Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [41]
Inspired by the possibilities, a group of religious thinkers and impresarios formed a loosely knit spiritual movement around this “scientific” religious concept. Thoughts, they argued, could be seen to manifest into actual events, such as health or sickness, wealth or poverty. They claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson as their founding prophet: “We know,” the Concord mystic wrote in 1841, “that the ancestor of every action is a thought.” The Bible, in their reading, seemed to agree, particularly in the Proverb: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” In an enthused leap of reasoning, the movement that came to be known as New Thought maintained that the individual’s creative mind was one and the same as the creative force called God. As such, a person could literally think his dreams to life. It was America’s boldest—and most influential—attempt at what religious scholar John B. Anderson called “a practical use of the occult powers of the soul.”
Healthy Thinking
Like most religious movements, New Thought had its earliest beginnings in the experience of a single individual. In the early 1830s, a clockmaker named Phineas P. Quimby noticed that his tuberculosis seemed to ease whenever he took a rejuvenating carriage ride in the Maine countryside. A small man with intense, piercing eyes, Quimby discovered that when his spirits lifted, so did his illness. He began hearing news of Mesmerism as it was spread by the young Frenchman Charles Poyen, who visited Bangor, Maine, in 1836. Two years later, Quimby attended another Mesmerist lecture, delivered in Belfast, Maine, by a Massachusetts physician named Robert Collyer. Where Poyen’s style had been hesitant and retiring, in a language that was never fully his own, Collyer came across as a formidable and convincing presence. Quimby grew fascinated with the similarities between Mesmerist healings and his own experience. He began to study the practice and soon developed the ability to Mesmerize subjects of his own.
Like Andrew Jackson Davis before him, Quimby possessed little in the way of formal education. He was self-schooled and gave no appearance otherwise. One Belfast citizen wrote in admiration to a friend, “Mr. Quimby is not an educated man, nor is he pretending or obstrusive; but I think if you should take occasion to converse with him you will discern many traces of deep thought and reflection.…” Quimby’s lack of formal schooling, while a mark of his genuineness to some, later became a point of harsh criticism.
In another parallel to the life of the Poughkeepsie Seer, Quimby toured New England in the early 1840s with a seventeen-year-old boy named Lucius Burkmar, whom Quimby would put into a trance state. From this state, Burkmar diagnosed and prescribed folk cures for diseases. Stories abounded of Burkmar’s abilities. But Quimby eventually grew convinced that it was neither Burkmar’s powers to mentally scan the human body nor his herbal-tea remedies that were curing people: rather, it was the boy’s ability to change their beliefs about their illnesses. The mind itself was where the actual cause—and cure—seemed to rest. Disease, Quimby reasoned, “follows an opinion.” By 1859, Quimby developed a philosophy of “mental healing” and began using it to treat patients himself, without a Mesmeric trance or clairvoyant intermediary. When a man was sick, he explained, “I affirm that the disease is in his belief and his belief is in error.” While Quimby focused primarily on the mind’s curative abilities, he increasingly came to view the subconscious as an extension of the Divine power, through which a person could, with the