Reincarnation
recurring karma
— recurrent traits,
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, c.1595, II:ii
Disabilities
Stephen Hawking was a reincarnation of the Italian Jesuit, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who persecuted Galileo and Giordano Bruno for their scientific doctrines. As a result, Hawking’s karma cast him into the service of the science he once persecuted, since the law of karma ever decrees that we must inevitably become that which we condemn. The following was disclosed prior to his passing in 2018: “Stephen Hawking’s soul has too long rejected everything spiritual, for even as a priest of the Church his concern was not with spiritual truth but with temporal power, and thus it is his material-mindedness that has shackled him in such a disabled body. Unfortunately, so far he has not shown any change of attitude in his incarnate mind; but on a soul level he will learn of the limitations of matter and of the transcendental potential of the mind.” (Onesipheru, 1998)
Here's a case of one name recurring over many lives and sounding just as sweet — or just as sad: Thomas 'TS' Eliot, Thomas More and Thomas Becket. Eliot's 'Murder in the Cathedral' (1935) is a dramatisation of his own martyrdom as Thomas Becket (1170), a prior incarnation of himself.
While spelling varies over time and between cultures, the resonance or sound produced appears to be what counts. Similarly, Pharaoh Thothmes III returned as US President Thomas Jefferson. Same name, different spelling.
Likewise, the name Osiris is correctly pronounced Asur, as used in Atlantis and Egypt, and relates to the Sanskrit sun god, Surya. Ditto that for Arthur, Ar-Thur and Thor. Ar-Thur derives from the Atlantean royal line of Arbal. The earliest Egyptians remembered him as Anhur, a warrior god whom they called 'Saviour'. The Scandinavians celebrated him as their god of thunder, namely Thor. Thursday is thus named after him: Ar-Thur's Day, and so on. These names all share the same resonance and thus have the same effect on us. Moreover, they evoke the same response in others.
Names
Injuries
According to biblical tradition, King Ahab imprisoned the prophet Micaiah for predicting his demise (1 Kings 22). As foretold, Ahab was fatally wounded by a stray arrow and died. Similarly, King Henri disregarded a prophecy of the seer Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus), then the reincarnate Micaiah, and was mortally wounded in a joust when a combatant's lance splintered and pierced his golden helmet, penetrating his head through an eye. A splinter wounded him in the throat. Henry suffered in cruel agony for several days before he died — precisely as predicted. ‘The young lion will overcome the older one, on a field of battle in single combat: He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage, one of two wounds, then he dies a cruel death’ — Nostradamus, Century 1:35
Clairvoyance
— accuracies and anomalies
“True clairvoyance rests, not in your ability to see things beyond the range of human vision, but rather in your ability to understand that which you see.”
René Magritte's La Clairvoyance (1936) is a remarkable self-portrait of the artist as a 'visionary' revealing unseen relationships between objects and subjects. The absence of any visual correspondence between the egg and the bird does not deny their intrinsic or indelible connection. We all know the two are one, if not simultaneously, but well then in essence. As with clairvoyance, we understand what we see here: an oil painting depicting our life's potential in different phases. Naturally, this is only one interpretation. Your interpretation may differ from ours.
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So, to begin, not all clairvoyants see things the same way or share the same views. Nor do they necessarily understand why their insights differ. To illustrate this we'll make use of a renowned example — the case of Nero Redivivus — and compare four recent past-life identifications by Rudolf Steiner, Edgar Cayce, Kevin Ryerson and Laurence Oliver. This isn't about who is right or whose method works best but, rather, what their findings may reveal to us about reincarnational vectors and karmic trajectories — including oversouls, conjoint incarnations, even imprinting. These findings also provide insight into the workings of their spirit guides or tutelary spirits.
The names of these entities derive from those used to identify them in Atlantean-Egyptian times — namely Aristonaiu, Akashu, Ahtun Re, El Ochre — and are shown here as a generic visage since individual portraits have not come down to us. Unlike other paired portraits on this site, the top row does not necessarily represent past incarnations of the men portrayed below.
According to Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925), Nero returned as Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. This identification was prompted by Steiner's professor, Karl Julius Schröer, two days after the Prince's untimely death in 1889, aged 30. It is not clear if Steiner was aware of the family's initial cover-up of 'heart-failure' or if, based on other reports, he concluded it had been a 'murder-suicide pact'. The prince and his 17-year-old mistress were found together, both shot, in the bedroom of the imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling. How much Schröer and Steiner knew within 48 hours is uncertain, but they would certainly have realised the dynastic crisis this incident now caused. Plus Nero also committed suicide at 30. All the concomitant scandal and intrigue, the imperial secrecy and conspiratorial politics, was enough to fire Steiner's imagination.
