The Memorist

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As with the first novel in this series, The Reincarnationist, there is a lot of fact mixed in with this fictional tale.

The funeral ceremony, musical instruments, culture, customs and flora I describe in the ancient Indus Valley were carefully researched, and I’ve tried to keep true to what is known.

In almost all cases, dates and descriptions of historical events such as the Congress of Vienna are accurate, as are most of the locales of that beautiful city in which I’ve spent several months. There is indeed a complex underground world there, rife with tunnels and archaeological treasures. There are several subterranean thermal lakes in the area, though there is not one directly beneath the main music hall, as far as anyone knows. The Heart Vault, the Dorotheum, the museums, Beethoven’s homes, the Central Cemetery and Steinhof hospital are all real. Sadly, so is the information about the Nazi experiments done there and the extent to which these experiments were still used and available to researchers.

As far as I know, the Memorist Society doesn’t exist, but there were many secret societies in Austria that broke off from the Freemasons-some of which might still be functional.

There is no Phoenix Foundation. The work done there was, however, inspired by the work done at the University of Virginia Medical Center by the real-life Dr. Ian Stevenson, who studied children with past life memories for over thirty years. Dr. Bruce Greyson and Dr. Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist, continue Ian Stevenson’s work today. (These fine doctors are not to be blamed for any of Dr. Malachai Samuels’ personality defects.)

There is fascinating research into binaural beats, some of which suggests these tones could offer a portal to past life memories. Sacred music, chanting and repetitive sounds have already been proven to affect the mind and change our perceptions.

The Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, along with Sir William Jones in England and Silvestre de Sacy in France, was responsible for the great dissemination of Eastern knowledge in late eighteenth-century Europe. In those early days of the Age of Enlightenment the study of Eastern philosophy-including reincarnation-became very popular. Ludwig van Beethoven was in fact among those interested in these doctrines. His own notebooks contain a number of passages from Bhagavad-Gita, as well as a quote from William Jones’s “Hymn to Narayena”: “We know this only, that we nothing know.”