Around 1970, she became interested in reincarnation. She had become friends with well-known occultist author Jess Stearn, who suggested that the vivid detail in her many historical novels was actually subconscious recollection of previous lives. She agreed to be hypnotized and undergo "past life regression" to disprove reincarnation. However, according to Stearn's book, "The Search for a Soul – Taylor Caldwell's Psychic Lives" (1973), Caldwell instead began to recall her own past lives – eleven in all, including one on the "lost" continent of Atlantis.