A PERSONAL STORY
This is the last entry in my small portfolio of reincarnation experiences for which I have direct experience correlated with some kind of paranormal (aka “psychic”) validation. In June 1993, I embarked on a three-week trip to the State of Israel. The first two weeks were spent touring with a group on a preplanned itinerary of sightseeing, recreational outings, and lectures and viewings, followed by a week on my own, first with a couple of friends visiting more of the Galilee and then by myself in a rental car.
One of my favorite places in the country is the city of Tiberias, which sits on the southwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee (aka “the Kinneret”). This large freshwater lake figures prominently in the Bible and is very picturesque, its shoreline once shared by both Israel and Syria. Post the 1967 Six Day War and Israel’s later annexation of the Golan Heights, this body of water is wholly contained within the geographic borders of Israel. Swimming in its water is palpably refreshing, which I did on several occasions to my everlasting delight. The water is clean and crystal clear, and it felt very fresh on my body’s skin.
When I left Tiberias, I travelled the two-lane highway that leads south through Israel into Samaria (aka Shomron or “the West Bank”) to Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, for my bus ride and airflight home. I had ample time to make the return drive, and so I drove at a leisurely pace. It was in the later afternoon, the sun shining brightly on a clear-sky day, when I spied a small, white roadside sign on a pole with an arrow end pointing to the right, about 12 miles south of Tiberias. It simply read “Belvoir”. My knowledge of the French language was sufficient for me to recall that this literally meant “beautiful to see.” Curious, I made the right turn and snaked my way up a hilly incline till I reached a small guardhouse hut on the other side of a rise in the terrain. A man standing in it sold me a ticket and waved me into the open parking area behind him. At 4:00 PM in the afternoon that day, I was the only person visiting whatever this site was.
Belvoir was a Crusader fort that was erected to protect this frontier of the Holy Land against the Muslim invaders under Salah ad-Din (aka Saladin) in the 12th century CE. All that remained in 1993 were stone walls and concentric embankments with many interior partitions made of the same material. Mostly sand but some green grass underlay my feet both inside and outside of the many structures. No explanatory signs were then in evidence about anything, and I do not specifically recall receiving a brochure at the entrance that offered any real details concerning Belvoir’s history or significance.
Alone in these ruins that bright summer day under a lowering sun, I wandered amongst all of the walls and structures in quiet awe. It had obviously been quite a construction in its time, and the ambient setting was peaceful and picturesque, looking as it did out over the Jordan River Valley about 1,600 feet below.
Inside the most interior wall, I viewed smaller areas that been partitioned, their floors barren of any structure or accoutrement. However, upon regarding them, I began “remembering” that it was in these discrete rooms where “we” had variously stored our foodstuffs; our swords and shields, lances, and battle armor; our water supplies, and where “we” had stabled our horses. Excuse me, We? It was then that I “remembered” being there, being a part of those who had garrisoned this fort. Climbing up onto the top of the east-facing outer wall, I gazed out over the beautifully serene river valley below, the setting sun casting magnificent shadows onto the hills in Syria across the river. Then, hearing the year “1200” in my mind, I “recalled” again that I had been there before, that I had been a knight of some kind, and that we had all been conquered by the Muslims at some point. In a gesture of mercy, the victors had allowed the knights to take their individual horses and go home (presumably to Europe via Jerusalem), but the common soldiers (whoever and however many they were) were ritually slaughtered.
Whoa! Was all this “remembering” merely a figment of my imagination, just an overly lurid daytime reverie? There was no way to tell that I could figure. And, how to validate such active imaginings?
Walking among the ruins some more, I left there much later, the sun then being hidden behind the hills to the west but not quite dusk, noting that the ticket-giver had vacated his hut for the day, nowhere to be seen. I drove back to Jerusalem in a somber mood, glad for the time spent in, on, and around the stonework of Belvoir, but still somewhat unsettled by the strength of my apparent recalls. I believed in the reality of reincarnation by that time, having had some vivid past-life regressions by the hand of a skilled regressionist and Ph.D. psychologist who was then the training director for the Association for Past Life Research and Therapies (APRT, later known as IARRT). This was not the first time that I had experienced “direct knowings” of past events and other things, but this was an epoch and train of events I was only superficially familiar with.
Today, the online Wikipedia website provides a concise history:
The Knights Hospitaller purchased the site from Velos, a French nobleman, in 1168. As soon as the Knights Hospitaller purchased the land, they began construction of [the] castle. While Gilbert of Assailly was Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller, the order gained around thirteen new castles, among which Belvoir was the most important. The castle of Belvoir served as a major obstacle to the Muslim goal of invading the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem from the east. It withstood an attack by Muslim forces in 1180. During the campaign of 1182, the Battle of Belvoir Castle was fought nearby between King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem and Saladin.
