Past lives and daimons

Children who remember past lives [ FT405:25] may be explained most simply by reincarnation, but also by temporary displacement of a child’s consciousness by another entity or recurring hallucinations mingled with clairvoyance and telepathy. In Beyond the Occult, Colin Wilson summarises the case of a girl who volunteered to let a dead girl take over her body for a few months, so this is plausible. It is also possible another entity takes over the child’s body and is displaced by the growing consciousness of the child and its ability to eject the outsider.

• The list of conspiracies involving Prince Phillip [ FT406:18] reminded me that around 2018 I saw it stated on social media that Prince Philip had died and was being preserved on ice till the announcement of his death was politically convenient. I forget if the same posters claimed the Queen had also died and been replaced by a lookalike. Further down page 18 the reported involvement of a ‘Mr Janus’ led me to speculate whether, if asked, he would have said his first name was Hugh.

• Merrily Harpur’s article on ABCs [ FT406:32-36] started me thinking of the MIB (Men in Black) as daimons. I then remembered a report in an early issue of FT about contact with a MIB who claimed to be from the Uranus Peanut Company. Mr Janus and this snippet make me feel I am onto something fundamental, but may also be on the verge of getting sucked into a rabbit hole. I wondered what evidence we have that Prince Philip or the rest of the royal family ever existed. A few days later I saw an advertisement of a lecture by an academic who claims to prove the world is not real, at which point I heard the Beatles singing “Lucy in the Sky With Daimons” inside my head followed by “Nothing is real” from “Strawberry Fields”. I have no desire to turn into a walrus.

Alex Kashko

Edinburgh