Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [11]
“Have ye faith that I can do this thing?” she demanded of the crowd.
“Yea, we believe!” followers replied.
“Then if ye have faith,” the Universal Friend said, “there is no need for any vulgar spectacle.”
And with that she turned around, got into her carriage monogrammed with her initials, U * F, and rode off.
The only confirmable part of the story is the monogrammed carriage, which still survives. Another apparent fiction surrounded the Friend’s death. Her detractors claimed that the Friend said she was immortal and that, when she died in 1819, her deputies snuck her body out of her Jerusalem basement by night and secreted it to an unmarked grave. In fact, Wilkinson’s body was interred with several others in a traditional burial vault on her property. It was not until several years later that her remains were moved, in Quaker fashion, to an unmarked plot.
Legal battles over township land emerged before and after the Friend’s death, but by and large her followers and their families—similar in spirit to the Millerites—balanced within them both fantastical beliefs and the canny abilities and competences needed for a successful outer life. Following their teacher’s death, these farmers, merchants, and tradesmen moved on to populate many of the region’s liberal and experimental religious communities. The Friend’s ministry, at once supernatural and down-to-earth, played a lasting if little-seen role in peopling the movements and attitudes that traveled the Psychic Highway and acculturated the nation to religious experiments.
The Lost Tribe
When Route 20 remained just a well-traveled carriage path, an ambitious, dreamy young man who grew up near its perimeter in the town of Palmyra—about forty miles north of the Universal Friend’s settlement—became its most influential traveler. Raised on the folklore of the Burned-Over District and possessed of ingenious and extraordinary visions, he went on to establish one of the fastest-growing religions of the contemporary world: Mormonism.
As a teenage boy in the late 1810s and early 1820s, Joseph Smith of Palmyra was locally known as a clairvoyant guide who could track down hidden treasure using a “seer stone”—a smooth rock, variously opaque or marked with magic symbols, that he placed in his hat and gazed into to gain the power of second sight. The manner in which Smith went about “peep-stoning” might be compared today with scrying or crystal-gazing. The area’s buried-treasure hunters valued his talents. In the early nineteenth century, many Western and Central New Yorkers believed that ancient artifacts were squirreled away within Indian burial mounds or subterranean chambers under the region’s hills and valleys. Legend told of buried ruins that belonged to a civilization older than the Indians.
Magic and myth were part of the firmament of the Smith household. According to historian D. Michael Quinn in his monumental study Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, Joseph Smith’s family owned magical charms, divining rods, amulets, a ceremonial dagger inscribed with astrological symbols of Scorpio and seals of Mars, and parchments marked with occult signs and cryptograms popular in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American folklore. In her 1845 oral memoir, the family matriarch, Lucy Mack Smith, recalled the Smiths’ interest in “the faculty of Abrac”—a term that might have been lost on some. In fact, Abrac, or Abraxas, is a Gnostic term for God that also served as a magical incantation.* It forms the root of a magic word known to every child: abracadabra.
For his part, Joseph Smith venerated the powers of the planet Jupiter, which was prominent in his astrological birth chart. According to Quinn, Smith’s first wife, Emma, reported that Smith carried a protective Jupiter amulet up to his death. The surviving silver amulet displays markings that derive from the work of Renaissance mage Cornelius Agrippa and that were spread among British and American readers by the English occultist Francis Barrett in his 1801 book The Magus, a popularization