Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [15]
Spiritualism shared a common trait with the utopian movements of the area. Spiritualists harbored the Yankee attitude that religion rested not just on faith but on proof. Like William Miller poring through Scripture to pinpoint the date of Armageddon, Spiritualists found tantalizing “facts” to back up their belief in the physical reality of the afterworld: spirit raps, table tilting, and communication through mediums. In a similar vein, the utopians maintained that they, too, were simply following a process of logic, in their case the cause-and-effect of better styles of living making for better men and women. In the Burned-Over District, mystics and radicals felt a shared stake in the prophecy of progress. They believed that spiritual and social forces, if properly discovered and used, could remake a person, inside and out. And a prophet was about to enter their midst who would herald the dawning of the Spiritualist movement and unify the reformist and religious passions that traveled the Psychic Highway.
As Miller was foretelling the dawn of a glorious new world, as Noyes was forecasting an earthly utopia, as Smith was spreading a new testament, further downstate, in the Hudson Valley region, a seventeen-year-old half-educated cobbler’s apprentice experienced cosmic visions of his own as he ambled across moonlit fields and meadows. His name was Andrew Jackson Davis—or, as he was called in the press after his hometown, the “Poughkeepsie Seer.” His influence did more than any other’s to shape the occult and alternative religious traditions of a growing nation.
The Poughkeepsie Seer
Andrew Jackson Davis was born in 1826 to an upstate New York family that scarcely fit his high-sounding name. The four-day-old infant was named “Andrew Jackson” by a boozy uncle who wept with sentiment over the future president and hero of the Battle of New Orleans—“the greatest man a livin’ in the world!”
Davis’s Hudson Valley home life was dreary: His mother spent most of her time bent over housework, and his cobbler father was an on-and-off drinker who could barely keep his family fed and clothed. Andrew, his older sister, and their parents were forced to pick up odd jobs and harvest chores at local farms to survive. With money short, there was little time for education. Davis’s young mind took to local influences: Tales of spooks and witchcraft ran up and down the Hudson countryside. Neighbors showed a sharp interest in strange signs and omens. And Davis’s mother—a dignified and honest woman in the face of both near-poverty and physical frailty—told of prophetic dreams and visions.
But Davis was no superstitious yokel. As though possessed of some finer instinct of the mind, he chafed against the hellfire-and-fury ramblings of the itinerant ministers who crisscrossed the Burned-Over District and Hudson Valley. He took careful notice that some of the most outwardly pious men neglected their debts at the country store where he clerked. His neighbors often felt sheepish and tongue-tied before well-practiced preachers who seized upon unsuspecting “sinners” on local lanes and at store counters, commanding them to repent or face hellfire. But Davis would argue back. “I ain’t afraid to meet my God,” he once told a local firebrand, sending the pastor into spasms of indignation. Be—calm! an inner voice reassured Davis. The—pastor—is—wrong; you—shall—see!
When the Davis family moved to the growing town of Poughkeepsie in 1839, things began to look up, at least a little. The family was able to enroll its fourteen-year-old son in an inexpensive experimental Quaker