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Emil Karl Gustav Alfred Mattiesen (23 January 1875Birth date given in his dissertation, Julian calendar: 11 January – 25 September 1939) was a Baltic Germans musician, music pedagogue, composer and philosopher. He composed , , ballads, chamber music and organ music, but is better known for standard works in German on parapsychology. He was a professor of church music at the University of Rostock from 1929.
Mattiesen travelled in Asia and America from 1898 to 1903, learning several Asian languages and the basics of Hinduism and other religions. From 1904 to 1908, he studied at the University of Cambridge and in London. He wrote his first major book, completed in 1914 but not published until 1925: Der jenseitige Mensch. Eine Einführung in die Metapsychologie der mystischen Erfahrung (Man of the Next World. An Introduction to the Metapsychology of the Mystical Experience). When he returned to Germany in 1908, he lived in Berlin, where he married and focused on music. He lived in Fürstenfeldbruck, Bavaria, for several years. He founded an association for the publication of his works in Munich in 1921.
In 1925, he moved to the village of Gehlsdorf, now part of Rostock. He was a lecturer on church music at the Theological Faculty of the University of Rostock from 1929. He was a composer of , especially , and of chamber and organ music. His compositions were published by Henri Hinrichsen, on a recommendation by Hugo Wolf, including 17 Liederhefte (song collections). He composed lieder for the contralto Lula Mysz-Gmeiner, and accompanied her in performances. These lieder included "Selige Sehnsucht" (Blissful longing), "Die kleine Passion" (The little passion) and "Philomele". A review in the journal Die Musik from February 1914 reports a recital in which she premiered five songs and mentions the composer's talent for humorous topics, such as "Jedem das seine" after a poem by Eduard Mörike.
He also researched and published in the field of parapsychology. His two main books in the field, Der jenseitige Mensch (published in 1925) and Das persönliche Überleben des Todes: eine Darstellung der Erfahrungsbeweise (The Personal Survival of Death: An Account of the Empirical Evidence) in three volumes (1936–1939), became standard works in German. In his Masterpiece Das persönliche Überleben des Todes, he advocated the Parapsychology, listing several phenomena which seem to prove empirically that the soul lives on after death. The Nazis objected to the topic, which caused his work to be neglected at first.
Mattiesen died in Rostock of leukemia shortly after the beginning of World War II.
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