(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Ann Merivale takes us on a very personal and spiritual journey through time in her latest book Woman Through the Ages. The author is a "Deep Memory Process" therapist and claims she can travel back to past lives while awake. It was her former teacher, Roger Woolger (1944–2011), a Jungian psychotherapist, who developed regression therapy in his practice. He believed that the patients could most easily come to terms with their recurring problems by reliving traumas from previous lives.
Woman Through the Ages follows a number of previous books Merivale has written about reincarnation, but she writes that this time "I promised myself that I would cover every possible aspect of being a woman". She takes us through several historical eras when she visiting their previous lives from prehistoric times up to our own century, which means that the book will also be well over 700 pages long.
The predefined roles
Merivale also switches roles and genders. Sometimes she lives as a victim, while in other lives she can be a ruthless "Thatcher-like" ruler, as she puts it. She is a healer in Atlantis, an orphan in Persia, a martyr and later a prostitute in Ravenna, a Muslim in Alexandria and a nun in Burgundy, to name a few lives. According to the author's re-experiences, we get the impression that women were more equal to men before monotheism became dominant. For example, we learn that Muslim women are far more oppressed today than they were in previous centuries. They lived more freely with a more liberal sexual attitude in ancient Egypt than most Western women do in our modern society. The further back in history she travels before the time of Christ, the more respected she is as a woman and, according to herself, freer to express her true self.
The author tries to place his personal experiences from past lives in a larger historical and cultural context.
But overall, women have suffered under patriarchy throughout history. Merivale highlights how women do not get to express their true identity because of the predefined roles society has imposed on the sexes. After each time journey, a chapter follows with her reflection on the historical circumstances of the time and area she has visited. In this way, she tries to put her personal experiences from previous lives in a larger historical and cultural context. It's an ambitious move that would perhaps work effectively in a lecture, but in book form it feels shallow when the primary sources she refers to are BBC documentaries and Google searches. For me, her personal soul journeys are far more interesting to read than her attempts to weave them into a historical perspective and all the considerations she makes about this.
A happy, open and confident lady
With each personal trauma the author relives, she becomes richer in her understanding of the person she is today. As she mentions in the introduction, these experiences have helped her grow from her unhappy childhood, where she was very mute and withdrawn, to become a contented, open and confident lady in her older days. In each life she describes from the past, new aspects of her personality emerge. Society and the roles she is assigned shape her personality. At the same time, her essential character, or soul, if you will, is the same from life to life.
Orlando discovers that he is in a woman's body.
This makes me think of Virginia Woolf's literary masterpiece Orlando (1928), where the main character also lives a life through several centuries. Orlando is a satire of British society, but on a deeper level it deals with important questions of gender and identity. The book opens with Orlando as a young nobleman from 1500th century England. One century later, Orlando finds himself in Constantinople, where he is an important ambassador. It is here that one day he wakes up from a deep sleep and discovers that he is now in a woman's body. The story is written as an internal monologue, and with humor and irony, Orlando reveals the absurd roles women were given throughout the 1800th and 1900th centuries. In a stream of thoughts, Orlando summarizes his experiences from the last century in the book's closing chapter and realizes that the perception of time is purely subjective. Woolf also rejects the assumption that it is gender that defines a person's character. In this sense, I see parallels in Orlando og Woman Through the Ages, where both authors arrive at some of the same points, but the similarities end there. The difference is primarily that one is a poetic masterpiece in world literature, while the other tries to present itself as a professional book where the spiritual and the historical are mixed together.
