Scene Report 003: Past Life Honeypot

Was I the beloved Queen of Prussia or a war-torn orphan?

A trip to the immigration office visit takes me hunting for clues from my recent past life regression hypnosis session.

Germans don’t appreciate when you’re poetic at the wrong time. On my first visa application I thought I’d win them over. Applying for a freelance work visa as an astrologer on Kepler Straße. I wrote some letter about how all of the streets surrounding the Immigration Office are named after astrologers (visual astronomers). My charms were not winsome but my Familienname earned some respect. The city feels much smaller now.

In a past life regression my “higher self” told me to go to the Charlottenburg Palace to learn about my past life in Berlin. After getting rejected at the door of the Immigration Office, I go to the nearby palace, where I last was with my best friend through the garden older than our county. She joined me, to a visa appointment, a walk-in, at 7am, 2018, afterwards we strolled towards the mausoleum.

In past life regression hypnosis I sought answers in the primordial ectoplasm of the collective unconscious. Why am I in this carnival of lost souls: Berlin?

Took three years for the Finanzamt to send me my tax ID, which I need for the audit for the permanent residency. Otherwise I need the new visa, which I need in order to get the job, but I need the insurance to get the visa, but I need the job to get the insurance, but I need the visa to get the job.

God was with me when I woke up 30 seconds before my alarm, and when I was bounced at the door. And now I’m meant to visit this palace. I saw this rejection coming astrologically but I still am not prepared for the blowback. I’m running out of plan B’s and living on a prayer.

I’m at the castle now looking in the garden and cemetery for the clues, the symbols that flashed from my unconscious mind out of my mouth as fragments into the hypnotist’s record: An eagle, Charlottenburg Palace, Hapsburg? I remain skeptical of the past life regression, but it’s possible that “Hapsburg” is relevant. And the clues to find out more are at Schloß Charlottenburg. The Hapsburgs weren’t even German, they were Austrian, but whatever.

I was a princess or a nun or an orphan. A war general or an astrologer. Was I the nun or the orphan? Whatever the case, I am certain I was bombed to death.

When trying to recount details of my past life in hypnosis, I was frozen. I recalled details of my present life, too. During my visualization I was covered in dirt and barefoot on the street. I was in New Orleans then I was in the sky then I was in Japan then I was in Florence. I was everywhere and nowhere. The city street was empty and desolate. No one was around. I couldn’t move. It was day but it was so cloudy that it looked like night. I look down and recognize my dress from my current life. In my mind I walked across Ponte Vecchio at night, to see Pontormo’s Deposition from the Cross, where I was in recent memory.

I was in the church of the convent. They were celebrating Eucharistic Adoration and singing. It felt like the party was for me since I had just returned to the convent after presenting my final project for my Master’s degree last November. The door, usually closed, was magically opened and lined with candles. But in this recollection, the hypnotist, a clinical psychiatrist with an eccentric hobby, asked me, “Who else is there?”

As I sat in the pew, a gilded nun appeared. She looked like a Simone Martini portrait of St Clare, or a fresco at the Convent of San Marco. Or was it the statue of St. Faustina that stands at St. Clemens in Kreuzberg? I said her name is Anna. I wept uncontrollably. I couldn’t talk anymore. I had to take a break to blow my nose. I know her, she’s my friend. She guided me to the convent kitchen with the other sisters. An orphaned child was in the corner. He didn’t want to eat. We froze in this scene. I couldn’t recall any more past life memories.

The hypnotist tried to get me to go further. She sat next to my bedside. I laid on my back with my eyes closed. I continued to verbalize what I saw in the psychic television of randomized symbols flowing from the channel of my unconscious, like a dream sequence I can tap into while awake. I blurted out the first things that flashed in my mind while I was in a supposed regressed state as she asked me a series of questions, which I prepared before going under. One of was about whether or not I have a past life in Berlin.

I cannot understand how the archetype of the royal family illustrates my psyche, but maybe I have a Jungian blind spot. Maybe it reflects a part of my personality I can’t yet recognize. I have been thinking more about Bohemia, since I realized the suffix of my last name, -bohm, seems to be more of a reference to Bohemia (now Czechia), than it does to a -baum, a tree.

When in Florence to study religious art, the day after I arrived, I learned one of mom’s ancestors was born in Florence, where he painted murals in churches. Because of war he fled to Spain, because of war he fled then Cuba. There he had a child with a costume designer (who must have been Spanish/Portuguese, according to mom’s DNA test). The family moved to New Orleans. Both parents died from Yellow Fever, and their daughter was orphaned. She was raised by Ursuline nuns who taught her French. She married a French man. Then eventually came my Great Grandmother, then came my Grandfather, then came my mom. Somewhere in Florence is one of my ancestor’s paintings.