Twenty years later Steiner recalled how difficult and time-consuming his clairvoyant investigation of the incident had proven to be: "I was continually being diverted by the fact that all sorts of people — you may believe it or not — were claiming with fanatical insistence that they themselves had been Nero! So it was a matter, first of all, of combating the subjective force emanating from these alleged reborn Neroes.” (GA 236, Karmic Relationships, Volume II: Lecture V, 27 April 1924)
Steiner had come close to discovering the truth. The soul of Crown Prince Rudolf was indeed among the 'reborn Neroes' who then appeared in the empire claiming Nero was still alive, and that he would return to take back his throne in Rome. Thus was born the legend of Nero Redivivus which persisted for centuries and was linked to the return of the Antichrist. However, we have since learnt that Prince Rudolf was a Nero-imposter called Terentius Maximus. (El Ochre, 14 February 2018)
Curiously, Steiner also described Nero as an Initiate of the pre-Christian Mysteries:
“The Emperors who were fully initiated into the secrets of the Mysteries were Caligula, and later, Nero. The fact that Initiates such as Caligula and Nero could acquire knowledge of the Mysteries by force is one of the enigmas of history." Imagine the state of mind, Steiner continues, among those who realised what it signified; namely, that the future spiritual well-being of humanity would be in the hands of godlike Caesars. Furthermore, he adds, their enforced initiation did not prepare them properly as emperors and thus their judgments failed to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, innocence from guilt. (GA 275, Building Stones for Understanding the Mystery of Golgotha, Lecture V, 27 March 1917)
In turn Edgar Cayce (1877 – 1945) identified an ex-coal miner, paralysed from the neck down after a car accident, as another reincarnation of Nero. In 1926, after four years without effective treatment, the man sought help for a permanent cure. He bargained a thousand dollars, all or nothing, should Cayce's method succeed. His name is recorded as Fred Argabrite and his reading, unsolicited in part, ended with Cayce softly voicing: 'This is Nero'.
For whatever reason, Argabrite did not undertake the advised spinal surgery and spent his last eighteen years dependent on Christian charity. This experience, it was said afterwards, "enabled him to overcome much of the bad karma incurred when, as Nero, he so relentlessly persecuted the Christians". (Julia Church, The Psychic Readings of Edgar Cayce, published in The Rosicrucian Digest, June 1949)
According to Cayce, one of the Christians who cared for Argabrite had previously been an accomplice or a companion of Nero. Her name is noted as Ethel D Corzine. Their life experiences in America did much to correct their karmic debt.
Cayce spoke about two other women from Nero’s household; one was “a member from the royal family”, the other “a noblewoman of the royal court". Both enjoyed watching the persecution of Christian captives in the Arena. The same two women appealed to Cayce for medical help; the former paralysed by polio and the latter suffering from tuberculosis of the hip. (Lucy Crawford, Edgar Cayce Past Lives and Karmic Connections, 31 July 2021)
A hundred years after the Nero-identifications by Steiner (1924) and Cayce (1926), two startling disclosures independently concurr that the soul once known as Nero is reincarnate today as Donald Trump. Once again the identity of Nero is linked to a contemporary incarnation.
Trance channel Kevin Ryerson (1953 – ), via his primary spirit guide Ahtun Re, confirmed the new Nero /Trump connection. This occurred during a joint Reincarnation Research session with Walter Semkiw in 2018. By then Trump was well into his first term as US President.
Already back in 2015, after Trump first announced his candidacy for US President, the clairaudient Laurence Oliver (1960 – ) asked about this soul's previous lives. Oliver's spiritual kith and kin, El Ochre, presented him with the missing piece to the puzzle. Oliver already knew that Nero had returned as Mussolini. He now learnt that Mussolini had, in turn, reappeared as Trump.
Needless to say, the Nero /Mussolin /Trump disclosure has not landed well among Anthroposophists since it disrupts their belief in only one incarnation per millennia. Plus, or course, it dislodges Steiner's identification of Crown Prince Rudolf as Nero. In response to our concerns when preparing this post, El Ochre weighed in to clarify, confirm and correct several issues. We repeat his counsel here in full:
"Again it must be said that we have no wish to create controversy or enter into disputes. Discrepancies exist among the claims of almost all sources purported to be esoteric — some genuine but many spurious. Some can be reconciled by looking more closely into the intricacies of reincarnational vectors [conjoint incarnations, oversouling, imprinting] since such considerations can sometimes account for apparently disparate presentations of reincarnational identifications between different paradigms, but not always. Sometimes there are simply mistakes. Mistakes can be innocent simply because the channels are not infallible though well-meaning. Mistakes can also be mischievous, where there is interference from malevolent entities.
