Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [20]
There is in the western country a very extraordinary missionary of the New Jerusalem. A man has appeared who seems to be almost independent of corporeal wants and sufferings. He goes barefooted, can sleep anywhere, in house or out of house, and live upon the coarsest and most scanty fare. He has actually thawed ice with his bare feet. He procures what books he can of the New Church Swedenborg, travels into the remote settlements, and lends them wherever he can find readers, and sometimes divides a book into two or three parts for more extensive distribution and usefulness. This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries.
By the time of John Chapman’s death in 1845 and the advent of Davis’s fame, the Church of the New Jerusalem was on a quest for acceptance and respectability. The last thing it needed was the backcountry mystic Davis claiming to be the protégé of its ghostly founder and quite possibly lifting ideas from the theologian’s texts. Johnny Appleseed was apostle enough for the Swedenborgians.
Davis’s controversial reputation served only to fuel public interest. He would never again dictate a book in a trance state, but—in an unusual feat for a cobbler’s apprentice—he began writing his own cosmic treatises, which would number more than thirty by the time he died in 1910. They continued to be based on his psychical visions, now freely entered. Davis discovered that he could go into a “Superior Condition” on his own, without a Mesmerist, and return to consciousness with fresh insights. Up until this point, trance writers or spirit mediums were considered mere channels of otherworldly forces, passive vessels for communication from higher powers. Not any longer in America. “In the land of democracy,” wrote nineteenth-century English historian and psychical researcher Frank Podmore, “we are confronted with a singular development unknown to the older monarchies. The transatlantic seers constantly tend to be independent; they assume the authority of the prophet.…”
And to a growing body of readers, Davis’s trance-induced writings were a divine revelation. Davis wrote reassuringly of heaven—or the Summer Land, as he called it—which sounded a lot like an idyllic version of the Burned-Over District and the Hudson Valley: “Its streams, rivers, fountains flitter with their own immortal radiance. Its mountains and undulating landscapes are ever green, beautiful with diamond effulgence, more ‘delectable’ than any pilgrim dreams, while the firmament glows with suns and planets, clusters within clusters, constellations within universes, far beyond mind’s conception. High thoughts visit us from the Heavenly alps.”
The landscape, metaphysics, and reformist ideals of Central New York formed the model for Davis’s cosmology. His Summer Land included people of all races and creeds—Africans, American Indians, Jews, and followers of “Mahomet.” The Hudson Valley prophet went further still, declaring the existence of “a Mother as well as a Father in God,” echoing Mother Ann Lee and Jemima Wilkinson. He proclaimed a social gospel “of freedom equally to man and woman, young and old, lord and serf.” For many, the true magic of Davis’s message was in its liberalism: sexual and racial parity, religions on equal footing, and a universal faith based on reason.
In the philosophy of Andrew Jackson Davis, the ideas of utopianism, Mesmerism, and Swedenborgianism were becoming joined. The concept of entering a trance state to reach the afterworld was playing on the public imagination. And the notion that higher dimensions were open to an everyday American—an uneducated cobbler’s apprentice, no less—made the possibilities all the more