I have had this thought more than once, and it seems to be at least tangentially related to the theory expressed above about death ratios and how so many past life experiences are not mathematically possible, etc, so allow me to express it here...

I mentioned in an earlier post to this thread that I believe one of my past lives saw some involvement in the medieval or perhaps Colonial witch trials. Since my initial assumption after having these impressions was that, of course! I must have been a witch, a martyr, a misunderstood village healer murdered by my vigilante neighbors!, it did not occur to me until years later, having met a lot more modern witches who also profess to have been persecuted witches in past lives, that I may be, ahem, wrong...

My persistent and often vivid memories and impressions (if indeed they are of past lives and not merely my own quite facile imagination) may not have been those of the victims; they may have been induced by guilt and vicarious horror experienced by those who did the actual accusing, torturing, hanging, burning, raping, etc.

This would make greater karmic sense, too, at least in my case since I am an activist with a group that helps people of alternative religious beliefs fight discrimination...it is said that we are given the lessons we most need to learn in this life to move forward. For example, a ruthless warrior of many lifetimes will enter an incarnation where he/she will repeatedly encounter anger and aggression and must learn to channel it appropriately.

Since most cultures do not currently parctice the old-fashioned, ritualized manner of human sacrfice, it can be argued that we still do practice huamn sacrifice on our streets and in our homes, that it is simply devoid of ritual significance or purpose...that in our mindless violence we are not appeasing the gods, but something in ourselves, we know not what...

(There is an interesting theory that many contemporary victims of childhood sexual abuse are in fact on this "warrrior path" and their healing is directly tied to their ability to overcome directionless anger...)

Stay with me, now...

So, after reading this thread the last few days, I have had the following thought as well:

That the reason there are so many people claiming to have been Cleopatra or Shakespeare or Catherine the Great or Crispus Attucks or the Marquis de Sade or King Arthur (I met one such in the UK and he is a true nutter and a lot of fun), is that, in the past as today, cults of celebrity are built up around heroic or charismatic personages.

Just think of all the songs and poems dedicated to Bonny Prince Charlie, such that he is a mythic figure not just in Scotland but also in Ireland...

Just as your average person in America knows way more than they should about Madonna's sex life (okay, we can blame her for that) or Robert Downey Jr's drug problem, so, too, people in earlier eras must have identified with their heroes and heroines. Except that, minus TV and the Internet and CDs and tabloids, this form of worship did in fact take the form of a more personalized, cult-like devotion: songs, poems, ballads, legends, myths...such that, even as we sing before the mirror into our hairbrush and dance about in our underwear pretending, perhaps, to be Madonna for a few minutes...our ancestors had similar fantasies and vicarious thoughts about their celebrities...

So, when in fact we think we are a reincarnation of Tutenkamen or Isodora Duncan or Nijinsky or Confucius or Aristotle, what we may not realize is, we are a reincarnation of one of their groupies or sycophants...

thoughts???