It started early in my childhood and in the beginning it caused me some concern. I didn´t know what I was experiencing and was afraid, that I was losing my mind. From what I had learned about this world, nobody else experienced such strange things. At least normal people didn´t.



From time to time I would be visited by memories from ancient times, memories, which had nothing to do with my life and which I didn´t understand. I think I might have always experienced it, but I don´t remember much from the first three or four years of my life.



One of the first of these memories, which I can recall and which came to me when I was a little girl, was that of a life far away, in another part of the world and very long time ago. I saw myself as a grown-up woman, sitting on the ground outside and doing some work. It was a very warm and very dry place, so different from my country. The landscape was like nothing I had seen before, there was little vegetation and both the ground and the houses were in warm, somewhat reddish colour. There were mountains there as well and they were the same reddish brown colour as everything else in the landscape. The houses were possibly carved into a mountainside or at least made of stone, they were the same color as the mountains. I was creating both decorative and useful objects, most of them very colourful, using strong colors and a lot of red. I worked with jewellery, pottery and textiles. I had a feeling, that those were really ancient times – thousands of years ago. The memories of similar cultures and from the same part of the world kept coming and going over several years. Later, when I began my education and started to learn about different parts of the world, I recognized the landscape from some regions in South America.



I didn´t say a word to anybody and I tried not to think about it, because I was afraid, that there was something wrong with me and that if I mentioned it, my mother would take me to a lunatic asylum. I didn´t understand what was happening, I couldn´t see how it was possible to live one life and have memories of another. I was just a child, I had never heard of anything like it and it didn´t make any sense. I hoped that if I didn´t think about it, it would go away. It didn´t.



The memories of ancient cultures from many different parts of the world kept coming and going. Sometimes I would have a long period of time without these experiences, but then there would come many, one after another, in short intervals.



Once, when I was a teenager, I came over a photo, which caught my attention, in some magazine or other. I didn´t know what the strange thing in the photo was, but I couldn´t take my eyes off it. I didn´t have any information about it, I didn´t know what it was called or where in the world it was. It looked like a huge, three armed candlestick, etched in the side of a sand dune. As I stared at that picture, I saw a chaotic scene taking place on that spot and I had a feeling of urgency, stress and fear. We were a big group of people – men, women and children, young and old, and we were running for our lives. At first we had the carved image to one side, as we were running alongside the hill, but then we made a turn, and had our backs to it. I don´t know who or what we were running from, but whatever it was, it wasn`t far behind us. There was a feeling, that time was running out and that we were in great danger. I couldn´t see any water in the picture, but in the scene I saw, when we turned our backs to the candlestick image, we had a big body of water, like a sea, in front of us and we were running towards it. We were to take that route, I think there was some kind of a boat or boats waiting for us there. Shortly before I reached the water, I turned back and looked at the image in the hillside. I was standing still, looking at it intensely for a long while, just as I was now looking at that photo. I knew I would never come back. As frantic people were running past me, colliding with me and each other, I kept staring at that image, as if I wanted to imprint it into my mind, so that it would stay with me for ever. In the end I turned away from it and continued running. I think I went on staring at that figure from the sea, for as long as it was visible to me, as we were slowly leaving it behind. For some reason, it was important to me to never forget it

El Candelabro – Peru
Credit: Bruno Girin

With time, the photo got lost somewhere and I didn´t think much about it. Without any information about it, it proved almost impossible to find it. More than twenty years later, in the era of Internet, I saw the candlestick image again, and found out where it was. It was called El Candelabro and the site was in Peru, but apart from that, there was no information about it. The mysterious figure is believed to have been created by the ancient Paracas culture more than two thousands years ago. Nobody knows, what it means or why it´s there.



As I was trying to find out more about it on the Internet, I saw many different pictures of it and discovered, that there indeed was a body of water there and that if one had had one´s back to the image, the water would be in front – just as I saw it in the “memory” in my teens.

El Candelabro – with the water visible
Credit and Copyright: JQ Jacobs, from jqjacobs.net

There would be other memories and many instances of this special feeling of familiarity and recognition, brought out by encounters with different cultures or by landscape pictures from different parts of the world, and sometimes – by who knows what. Ancient Greece and Rome, ancient China and Mongolia, Turkey and England, Chile and Peru, the Mayans and prehistoric Europe. Almost all of it from very old times (BC) and the most “recent” from around 900 AD. After that time – nothing. No memories.



Sometimes I would be haunted by strange patterns, which meant nothing to me, but which I couldn´t get out of my head. I would be drawing them mindlessly on pieces of paper or consciously looking for them among jewellery and artworks – rectangular spirals, chains of xs, others. I kept seeing them in my head, kept feeling, that they had some meaning, even though they were quite meaningless to me. Some of them had been with me since early in my childhood.



The sight of Mayan ruins is one of those things, that are likely to stir up memories. And it´s not as much the most famous buildings, like the Pyramid of Kukulkan in Chichen Itza, but rather the other ones, the ones which are less known, especially those, which are called “nunneries” and those, which have a similar look to them.

Uxmal – The Nunnery
Credit: from Flickr, Zynnel

One day, not so long ago, as I was looking at some photos of Mayan cities, which showed some details in the buildings, I discovered that two of those non-sensical patterns, which have been with me for many years, were repeated just about everywhere in Mayan ruins. They were the rectangular spirals and chains of xs. I still don´t know what they mean or if they even have any meaning at all.

Rectangular spirals in Uxmal, just like those, which I have pictured
for years. Some xs are also visible in the background.
But what do they mean?
Credit: from Flickr, Sean Henry

What are these memories? Are they even memories or are they something else altogether? What do they mean? Why do they keep coming back?

If I was a religious person and believed in reincarnation, I would have thought, that that was a proof, that what I believed in was true. Or perhaps I would have concluded, that my mind was trying to “recreate” what I believed in. But what does it all mean for somebody, who doesn´t believe anything – either way? What is it all about?



An agnostic wonders…

China – Mountain Landscape
Credit: from Flickr

Aida Gundersen
27 May 2008


Parts of the horoscope active:



Mercury conjunct Pluto
Moon square Pluto
Mnemosyne in the 8th house, conjunct the house cusp
The South Node in the 8th house
Memoria conjunct the Descendant
Aida conjunct Records in Aquarius, Retrograde