Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [28]
Americans like organizing things, and the supernatural was no exception. Within a decade of the Fox sisters, the nation saw the growth of Spiritualist clubs, lecture societies, and séance circles. Modeled on the instructions developed by Andrew Jackson Davis in his 1851 book The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse, three hundred distinct “circles” emerged in Philadelphia alone during that decade. According to a survey, the Burned-Over District was home to eighty-nine trance mediums and Spiritualist lecturers by 1859. And those numbers probably failed to capture the full range of “hobbyist” mediums. In 1850, journalist E. W. Capron counted in Auburn, New York, “fifty to one hundred” mediums “in different stages of development,” including those who could induce unseen hands to strum guitars and pound drums.
In the 1850s and beyond, believers and enthusiasts were served by dozens of newspapers specifically devoted to Spiritualist phenomena and ideas. Among the largest were The Banner of Light and The New Era in Boston, The Spiritual Telegraph in New York, The Better Way in Cincinnati, The Carrier Dove in Oakland, and Spiritual Republic and Religio-Philosophical Journal in Chicago. Most were ardently progressive, espousing suffragism and abolitionism alongside news of the spirit world. The Religio-Philosophical Journal, which began publication just after the Civil War, launched its maiden issue with an editorial against capital punishment for Confederate leaders, urging Spiritualists to “heal the breach” of war and begin “the regenerative work of enlightening and spiritualizing the masses.”
There soon emerged Spiritualist churches, summer camps, and—again at the instigation of Andrew Jackson Davis—Sunday schools, the first of which opened in New York in 1863. It was based on Davis’s description of teaching methods in the heavenly realm of Summer Land. Aiming to cultivate the wisdom of the “imperishable and perfect” soul of the individual child, Davis’s Children’s Lyceums anticipated future trends in progressive education by emphasizing the personal needs of each pupil.
In the minds of many Spiritualists, their movement held a special place for children. Oakland’s Carrier Dove featured a “Children’s Department,” which offered stories of “little angels coming to converse with wee Willy and Maud.” In 1886, the paper covered a children’s séance where a motherly trance medium:
placed the little stand into the center of the room and took her seat beside it, then called the children, six at a time, to come and put their hands upon it, while it danced to the tune of lively music. Then came the raps, and each child received some little message. It was indeed a beautiful picture to see the sweet, animated faces of the little ones as they heard for the first time the signals from the spirit land.
Mysterious Numbers
While the numbers were large, it is difficult to say precisely how many Americans considered themselves Spiritualists in the nineteenth century. The figure of 1.5 million, out of a total population of about thirty million, appears repeatedly at the movement’s initial flush of excitement in the 1850s—sometimes attributed to surveys, other times not attributed at all.
Works of history, both old and new, report figures upward of that amount. As a rule, the higher the number, the thinner the attribution: 2.5 million from the pen of a sympathetic Reverend W. R. Hayden in 1885 (and repeated in an influential British study); three million reported in several early Spiritualist journals; nine million claimed in 1874 by the movement’s preeminent theologian Davis (confirmed while in a clairvoyant trance); and Boston’s Banner of Light, hitting the all-time record, reported eleven to thirteen million