I made a supreme effort and concentrated all my attention on doing what I had seen them do the previous day to help the fish. Much to my relief I found that I could do it, and the pain I felt started to go away. Also I could start and stop doing it just as the mermaids could. Without another word I followed them and joined in with their work, and they were happy to accept me as one of them. When they stopped work to get on with their private lives, I stopped too.

They certainly seemed to have strange private lives. All the mermaids went around together in a shoal and all the mermen did the same; the two sexes ignored one another completely and behaved like two separate species. I wondered how they managed to reproduce, but did not like to ask. When they were resting they lay on the rocks and talked. I found the mermaids friendly and confided to them that I had tried to achieve peace and justice, but it had all gone wrong and I had been thwarted. They had trouble understanding that because I was talking about recurring attitudes and patterns of behaviour, and to them all impressions were fleeting.

I am not sure how long I stayed with these water spirits, it felt like a few years to me, and then one day they told me that I must go back to my own people. "They are asking for you," they said, "over there." They steered me towards a small and anxious-looking group of humans who were standing on the shore of France. I did not recognise any of them. I tried to say goodbye to the mermaids, but they looked as if they had already forgotten me and it was obvious that goodbyes didn't mean anything to them.

The people did not say much, and they gripped me quite firmly as if they were afraid I would slide back into the water. They took me to the region which is described in great detail in some Spiritualist books and is called the Summerland, the lower part of Heaven where the conditions are similar to those of Earth.

They placed me in a group of eight or nine people, most of them black with a white girl named Vera as the leader, and explained that this was my group and I would be working with them. We would be helping distressed people who were traumatised by various experiences, some of them connected with slavery. Nothing was said about why I was there. I suppose they thought it was obvious: they were giving me the job the Quakers had refused to give me and showing that in their eyes I was qualified.

To some extent this made me happy, but I was uneasy about having been slotted into exactly the right place like a jigsaw piece: it was too much like my mother's philosophy of no shades of grey. This even applied to my sex life. Vera had been a lesbian, but she had given it up, 'reformed' as she put it. She regarded her lesbianism as a sin that she had committed in the past and was keen to lead me onto the right path as well. She was so uptight about it that she even recoiled if I tried to give her a friendly pat or a hug.

I stayed with these people and worked with them for many years, much longer than I spent with the water spirits. We moved in a multi-racial circle with black and white victims and black and white helpers in equal proportions. I was happy to go along with Vera's views about relationships as I had always felt that I wasn't really a lesbian and it was Pamela who had pressured me into it.

For a while I had a relationship with a black boy whose name in the present day is Raoul; I don't know what it was then. Raoul was annoyed with me for being casual and uncommitted, but that was all I had ever learnt to do. I only know who he is because in my present life I once worked in the same office building as him, and one night while I worked there I had a dramatic dream in which Raoul made a tremendous scene about what had happened between us in the past. Around that time I met a number of people related to my Quaker lifetime in my dreams: Pamela, Vera and some of the black people who we worked with. I also met a girl who I am sure was one of the maids I knew, and she had reincarnated on the astral plane itself with one of her parents a Deva and the other a human being. This girl had a very great influence on me, and it was through her that I began to meet a wider range of Devic beings.

Like the water spirits, those of us in Vera's group had alternating periods of work and leisure time. I cannot remember any details of the work we did; however, my leisure time I remember much more clearly. It became my hobby to go to the akashic records and study there. The aim of my studies was most ambitious: I wanted to understand good and evil, and to this end I chose a particular man as my study project. He had spent multiple lifetimes on Earth, far more than I had, and every time things had always gone wrong for him and he had always been considered evil. His books were in sets with each one named for a particular religious culture, Judeo-Christian being the largest. My method of study was quite pedantic: I made myself read one book from each series, even though this was tedious because there were so many of them. Unfortunately when I reached the end I understood no more about good and evil than I did when I started.

The books of the akasha are like living beings: as you begin to read pictures rapidly spring up all around you and turn into moving sequences like a film. It is easy to get lost in the films; however, I soon learnt to hold back and pull out of them, and then dip into them in a more controlled way. I was doing it whenever I had free time and was soon quite experienced, though I did not retain anything I read about myself until later on.

