Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [25]
In 1851, the Boston-based Transcendentalist writer and teacher Alcott made the mythical Hermes Trismegistus the opening subject in a program of literary salons. “Few persons to hear and discuss Hermes, in consequence of the rain,” Alcott remarked in his journals. “But we had a very good time of it.” Alcott’s interest in the magico-Egyptian writings of Hermes probably arose from Emerson, whose influence touched the circle of Transcendentalists more deeply than any other. Emerson mentioned Hermes in his journals as early as 1834, challenging pedants to “strengthen the hearts of the waiting lovers of the primal philosophy.” He admiringly quoted the seventeenth-century philosopher Sir Thomas Browne, who, chin out, declared: “The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible World is but a Picture of the invisible wherein …” The Transcendentalists wouldn’t be laughed out either, and they embraced the Hermetic concept of man as a microcosm of the universe. “The world,” wrote Emerson in his essay “Compensation,” “globes itself in a drop of dew.” It was an American sounding of the great Hermetic dictum: “As above, so below.”
As seen through his journals, Emerson was among the first serious American writers to carefully consider topics such as the Persian prophet Zoroaster (1822), Hindu mythology (1823), the Greek mage Pythagoras (1832), Confucius (1836), Buddha (1838), the Vedas (1839), Hermes and the Neo-Platonists (1841), and reincarnation (1845). He familiarized the reading public with esoteric ideas in a way that later made it possible for Theosophy and other occult movements to be understood in America. “It may seem ludicrous to suggest that Emerson was the chief forerunner of Madame Blavatsky, her John the Baptist,” wrote religious scholar Alvin Boyd Kuhn in his 1930 study, Theosophy. “Yet, seriously, without Emerson, Madame Blavatsky could hardly have launched her gospel when she did with equal hope of success.”
Mystical Europe
Some of Blavatsky’s earliest and closest followers harbored a secret hope, discussed in letters and lodge conversations. It was that the mysterious madame had arrived to replace a fallen heterodox hero—the renegade Freemason and occult seeker Cagliostro, who had perished in the prisons of the Inquisition in Central Italy in 1795. First arrested in Rome in 1789 for the “heresy” of Freemasonry and other antipapal activities, the mysterious, widely traveled Cagliostro was probably the last man to die under the penalties of the Inquisition. But in the 1870s, antimonarchists and papal foes were riding on high hopes that history had finally turned their way, as conservative monarchies and Church influence waned throughout the decade. In 1870, Rome itself had fallen as an independent state, disbanding its military and stubbornly joining a unified Italian republic. It was weakened after years of assault by the democratic revolutionary Garibaldi—himself a committed Freemason and reputed confederate of Madame Blavatsky. “For admirers of the martyred Cagliostro,” wrote historian K. Paul Johnson, “events in Italy that decade were long-awaited retribution for the Church’s savage persecution of Masonry.”
In Europe, the occult experimentation that had been cut short by the Thirty Years’ War seemed everywhere to flourish anew. What came to be seen as a European occult revival touched America’s burgeoning occult culture and mixed with it. But the two movements soon divided into different channels, each with its own distinct aims and styles of thought. To understand how these sister movements converged and then split requires a brief look at how Europe’s revival emerged.
Napoleon’s disastrous military campaign in Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century had