Who were you in a past life?

According to the test I completed online, my previous birth was around 1875 in Greece.

The other day, I was reading people’s stories about former lives online. I was baffled by the fascinating stories regarding the past lives of ordinary people on the web.

There were several former soldiers who served in Alexander the Great's army. One Mayan priest who lived during the 1200s still managed to recall details of human sacrifices. Someone swore having been the son of an Egyptian Pharaoh’s treasurer, drowned in the Nile by a crocodile.

The stories described dramatic experiences from concentration camps, sea battles during the ages of now lost empires, civil wars and death sentences on the bonfire due to forbidden love. Some know for a fact that they now have a birthmark right where a bullet hit them in a former life.

Once, a close friend of mine went to an event where a clairvoyant revealed the participators' astral histories. My friend had worked as a tobacco picker in a Dutch colony during the 1600s. The hardships of that profession caused the back pains experienced in his current incarnation.

Temporal, spatial and psychological distance is characteristic of past lives. Many people have even lived in the mythical island of Atlantis. Surprisingly many relate to exceptional, great historical men, such as Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan.

I completed a test online. According to the test, my previous birth was around 1875 in Greece. I was a teacher, a mathematician or a geologist. I had a curious personality and I was a keen follower of new trends in the arts, music and cooking.

A geologist who cooks. Well, that was a disappointment!

This made me wonder, how come the lives of so many others were so fascinating.

How come no-one had wasted their past lives as ugly, dumb and shy housemaids in, say, Juupajoki? Or as a lazy farmhand from Humppila whose main attraction was organising spitting competitions with his boorish friends every night? How come not a single soul admitted to having been the lacklustre secretary for a family lawyer who lived a poor and uneventful life, finally dying of a hernia without anybody actually noticing?

Or is it that only really fascinating lives leave traces in our memories?

Riku Korhonen
Riku Korhonen is an author from Turku who is currently working on his fifth book.