Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [96]
As I stand alone in Your great silence, God my Father, in the midst of me there blazes a pure light and it fills every atom of my whole being with its great radiance. Life, Love, Strength, Purity, Beauty, Perfection, stand forth in all dominion within me. As I gaze into the very heart of this light, I see another light,—liquid, soft, golden-white and radiantly luminous,—absorbing, mothering and giving forth the caressing fire of the Greater Light.
Now I know that I am God and one with God’s whole universe. I whisper to God my Father and I am undisturbed.
Looking back, it can seem puzzling that many thousands of readers could accept Spalding’s tales of a Christ extant in India, living among other Masters who performed acts of teleportation, clairvoyance, and levitation. But time and again Americans had flocked to fantastic visions or stories of occult prowess that, regardless of the believability of their outer details, touched people’s innermost religious emotions or hopes: the Fox sisters summoning the spirit world, Andrew Jackson Davis’s dispatches from the Summer Land, Joseph Smith’s record of America as a land of biblical patriarchs, Phineas Quimby’s mental healing, William Dudley Pelley’s reports from the afterlife, and Frank B. Robinson’s claims to have “talked with God.” Each tore the lid off a yearning that existed just beneath the surface of popular religious culture.
Like Miss Chew’s congregants in Helena, Montana, Spalding’s readers felt a particular hunger to know more about the Masters and the “world traveler” who recorded their metaphysical testament. The scribe of the Masters was, however, someone about whom almost nothing could be said with certainty: not his age, his background, his vocation, or whether he had really visited the Far East or even set foot outside the United States.
The Book of Gold
Spalding was, in fact, a Western mining prospector with an uncanny knack for reciting dead-to-rights details about people and places that all reasonable deduction precluded his having ever encountered. He likewise possessed the ability to speak movingly on spiritual systems—Hinduism, Buddhism, and ancient forms of mysticism—with which he had little direct contact. Spalding spent most of his time laboring as a solitary claims prospector. And while his mining ventures left him broke, his first Far East narrative—which the miner initially called The Book of Gold—attracted and thrilled readers, as did the enigma of the man himself, from the time when his manuscripts began privately circulating in the early 1920s to the day of his lonely death on the morning of March 18, 1953, at a Tempe, Arizona, motor inn.
The motel owner discovered Spalding’s body half draped over a bed that he had just managed to reach before collapsing. The best-selling author had $15.98 in his pockets, wore bedraggled miner’s clothes, and drove a ’47 pickup. Though once married, he had spent much of his final year living alone in New Mexico in an old mining shack with no modern conveniences. From the conflicting reports he had given friends—further confused by the two different driver’s licenses found on his body—Spalding could have been anywhere from middle age to ninety-five years old. Later investigations showed that he was probably eighty.
A smallish man whose nose had become misshapen—he said from atomic radiation exposure—Spalding had died of a heart attack while stopping en route to Reno, Nevada, to visit one of his mining claims. Even in his aged years, however, Spalding was reported to be capable of remarkable feats of physical