As the years went by I began increasingly to have arguments with Vera. She was the one who made all the decisions about where we went and what we did when we got there, sometimes in consultation with her superiors in the hierarchy. I did not want to obey Vera any longer, I wanted to make my own decisions. Vera was upset that we had started to disagree about this, and I asked her to consult her superiors to find out whether I could take turns at being the leader, or if this was not possible to leave and start a group of my own.

Vera's chiefs turned down my request. They said that Vera was working on a ray of compassion while I was working on a ray of enthusiasm, like a hot flame. She was water and I was fire, and therefore Vera had to be the leader. So Vera stuck to her position of authority and tried hard to make it work, but I became more and more angry. Finally one day I shouted, "I don't want to obey you all the time! No-one puts me in a hierarchy and makes me obey. I'm leaving!" and I stormed off.

It was immediately apparent that in a place with such an inflexible structure there were very few choices of where to go. I thought about going to Hell certainly, especially as I knew I had been there before, but there was still that blackout curtain blocking out my memory of the last time I was there, and I hesitated to go to unknown territory. As for the Earth I did not like to think about it too much because I knew it would draw me back there, and I was not sure I was ready to go.

I took refuge in the akashic library and quickly tried to plan another study project, but try as I might I couldn't think of anything. For a little while I sat there, still trying to think of something worthwhile to study and still trying not to think about the Earth. But it was clearly too late because the next thing I knew I found myself back there, in my present life. So it was I experienced my very own fall from Heaven like Lucifer, and like him it was due to rebelling against my superior in the hierarchy.

As I have decided not to continue to the present day I must stop here. I have found it very useful to study the workings of the Law of Karma, and I've noticed that in my case I get a lot of triangles of force; even the families I've belonged to in my present life have all had three members. The clashes and triangles all seem to resolve themselves in the end, though often violently and after creating a lot of activity.

# End Notes

Notes on Chapter 1

Succubi are at the bottom of the angelic hierarchy, only just above human beings, although their chief Lilith is a senior angel. Since I first wrote 'Alchemical Journey' I've found out more about them. Recently I've become involved with darker forms of spirituality, such as demonolatry and learning wisdom from Lucifer. All the angels and gods call me 'Sherry' now, referring to my original succubus name Sherry Zahd. I'm getting old, and maybe it's not the best time of life to become closer to demons and Lucifer! But I still have the same moral beliefs, and I'm still non-violent.

I know now that I shouldn't have just accepted being exiled to the Earth. I should have asked to join another legion of demons that I was more in harmony with, because succubi can transfer. Unfortunately I was quite passive. Not all succubi are forceful; their personalities differ, as with every other sentient creature.

The entity which gave me the teachings about the black blade, the green blade and the red blade was one that my partner was experimenting with in 1987, and attracted into our home for a while. This entity really did seem to be a composite male form of the three Furies of Greek myth. I've never come across any similar teachings anywhere else, and I'm sure the athame has other origins in addition to the black blade that he spoke of, but there is no reason why these concepts shouldn't be authentic among his species.

Notes on Chapter 2

I feel that the other clones who came to Earth with me are no longer here- they have gone away to some other part of the cosmos. 'A hundred' was probably a symbolic number- I very much doubt that there were exactly one hundred of us. Anyway, I'm here on my own now, which I expect is due to the extremely long time that I spent in one place, in Rosebud's garden. (See Chapter 4.)

At the time in my present life when I met two of the Pandavas I was quite young, only in my twenties. They belonged to a devotional Vaishnava sect who lived their lives very close to Krishna, and I recall hearing of one who remembered being the character Lalita from the cycle of stories about Krishna, but most of them were not sure who specifically they had been in the time of the Mahabharata. They knew they were Krishna's people who had been scattered over many parts of the Earth, and that Krishna would like to bring them all back together. Some of the sect were Indian and others were westerners who had gone to India and spent time at temples there.

For a while I was very devoted to the Pandava couple and bought them a lot of presents, which was quite uncharacteristic of me. I've never showered anyone else with presents. It was like I was trying to make up for having taken all their land and property before.

