No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Andrew Jackson Davis and Spiritualist Constructions of Religion(s)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2023
Abstract
That the concept of religion is of recent construction is well established in the literature. What is less understood is the American contribution to this global discourse, in particular its nineteenth-century popularization below the upper echelons of Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and comparative religion scholars. The small but very influential group of Spiritualists associated with the seer Andrew Jackson Davis offer a fascinating window into popular construals of religion and world religions—here, internally oriented, naturalized, and evolutionary—taking shape amid increasing globalization and the challenge of scientific materialism. The subdiscourse articulated by Davis and his circle provides an interesting case not only for its antiinstitutional and individualized qualities but also for its radical decentering of Christianity and paradoxical relationship to science. Moreover, Davis's efforts to define true religion and frame his system as its purest expression are connected to struggles for legitimacy within the public sphere and contests concerning religious authority.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2023 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
1 Delp, Robert W., “A Spiritualist in Connecticut: Andrew Jackson Davis, the Hartford Years, 1850–1854,” The New England Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1980): 356–57Google Scholar; “The Hartford Bible Convention,” New York Tribune, June 4, 1853, 4.
2 Davis, Andrew Jackson, Free Thoughts Concerning Religion; or, Nature versus Theology (Boston: William White and Co., 1870), 7Google Scholar.
3 “The Bible Convention,” New York Tribune, June 3, 1853, 5; “The Hartford Bible Convention,” 4; Delp, “A Spiritualist in Connecticut,” 361–62.
4 “Anti-Bible Convention,” Hartford Daily Courant, June 7, 1853, 2.
5 “The Last Hartford Convention,” New York Times, June 3, 1853, 4.
6 “The Bible Convention at Hartford,” The Liberator 23, no. 24 (June 17, 1853): 95; Davis, Free Thoughts Concerning Religion, 11; “Anti-Bible Convention,” 2; “From the Hartford Daily Times. The Bible Convention,” The Liberator 23, no. 24 (June 17, 1853): 96.
7 See, e.g., the foundational study Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
8 Lincoln, Bruce, Authority: Construction and Corrosion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 8–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.
9 Davis, Free Thoughts Concerning Religion, 9. Consider also Horace Bushnell's squeamishness about engaging Davis in debate. Albanese, Catherine L., “Horace Bushnell among the Metaphysicians,” Church History 79, no. 3 (2010): 617CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Delp, “A Spiritualist in Connecticut,” 357; “The Bible Convention and the Clergy of Hartford,” New York Daily Tribune, April 29, 1853, 6.
11 Field, Peter S., The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
12 The episode is reminiscent of Lincoln's discussion of Odysseus's violent ejection of Thersites from the assembly—the removal of an unauthorized speaker from the authorized place. Lincoln, Authority, 26, 75–76.
13 For the prior history of the construction of religion(s), especially among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century freethinkers, see Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter Byrne, Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism (London: Routledge, 1989).
14 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 15–50, quotation 51. As Brent Nongbri observes, subsequent scholarship has importantly moved beyond simple “reification” and has emphasized religion's co-constitutive formation with concepts like secularism. Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 4–5. See also, Talal Asad, “Reading a Modern Classic: W. C. Smith's The Meaning and End of Religion,” History of Religions 40, 3 (2001).
15 See Nongbri, Before Religion, 106–31.
16 As several scholars of Spiritualism have pointed out, Spiritualism was not without conservative elements. See Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 149–51; Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 145–61.
17 James Turner, Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2011), 6–7.
18 Michael J. Altman, “‘Religion, Religions, Religious’ in America: Toward a Smithian Account of ‘Evangelicalism’,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 31 (2019): 72–74. Altman specifically refers to Johnathan Z. Smith's 1998 essay, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” but the larger point stands about scholarship concerning the American construction of religion more generally. Smith's essay is in Critical Terms for Religious Study, edited by Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–84.
