Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [21]
* Gnostics were members of early Christian sects that had not been enfolded within the Church structure. Their literature and theology were a distinctly independent mixture of Christian, classical, and pagan thought.
* As will later be explored, the Great Seal did not actually appear on the back of the dollar bill until 1935. Until then the seal was an instrument of official government business, of little familiarity to the general public. In a stroke that would make the arcane image instantly recognizable, the Great Seal was placed there on the initiative of a president and vice president who also happened to be Masons: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Henry A. Wallace.
CHAPTER TWO
MYSTIC AMERICANS
The world is infested, just now, by a new sect of philosophers, who have not yet suspected themselves of forming a sect, and who, consequently, have adopted no name. They are the Believers in Everything Old.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “FIFTY SUGGESTIONS”
Today, Manhattan’s West 47th Street—a narrow strip of soot-stained office towers, honking traffic, and sidewalks lined with cut-rate jewelry stalls—seems an unlikely birthplace for a spiritual revolution. But in the late nineteenth century, the grimy thoroughfare was every bit as much a staging ground for a flowering of occultism as the marbled palaces of the Renaissance had been four centuries earlier.
It was there in the summer of 1876 that a bearded lawyer and former Civil War officer whom people still called “the colonel” turned a crucial page in his life. The respected jurist had recently divorced his religiously conservative wife, the daughter of an Episcopal minister. In the process he effectively severed his relationship with two teenage sons, who could not follow, much less understand, the new life their father had chosen. His name was Henry Steel Olcott. Decades later, the Buddhist nation of Ceylon would enshrine his image on a postage stamp and mark his death with a national holiday. Hindus in India would celebrate his birthday. And if there were a Mount Rushmore of American occultism, his visage would be carved on it. But instead, in his home country, his name was quickly forgotten.
A tall, bespectacled man whose muttonchop beard made him look older than his forty-four years, Olcott outwardly appeared the product of his conservative Presbyterian upbringing in Orange, New Jersey. But beneath his respectable exterior lay a passion for the arcane that he had harbored since he was young. As a boy of twelve, he made a pilgrimage to Poughkeepsie. There he climbed the stairs of a two-story building to witness Andrew Jackson Davis, still a teenager himself, hold in his hand the lock of a sick man’s hair, from which Olcott said the seer made a complete medical diagnosis. The memory never left him. After entering New York University at fifteen, Olcott was forced to drop out following his first year, when his businessman father went broke. On his own, he traveled to relatives in Ohio to try a career in farming. When fieldwork was done, his relatives cultivated an unusual set of interests: séances, Spiritualism, and table-rapping—trends that were just winding their way down the Psychic Highway of New York’s Burned-Over District into the farm country of the West.
The fields of Ohio were not enough for Olcott’s ambitions. Within a few years he returned home to work at an agricultural school in Newark, New Jersey. A relative soon left him an inheritance, which he used to open a research farm near Mount Vernon, New York. And here the winds of fate lifted him. The young agriculturalist had developed expertise in a strain of Chinese sugarcane that seemed promisingly adaptable to the climes of the American North. As the threat of war loomed over the Mason–Dixon Line, Northerners grew anxious to loosen their dependence on the South’s sugar crop. Not yet twenty-five, Olcott wrote