Answering Eevee Part 3
Why do you think all those detailed memories came to you in THIS life?
Can't answer this next set of questions without naming names...
Leaving life as Alexander I swore I would remember. (It is something of a secret, though not on this forum, that ancient Greeks believed in reincarnation.) Why this life, 2,300 years later? I think it’s either that as a soul I came to a point of readiness, or that there are emotional healing modalities available in this era that never were before that I used to expedite getting to the point of readiness. Or both. I once did an inventory of methods I’ve used and determined that all but one of them arose in the 20th Century, and the older one arose in the 18th/19th.
Do you have a suspicion that the memory of him popped up in another Pl of yours also? After all, he was a very significant/strong/stubborn personality...
Heh, oh yeah, both those lives. As Alexander it was “nothing and no one will stop me” and as Thomas More it was “I won’t change my mind even if you torture and kill me.” My this-life (and humbler) version is that I have no quit in me for my mission now—healing and integrating myself to wholeness, including remembering. I didn’t even stop during my reincarnation hiatus, just took other approaches, excellent ones, which ended up sending me back to it.
The first question—a little background. Forbidden to frame my violent pre-firearms creative output as anything but fantasy by my mother, I went on to become a fantasy novelist. I only seemed to have one story in me, however, that I started as a young teen and stuck to, on and off, for about 40 years. It’s about a warrior-king type who conquers a great empire, never loses a battle, is bi and has multiple lovers in a kind of crazy personal life, loses his father to assassination by knife, becomes head of state at the age of 20, is a brilliant strategist and warrior, is very charismatic and deeply loved by his warriors, thinks outside the box, purposely spreads culture and technology, comes to be worshipped as a God by some, is very generous but at the same time can be wicked ruthless, gets in trouble with some of his own people for taking on the ways of the conquered empire too much, and dies young. Aside from that, he doesn’t resemble Alexander in the slightest.
So once I was into PLs and noticing the parallels, I thought: if there are Alexander parallels in fiction I wrote in this life, could there be in fiction I wrote in a life in between? With shaking hands, not sure whether I was more afraid of not finding them or finding them, I opened an old copy of
Utopia, which I had never read in this life.
They’re subtle—Alexander is never mentioned by name, for instance—but they are there and have the feel of something subconscious. If you want to see this for yourself, bone up on Alexander history, for which I recommend Robin Lane Fox’s
Alexander the Great. I thought it was the most accurate even before I learned to my delight it was informed by PL memory... Lane Fox said as much in a column in the
Sunday Times, not online, alas, around the same time the Oliver Stone movie came out. He consulted on the movie, btw, and took as his only pay the opportunity to take an extra role as a cavalier.
Then crack
Utopia yourself. I don’t even know how many Alexander traces there are, because I freaked out so much I never finished the job... I should try again now. The one that jumped out the most at me is that Utopia, the original utopian society, is a hybrid of Greek and Persian culture. Only one person ever attempted to create that in real life... I guess I wanted to do in imagination what I couldn’t in the flesh. What I remember about writing
Utopia was that it started out as pure satire, but then grabbed me and grew into something more as I was writing, and I just let that happen, same as I do writing in this life.
...continued...