Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [127]
(And What Is It Doing in America?)
Sources on the Kelpius and Ephrata communes include The Diarium of Magister Johannes Kelpius, with annotations by Julius Friedrich Sachse (Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society; v. 25, 1917), The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania by Sachse (privately printed, 1895), Wisdom’s Children by Arthur Versluis (State University of New York Press, 1999), The American Soul by Jacob Needleman (Tarcher/Penguin, 2002), and The Woman in the Wilderness by Jona than D. Scott (Middleton Books, 2005), a rigorously researched historical novel.
Éliphas Lévi is quoted from his 1855 Transcendental Magic, as translated by Arthur Edward Waite in 1896. Aleister Crowley is quoted from The Book of the Law (Weiser, 1926, 1938, 2004).
The works of Frances A. Yates form an extraordinary guide to the intellectual history of Renaissance and Elizabethan occultism, particularly The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), and Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (The University of Chicago Press, 1964), from which the epigraph from the Hermetic dialogue Asclepius is translated.
Articles on Zolar include “Dean of Astrologers” by John Updike, The New Yorker, 10/31/59; “In the Stars,” Time magazine, 8/24/62; “Publishing Enters the Age of Aquarius” by Marcia Seligson, The New York Times, 9/28/69; “Tells Fortunes, Makes a Fortune” by George C. Harlan, San Mateo Times, 2/3/60; and “Zodiac Provides Signs of the Times” by Richard Blystone, Associated Press, 3/1/70.
Chapter One: The Psychic Highway
General sources on Ann Lee and the Shakers include The Shaker Experience in America by Stephen J. Stein (Yale University Press, 1994), Spirit Possession and Popular Religion by Clarke Garrett (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), The People Called Shakers by Edward Deming Andrews (Dover, 1963), Mother Ann Lee by Nardi Reeder Campion (University Press of New England, 1976, 1990), and Ann the Word by Richard Francis (Arcade, 2000). The legend of Mother Ann Lee and the averted shipwreck appears in A Summary View of the Millennial Church, or United Society of Believers, (Commonly Called the Shakers) by Calvin Green and Seth Y. Wells (Packard & Van Benthuysen, 1823). The stories of Mother Ann’s maternal and marital woes, the mob violence against her, and the winter travelers reaching the Shaker colony at Niskayuna (now called Watervliet) appear in Shakerism by Anna White and Leila S. Taylor (Press of Fred J. Heer, 1905) and in Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Mother Ann Lee, and the Elders with Her by Rufus Bishop and Seth Y. Wells (privately printed 1816 and reissued 1888). The story of Mother Ann Lee’s “psychometric portrait” appears in The New York Folklore Quarterly, autumn 1960. The events of the “Dark Day” are reported in Historic Storms of New England by Sidney Perley (The Salem Press, 1891). Henry Steel Olcott’s People from the Other World (American Publishing Company, 1875) is a useful window on how the Shakers considered their order a forerunner of Spiritualism.
Carl Carmer’s phrase is from Listen For a Lonesome Drum: A York State Chronicle (Farrar & Rinehart, 1936, 1950). The history of Millerism draws on accounts by historian Whitney R. Cross in his indispensable The Burned-over District (Cornell University Press, 1950), Francis D. Nichol in his sympathetic but responsible The Midnight Cry (Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1944), and The Memoirs of William Miller by Sylvester Bliss (J. V. Himes, 1853).
The most reliable sources I have found on the life of Jemima Wilkinson include History and Directory of Yates County by Stafford C. Cleveland (1873), “Jemima Wilkinson” by Robert P. St. John, The Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association (April 1930), and Pioneer Prophetess by Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr. (Cornell University Press, 1964). Also helpful on the movements of the Burned-Over District are The Crucible of Ferment by Emerson Klees (Cameo