Reincarnation effects on Biological Form
As we saw in chapter 6, psychiatrist Ian Stevenson has documented cases of past life memories spontaneously reported by young children. Out of 895 cases of children who claimed to remember a previous life, unusual birthmarks and/or birth defects were reported in 309 of the subjects (Stevenson 1993, p. 405). These birthmarks or defects corresponded in appearance and location to wounds or other marks on the deceased person whose life the child remembered. The marks on the deceased person were verified by statements from living witnesses who knew the deceased person. In 49 cases, Stevenson was able to also use postmortem medical reports and death certificates to verify the wounds or marks on the prior personality. A correspondence between a birthmark on the living child and a wound on the deceased person was judged satisfactory if both the birthmark and wound occurred within an area of 10 square centimeters at the same anatomical location. Stevenson noted that out of the 49 cases where medical documentation was available, the marks corresponded in 43 (88 percent) of the cases (Stevenson 1993, p. 405). This strong correlation increased the confidence in the accuracy of informants’ memories concerning wounds and other marks on deceased persons for the other cases. For 18 cases in which two birthmarks on a subject corresponded to gunshot wounds of entry and exit, in 14 cases the evidence clearly showed that the smaller birthmark corresponded to the wound of entry and the larger birthmark corresponded to the wound of exit. Exit wounds are nearly always larger than entry wounds. According to Stevenson (1997, pp. 1131–1137), the probability that the location of a single birthmark would correspond to a wound from a previous life is about 1 in 160. The probability that the locations of two birthmarks would correspond to the locations of two wounds is 1 in 25,600. Stevenson (1997, p. 1135) cites cases in which the birthmarks and wounds occur within 5 centimeters of each other. In the case of single birthmark/wound correlations, the probability for such occurrences is 1 in 645, and the probability of double birthmark/wound correlations is 1 in 416,025. Let us now consider some examples of unusual birthmarks related to wounds suffered in a past life. Henry Demmert III was born with a mark corresponding to a knife wound suffered by Henry Demmert, Jr. (Stevenson 1997, pp. 417–421). Henry Demmert, Jr., was born in Juneau, Alaska, on December 6, 1929. He was the son of Henry Demmert, Sr., and his wife Muriel. Because they were Tlingit Indians, Henry and Muriel also gave their son the Tlingit name Shtani. Muriel Demmert died soon thereafter, and in 1932 Henry Demmert, Sr., married his second wife, Gertrude. When Henry Demmert, Jr., grew up, he worked as a fisherman in Juneau. On March 6, 1957, he went to a party where he and others drank a lot of alcohol. A fight broke out around 5:30 the next morning, and Henry Demmert, Jr., was stabbed in the heart. He died at the Juneau hospital at 6:45 a.m. The death certificate said the attacker’s knife cut and wounded the left lung and heart.
Henry Demmert, Sr., and his second wife, Gertrude, had a daughter Carole. She married Cyrus Robinson, and they had a child, Henry Robinson. Shortly before Henry was born Gertrude Demmert had a dream about him. The child was searching for Henry Demmert, Sr., and Gertrude. Henry Robinson was born on October 5, 1968. When Henry Demmert, Sr., and Gertrude saw their newly born grandson, they both noticed a birthmark at the same place as the stab wound that had killed Henry Demmert, Jr. Shortly after Henry was born, his parents separated. Henry Demmert, Sr., and Gertrude adopted him. They gave him the name Henry Demmert III, believing him to be a reincarnation of their son Henry Demmert, Jr. They also gave him the same Tlingit name (Shtani) they had given Henry Demmert, Jr. When Henry Demmert III was about two years old, he made some statements to his grandfather about his wound. Stevenson (1997, p. 420) reported, “Pointing to his birthmark he said that he had ‘got hurt there.’ He added that this had happened when he ‘was big.’”
In 1978, Ian Stevenson examined Henry Demmert III and photographed the birthmark. Stevenson (1997, p. 420) said: “The birthmark was inferior and slightly lateral to the left nipple. It was located at approximately the level of sixth rib. It was . . . approximately 3 centimeters long and 8 millimeters wide. The medial end of the birthmark was slightly more pointed than the lateral end. The birthmark was not elevated. It may have been fractionally depressed below the surrounding skin.” Stevenson (1997, p. 420) added: “A knife-entering the chest at the site of the birthmark, or near it, would penetrate the heart if directed medially and upward. No other member of the family had a birthmark in this location.” The birthmark had an approximately triangular shape. Stevenson (1997, p. 421) commented: “The suggestion of triangularity in the birthmark may provide an indication that the weapon stabbing Henry Demmert, Jr., had a single cutting edge, like a clasp knife or a kitchen knife, instead of having two cutting edges like a dagger.”
Ekouroume Uchendu was a member of the Igbo tribe in Nigeria. He was, as Stevenson (1997, p. 1652) puts it, “a practitioner of indigenous medicine.” He had a sister named Wankwo. When Wankwo was grown up and married, she and a man named Kafor quarreled. Kafor threatened to kill Wankwo. Upon being threatened in this way, Wankwo went to her brother Ekouroume Uchendu for help. He killed Kafor by sorcery. Wankwo later died.
Ekouroume Uchendu had several wives. In 1946, a daughter, Nwanyi, was born to Onyenyerego, one of his senior wives. From an oracle, Ekouroume Uchendu learned that Nwanyi was a reincarnation of his sister Wankwo. Nwanyi died when she was just one year old. Believing that Nwanyi’s departure from this world was deliberate, Stevenson (1997, p.1633) stated: “He thought that the least she—the reincarnation of his sister Wankwo—could have done, given the trouble he had taken to kill Kafor, was to stay in the family for longer than a year. In what can only be regarded as a fit of rage, he cut off some of the dead Nwanyi’s fingers and toes. In addition, he tied her legs together with some cord, symbolically preventing her from ever walking again. To block the Wankwo/Nwanyi personality from ever returning, he put some of the amputated fingers and toes, along with some ‘medicines,’ in a little bag and hung this up in his house. This ritual was intended to banish Wankwo/Nwanyi permanently and prevent her from ever being reborn in Ekouroume Uchendu’s family.”
After this, Ekouroume Uchendu took yet another wife, named Irodirionyerku, who knew nothing about Nwanyi and the ritual mutilation carried out after her death (to stop her from coming back into Ekouroume Uchendu’s family). Over the course of eleven years, Irodirionyerku had three children. Then one day, while doing some remodeling of the house, she took down the bag that contained the toes and fingers of Nwanyi, without knowing what it was. Stevenson (1997, pp. 1635–1636) said she was pregnant at the time this happened. When Irodirionyerku’s child Cordelia was born in 1958, in the village of Umuokue, Imo State, Nigeria, she had birth defects. Stevenson (1997, p. 1636) described them: “Several fingers on each hand were markedly shortened, and some had no nails. . . . There was a deep constriction of the left lower leg above the ankle. (This was said to correspond to the groove made by the cord with which Ekouroume Uchendu had tied Nwanyi’s legs.) The right leg had a similar, but much less prominent mark at about the same level . . . All the toes (except the right great toe) were shortened, none had nails . . . Ekouroume Uchendu said that he had amputated some but not all of Nwanyi’s fingers and that the birth defects of Cordelia’s fingers ‘corresponded exactly’ to the mutilations he had made on Nwanyi’s body.”