19 Turner, Religion Enters the Academy.
20 Alan D. Hodder, “Asia in Emerson and Emerson in Asia,” in Mr. Emerson's Revolution, ed. Jean McClure Mudge (Cambridge: Open Books, 2015), 373–405.
21 Jan Stievermann, “Emersonian Transcendentalism and the Invention of Religion(s) in the Nineteenth Century,” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 67, no. 3–4 (2021): 533–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/esq.2021.0019.
22 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Berkley: University of California Press, 2005); Michael Bergunder, “Experiments with Theosophical Truth: Gandhi, Esotericism, and Global Religious History,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 2 (2014): 398–426; Michael Bergunder, “‘Religion’ and ‘Science’ Within a Global Religious History,” Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016): 86–141; Hans Martin Krämer and Julian Strube, eds., Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement (New York: SUNY Press, 2020); Michael J. Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721–1893 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 98–119; Jason Ā Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 115–20. A positive sign of this development is a recent roundtable issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (December 2021), which demonstrates a growing scholarly interest in Theosophy and constructions of religion.
23 Bergunder, “‘Religion’ and ‘Science’,” 101.
24 John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America: With Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and their Metaphors; Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing State Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 39–45, 175–81; John Lardas Modern, Neuromatic: or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), 136–208.
25 Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
26 John Benedict Buescher, The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience (Boston: Skinner House, 2004).
27 Jason Ā Josephson-Storm has similarly noted the influence of Spiritualism on E. B. Tylor's theories of religion, though Davis, arguably the movement's key thinker, is absent from his analysis. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment, 94–101, 120–24. Older studies that explore Spiritualism's connection to psychical research and anthropology are R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
28 See Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 46–48.
29 Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
30 Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
31 The term spirituality requires as much historicization as religion, as Leigh Eric Schmidt shows in Restless Souls and John Lardas Modern in Secularism in Antebellum America, 119–82.
32 On nineteenth-century debates over ongoing revelation and the canon, see David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
33 S. B. Brittan, “The Church of the Future,” The Univercœlum and Spiritual Philosopher 1, no. 21 (April 22, 1848): 328.
34 Thomas Cook, “Great Men—A. J. Davis,” Religio-Philosophical Journal 20, no. 21 (Aug. 5, 1876): 161.
35 Max Weber, Max Weber on Charisma and Instituion Building: Selected Papers, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), esp. 253–67.
36 Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography of Andrew Jackson Davis, 8th ed. (Boston: Bella Marsh, 1867), 28–33. First published in 1857.
37 Lincoln, Authority, 112.
38 The phrase, which is the basis for the title of Catherine Albanese's magisterial work, is from Andrew Jackson Davis, Beyond the Valley; A Sequel to ‘The Magic Staff’ (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1885), 323–26. On the inseparability of Spiritualist religious beliefs from their political aims and ideology surrounding social organization, see Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 35–59; Cox, Body and Soul, 136–45; Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 178–80, 246–54.
39 Uriah Clark, The Spiritualist Register, with a Counting House and Speaker's Almanac; Containing Facts and Statistics of Spiritualism, for 1857 (Auburn, NY: U. Clark, 1857), 22, 24; Uriah Clark, Fifth Annual Spiritualist Register, with a Calendar and Speaker's Almanac, for 1861 (Auburn, N.Y.: U. Clark, 1861), 34.
40 David K. Nartonis, “The Rise of 19th-century American Spiritualism, 1854–1873,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49, no. 2 (2010): 364–72, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40664707.
41 Foundational works in this regard are Ann Braude's Radical Spirits and Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).
42 The oft-repeated claim is that the book when through thirty-four editions. Slater Brown, however, observes that the thirteenth edition was released in 1866 and the thirtieth in 1868 with no extant editions in between, suggesting an error that the publishers were happy to let stand. Slater Brown, The Heyday of Spiritualism (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 96–97.
43 “Spiritual and Progressive Books,” American Book Sellers’ Guide 3, no. 2 (February 1, 1871): 62.
