Posts on novel The Anathemas: composition, questions, comments
So here I was with a mystery that went back millennia and touched the lives and minds of half the world’s population. Why not just write the facts and let the reader come to his own conclusion? Why a novel?
Who would not trade in the dismal declaration, Remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return! for a destiny more suited to man’s nobler aspirations? From “What if reincarnation?” it is a natural leap, at least theoretically, to “Why not reincarnation?”
A wannabe writer in my early 20’s, I never imagined that typing out a couple of one-page character sketches about this imperial pair would start a process, and not merely a writing project, that would span decades before completion. Their story was history and thus worthy of a self-defined scholar, but with a twist that defied the status quo enough to support my recently adopted unorthodoxy.
In 1879, Richard Strawn, a Civil War medic disowned by his fellow Quakers, has to come to terms with his daughter Jennifer’s conviction that she was once a fabulous queen and he a king, or concur with his wife, Lucinda, that the girl is hopelessly insane.
In 553 AD, Justinian I, the self-righteous ruler of the eastern half of the decaying Roman Empire, held Pope Vigilius prisoner until the church leader agreed to sign The Anathemas of the Council of Constantinople, previously convened by the emperor. Thus, with the stroke of the papal pen, anyone who believed in the ancient doctrine that souls existed before the present body’s birth or reincarnated after its death was excommunicated from the church, subject to persecution and eternally damned.
Is it possible that centuries ago we were robbed, personally and collectively, of our true history, our immortal heritage, and then force-fed a myth about a rigid and unforgiving spiritual destiny that enslaved us to the robbers?
In the few years since the publication of my first novel, The Anathemas, A Novel about Reincarnation and Restitution, I have been asked many question about the book: What’s does the title mean? How did you come up with the material in it? How much is history and how much fiction? Did you use material supposedly from your own past lives in the book? And many more.
