Guirdham, Arthur (1905-?)

British physician, psychiatrist, novelist, and writer on ESP and reincarnation. He also wrote under the pseudonym "Francis Eaglesfield." Born March 9, 1905, in Workington, Cumberland, England, he was educated at Keble College, Oxford University, and at Charing Cross Hospital, London (B.S., M.A., M.D.). He was senior consulting psychiatrist in the Bath Child Guidance Clinic, retiring from the National Health Service in 1968.

During his adult life Guirdham became increasingly interested in the history and teachings of the Cathar sect of thirteenth-century France. Cathar doctrine regarded the world as a kind of hell for rebellious angels, condemned to human existence until redeemed by unification with Christ. This doctrine was related to Gnosticism and Manichean teachings. The Cathars were persecuted and murdered by the established Church, culminating in their final destruction in 1243 at Montségur, France, when 200 Cathars were burned alive on one day.

Guirdham became convinced that he had been a Cathar priest named Roger de Grisolles in a former incarnation. In his book The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970) he describes the strange circumstances leading to this belief. He had a woman patient who was referred to him for treatment as a possible epileptic. She had vivid nightmares of life in the thirteenth century as a peasant girl in Toulouse, France, in a family that befriended a priest named Roger de Grisolles. Grisolles was arrested and died in prison; the girl was burned at the stake.

Extraordinarily enough Guirdham had also had similar nightmares since childhood, and when he met the patient, a Mrs. Smith, she revealed that he was the priest de Grisolles she had seen in her own dreams. Guirdham was sufficiently impressed with the factual aspects of her narrative to undertake research, in which he was able to confirm events and names in Smith's nightmares. There was a Roger de Grisolles who was murdered in 1242, and the details of the family who befriended him before betrayal were correct. In addition, Smith's own notes, written earlier, contained much background material on the Cathars not then known to scholars and only subsequently verified.

Guirdham also published The Lake and the Castle (1976), which surveys evidence of "far memory" from himself and a group of friends, suggesting various incarnations at different periods of history. His book The Great Heresy: The History and Beliefs of the Cathars (1977) compares his own scholarship on Cathar history with claimed evidence from discarnate entities. In addition to his fascinating works on Cathar reincarnation, Guirdham also published A Theory of Disease (1957), in which diseases are related to a realistic assessment of personality.

Sources:

Guirdham, Arthur. The Cathars and Reincarnation. Welling-borough, England: Turnstone Press, 1982.

——. Christ and Freud. London: Allen & Unwin, 1959.

——. Cosmic Factors in Disease. London: Duckworth, 1963.

——. A Foot in Both Worlds: A Doctor's Autobiography of Psychic Experience. [St. Helier] Jersey, Spearman, 1973.

——. The Great Heresy. St. Helier: Neville Spearman, 1977.

Wilson, Colin. Strange Powers. New York: Random House, 1973.