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Romanticism brings back the twinned concepts of preexistence and theosis. The revival of Plato (under Thomas Taylor's influence) sparks revival of interest in preexistence especially. William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge are only the most prominent names among the Romantics, as is Alfred, Lord Tennyson among the Victorians, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among the Transcendentalists, to espouse preexistence.

This chapter addresses what Gilbert intended to represent through the action of his poem. An evidently symbolic young girl, Elmira, is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Her mother is drowned. Gilbert makes several references to the Eleusinian Mysteries which concern the rebirth of Ceres’ daughter Proserpina. The common mother-daughter theme suggests a parallel interplay between the living and the dead. The ancient mystery cults, and their parallels with the secret rituals associated with Masonic initiation, were of contemporary interest, as can be shown by Thomas Taylor’s Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, which was based on an exegesis of Aeneas’ descent into the underworld (Aeneid, Book VI). This method of exegesis – which had been used by Neoplatonists to unlock hidden meanings in Homer – provides a possible key to Gilbert’s allegory.

This chapter explores the legal dispute between the University of Aberdeen and the Queen's and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer (QLTR) of the Crown regarding the ownership of St. Ninian's isle treasure in Shetland. The University, led by Principal Thomas Taylor QC, initially intended to house the treasure in the Museum of Marischal College until such time as a suitable museum was available in Shetland. However, the Crown, through QLTR, claimed its absolute right of ownership over the treasure based on the quod nullius principle — the vesting of the title to ownerless moveable goods, which had been previously owned, in the Crown. As a defence, the University argued that, under the udal tenure law, the absolute ownership of buried things is vested in the landowner. Despite the quashing of the University's claim, the treasure remained in their possession for about two years before it was transferred to the Crown.

Chapter 5 argues that Blavatsky’s works are an important site for the intersection of occultist thought with nineteenth-century Classicism. It shows that Blavatsky initially argued that Pythagoras and Plato were advocates of metempsychosis and that later, she said they taught reincarnation. The chapter considers the relationship between Blavatsky’s rebirth teachings and her constructions of the ancient Greeks, situating her interest within a far-ranging nineteenth-century fascination with Classical civilisation. It argues that Blavatsky’s interpretations had substantial anti-establishment elements and that they were influenced by her friend, the American physician Alexander Wilder (1823–1908), himself a member of an American Platonic tradition with roots in Transcendentalism and the thought of the English neo-Platonist Thomas Taylor (1758–1835). The chapter shows that Blavatsky drew on her sources to construe the Greeks according to an occultist exegesis that claimed Hellenism had an Oriental source and located parallels for Greek rebirth ideas in Hebraic, Gnostic, and Indian thought.