Steiner, as we have seen, was not infallible and could be mistaken as he was prone to what we have called his overactive imagination. Cayce too was not infallible. There was sometimes distortion from his own subconscious mind. This is particularly evident in his readings wherein he identified a large number of his subjects as reincarnations of Biblical characters.
Cayce was well-versed in the Bible, having read it cover to cover continuously throughout his life, which conditioned his mind to see Biblical characters in too many of his readings. His subjects often conformed to certain types approximating the archetypal templates of Biblical figures, which influenced his identifications.
And even Cayce was sometimes beset by malevolent interference. I will refer to one example. There are communications purportedly from an entity which claimed to be Michael, ostensibly the Biblical archangel, a rather aggressive and wrathful spirit. There is in any case no such actual entity as the archangel Michael, as we have previously explained."
"Nevertheless, Cayce was a source of many valuable revelations in the broader esoteric paradigm and especially concerning reincarnation. He was oversouled by the Dhuman-Adamic entity Akashu, the name by which he was first known in Atlantis — and its resonance with the word akasha is because of his then renowned ability to read the akashic record. The akasha is the all-preserving memory of the universal mind. The term originated in Atlantis and passed into the Sanskrit dialects of Iran and India.
Now Cayce's identification of a subject as Nero might seem discrepant in the light of our disclosures about Nero, but in this instance it is once again simply a case of oversouling. This is the soul that was oversouled (we would even say possessed) by the demonic Belilul as Nero. The demonic divine sparks seldom incarnate from birth, but rather choose to take possession of a willing host at some stage of the incarnation.
This was the case with Hitler, for instance, a soul that willingly surrendered to possession by the demon Belzebul to become the Führer of the Nazi scourge. And so too with Nero. In this case the soul that was so possessed became penitent and chose to undergo the karma of rehabilitation through incarnations enduring suffering. Cayce encountered him in one of these penitent incarnations suffering paralysis and at the mercy of Christian charity. He also identified such penitent lives of other entities from Nero's time who had not been possessed by demonic entities necessarily, but who had turned away from the evil to which they had been induced by Nero and his machinations.
We have seen how misguided souls can turn even from extreme evil and rehabilitate themselves through lives of karmic penitence, as in the example of Jimmy Carter. Caligula had not been possessed by a demonic oversoul but had simply reached a critical point of spiritual madness due to too many lives spent in the misguided pursuit and abuse of power. But this soul awoke from its madness and became penitent, and willingly chose to endure the karmic consequences of its wrongdoing through many lives of suffering and servitude as a spiritual cleansing. Such karma must be embraced willingly. It is never a punishment inflicted on an unwilling soul."
El Ochre continues:
"The demonic souls, such as we have identified among the leaders of the hierarchy of evil — Theboliath, Muluk, Belzebul, Belilul and others — are all incorrigible, and have long reached the point of no return. They will never repent. They will never embrace penitence. Hence there is no point to karmic punishment. Instead, they are used by the Cherubim under the command of the viceroy Melchizedek (in our view the true entity behind the Biblical allusion to the archangel Michael) and his chief lieutenant Saturn as agents of trial and tribulation at certain times of testing in accordance with world karma.
As such they serve a useful purpose, but their personal fate is to be extinguished at the close of the cosmic dispensation. This too is not a punishment but a mercy, for although the irredeemable soul is permanently extinguished, its essence (atman) is eternal and will be planted anew as a soul-seed in a new cosmic dispensation to begin afresh with a clean slate, as it were, its spiritual evolution towards ultimate self-realization and at-one-ment with the All-One. On this we have discoursed before."
"It remains to be said that there are many so-called channels, past and present, and many diverse claims emanating from them. It is not for us to pass judgement upon them, nor to endorse nor condemn any of them. But we would counsel caution. Many are inauthentic, and even amongst the more authentic ones there are mistakes. Many are still susceptible to malign or at least mischievous interference, although progress has been made in this regard at this time of the dawning of the Aquarian age of enlightenment.
We guard our channel against mistakes and interference of this kind to a degree hitherto unprecedented. Hence we assert the reliability of our disclosures, even though we would not go as far as to claim infallibility." (20 July 2025)
Lastly, to conclude, we return to Magritte and a photograph taken of him looking at an egg while painting himself looking at that same egg. This 'second reflection' is not only amusing but also instructive since we, likewise, have viewed ourselves reviewing the same past lives as others. What appears to some as the soul is seen by others as a daimon or a demonic entity.
Such discrepancies have to do with perspective and paradigm. As the diagrams below show, truth is a matter of perspective. While some see circles or lines, others may see only the word TRUTH. Not all interpretations are correct. Errors can occur. None of us are infallible.
