Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [42]
Quimby’s ideas quickly found influence. One of his earliest followers was religious thinker and writer Warren Felt Evans. When the men met in around 1864, Evans had already left the Methodist ministry to pursue the ideas of the Swedish mystic–scholar Emanuel Swedenborg. Evans was one of the first American metaphysical writers to use the term “New Age” to herald a dawning era of mystical awareness, as he did in his 1864 book, The New Age and Its Messenger. The “messenger” was Swedenborg.
Quimby’s ideas made innate sense to people who had studied Swedenborg’s theory that cosmic laws corresponded to and affected the qualities of the human soul. For Quimby, these cosmic laws were Christian laws, their action was summoned through one’s thoughts, and their power extended to all forms of experience. Like Evans, some of Quimby’s earliest supporters were American Swedenborgians willing to make the leap to this bold philosophy that they believed was implicit in the work of the Swedish seer. Evans’s books, such as The Mental Cure in 1869, helped spread Quimby’s ideas beyond New England. But a far greater apostle already sat at the master’s feet.
In 1862, Quimby had begun to treat a patient named Mary Glover Patterson. She later remarried and took the name by which she is remembered in religious history: Mary Baker Eddy. Eddy proved an extraordinary, if contentious, proponent of spiritual healing. Far and above any of Quimby’s other patients or students, Eddy codified a theology around the “doctor’s” core ideas. She called it Christian Science—a term Quimby himself had used. Eddy’s philosophy at once overlapped with Quimby’s and sharply diverged from it. Rather than extolling the agencies of the human mind, she believed in the need for its eradication. The “mortal mind,” steeped in malevolence and illusions, needed to be overcome by the universal “divine mind,” the one true and absolute reality. Eddy denied the reality of disease, evil, and physical matter itself as mere human perversions, or “an illusion of material sense,” as she later wrote in her masterwork, Science and Health.
After Quimby died in 1866 (the mind healer was just sixty-four), Eddy, whose own health had been suffering, briefly cast about for a new mentor. Finding none to answer the call, she soon decided to build her own spiritual-healing religion, with herself at its helm. With a degree of absolutism that she may have later come to regret, Mrs. Eddy (as followers called her) dismissed her old mentor Quimby as little more than a backwoods Mesmerist, at times depicting the unschooled man as one step above a carnival performer. Quimby’s followers retaliated. They pointed out that Eddy had published articles heaping adoration upon the mental healer even after his death, when she eulogized him in a Lynn, Massachusetts, newspaper as one “who healed with the truth that Christ taught.” Eddy countered that, even if she had written such things, it must have been under the thrall of the “illiterate” Quimby’s Mesmeric powers.
For every lash that Eddy directed at Quimby’s memory, she was tougher on her own disciples. In the 1880s, Eddy cut off student after student who attempted innovations or referred to insights of their own. A wrong word in a pamphlet or journal could earn immediate dismissal. In this way, Eddy became the mother—or, as some came to see it, the stepmother—of New Thought, fostering an offspring that she never wanted. When Eddy’s beautiful and articulate younger student Emma Curtis Hopkins made passing reference to her own intimacies with the Divine power in The Christian Science Journal, which she edited for Eddy in the mid-1880s, the church leader drummed her out of the movement.* Hopkins was locked out of the Christian Science ladies’ dormitory in Boston where she had lived. Forced to rely on her own resources, Hopkins relocated to Chicago, where she hung out a shingle as an independent instructor