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“If you don’t find life fun and funny, you are really missing the point.”

In her new book, The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit (Simon and Schuster), MacLaine recounts her past life love affair Charlemagne and tells how she saved him from impotence.

MacLaine remembers herself as a coffee-skinned, black-haired woman who comes to the emperor as a healer. “He succumbed to the vibration of my touch and soon became aroused,” he says. “His protectors left as I proceeded to consummate the healing.”

At another point in the book, Shirley travels — out of her body, we presume — back to the Garden of Eden, where her soul is re-embodied as both Adam and Eve. Of course, she relives humanity’s first stirring of sex — as both man and woman.

“Dear Reader,” MacLaine writes at one point in The Camino, “it is here, at this point, that I have debated with myself whether to include the ensuing events in the telling of my Camino tale. … But I have always felt that if one cannot walk to the end of the precipice, then why walk at all?”

One can only imagine the past lives of Warren Beatty, MacLaine’s younger brother, whom she has described as “left brained” and “cerebral.”

Yet for all her eccentricities, MacLaine’s popularity as a spiritual guide is astounding. When she embarked on a seminar series in the late 1980s, she filled 1,000-seat reception halls across the country — with each attendee paying $300. Midge Costanza, once a special assistant to President Jimmy Carter, served as the organizer of the “Connecting With the Higher Self” lecture series.

Old Friends: Keep Quiet

Her show business friends and advisers once told her to keep her controversial beliefs to herself. But ever since her 1983 bestseller Out on a Limb, she’s found a giant audience for her own brand of spirituality — a mixture of several religions with an emphasis on Eastern traditions and a dash of UFOs.