Abstract
In the nineteenth century, Western esotericism emphatically received reports of near-death experiences, which included a panoramic life review—namely to recall one’s life in a highly accelerated form. For spiritualists and occultists, these narratives gained currency as key evidence of the soul’s ability to enter into a state of “total recall,” a timeless self-presence and full awareness of everything experienced in the current or even former lives. In this view, death is a form of spiritual awakening. This chapter argues that the idea of a “total recall” at death could only be established by combining Jewish-Christian doctrines—such as the book of deeds and final judgment—with practices of autobiographical writing that co-evolved with the modern, autonomous self. Influential were also technological innovations such as photography, whereas the absence of the life review in antique and medieval authors is not surprising.
It will be during life that we drink the bitter cup of Lethe, it will be with our brain that we are enabled to forget […;] nothing is ever forgotten wholly and beyond recall
Schiller 1891: 296.
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Notes
- 1.
In Meno , Socrates explains that the soul is immortal and “has been born many times, and has beheld all things both in this world and in the nether realms, she has acquired knowledge of all and everything; so that it is no wonder that she should be able to recollect all that she knew before about virtue and other things” (81c–d; Lamb 1962: 303).
- 2.
However, it is narrated that the souls, after they have chosen their new lives, are requested to drink (and, according to their moral worth, different portions) of water from the river of lēthē, the “River of Forgetfulness,” and “every man,” Plato recounts, “as he drinks forgets everything” (Politeia , 620); the soldier Er, destined to return to life, was not allowed to drink from the water, which enabled him to remember what had happened to him. In contrast, in the so-called “Orphic Gold Tablets” (Orphicae lamellae ) there is mention of the “aters of Memory” (mnemosyne ). The dying soul, drinking from “the Lake of Memory,” “should remember everything about their former lives” (Graf and Johnson 2007: 117). Having drunk, they will travel “the sacred road” of the “glorious initiates” (tablet 1; ibid.: 5).
- 3.
According to Zaleski (1987: 19), the moral of the story is that “only an ardent dedication to the pursuit of wisdom can combat the stupefaction (symbolized by the effects of drinking from Lethe) to which all flesh is subject.”
- 4.
They differ in its “moral” positions: whereas the moral soul, destined for a positive appraisal, carries a sign fixed by the “judges” in front, unjust souls carry these “signs” or “tokens,” which “bore evidence of all their deeds” (Macdonald Cornford 1976: 351) on their back. For our purpose, these signs of all deeds may allude to an idea of a co-presence of all deeds done, as it is in an analogous way encapsulated in Judaeo-Christian narratives of the “Book of Deeds.”
- 5.
The internal memory is not only “inscribed” in the brain and body, but also in the spirit. Moreover, there seems to be a successive order in which the forms of memory evolve, culminating in a third form, the “angelic memory” of moral relevance (Swedenborg 1778: 312, n. 467).
- 6.
Man “takes with him his natural memory, retaining all that he ever heard, saw, read, learned, or thought in the world, from his infancy to his leaving it; but as to the memory of such natural objects, which there is nothing in the spiritual world to revive the ideas of, that is quiescent, like as in a man when he thinks not of them; however, these also are again excited in the mind occasionally, by the divine permission” (Swedenborg 1778: 304, n. 461).
- 7.
- 8.
Sometimes, the act of deciphering resembles the “reading” of inscriptions, whereas in other occasions it seems more to be a process of “becoming manifest.”
- 9.
Although some of the protagonists discussed here distinguished between reincarnation and metempsychosis (e.g., Blavatsky; see Chajes 2012), I adhere to a simplified discussion of the doctrines.
- 10.
- 11.
