This combined compendium traces two parallel dramas—one ancient and public, the other modern and solitary—that interrogate conscience, political power, and the persistence of subjective life across time.

Part I opens in Jerusalem at Passover, where a Galilean preacher, Jesus, upends expectations by healing lepers and feeding crowds. The episode is staged as a tense contest among protagonists: Pontius Pilate, ambivalent and inclined to see Jesus as visionary rather than seditious; Pilate’s wife and Miriam, a politically connected Jewish woman, who are moved by the man’s moral authority; Caiaphas and Hanan, who marshal priestly influence to convert popular agitation into juridical pressure; and the narrator Lodbrog (Ragnar Lodbrog), who observes and debates the necessities of fate and allegiance. Despite Pilate’s private reluctance and efforts to avoid bloodshed, ritual, procedural manoeuvre and mass emotion force a political solution: the Sanhedrim’s maneuvers, transfer to Pilate, the mock-royal inscription “King of the Jews,” and Pilate’s hand‑washing all codify crucifixion as both punishment and symbolic settlement. Lodbrog, urged by Miriam to intervene, refuses—bound by Roman duty, a sense of historic necessity, and the conviction that some events must run their course. The Passion is thus rendered as the interplay of personal charm, state calculation and collective responsibility.

Part II follows Professor Darrell Standing, an agronomist condemned to long terms in San Quentin and Folsom after a politically fraught conviction. Subjected to vindictive frame-ups (including a forged dynamite search engineered by Cecil Winwood), repeated beatings, dungeon privations and the strait‑jacket—culminating in a designed double‑jacketing meant to break him—Standing survives by disciplined mental techniques. Taught by fellow lifer Ed Morrell, he practices voluntary cataleptic trances—“death in life”—and develops mechanical self‑hypnosis, knuckle‑code communication with Jake Oppenheimer, and elaborate inner exercises that open sustained recollections of prior lives. These narratives range from prehistoric slime and a Norseman‑turned‑Roman commander to Jesse Fancher at Mountain Meadows, Adam Strang / Yi Yong‑ik in Korea, and a meticulous account of Daniel Foss, shipwrecked in 1809—whose carved oar is later corroborated in the Philadelphia Museum. Standing weaves these memories into a metaphysical thesis: consciousness endures, accumulating memory and skill through incarnations; matter is transient. Interlaced with this are trenchant indictments of procedural injustice, torture’s mechanics and the moral perversity of execution. Facing imminent death—technically for assault on a guard—Standing accepts mortality calmly and leaves his manuscript to argue for continuity of the self and against carceral brutality.

Together the two strands explore the tension between individual conscience and public necessity, the persuasive force of charismatic moral authority, and a sustained critique of state violence, while posing the radical claim that personal identity threads through many lives beyond recorded history.