• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

7. The Return of the “Secret Teachings”

8. New Deal of the Ages: Politics and the Occult

9. The Masters Among Us

10. Secrets for Sale

11. “The Greatest Mystic Who Ever Lived in America”

Epilogue: Aquarius Rising: The New Age Dawns

Notes on Sources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS THE OCCULT?

(And What Is It Doing in America?)

Religious history, like literary or any cultural history, is made by genius, by the mystery of rare human personalities.

—HAROLD BLOOM, THE AMERICAN RELIGION

In the summer of 1693, the philosopher Johannes Kelpius and a small band of followers fled their Rhine Valley homeland. The region had once been a sanctuary of political independence and esoteric spirituality. It was now a charred land of devastation, crushed by the papal Habsburg Empire during the Thirty Years’ War.

The twenty-one-year-old Kelpius, a protégé of mystical scholars who survived in the Rhine corridor, led his German pilgrims to the New World. Fewer than forty in number, they first traveled over land and later endured a five-month sea voyage, which proved less dangerous for the weather than for warring French and British ships crisscrossing Atlantic routes. By late June of 1694, the group reached Philadelphia, then a cluster of about five hundred houses. They settled along the wooded banks of the Wissahickon Creek outside town. There they lived a monastic existence, occupying caves and constructing a forty-foot-square log tabernacle topped with a telescope, from which they scanned the stars for holy signs. By sunlight and hearth fire, they studied astrology, alchemy, number symbolism, esoteric Christianity, Kabala, and other philosophies that had once flowered back home. Newcomers journeyed to America to join their Tabernacle in the Forest, and in the years following Kelpius’s death from tuberculosis in 1708, they created a larger commune at Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

News drifted back to the Old World: A land existed where mystical thinkers and mystery religions—remnants of esoteric movements that had thrived during the Renaissance and were later harassed—could find safe harbor. And so began a revolution in religious life that was eventually felt around the earth. America hosted a remarkable assortment of breakaway faiths, from Mormonism to Seventh-day Adventism to Christian Science. But one movement that grew within its borders came to wield radical influence over nineteenth- and twentieth-century spirituality. It encompassed a wide array of mystical philosophies and mythical lore, particularly the belief in an “unseen world” whose forces act upon us and through us. It is called the occult.

The teachers and purveyors of the American occult—colorful, audacious, and often deeply self-educated men and women—shattered every stereotype, real and imagined, of the power-mad dabbler in dark arts. Rather than seeing mystical or magical ideas as a means to narcissistic power or moral freedom, they emphasized an unlikely ethic of social progress and individual betterment. These religious radicals, acting outside the folds of traditional churches and mostly overlooked or ignored in the pages of history, transformed a young nation into the launching pad for the revolutions in therapeutic and alternative spirituality that swept the earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even reigniting mystical traditions in the East.

Sons of Frankenstein

In her 1818 novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley offered a stirring portrait—not sympathetic, but not as unsympathetic as many suppose—of the European occult in the Age of Enlightenment in the 1700s. Her budding scientist Victor Frankenstein was torn between the occult visions that drew him to science as a child and the materialist philosophy of his peers: “It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed.… I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.” In the public