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fascinated with the idea that he had been here before and would be back again. Mom wasn’t buying any of it. She believed that we have only one life to live, and we’d better make the best of it. When she tried to have civilized discussions with him about her views on these topics, they went nowhere. At this point in his path, his views were so far out that he was looking for agreement, not logic, and certainly not dissension.
    One evening, just at twilight, my father and I were sitting in near darkness. As we continued to talk, we must have looked like talking-head silhouettes shrouded in black. We could barely make each other out. He began explaining the concept of reincarnation, which I had never heard before. Suddenly my life seemed a little less solid. I began to feel completely transparent as I imagined the ghosts from my past lives surrounding me. The idea that this was not my only life really scared me. I didn’t want to have another life either as an Egyptian prince or as a high priest in Atlantis; I wanted this one. He laughed when I told him that I didn’t like this subject. The laugh made me uncomfortable. It was the kind of Vincent Price all-knowing laugh that implied, “You foolish young thing, you can fight this strange idea all you want, but one day you will succumb…”
    His curiosity about reincarnation naturally led him to the provocative mythology that surrounds the pyramids. Pop was especially fond of an out-of-print book from England on the secret science of the pyramids. This was not your average pyramid power book positing that the pyramids acted as landing cones on the runway for errant flying saucers but instead a scientific treatise the size of a large city’s yellow pages. The Great Pyramid: Its Divine Message, printed in 1925, featured complex fold-out tables with such dense titles as “Pyramid Noon Reflexions During the Winter Half of the Year,” providing the reader with numerous calculations of the sun’s altitude along with azimuth of apex ridge of “reflexion.” Another chart offered information on the “Precession of the Equinoxes—The Solar Year in 4699 BC.” “The Sed Hebs of Dynasties XVIII and XIX” detailed the genealogy of specific Egyptian dynasties.
    Pop read this book as seriously as if he were in Bible study class trying to gain enlightenment from the book of Revelation. He must have felt that this book contained some missing key that would illuminate his life. Over time he filled several notebooks with quotes and observations from the book. I would flip through the book and carefully pull out the diagrams of the secret chambers within the Great Pyramid and imagine becoming an archaeologist. In my father’s growing library, this book was like a magic carpet that transported me to other worlds.
    The prophetic messages supposedly contained in the Great Pyramid led my father to read about Edgar Cayce, the famous sleeping prophet. During the 1920s Cayce, a simple churchgoing man, was able to diagnose and provide remedies for various illnesses while asleep in a deep trance. Once he went into a trance, associates would bring by “patients” with difficult-to-treat ailments. While in this state, Cayce was able to contact some other form of intelligence that allowed him to prescribe numerous effective treatments. Clearly this was an ability that Pop wanted to acquire. Cayce became an early role model for my father, who was fascinated with the idea that you could obtain from invisible sources information that could heal people. Years later Pop became close friends with Edgar’s son, Hugh Lynn, who would visit and stay with us during the winter.
    As my father’s curiosity and explorations expanded, he would eventually follow a trail that led him to the theosophical teachings of Krishnamurti and Madame Blavatsky. Over time his affiliation with the Theosophical Society would grow, and he would become one