The moon hangs waning gibbous over the gilded peak of the Charlottenburg Palace. A stone in the cloudless blue slate. White marble figures of allegorical virtues stand on the edge of the roof of the palace, looking out towards the manicured garden, reminiscent of Versailles. 

Many are faceless, due to conservation efforts. Instead of a face, they have a flat slate. To the left side are the allegories for the sciences, faceless. In the middle stands Athena with a crescent crown. Followed by Urania. I also recognize Aries, god of war.

Reading from left to right: virtues, gods... the third and final group of statues are damaged. They look as if they have been dissolved by acid rain, like casts of a Giacometti bronze statue, with a flecked carbon patina. From left to right, the statues on the palace grow more damaged, like reading a book that was bombed in conclusion. I try to interpret the iconology of the bombed statues, but it’s written in braille. Divine virtues humbled by the fallout.

A stroll through the hedges of the Baroque garden leads me to a statue of a warrior. A bug-eyed eagle at his foot. Almost cartoonishly Carolingian, but certainly Baroque. A staff in his hand. No nomenclature. A very commonplace eagle, a war emblem, in the garden at the Charlottenburg Palace. I’m floating towards where I remember there being a mausoleum.

As someone who died in a war in a past life: Veterans get no respect, not enough benefits. I can’t even get a simple part-time job without the bureaucratic runaround.

Another pantheon of white marble statues stand before the palatial pond. Google Maps says I’m getting closer to the mausoleum. I think I’m going to be sick. Çigarabörek ça ne vas pas.

I’ve never seen a duck so beautiful. A vine grows around a dead tree to take it down one small leaf by one small leaf. Three red squirrels, a monogamous pair of blue jays, a family of finches with yellow stomachs.

I walk through wet grass to find the mausoleum entrance like I’m some sort of dewy land spirit before I find the path again. The door is sealed shut. I don’t dare to touch the doorknob. I’m scared. I have never seen this building and yet I swore I visited it years ago.

I try to walk to find the other graves in the park, the ones I remember. I turn through a labyrinthine hedge and am looped into a roundabout. I am met by the weathered warrior statue again. The graves I recalled during hypnosis are not there. They were an invented memory. Onward I march in my Ionian death gown.

As I exit the park the mausoleum stares at me — a clear path straight to the door. A Schönebergian man in work friendly fetish outfit strolls past on his morning commute. The church is closed but the farmers market is selling herbs for Frankfurter Grüne Soße. I’m looking for a place to charge my phone.

I pass a block party of school children. I was a nun who looked after war orphans in a past life. Or was I the orphan? The children scream and play in the street. They seem to have parents, but they’re all orphaned for the day. Teachers become like parents. Does this mean I have to find work at a Kita?

In Deutschland gibt es keinen Platz für Fehler.

I step over small disembodied bird wings being eaten by wasps. There’s a gallery of marble busts. Smooth sculptures in the big windows of a repurposed factory. A giant replica of the winged back of The Victory of Samothrace faces me: Nike, Goddess of war.

I see a cafe on Schloss Straße. The door is wide open. A single table in the doorway. A power outlet hangs over the table. Once my phone finishes charging, the mausoleum ought to be open.

Although walk-in emergency appointments are no longer possible at any government office across Germany since the pandemic, I showed up anyway. I needed to be in Charlottenburg this morning.

“Why am I in Berlin?” At my progressed lunar return, an elder astrologer suggested I have unfinished business here. She pointed out that my natal moon south node conjunction is pronounced in my relocated chart. The line runs through Frankfurt, my first destination in Germany, at least in this lifetime.

I have until the second week of October to have some sort of answer from the Immigration Office. All I have left at this point is prayer. I still feel sick from the börek.

The mausoleum is a neoclassical red marble Doric temple. The pediment displays the Christian Greek symbols: Alpha, Chi Rho, Omega. Directly through the door I can see an altar and a marble crucifix before a gilded apse. The mausoleum was built for Queen Louise in 1810. Here is buried, Augusta, Wilhelm I., Louise, the heart of Frederich Wilhelm IV., Friedrich Wilhelm I., Auguste, and Albrecht.

A grid of Prussian army stars adorn the sky light. Eagles guard the foot of the marble reclining figures marking two of the graves of the Prussian royal family: Luise and Wilheim III, who died on Pentecost 1840. The other two graves do not have eagle statues on them, which I noted as a sign.

I wonder, through my Christian lens of “reincarnation”: what penance must I make for all souls to be at rest. And must I make penance for the Prussian royal family? If he died on Pentecost, and she was regarded as a benevolent leader, I don’t think I should worry about their souls as much as I should contemplate the state of my own.