Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [67]
Making a definite spiritual use of the term science, Garvey told the audience that whites “live by science. You do everything by emotion. That makes the vast difference between the two races.… Get a scientific knowledge of religion, of God, of what you are; and you will create a better world for yourselves. Negroes, the world is to your making.” Contemporary readers of Garvey’s words could easily miss, or simply wonder at, the political leader’s references to religion and science—but the signposts abounded in Garvey’s day. The mental healer Phineas P. Quimby had made a direct link between religion and science. Quimby believed that religion was, above all, a lawful phenomenon guaranteed to produce certain results. In his writings, which appeared to the public for the first time a few years before Garvey’s address, the metaphysical healer used phrases like Science of Christ, Science of Health and Happiness, and, most tellingly, Christian Science.
Garvey’s spiritual “science” also had roots—occult roots—in his Caribbean boyhood. In the West Indies, the term science sometimes connoted magical practices. Writer–activist C. L. R. James, in his 1936 novel of Trinidadian domestic life, Minty Alley, showed how “science” and “magic” got tangled up when an older man confronted a younger neighbor:
“These books you always reading,” he picked up one and looked at the title. “About science! Ah! you read about science. Then you have books by de Laurence?”
This de Laurence was an American writer on magic and psychic science, whose books had some vogue in the islands.
“No,” said Haynes. “It isn’t that sort of science.”
“A man with your intelligence, if you read books on science you would do well. See now, about two o’clock, all the spirits of the air passing up and down. And if you know what to do you can compel them and make them do what you like.”
The writer “de Laurence” was a real person, a Chicago-based mail-order retailer of occult supplies who was especially popular among Caribbean, African, and African–American consumers. A handsome, angular man who liked to be photographed wearing a turban over his blondish hair, L. W. de Laurence was not above sometimes affixing his name to occult volumes that others had written. He was not quite a plagiarist—rather, he was a “book pirate,” freely pilfering the work of others in an age of flimsy copyrights, much like English occultist Francis Barrett did in 1801 when he swiped large swaths of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. (In a karmic cycle of occult “borrowing,” de Laurence lifted Barrett’s ghoulish illustrations of “evil spirits” for reuse in his massive Great Book of Magical Art, Hindoo Magic & Indian Occultism.)
Though white, de Laurence specifically targeted Afro–Caribbean buyers. His overseas customers—who abounded in Garvey’s Jamaica—may have found a kind of magical appeal in the fact that de Laurence peddled his wares from the “Institute of Hypnotism and Occult Philosophy” in the heartland of America, a nation that still had the majestic sheen of promise and progress.
Almost single-handedly, de Laurence introduced the texts and formulas of American hoodoo to the Caribbean Islands. Indeed, de Laurence’s “scientific,” American-made formulas (with names typical in hoodoo catalogs, like compelling powder, destruction powder, and oil of turn-back) often displaced indigenous forms of herb magic in Jamaica’s cities. Fearing de Laurence’s influence as a foreign agent of black magic, the nation’s legal authorities banned his books. Even when the populist government of Michael Manley in 1972 slashed away at the list of officially censored publications,