Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [19]
It was one of Poe’s most widely read tales. Never explicitly billed as fiction and written like a medical case study, the story was initially taken as literal reportage by some in the United States and Britain. The Sunday Times of London reprinted it without comment in January of 1846 under the banner Mesmerism in America: Astounding and Horrifying Narrative. Whatever the author’s intent, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” served to popularize and lend credibility to the mysterious art.
Whether Poe was equally fascinated with the facts in the case of Andrew Jackson Davis was another matter. The one public reference Poe made to the young medium was a brusque aside in Graham’s Magazine in 1849: “There surely cannot be more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of (Oh, Andrew Jackson Davis!) in your philosophy.” In one of Poe’s last short stories, “Mellonta Tauta,” he opened with an obviously satirical letter that parodied Davis’s name and called the story “a translation, by my friend, Martin Van Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the ‘Toughkeepsie Seer,’).”
Regardless, when Davis’s boldly titled tome, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, appeared in its nearly eight hundred pages in 1847, it became an instant sensation, selling nine hundred copies in a single week. (Poe soon followed with his own cosmological tract, “Eureka,” in which some noted more than a little more similarity with Davis’s grand vision. Humorously or not, Poe read from his work in an apparent trance state before an audience.) Although dense, repetitive, and ponderous, Davis’s Principles of Nature attempted grand heights, setting forth its new creation myth: “IN THE BEGINNING, the Univercoelum was one boundless, undefinable, and unimaginable ocean of LIQUID FIRE!” Davis described the making of the great universe and all its spiritual dimensions—of which life on earth was just one.
He recorded journeys to other planets and provided details of the afterlife and the creative workings of the Eternal Mind. To some critics, the book was an obvious pilfering of Swedenborg. Indeed, some of Davis’s passages—such as his flights through the planets and discourses on the extraterrestrial beings of Saturn and Jupiter—are direct echoes of the Swedish mystic, who produced his own massive treatises on interplanetary dimensions and higher realms before he died in 1772. These volumes by Swedenborg appeared in their first widely circulated English translations in America in 1845, about the same time that Davis embarked on his trance dictations. Davis openly acknowledged his “debt” to Swedenborg—but, he insisted, strictly as a student to a spirit guide. Davis maintained that he had read next to nothing in his young life, and certainly not the formidable works of Swedenborg. A preacher who had befriended Davis while the seer was still a local Poughkeepsie boy recalled that the lad displayed a ravenous appetite for “controversial religious works … whenever he could borrow them and obtain leisure for their perusal.” Rather lamely, Davis countered that he had merely borrowed his preacher friend’s books “for others who wished to read but who did not sufficiently know the pastor to borrow for themselves.”
Some influential observers didn’t know what to think. A prominent Davis supporter named George Bush, a professor of Hebrew at New York University—and a first cousin, five times removed, to President George W. Bush—told the New York Tribune: “I can solemnly affirm that I have heard him correctly quote the Hebrew language in his lectures and display a knowledge of geology which would have been astonishing in a person of his age, even if he had devoted years to the study.”
The Church of the New Jerusalem, the ecclesiastical body founded in North America on the principles of Swedenborg, kept its distance from the controversial medium. Indeed, the Swedenborgian Church already