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When Ralph Waldo Emerson died in April 1882, the nation paused in a way few American thinkers have experienced since. Reconstructing that funeral—and the strange wave of mourning that followed—reveals what happens when a country canonizes the radical it once resisted.
Long before meditation apps topped the App Store charts and "mindfulness" became a billion-dollar industry, Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated a vision of universal spiritual interconnection he called the Oversoul. His 1841 essay of the same name proposed that beneath the surface of individual consciousness lies a shared divine intelligence accessible to all who quiet the ego and attend to the deeper rhythms of existence. The echoes of that vision in contemporary American wellness culture are, upon