I was skeptical upon hearing of a detailed chronicle of a man claiming to remember two past lives, but Maikranz’s research to verify facts from the work offered evidence meriting further investigation. The memoir, while interesting from a clinical perspective, takes a back seat in my mind to Evan’s detailed description of the Cognomina, the Zürich-based clandestine collective for individuals like Evan who remember many past lives. The principal utility in such a collective ostensibly being the ability to associate with similar members; Subjects with past life memories often skew toward dissociative disorders, depression, and misanthropy, associating with one another might mitigate these feelings. A second benefit would be the ability to bequeath acquired wealth to the collective, which the individual could claim as inherited property from him/herself upon a successful verification of claim to the peerage in a successive incarnation. Another interesting fact about the members of this collective is their adoption, in each new body, of a distinctive black tattoo on the back of the right hand. This tattoo was a key clue in pushing verification of his claim forward.

The first question posed by this book is do these individuals, and when I say individuals I mean their surviving personalities, exist as a collective group associating with one another lifetime after lifetime? My answer to this question, even before seeing the evidence of Mr. Evan Michaels, was yes and this is due to tangible (though scarce) evidence of the existence of the Cognomina back to the Middle Ages.

The first mention of a group resembling the Cognomina, tattooed hands, secrecy, non-adherence to traditional religious views, dates to the 15th century in the Konstanz Codex. Konrad Grünenberg’s largely heraldic work contains a brief but interesting reference to a Zurich-based guild with a distinctive crossed-flail tattoo ever present on the right hand. Additional reference comes in the early 19th century from Ludwig Meyer von Knonau, noted Swiss statesman and historian, in his Handbuch Geschichte der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft, which contains a short passage in his 1826 edition (the entry was curiously removed from the 1829 two-volume rerelease) about a secretive group of landed nobles in Zurich described as auslanders, who all carried the same crossed mark on their hands as if a brand.

If these were the only references to the Cognomina and their distinctive tattoo, the research might have stalled but for the recent discovery of individuals from this collective that have been seen by this researcher and staffers in the present day. Attempts to interview these subjects have been futile to this point as, per the text, they do prize their privacy above all things. A comprehensive examination of both historical references and contemporary sightings will be published in a forthcoming paper in 2009.