My connection with them only lasted a short time. The man began asking me to have an affair with him. I refused, but his wife suspected what was happening and was very upset. She broke off contact with me, and I never saw them again.

About a year before meeting them, I did some things that fulfilled my original Kshatriya vow. I parted my two sisters, although I had no idea that was what I was doing, and then I became obsessed with 'doing a job that was Kshatriya instead of Brahmin.' This despite the fact that the two terms have no meaning in modern western society. I ended up stuck in administrative jobs that I wasn't especially good at for most of my working life, and didn't find out what had happened until it was difficult to make changes. It was only after retiring from full-time work that I did some part-time jobs in the education system, and did them much better.

During the time when I had the strange obsession with Kshatriyas and Brahmins, I even tried to get married to someone who the ancient Hindus would have called 'Kshatriya.' This resulted in a broken engagement to a man who was very much mentally cruel.

Programming myself to do these kinds of things in the future was foolish and led to life situations that didn't work out. Despite that, I've always been glad that when I met the Pandavas again, I tried to be their friend.

Notes on Chapter 3

When I met the Egyptian Priest in my present life, and he approached me to continue our previous relationship, I was terrified. I actually jumped onto a passing bus to get away, and the man taking the fares asked me if that was my husband I was running away from, even though he was someone I barely knew. That's the only incident I'm going to describe. My original draft of this autobiography had a chapter about his doings in the twentieth century, but it would just cause too much trouble to relate them.

Suffice it to say, he influenced me directly for several years, and from a distance for much longer than that.

My foreknowledge about the Nazis has interested some readers. I believe they should have realised that the revenge they planned was too extreme, and should have refused to do it when the time came. It seems that they hold some kind of conviction that "you must not be the weak link in a chain'' and if you have pledged to do something, you must stick to it. Once again I think that when the time came they should have simply given up this belief, as it caused disaster for humanity.

Notes on Chapter 4

It appears that Rosebud kept me out of action for a long time, out of play on the world stage, because I was never meant to be a part of those early societies.

She was the first muse who I encountered, and that set a pattern of affinity with muses when later I met and worked with Cherry, (See Chapter 5), and in the present day with the dark muse Ino.

In the present time my method is to write some fiction pieces that are completely mine, and to channel others completely from Ino. This is a radical departure from the usual method of an artist being inspired by a muse. I always indicate which parts each of us have written, and two of my fiction books were entirely written by Ino. I call this "my unique experiment", although of course it may not be, and there might be other artists doing exactly the same thing. The foundations for my close relationship with muses were laid all that time ago, when I was Rosebud's pet cat.

Notes on Chapter 5

Cherry's minstrel was actually my first husband, but we were only together for six years because, to tell the honest truth, I was never faithful to him. Cherry was around at the time and she lied to me, pretending she was a human being who had been his girlfriend in the Middle Ages, and trying to be born as our daughter.

That never happened, and one day he fell into a trance and remembered much more than usual about his medieval life. I asked him eagerly about Cherry, and it was as if something was trying to stop him telling me. But he overcame it and related that she had not been a real girl, only a dream girl in his mind, who used a sigil of entwined fruits. He called her the Lady of the Fruit and dedicated all his music to her.

He actually remembered being bound with Cherry, unable to reincarnate until it was time for her music to appear. He described it as "like waiting for a bus that never comes, but it's almost worth it because of who you are waiting with."

Notes on Chapter 6

There was a time in my present life when I worked in a local council office with Mary, just as I had done in the seventeenth century. Mary and I disliked one another, and until I remembered my Civil War life I had no idea why.

Lilith was also in my life at that time. I had a ring that was dedicated to her; she had asked for a pendant, but I thought that would be too powerful, and got myself a ring instead. As it turned out, the ring was powerful enough: when I wore it at work one day, Mary came down with a terrible headache unlike any she had ever had before. I never wore it at work again after that.

I heard from Mary about her neighbour Suzanne who was mentally ill and trying to harm her children. This news had a very strong effect on me, and I included healing rituals for Suzanne in all my magical ventures. Again, I didn't know why until I remembered that lifetime. I don't know whether or not her mental health improved, because I was unhappy in that job and left, and was no longer in touch with Mary.

