This page last revised:
THE ANATHEMASA Novel about
Reincarnation and Restitution
|
|
|
The Novel
The Seawall of From photo in
|
THE ANATHEMAS takes the religious controversy over reincarnation in early Christian history and weaves it into a currently relevant multiple-lifetime saga of love, betrayal and redemption. Compelling evidence that they had once been a dynamic
royal couple who fell from grace sets a 19th-century American father and
daughter on a reluctant hunt for their past identities: the 6th-century Roman
Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora. Richard and Jennifer Strawn
eventually travel to |
|
Why a
Novel about Past Lives?
The Emperor Justinian depicted in a mosaic in the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia,
|
Human curiosity about what
we might have been before we were born into the present lifetime and what
becomes of us after we die is insatiable but disturbing. Bypassing intellect,
our creeds offer only further mysteries in explanation, and our sciences
present theories extrapolated only from the residue of dust here before we
came and left behind when life leaves the body. That a person’s spirit
existed before this physical birth and survives the inevitable death of the
current body, perhaps to return to the physical plane again, has long been
suspected but rarely scrutinized at the depth the possibility deserves . It is our history—what has
been recorded of earlier events—that bounds our view of ourselves. What is
written about our past largely governs how we think in the present and thus
plan, and so create, the future. But the record, we often forget, is
necessarily incomplete. The Second Insight of
Robert Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy’s
advises one to re-view the history of the Christian Era to “grasp how your
everyday view of the world developed, how it was created by the reality of
the people who lived before you.” Akin to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, The Anathemas
takes this examination back to the First Millennium, during which the beliefs
of the Second Millennium were formulated. The Anathemas,
as a novel, is fiction—a creation—not entirely dependent on the records of
the past events depicted, even while it takes them into account. So, it is
free to fill in where the record falls short, to adjust where the record
seems in error, and to postulate the record’s impact—the advantage of
hindsight—on later and present thinking and behavior.
|
|
Victor E. Smith
The author in London 2005.
|
Vic Smith, The Anathemas’ author, considers himself a “generalist.” From his childhood on a back-to-the-land community in postwar Pennsylvania, to an adolescence cloistered in a religious seminary, into an adulthood that has ranged among careers as varied as personal counselor, school teacher, administrator, entrepreneur, computer maven, and corporate trainer, Vic remains astounded, somewhat stunned, by the wonders and terrors of human existence. Throughout the experience of personal accomplishment and failure and the observation of the rise and fall of various communities, he has felt compelled to keep the record—by writing. In addition to works published as an educator and business advisor, he has maintained, over decades, a journal, now thousands of pages long, tracking largely how thought—individual and common—impacts oneself, others, events, and even the overall environment. Vic prefers to enhance his studies of religion, philosophy and history, especially the classical and early Christian periods, with personal exploration and experiment. Beyond the written records, it is from the skies and seas, the statues and stones of the places that inspired critical human thought and events that he draws the deepest insight for his work. |