Following Saladin’s victory over the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin [on 4 July 1187], Belvoir was besieged. The siege lasted a year and a half, until the defenders surrendered on 5 January 1189. An Arab governor occupied it until 1219 when the Ayyubid ruler in Damascus had it slighted. In 1241 Belvoir was ceded to the Franks, who controlled it until 1263.
Another Wikipedia entry provides an explanation of the Knights Hospitaller. In pertinent part, the “Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem” (aka the Knights Hospitaller) was a medieval Roman Catholic military religious order that arose in the early 12th century CE under its own papal charter. Originally formed to administer a hospital in Jerusalem that cared for sick and injured pilgrims to the Holy Land, and headquartered there until 1291, it became charged with the care and defense of the Holy Land after the success of the First Crusade.
That the Muslims under Salah ad-Din may have spared the lives of at least some of the Christian defenders of Belvoir is evidenced by this Wikipedia entry for the Battle of Hattin, which had concluded with the Muslims’ victory just a year and a half earlier:
The Crusader king, Guy of Lusignan, was taken to Damascus as a prisoner and granted release in 1188, while the other noble captives were eventually ransomed.
After executing Raynald of Chatillon, Saladin ordered that the other captive barons be spared and treated humanely. All 200 of the Templar and Hospitaller Knights taken prisoner were executed on Saladin’s orders, with the exception of the Grand Master of the Temple. The executions were by decapitation. . . .
Captured turcopoles (locally recruited mounted archers employed by the Crusader states) were also executed on Saladin’s orders. Though the prisoners claimed to be Christians by heritage, Saladin believed the turcopoles to be Christian converts from Islam, which was only punishable by death under the form of Islamic jurisprudence followed by the Ayyubid state. Modern historians have corroborated Saladin’s belief that the turcopoles in the Ayyubid–Crusader wars were mostly recruited from converted Turks and Arabs.
The rest of the captured knights and soldiers were sold into slavery, and one was reportedly bought in Damascus in exchange for some sandals. The high-ranking Frankish barons captured were held in Damascus and treated well. Some of Saladin’s men left the army after the battle, taking lower-ranking Frankish prisoners with them as slaves.
My own at-that-time untutored “memories” of Belvoir circa 1188-89 only sparingly coincide with the history described above, even if not totally at variance with it. But, more importantly, without some reasonable form of independent validation, all of these recollections could easily be attributed to mere fanciful mental meandering on my part. Just my imagination run amok on a quiet summer afternoon in an ancient foreign land with a long and storied political and religious history. I was thus left not knowing what, if anything, may have been true for a long time.
Flash forward to December 2007: I had a reading with a friend of mine who has been training to be a psychic with a company called Psychic Horizons located in Boulder, Colorado. Denise G. was a successful businesswoman with Xerox who had demonstrated a natural ability in reading people who sat with her, detailing significant events and people in their lives with an uncanny accuracy. That day, she read me “blind”, that is, without any frontloading by me of any details of my current life or issues of concern. When I asked her about any past lives of mine that she could discern, she replied as follows:
It appears that you had a life as a Templar knight during the time of the Crusades. Your fort was captured by the Muslims, but your life was spared. You returned to Europe a broken man, likely to Germany, and you died there very sad and lonely.
And that was it. A stunningly clear confirmation, if again spare in the details.
Later, I related this episode to an older female friend, Pat L., who was also a long-time believer in reincarnation, she having had dreams and readings that seemingly indicated a past life as a female European royal who had been sentenced to death and was beheaded. She believed a former romantic partner in her current life had been her illicit paramour in that earlier life, and that I had signed the death warrant in some official capacity that authorized her decapitation. For myself, I had no memory then or afterwards of any such act or such a life, so that remains an unsolvable mystery at this time. However, she also related that she had seen me in a dream as a Templar knight in another life, signified as such by a tunic I was wearing with a red Maltese cross emblazoned on it. More she could not say.
So, what does all of the foregoing prove? It is hard to assert that these two anecdotes validate beyond a reasonable doubt that I lived an earlier incarnation as a medieval Templar or Hospitaller or Teutonic knight and served in the Holy Land defending a Crusader fort (“castle”) against a massive Muslim army bent on reclaiming it for Islam. Still, the close correlation between these psychical anecdotes and my original ruminations while walking the site of Belvoir castle in June 1993 is inescapable. Given my earlier experiences with reincarnation and their independent-source validations, all as detailed in earlier posts I have made to this blog, it seems likely that I did experience a lifetime in some medieval military order’s service to Christ and Christendom against Salah ad-Din’s Muslims in what is today the modern State of Israel. All I can think to say is, Praise Christ I survived the siege of Belvoir!