Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [18]
For Davis and Swedenborg, as for many others, however, the experience did not end at physical sensation. After his feeling of dissolution, Davis discovered that his mental acuteness remained intact—and seemed to expand into higher realms. He had an inner vision of standing on a pitch-dark shore with waves crashing about him. He remained still but with a sense of brilliant alertness, as though poised to receive some great message. “Ain’t this exceedingly strange?” he marveled to himself.
On one “chilly, fitful, disagreeable” winter night in 1844, Davis found that after a particularly deep Mesmeric session he had trouble returning to ordinary consciousness. He stumbled back to the room where he was staying, at the home of his tailor–trance master. Davis dropped onto his bed and immediately fell asleep. Later he awoke at the beckoning of a voice outside that sounded like his recently deceased mother. He ran outdoors and on the road beheld a vision: It was a flock of unruly sheep being led by an overcome shepherd; the shepherd seemed to need his help. At this point Davis embarked on a kind of vision quest—or what he called a psychical “flight through space”—traveling in either mind or body (and possibly both, as he vanished until the next day) over the wintry New York terrain.
He said he traversed west across the frozen Hudson River, scaled steep hills in the Catskills, slept on a pile of tree branches resembling an altar, and beheld incredible visions of nature: mountains caked with snow and ice; dark, forbidding valleys; a thunder-and-lightning torrent of rain. He eventually found his way to a fenced graveyard, where he encountered the spirits of Galen, the legendary Greek physician, and none other than Emanuel Swedenborg himself. “By thee will a new light appear,” the Swedish scientist and seer told him.
Davis returned to the tailor’s home the next day, shaken but possessed of a sense of mission. The bearded youngster no longer seemed an apprentice cobbler ready to perform stage tricks. “No more time upon wonder-seekers,” he insisted. Instead, Davis began delivering lectures on religious or metaphysical topics while in a trance, or magnetized, state. His ideas, he claimed, came from higher regions that he could visit in his psychical flights. Davis determined that he would dictate an entire book this way: It would be the vehicle for the “new light” Swedenborg told him to deliver to humanity.
The Seer Emerges
In 1845, the nineteen-year-old Davis decided to leave his tailor friend and his hometown. Accompanied by two new collaborators—a doctor of “botanic remedies” from Bridgeport, Connecticut, and a Universalist minister from New Haven—the Poughkeepsie Seer moved to Manhattan. From a series of low-rent downtown apartments, Davis entered a trance day after day for months. He dictated visions of other planets, heaven, angels, afterlife realms, and the spiritual mechanics of the entire universe, all recorded by his minister friend for the pages of a massively swelling book.
The trance sittings were open to witnesses—one of whom was a pallid, no-nonsense journalist named Edgar Allan Poe. While Davis was living on Vesey Street in Manhattan’s financial district, Poe sojourned from his Greenwich Village apartment to make a survey of the seer’s work. Poe was fascinated by Mesmerism, placing it at the center of some of his most famous stories, including “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a tale completed in New York that same year. Poe’s story involves the sickly Valdemar, who agrees to be suspended in a Mesmeric trance at the moment of his death. For seven months, the trance master, called P__, keeps Valdemar’s consciousness—or magnetic fluid—separated from the man’s physical form, suspending him in a state of semilife. The body can move only the “swollen and blackened tongue” in its open mouth, from which issues a horrifying, hollow voice that begs the Mesmerist to set him free. When P__ finally releases Valdemar from the trance, the body “within the space of a single minute, or less,