It was Archangel Michael who discovered that I was originally Lilith's daughter Sherry Zahd. He found me one day during the 1990's,visiting the temple site in Suffolk. I was probably putting a green blade of grass over my heart, because by then I had remembered that rite and would do it whenever I went there.

He said that I appeared to be a site guardian, not just a visitor, and that would be impossible if I was an ordinary human being. He was expecting to shove the site guardian out of the way and get on with checking on the temple to make sure it remained inactive. But he couldn't do that when it was apparently a vulnerable human woman.

"I need to find out who you are," he said. "What's the first thing you can remember from your previous lives?"

I said it was being a Kaurava. We discussed the Mahabharata, particularly the passages referring to a stag totem, and he worked out my real identity.

For me that was the final piece of the puzzle. Now I knew my whole history, even though it was only in outline, and that was when I began to write down the details. There may of course be lifetimes I've forgotten, or previous cycles of time that I've forgotten. I wouldn't want to claim that my account was infallible and then find out that there were missing parts after all.

He never did shove me out of the way! But the temple did remain inactive, because I didn't feel I was the right person to reopen it. However, there were modern alchemists in various other parts of the country, and some of them created Antichrists. It's a plural- there are many of them, and they are not particularly evil. They are just lunar people, as I described in Chapter 2 when I discussed the Kauravas being lunar.

The Sage is back. He grew up in the area near the temple site, and later in life came in contact with some modern alchemists and did helpful favours for them. If he were to remember the past, he would be most shocked that he had killed people. In a horror film his former victims would punish him, but in real life it's very inspiring to see someone making amends for what they did before.

Notes on Chapter 7

I'm sure that anyone who knows Loki would not be surprised to see him joining the Voodoo Loa if there were no Viking ceremonies being performed. However, there has been a revival of the Norse religion in modern times, (and some say it has always kept going in secret), so perhaps now he divides his time between the two of them.

I haven't had much contact with him in my present life. Once in a dream I saw him in my room and became very frightened, and when he noticed I was frightened, he went away. Soon afterwards I remembered our relationship, and I've done some work on the dance I used to do to try and develop it into a sacred dance technique. It took me years to progress from one section to three and even now I think it's still far too simple to qualify as a real sacred dance. After I completed it I tried dancing it with Loki sometimes, but he was inconsiderate, like he always is.

I've had quite a lot of contact with the Wiccans who originally came from south-eastern Ireland, and some of them became my relatives. Remember I got into their bloodline? But I'm not a blood relation of any of the women, so I'm not in the matriarchal descent itself. The main reason I didn't join one of their covens is that I have a health condition and I didn't want to go out in the woodland all night long.

I ended up doing solitary Wicca for several years and literally being away with the fairies, because my meditations featured the Wiccan gods, nature spirits, animal guides and thought forms. They performed ceremonies with me and even gave me their three degrees, and I certainly made it up to them for having been their enemy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it didn't ground itself in my earthly life; for that, I would have had to join a coven on the Earth.

At first they called me by two different names, which to me felt like two separate people. One was a circle name which meant me as a microcosm of the Goddess, and the other was my succubus name Sherry. I noticed that the first one was strong and independent, and she flew with wings like those of an eagle. The Sherry personality, by contrast, was very clingy and passionate with men, especially non-human males, and quite dependent on men.

To most Pagan women, the microcosm of the Goddess would have been the obvious choice. But for me the Sherry identity won in the end, and the other one gradually disappeared from my meditation. I started to see myself more and more as Sherry.

Notes on Chapter 8

I mentioned in my original account the dreams I had in which I met some of the people from my Quaker life. I belonged for a while to the Theosophical Society, and did some voluntary work there with a lady who was a guide while she was asleep. She helped me to start having lucid dreams and to experience astral projection.

I later lost these abilities, but during the 1970's and 80's they were at full strength and I kept detailed dream diaries. At first I found it a little disturbing when some of the ladies in my dreams made love to me, because in the present day I'm heterosexual ! But eventually I pieced together the story of what had happened in the nineteenth century. Even lucid dreams are not literal all the way through- there are symbolic elements and distortions, and little dream stories which fight hard to continue through to the end, and you have to pick out the facts from that tangled muddle. I wasn't disciplined enough to gain complete control over that environment.

