Ptolemy Tompkins

Ptolemy Tompkins is an American writer, author of Paradise Fever: Dispatches from the Dawn of the New Age and a senior editor at Guideposts magazine.

Tompkins was born in Washington, D.C., educated at Sarah Lawrence College, and currently lives in New York City. He is the son of best-selling occult writer Peter Tompkins, author of The Secret Life of Plants. Paradise Fever (Avon Books, ISBN 038097438X), his 1997 memoir, chronicles his childhood in the early seventies, focusing on the time his father spent searching for Atlantis in the waters off Bimini in the Bahamas. His The Divine Life of Animals (Crown, 2010), argues for the validity of the idea that animals possess souls, while The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria, 2012) sketches a contemporary map of the afterlife focusing on the work of mid-twentieth-century afterlife investigators Robert Crookall and Jane Sherwood. Other books include The Beaten Path: Field Notes on Getting Wise in a Wisdom-Crazy World (William Morrow, ISBN 978-0-380-97822-9), The Monkey in Art, and This Tree Grows Out of Hell (Sterling, ISBN 978-1-4027-4882-0), a spiritual history of Mesoamerica heavily influenced by the thinking of Ken Wilber and Owen Barfield. He is the collaborative ghost author of Dr. Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven.

His mother is Jeree Talbot Smith Tompkins. His siblings include sister Robin Tompkins Ray of Nassau, Bahamas and brother Timothy Christopher (T.C.) Tompkins.