“Wahrscheinlichkeit einer großen Revolution im Bewußtsein im Augenblick des Todes; vielleicht erwacht die Erinnerung der ersten Kindheit wieder, vielleicht geschieht ein Blick in d[en] Zusammenhang unsrer Seele, mit d[er] d.[er] Eltern der Geliebten, ein Blick in die geheime Werkstätte der Seelenwanderung in das Bewußtsein der Erde (d.[es] Erdgeistes sowohl als der Erdseele; das erste ein vorzüglich edler und schöner Tod.) Vorbereitung zum Tode ist daher für uns selbst das höchste Ziel der Religion […]. <Ergänzung und Vollendung unsres Bewußtseins Sterben ist nicht ein Entschlummern sondern ein Erwachen des Geistes. Helles Bewußtsein mancher Sterbenden; sonderbare Visionen.>” (Schlegel 1971: 100–101; 17 [176]); cf. Zander 1999: 389). Schlegel speculates that the same may be true for humankind in total – an awakening of the beginning may come at the end (Schlegel 1971, 101; 17 [177]). Cognate ideas were articulated by Friedrich W. J. Schelling in 1816/1817. Dying should be seen as an “awakening,” and in approaching death there is a moment of “highest inner clarity,” a state of “non-interrupted clairvoyance.” In death, finally, there is a “most intimate consciousness,” and “their whole being will be condensed in a focal point, that unites past, present, and future. Far less than losing memory,” the dying and dead will be able to view their distant past, and will even be able to see into future (cf. Schelling 1972 [IX 65]: 164–168).
- 12.
- 13.
Jung-Stilling 1834: 64: “The somnambulist reads in the soul of him with whom he is placed in rapport; there is no need of language for the purpose, and such also is the case after death, the one reads in the soul of the other.”
- 14.
On Passavant, see Baier 2009: 210–218.
- 15.
On the case of Schwerdtfeger, see Schlieter 2018b: 59–64.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
Interestingly, in his sequel Suspiria de Profundis , de Quincey returned to the topic, reassuring his readers of the veracity of the report, portraying it in ever more fantastic words, and, furthermore, alluding to the “Damascene conversion” of Paul: “Such a light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards into the shades of infancy, as the light, perhaps; which wrapt the destined Apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light blinded for a season; but hers poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review” (de Quincey 1851: 234). These “immortal impresses” can even be experienced “experimentally,” as de Quincey argues, by “every man” who passes through similar states, for example, by opium ingestion (ibid.: 236).
- 19.
Strictly speaking, the generic term “near-death experience,” notorious for its unclear boundaries (e.g., so-called “fear of death”-experiences that are structurally similar but not emerging in any sort of life-threatening situation), is very much connected to the usage of Raymond Moody and the post-1975 discourse (see Schlieter 2018b).
- 20.
For example, cf. French spiritualist Jean Dupotet de Sennevoy’s (1796–1881) Introduction to the Study of Animal Magnetism (1838: 131–136).
- 21.
Letter, quoted in Barrow 1847: 400–401; cf. 398–402.
- 22.
For a philosophical discussion of the “life review,” see Schlieter 2018a.
- 23.
The external memory is “a tablet whereon the world of matter and sensuous objects write the evanescent impressions of their panoramic existence.” The internal memory, in contrast, contains “as imperishable jewels in a casket which none but the possessor can open, the spirit of things, of all impressions, of all useful experiences!” And he continues: “on the internal memory, the faintest lines of a spiritual reality produce the most permanent impressions,” but are, as “the mind’s most interior experiences” (Davis 1853: 162; cf. 260), seldom remembered.
- 24.
Ludlow is one of the first to describe an autoscopic interest of the disembodied observer (cf. Schlieter 2018b: 75–6); but mentions the “panoramic display of internal images” only in passing (cf. Ludlow 1857: 227). However, one visionary experience is highly relevant. Ludlow reports that he was immersed in an internal dialogue on the dreadful question of damnation, musing “Oh thou Angel of Destiny, in whose book all the names of the saved are written, I call on thee to open unto me the leaves!” Suddenly, a “dread registrar” appears, and shows to him “the great volume of record,” and Ludlow, with “devouring eyes,” scans the pages, “turning them over in wild haste that did not preclude the most rigid scrutiny. Leaf after leaf flew back […]. Here and there I recognized a familiar name, but even my joy at such revelations took nothing from the cruelty of the suspense in which I looked to find my own. With a face cold as marble I came to the last page, and had not found it yet. Drops of torture beaded my brow as […] I ran down the final column. One, two, three— I came to the bottom— the last. I was not there!” (Ludlow 1857: 144–145). This, he felt, is evidence of his annihilation, and he “saw Eternity, like a chariot out of which I had fallen, roll out of sight.” However, shortly afterwards, he receives comfort in a vision of the merciful Christ (cf. ibid.: 145–146 cf. Partridge 2018: 115–117). In sum, Ludlow’s experience shows the interdependency of the moral vision of the book of life (here, with the entries of the saved), hallucinatory drug experiences, and the emergent panoramic life review.