During one dream in 1981, the Theosophists gave me the first of the five initiations that they confer. Then after that the tests started: life experiences intended to make me choose between the left hand path and the right hand path. I endeavoured to choose the right hand path every time, but my Egyptian Priest friend made strong efforts to get me to join him on his path. Over the years I've done a lot of left hand techniques, although not the ones that are aimed at harming people, and well....even doing one of them pushes you over the line.

The Theosophists didn't give me any further initiations. I received several from demons, during meditations, and the scale from which they came appeared to be roughly equivalent to the five theosophical initiations, or ten Kabbalist ones. I wondered whether the White Brotherhood would think they had been given much to easily, and I didn't deserve them. However, some of the angels who are associated with the Kabbalah say that there are forty grades, not ten, corresponding with the Tree of Life on each of the four levels of existence.

Notes on Chapter 9

I didn't remember my identity as Sherry when my Quaker life ended. However, the archetypal story of 'The Little Mermaid' has a lot of symbolism to do with succubi in it, and I fitted right in as a substitute mermaid until I joined Vera's group.

There is even a man who fits the role of the prince in the Little Mermaid story: a Franciscan monk living in Normandy. I have been aware of him for most of my life and I think of him as a soulmate, although I'm perfectly happy not to live with him. I think he may be dead now. Archetypes certainly do have some strange effects.

Vera's group were what is known as a rescue circle. This is the term used by Theosophists and Spiritualists who frequently join them, and they often have living members in them as well as deceased ones.

I believe that when I was a young child, a rescue circle used to take me to Vietnam at night during my sleep. These people were helping soldiers who had been killed in the Vietnam war, and they took me with them because by coincidence one of the elderly members was named Vera, and she found that I obeyed her instructions when I was asleep and dreaming. The memory of this came back along with my past life memories, and like those it had a story book texture, as if I had read it on the akasha.

Much later in life I was amazed to encounter on the internet a lady from the other side of the world who remembered the same experience. It seems the leaders of that group had a policy of taking children with them, because when the soldiers saw the children apparently stranded on the battlefield and tried to rescue them, their feelings became softer and they were then receptive to the people in the rescue circle. The other lady had been horrified by seeing mortal wounds and dead bodies; however, my awareness was much lower than hers and I did not see these things. I only saw the bare plain where they made me stand, wearing a bright ribbon in my hair.

There were a lot of demons there that incite violence, and I took no notice of them because I had been a Quaker and a pacifist. But one day they gave me a message from Lilith, to which I responded, and Vera Number 2 had a terrible shock and didn't take me there again.

I ended my original account of my past lives very suddenly, after briefly mentioning the triangles of force. My Egyptian Priest friend once said something to me about triangles, and the fact that all the families I've been in have had three members, and I wasn't sure what he meant but he seemed to think it was important. I know that Lilith's mythology is based quite heavily on love triangles, the original one between Adam and Eve and herself, and subsequent ones among human beings, due to adultery.

I was referring more to the triangle of force I experienced in the Middle Ages and then again in the Seventeenth Century. It seemed to disappear after that, but it's possible it just took new forms that were not as obvious, and it still exists.

Whatever happens in the future, I'll always identify myself as Sherry, and I'll always be Sherry.

# Fiction Books by Candy Ray

All available as free eBooks on Smashwords.

Short Story Collections

Chaos Dreams Part 1

These short stories were channelled by Candy Ray from a non-human chaos muse called Ino. Each one creates a vivid and enchanting world, sometimes in the past. Some of the stories have a narrative style that roves around observing. The tales are a showcase for Ino's unique views about human beings; her observation of people is very sharp, yet with a motherly quality.

Chaos Dreams part 2: Astral Tales

The common theme in this collection of Candy Ray's short stories is the astral plane, which is both the realm of the dead and the plane of dreams.

A murdered child tries to contact her mother.

A solitary student has lucid dreams, but they trap her in an oppressive forest.

