"Metempsychosis"
or "transmigration
of souls" are
the labels I've seen most often applied in the 1860s to what we'd call
"reincarnation," and it was discussed in connection with eastern
religions and ancient beliefs held by famous people such as Pythagorus. It
didn't grip the popular imagination as much as spirit rapping or other ways of
contacting the dead, but it wasn't unknown.
The same sensations that inspire thoughts of
reincarnation today were recognized then:
"...there are certain familiar
psychological experiences which would serve to suggest and to support the theory
of transmigration, and which are themselves in return explained by such a
surmise. Thinking upon some unwonted subject, often a dim impression arises in
the mind, fastens upon us, and we cannot help feeling, that somewhere, long ago,
we have had these reflections before. Learning a fact, meeting a face for the
first time, we are puzzled with an obscure assurance that it is not the first
time. Travelling in foreign lands, we are ever and anon haunted by a sense of
familiarity with the views, urging us to conclude, that surely we have more than
once trodden those fields and gazed on those scenes; and from hoary mountain,
trickling rill, and vesper bell, meanwhile, mystic tones of strange memorial
music seem to sigh in remembered accents through the soul's plaintive echoing
halls, 'Twas auld lang syne, my dear, 'Twas auld lang syne. Plato's doctrine of
reminiscence here finds its basis. We have lived before, perchance many times,
and through the clouds of sense and imagination now and then float the veiled
visions of things that were. Efforts of thought reveal the half-effaced
inscriptions and pictures on the tablets of memory. Snatches of dialogues once
held are recalled, faint recollections of old friendships return, and fragments
of landscapes beheld and deeds performed long ago pass in weird procession
before the mind's half-opened eye. We know a professional gentleman of
unimpeachable veracity and distinguished talents and attainments, who is a firm
believer in his own existence on the earth previously to his present life. He
testifies that on innumerable occasions he has experienced remembrances of
events, and recognitions of places, accompanied by a flash of irresistable
conviction that he had known them in a former state. Nearly every one has felt
instances of this, more or less numerous and vivid.... The belief in the
doctrine of the metempsychosis, among a fanciful people and in an unscientific
age, need be no wonder to any cultivated man acquainted with the marvels of
experience..." (from "The Transmigration of Souls," The North
American Review, January 1855)
Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net
http://www.geocities.com/bradfordplace1863