Here's an
interview with May Sinclair, PhD! View my review of her book In the Between
here.
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Q. What
inspired you to write a novel on reincarnation?
A. I’ve been attracted to the concept of
reincarnation for a long as I can remember.
Especially, after I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the concept
of getting to choose our parents is described.
It was all quite intriguing. Then
when I was invited to join a writers’ group and they were all writing fiction,
I decided to put aside the non-fiction book I was then working on for a while
to write a metaphysical fantasy. Of
course, I also used prior research from other books I’d written, and my
personal experiences, along with my imagination, to develop the story.
Q. What made
you decide on those specific places and time periods?
A. Conversations with various people
over the years suggested some places and periods of time that fit into the
overall story. My husband and I used to
sit in our kitchen enjoying ourselves as we made up past-life stories about the
two of us and people we know.
My real sister, just like my sister in the book, believed she was buried alive
in Egypt and she told me that was why she was claustrophobic. One of my dearest friends told me she felt
she lived in Greece and could picture herself looking out from a set of wide
steps to view a columned Greek temple.
Q. How did
you come up with the character of Starry and her traits?
A. Now that is both psychological and
metaphysical. Psychologically, I, like
most people, hear voices in my head that tell me what I “should” do. Things like: hurry up, you can’t have fun
until the work is done, you won’t succeed unless you to this or that. Those voices come from the pieces of me that
I developed throughout my life to cope with it.
The core of metaphysics indicates there is more to us than our five
senses: hearing, speaking, seeing, smelling, and touching, while many religions
and philosophies teach that a soul is placed within a physical body to learn—to
increase consciousness.
The Starry character is a creation from those parts of my concept of soul that
is both a goad to cope and to evolve consciousness. She is a blend of instincts that are often
automatic and self-protective along with the sense there is something greater than
can be comprehended with only five senses alone. Starry is joyous. She knows life is infinite and if one choice
doesn’t turn out well, there are many more opportunities to choose from again
and again. Still, Starry’s character
flaw is that she’s not using the emotional element in the best way to feel
compassion and to cooperate with her physical aspect to grow more easily. Her detachment is necessary yet stressful for
evolution of the complete soul.
Q. Who do
you think you were in a prior life?
A. At one point my life, I experimented
with Past-life regression. Of course,
all of it could be from my imagination, but I saw myself during one of the
regressions with other young women in the Ambassador’s wing of the palace of
Versailles. I used that as a basis for
the parts of the book that took place in Spain, England, France, and the
Netherlands. In another of those
regressions I saw myself in a harem where a man (my real husband in this life)
was mutilated for some misdeed that could have been attributed to me. That was a terrible experience and I remember
telling my husband after I came out of the trace state that it wasn’t my
fault. He looked at me as though I was
nuts and then we laughed about it.
Q. How much research did it take to write as
true to the time periods as possible?
A. The amount of time was lessened because I was
able to use my prior research about the sacred marriage rites from Mesopotamia,
the medical practices used to produce a son in ancient Greece, and how the throne
mysticism of the Kabalah affected temple worship in Jerusalem from another
non-fiction book I wrote many years ago: Infamous Eve, A History.
The second book
in this series, The Beginning Begins, continues the progression of the soul
(two souls rather than one), but it also weaves into the story the mystery
surrounding the scrolls that were hidden, along with the Urim and Thummim that
were said to be used to get answers to questions from God—by Salome Alexandra
in Jerusalem—in this book.
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Thanks
to May Sinclair for answering all my questions! The link to my review of her
book is posted above. It's an amazing book and it's an interesting concept so
please go check it out!