In the afterlife, a girl strives to stop sadness pulling her down, and is helped by an unexpected encounter.

Batman's niece goes on a quest unlike a superhero comic, full of alchemical symbols instead.

On Midsummer Night an occultist meets his true love; can he use the film he is making to win her from another man?

Chaos dreams Part 3: Fruition

This is a compilation of three chaos magic stories. The first one 'Eoss and Bidskimmer' was part of an ambitious servitor project, which was carried out by chaos magicians in an online group. It is about a servitor and an egregore who make life much better for a group of young people.

The second one 'Arcana' is a hypersigil, a chaos magic spell, and it is the story of a lady chaos magician and game designer, her cute servitor, tarot cards, an angel and a demon.

The third one 'Beads Falling, Falling Into A Design' was channelled from Ino, and the main character is based partly on herself. This story is narrated by a spirit from the mineral kingdom who finds herself within a bead in a ladies' necklace, and through this becomes closely involved with a human family.

Chaotic Dreams

Five short stories of surreal and slightly dark fantasy. The last two stories are channelled from Ino.

An ancient legend meanders into strange directions.

An inner demon seems to depart- but has he really gone?

Alchemical fantasies sweep one man's world into disarray.

A living doll yearns to escape.

Trading in crystals leads to an unexpected magical drama.

Novellas

The Wizard From Vahan (Fantasy/Science Fiction)

Jasper is an apprentice magician in a society of the future where chaos magic has become the dominant religion. He does a time-jump which is supposed to be a meditation, but it goes wrong and he finds himself in a parallel world about to embark on a mission as a heroic knight: a mission that he does not want, as he is more of a mystic than a warrior. He encounters Emin, an advanced magician who offers to help by swapping places with him, leaving Jasper in his Retreat up in space.

Jasper must use his emerging magical abilities to return to the planet and fight aliens who threaten its people and the girl he loves. The story explores the role of magicians in society, and the contrast between a great adept and a junior magician.

Copying A Master (channelled from Ino).

Maurice, an idealistic painter, is pulled into an art fraud against his will. It is the 1950's, the time when Austin Spare was alive, and the premise of this book is that artists had already been painting magical sigils for millennia. So Maurice seeks a solution to his problem through a sigil spell. Meanwhile the crisis of the fraud uproots him, wrecks his domestic life and drags him across three European countries as he flees the revenge he fears.

The Rescue Circle

A magician undertakes a dangerous quest to become a psychopomp, a guide of the dead, and afterwards to find his true love who has gone hitchhiking without him. During his trance he encounters angels, gods, djinn and troubled souls, and joins a rescue circle of Spiritualists who are more advanced than himself.

Novellas under the pen name Lena Chere

The Eoss Trilogy

1. Platara Mountain: (Paperback)

Imagine magicians of the modern-day internet becoming involved with a parallel world where human beings are still in the Stone Age. Imagine this involvement precipitated by a kind but much-feared Horse Goddess who was created on Facebook.

Alexandra has just left school and is looking for love and a vocation in life when that scenario becomes her reality. She comes to care deeply about both the Horse Goddess and a young family in the parallel world; it dramatically reveals her past and changes her future, transforming her into a magician.

2. Mount Clexa: (Self -published paperback and eBook)

This is a book of serious occult fiction told in the first person by Clexa, the daughter of the Horse Goddess Eoss.

Bound to a magician in service, she finds herself forced to explore the aethyrs of the Enochian magic system with him, and to carry out a revenge curse on a girl when she would prefer to spare her.

Clexa thinks for herself about how to interact with the human beings she meets and also the aethyr guardians, and this results in her being chased and harried across the inner realms, so that she has to evolve much faster than she anticipated.

3. Silver Manes: (Self -published paperback and eBook)

Arran is a Kabbalist, a young professional man from the UK, and his accident comes at a critical moment in his love life. It also serves to deepen his emerging connection with one of the kingdoms of Hell.

He enters into an extended coma, which becomes a test of character both for himself and for his secret enemy, Jez. As Arran learns lessons about love and about the phenomenon of archetypes, many of the people around him get the opportunity to petition a Wishing Horse for three wishes- or for anything else they want.