- 25.
In states of “trance,” the soul, or “Atma,” as she says with reference to Hindu thought, “can go forth, and wander abroad in space,” can ascend heavens etc., and can, finally, “behold the past, present and future outstretched as in a vast panorama […]. The full perfection of the trance state is very seldom reached until Death sets the soul at liberty, but even an approximation to this Divine condition is eagerly coveted by illuminated minds” (Hardinge Britten and Britten 1876: 185). Interestingly, she refers in this context to a “Hindoo” idea of an “all-pervading fluid,” or “Astral fluid,” “AKASA” (ibid.: 187). If accumulated by capable Indian ascetics, she holds, this “Astral fluid” can be “projected,” which means that the practitioners can, for instance, travel through the air, or become invisible (ibid.: 189).
- 26.
For example, American spiritualist Hudson Tuttle (1836–1910) points to “total recall”-experiences, naming in one breath hashish “which the Hindoos used,” magnetising, and cases of drowning (cf. Tuttle 1864, vol. 2: 141, cf. 63).
- 27.
Joseph Rodes Buchanan (1814–1899), William Denton (1823–1883), and others had argued with “psychometry” that the human mind has the hidden power to make infinite use of mental “daguerreotypes” (Hanegraaff 2017: 20–22). Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864), whom Blavatsky quotes as well, had outlined in his The Religion of Geology (1852) that rays of light, captured by chemical processes of photography, will expand into the universe and, therefore, carry with them photographic portrait of every detail of the world. It is “nature” that, “more skilfully than any human photographist, can bring out and fix those portraits, so that acuter senses than ours shall see them, as on a great canvas, spread over the material universe. Perhaps, too, they may never fade from that canvas, but become specimens in the great picture gallery of eternity” (Hitchcock 1852: 426). So, our minutest actions, and perhaps our thoughts, from day to day, are known throughout the universe (ibid.: 439, emphasis in the original); in a future state, Hitchcock holds, attaining higher sensitiveness, man may be able to read the past history of the world and of individuals (Hitchcock 1852: 440, emphasis in the original; see Hanegraaff 2017: 24). The relationship of these ideas to Theosophy’s all-encompassing “Akashic records” is obvious.
- 28.
- 29.
Féré (1889: 109) displays a more naturalist attitude towards the “panoramic life review,” arguing that quite often the visionary content is meaningless, while in some other instances it might—historically speaking—have contributed to the belief in final judgment.
- 30.
Elsewhere, Blavatsky explains that hashish experiences may uncover “a recollection of my former existences, my previous incarnations,” yet only “one series” at a “given time,” to prevent “crowded memory,” as her interlocutor suggests (quoted in Hanegraaff 2017: 14).
- 31.
He remembered his manifold past lives with all details: “There I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term [that is, his end of life]; and passing away from there, I reappeared elsewhere; and there too I was so named, of such a clan,” etc. (Nyanamoli and Bodhi 1995: 106 [Bhayabheravasutta, Majjhimanikāya I.22; see Majjhimanikāya I. 247–248]).
- 32.
Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind that the standard hagiography holds that the Buddha almost died as a result of radically reducing his food intake due to aesthetic motives.
- 33.
“And in the consciousness of that person who at the end of a given chain of beings attains Buddhahood, or who succeeds in attaining the fourth stage of Dhyana […], the scenes of all these serial births are perceptible. […] Early Buddhism then, clearly held to a permanency of records in the Akasa [sic], and the potential capacity of man to read the same when he has evoluted to the stage of true individual enlightenment ” (Sinnett 1885: 80–81). It must be admitted, however, that instead of adapting Indian and Buddhist thought and practices, early Theosophy was more inclined to merely illustrate western spiritualist beliefs with these ideas (cf. Baier 2009, vol. 1: 334–358).
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Schlieter, J. (2021). Total Recall: The “Panoramic Life Review” Near Death as Proof of the Soul’s Timeless Self-Presence in Western Esotericism of the Nineteenth Century. In: Pokorny, L., Winter, F. (eds) The Occult Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55318-0_6
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