The Reincarnationist Papers

The Reincarnationist Papers is both a translated manuscript within the book’s framing account and the title D. Eric Maikranz says he gave it. Its three original notebooks were untitled and numbered; the title belongs to the compiled and translated work, not to the notebooks as he found them. That distinction sets the text between physical evidence and editorial reconstruction, while its narrative supplies the account of Evan Michaels and the Cognomina that Maikranz says he later sought to verify.

The Notebooks and Their Discovery

In his explanatory note, Maikranz places the notebooks in Rome at the turn of the millennium. While researching his first book, a travel guide to less familiar sites in the city, he noticed three weathered notebooks in an antique shop on the medieval Via dei Coronari, near Piazza Navona. They seemed out of place: worn, but not quite old enough. He bought them for 20,000 lire, about ten U.S. dollars at the time.

The first notebook was filled with Cyrillic handwriting. Although Maikranz spoke Russian, he could not fully translate the text and concluded that it was Serbian, Bulgarian, or Ukrainian rather than Russian. A visit to the Bulgarian Embassy on Via Pietro Rubens settled the question: a receptionist confirmed that the writing was Bulgarian. The notebooks thus entered the book’s frame not as a legible record whose meaning was immediately clear, but as an object that required linguistic identification and assistance before its contents could be read.

Translation and Editorial Framing

Over the summer, Marina Lizhiva translated the text aloud while Maikranz typed. They worked through the notebooks during evenings in his apartment on Caio Mario, near the Vatican, and became absorbed in the unfolding story. Maikranz says he titled the compiled, translated work himself because the originals carried no title, only the numbers one, two, and three.

Translation did not end the editorial process. Once the text was complete, Maikranz researched what he could of Evan’s claims, placing that verification in footnotes. He describes those notes as the only editorial work required after translation. The book therefore presents two connected but distinct acts of mediation: Lizhiva’s spoken translation and Maikranz’s subsequent checking of the narrative against information he could verify.

What the Manuscript Records

Among the manuscript’s revelations is the Cognomina, a society whose members remember their past lives. Its name is explained as a Latin term meaning to remember the same name. The papers describe the Embe tattoo as a mark worn by members in successive lives after Ascension, the society’s test for establishing that a candidate is the same person in a new body.

The account contrasts an older, lethal form of recognition with the later panel hearing. In the earlier practice, a candidate was run through with a spear and accepted only if he returned in another life and identified his killer. In the contemporary procedure described in the manuscript, judges assess names, dates, places, and other verifiable details. Evan’s own hearing ends with a four-to-one vote finding that he is what he claims to be and welcoming him as a brother. The papers thus record not only a theory of reincarnation, but the procedures through which the Cognomina turns remembered identity into recognized membership.

Significance as an Object and a Text

The notebooks’ material history gives the narrative a documentary frame: Cyrillic handwriting first resists the finder’s attempt to read it, then becomes a translated account whose claims are partly checked through footnotes. The title, supplied by Maikranz, makes the three separate numbered volumes into a single named work, while the book preserves the steps by which that work was assembled.

Within that frame, the manuscript’s central concern with memory has a formal counterpart. Its account depends on memories carried across lives, while its passage into publication depends on handwriting being identified, spoken aloud in translation, typed, and annotated. The papers are therefore both the purported record of the Cognomina and the object around which the book constructs its question of how a past can be remembered, transmitted, and believed.