Speaking in tongues

This extraordinary study chronicles an investigation of a woman who, under hypnosis, was able to speak a language neither she nor the hypnotist had any previous knowledge of.

The study, ‘A Case of Xenoglossy Under Hypnosis’ by Ohkado Masayuki and Okamoto Satoshi (in EdgeScience, the journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration, February 2014), concerned a Japanese dietician, ‘Rasa’, who sought the help of a hypnotherapist with personal problems. Under hypnosis, she recalled a past life as Rataraju, the chief in a village in Nepal, and spoke several sentences in Nepali – a language she claimed never to have heard – which were tape-recorded.

In a second session, this time attended by a native Nepali speaker, the Japanese woman conversed in Nepali for 24 minutes, though her speech was not always fluent. Further examination of the tape suggested this was because Rataraju and the interpreter were using different dialects, and that Nepali was probably Rataraju’s second language, the first being Tamang. Neither language have any similarity to Japanese and a lie-detector test verified Rasa’s claim that she had never knowingly encountered either language before.

The investigators travelled to Nepal and were able to identify the village in question, which closely resembled the description Rasa had given, where Tamang was indeed spoken. They were unable to trace Rataraju himself, however, as written records did not exist prior to 1950.

Two other scientifically-documented cases of xenoglossy under hypnosis were recorded by Dr Ian Stevenson in an earlier publication. One was a doctor’s wife in Philadelphia, who was able to converse in Swedish in eight separate sessions whilst under hypnosis. The other was the wife of a Methodist minister, who conversed in German, in 19 separate sessions, as ‘Gretchen’, a woman living in the late 19th Century.

EdgeScience, the journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration.