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For his part, the poet Merrill took a subtler view of the matter. “If it’s still yourself that you’re drawing upon,” he said, “then that self is much stranger and freer and more far-seeking than the one you thought you knew.” And at another point: “If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become!”

In the end, Ouija confounds. This oddly magnetic toy—the one device from the age of Spiritualism still used in the twenty-first century—evokes nostalgic memories of pajama parties for some and for others nightmares they would sooner forget. It also left an indisputable mark on the work of one of the greatest American poets of the last century. Whether Ouija is a mysterious instrument, a harmless entertainment, or a “dangerous doorway” lies in the experience of the user. But the words caveat emptor inevitably hang over the history of this strangest of American curios.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SCIENCE OF RIGHT THINKING

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST

It began as the bleakest of Christmases at the Wattles home. In the Indiana winter of 1896, the family patriarch, Wallace, a rake-thin Methodist minister with a passion for Christ’s defense of the poor, had been away in Chicago at a conference of social reformers. A Christian socialist, Wallace D. Wattles was already irritating the more-conservative members of his episcopate, some of whom were eyeing his dismissal. Back home in LaPorte, Indiana, his family had no money for a Christmas tree; all they could muster was an evergreen branch decorated with a few smudgy tallow candles and strung with popcorn. Gifts were meager—the family had spent the last of its holiday savings on a cuff box that waited for Wattles under the branch.

“Finally Father came,” his daughter Florence recalled. “With that beautiful smile he praised the tree, said the cuff box was just what he had been wanting—and took us all in his arms to tell us of the wonderful social message of Jesus.” It was a critical turning point for Wattles. In Chicago, he had met a radical minister named George D. Herron. An ardent purveyor of the “social gospel,” Herron had gained national prominence using the message of Christ to condemn the cruel mechanisms of an economic system that sent children to work in cotton mills. He impressed upon Wattles that Christ’s vision of social justice must be at the heart of the pastorate’s mission.

For Wattles, it was the final stroke in a spiritual philosophy he was developing himself. The minister had been imbibing metaphysical ideas that were bubbling up around him and combining them with his own experiments into the creative powers of the human mind. As Wattles saw it, man was a prisoner to outer circumstance only to the degree that he was a prisoner of inner circumstance. Free the mind, he concluded, and outer circumstance would follow. If the mind—this magical, ethereal “thinking stuff” that molded the surrounding world—could be properly harnessed, there was no limit to what a man could achieve.

A Science of God

America in the late nineteenth century was suffused with influences from Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and Theosophy. Each, in its own fashion, imbued the nation’s spiritual culture with the conviction that divine mysteries existed not at the top rung of a cosmic ladder but within the settings of ordinary life.

And ordinary life was undergoing remarkable changes. As the nineteenth century closed, the fruits of modern science appeared everywhere: telegraphs, motor engines, electricity, and automated production. In medicine, Pasteur’s germ theory was explaining illnesses that for years had resisted understanding. In biology, Darwin had theorized a gradual order in the development of all forms of life. In politics, Marx had classified economics as a matter of “science,” in which inevitable outcomes could be foreseen. In psychology, Freud had begun to codify childhood traumas that triggered adult neuroses, and hypnotists