Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [53]
With plans bursting in his head, he moved with his wife and young son to the five-thousand-person town of Moscow, Idaho, near Spokane, Washington. Moscow’s nineteenth-century settlers had called it “Hog Heaven” for its abundance of flora favored by pigs. But by the time the Robinson family arrived, it was a bustling community with a neatly ordered main street and served as the home to the University of Idaho. Robinson’s sole purpose in moving there was to accept a job at a pharmacy that closed at six P.M. Punching out early allowed the Corner Drug Store’s new counter clerk to begin writing out the concepts of his “new psychological religion.” Beginning one Saturday night, Robinson sat at a borrowed Corona typewriter and pecked the keys for thirty-six hours straight. When he stopped, he had the lesson plan that would deliver the “God law” into the hands of ordinary people. But he needed a way to reach them. Now a family man, Robinson’s roust about days were behind him; he could no longer pick up and roam the nation. National advertising was a new enough medium to still seem revolutionary, and it struck him as the perfect vehicle: His would be a mail-order faith.
Approaching everyone from a local highway commissioner to a grocery clerk, he pulled together $500 and visited an advertising agency in Spokane, the nearest city. They told him not to waste his money. So, on his own, Robinson spent $400 and placed a single ad in Psychology Magazine: I TALKED WITH GOD—SO CAN YOU—IT’S EASY.
Even Robinson was surprised when the one notice attracted five thousand replies and ultimately netted $13,000 in cash. He wasted no time in seizing the momentum: In newspapers, magazines, and radio stations all over America, Robinson proclaimed Psychiana a “money-back religion,” promising unlimited potential—or a full refund—to any who tried it. Within the first decade, he secured six hundred thousand paying subscribers spanning sixty-seven nations. His direct-mail ads, consisting of detailed pamphlet-length espousals of Psychiana theology, began entering two to three million households a year. So was born a mass movement.
The Psychiana Method
Robinson took a bold tack on religion, insisting that its results should be measurable and provable. Hence, hopeful students and more than a few critics wondered: Did Robinson’s ideas work?
Religious historian Charles S. Braden knew Robinson and wrote about him in the 1940s. One of the few scholars to take any note of Psychiana, Braden remarked on how Robinson’s lessons had a way of “awakening, through the power of suggestion, a lively sense of expectancy in the student.” Enthusiasm, as Carl Jung once noted, is the hidden key to the effectiveness of any belief system. In his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James found that a dramatic conversion could alter a person’s character, objectively changing the circumstances of his outer life. On a similar scale, Psychiana, like other positive-thinking philosophies, could awaken new thoughts, ideas, and options, with the results seeming veritably magical at times.
Even in the twenty-first century—surrounded by an endless stream of self-help programs and practical spiritual ideas—it is still possible for a sympathetic reader to get swept up in the tone of portent and certainty that permeates Robinson’s first lesson. In it, he encouraged the repeated use of his key mantra: “I believe in the power of the living God.” Other affirmations quickly followed—“I am more and more successful”—and Robinson prescribed simple, specific methods, such as closing one’s eyes at night before falling asleep and meditating on a “white spot”—the veil that he told students separates