The Transcendentalists view of the afterlife

“In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Romantic period in Europe was in its waning years, this new Romantic revisioning and retelling of the old Western idea of fall and redemption started occupying the minds of a very different group of thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic. When it did, and idea that was constantly present in the background in the musings of the European and British Romantics came to the foreground—for in truth, the whole Romantic cosmic vision couldn’t really work without it.

“This idea was, of course, the doctrine of reincarnation. Owen Barfield, a British barrister and writer who early in his life became a student of the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, was one of the twentieth century’s most eloquent advocates of the Romantic philosophy. Barfield felt that the ideas of the Romantics were not dusty literary relics but were still vital and living. New age thinking, as its sharpest and most responsible, is, Barfield would suggest, really just, to use the term he was fond of, ‘Romanticism come of age.’ But to really take those Romantic ideas seriously, Barfield felt, we also need to take seriously the idea of what he like to call ‘repeated earth lives.’

“If the idea of [spiritual] evolution . . . has become attractive to many minds,” Barfield wrote, “there is nevertheless one awkward obstacle in the way of its acceptance; and particularly of its acceptance as a ground for believing in my own existence.” This belief, said Barfield, is “that the self really evolved, not just the vehicles of it.” In other words, if we are to take the spiritual/developmental worldview initiated by the Romantics seriously, we must realize that this also entails taking seriously the idea that the personal being we experience ourselves to be right here and now did not come into existence with the birth of our present bodies, but has been around for a much, much longer time.

“This was precisely what that new group of thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic was beginning to suspect. In the life we know here on earth, we find ourselves, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘on a stair; there are other stairs below us which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.’ Emerson is using a poetic image here, but he is not doing so just because the image sounds pretty. He very much means, with this came-from-somewhere, going-somewhere imagery, what he says, just as he does in another, more direct passage from his writing on this subject. ‘The soul,’ wrote Emerson, ‘comes from without into the human body as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew. . . . It passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.”

“Emerson viewed our true larger life as a kind of forward-moving yet also spiral drama in which one life follows another, each to some degree imitating the shape and trajectory of the one that came before yet also introducing new material. And this, of course, meant that Emerson accepted an extremely personal and individual version of the concept of repeated earth lives. For if the soul is really and truly to grow over time, if it is on a genuine journey through the temporal and physical dimensions, then in order for that journey to lead somewhere really valuable, not only must the same individual soul keep on returning, time and again, but it must bring with it all the accumulated memories of what happened to it in lives past, even if while on earth, they typically remaining unavailable to the conscious portion of the mind, appearing only in otherwise inexplicable likes and dislikes, and various and sundry other quirks of character."

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 133-35.