44 The term univercœlum is Davis's neologism for “the united revolving heavens,” probably derived from Swedenborg's Latin phrase universum coelum, “the whole heaven.” “Univercœlum,” The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, updated 14 April 2020, accessed 8 August, 2022, http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/univercoelum/index.html; Braude, Radical Spirits, 34–35, 45; Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion between Earth and the World of the Spirits (New York, 1870), 28.
45 Braude, Radical Spirits, 35; Cox, Body and Soul, 7–10, 75.
46 Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 260, 220; Stephen R. Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 19–20, 23, 28.
47 Andrew Jackson Davis, Memoranda of Persons, Places, and Events; Embracing Authentic Facts, Visions, Impressions, Discoveries, in Magnetism, Clairvoyance, Spiritualism. Also Quotations from the Opposition (Boston: William White and Co., 1868), 465–88; Daniel Cyranka, “Religious Revolutionaries and Spiritualism in Germany around 1848,” Aries 16, no. 1 (2016): 27–33.
48 “The Rationalism of the Day. Andrew Jackson Davis—Spiritual Manifestations—Rappings, etc., etc.,” in The United States Democratic Review (New York: 251 Broadway, 1853), 270, 272.
49 Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, 10th ed. (New York: S. S. Lyon and W. Fishbough, 1852). First published 1847.
50 Prior to The Principles of Nature, the Universalist minister Rev. Gibson Smith published a short pamphlet of Davis's clairvoyant lectures in 1845 entitled Lectures on Clairmativeness: or, Human Magnetism, though Davis later disavowed it. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 207.
51 For Chambers and Vestiges, see James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural Creation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000).
52 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 121–31.
53 See David Jaffee, “The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760–1820,” The William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1990): 327–46, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2938091; Craig James Hazen, The Village Enlightenment in America: Popular Religion and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
54 On the Spiritualist emphasis on science and empiricism, see Moore, In Search of White Crows, 7, 19, 23–39; Oppenheim, The Other World.
55 Andrew Jackson Davis, The Great Harmonia: Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial Universe: Vol. I., The Physician, 4th ed. (New York: J. S. Redfield; Fowlers and Wells, 1850), 48, 70, 47.
56 See, for example, Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004); Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment; Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkley: University of California Press, 2008), 121–53.
57 For the ambivalent relationship between Spiritualism and evolution, see Cox, Body and Soul, 211–32.
58 Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 397–99; Fuller, Spiritual, but not Religious, 61, 68.
59 S. B. Brittan, “Spiritualism: Its Nature and Mission,” in The Shekinah, vol. 1, ed. S. B. Brittan (New York: Partridge and Brittan, 1852), 3.
60 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 329, 335–36.
61 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 405.
62 See, for example, “Art. II. Asiatic Researches; or Translations of the Society instituted in Bengal, for inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature of Asia. Volume VIII. 4vo. 518 pp. Calcutta, printed. 1805,” in British Critic, for January, February, March, April, May, June (London: Law and Gilbert, 1810), 221–22. On euhemerism, see Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 83–125.
63 Brown, The Heyday of Spiritualism, 99–104; Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, 10, 48–73; Turner, Religion Enters the Academy, 24, 33–34.
64 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature (1836),” in The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, ed. Lawrence Buell (New York: The Modern Library, 2006), 44.
65 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 330.
66 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 377.
67 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 382.
68 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 379–82.
69 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 384.
70 Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, 22.
71 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 388.
72 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 384–85.
73 Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, 17.
74 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 403.
75 William Fishbough, “The Theological Conception; Its Growth, Dependencies, and Probable Ultimate Form,” The Univercœlum and Spiritual Philosopher 2, no. 18 (September 30, 1848): 274; R. P. Ambler, “The Idea of Three Gods,” The Spirit Messenger 2, no. 3 (June 1, 1852): 94. On the twofold philosophy, see Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions, 16; Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 65–69. Popular textbooks like Samuel Goodrich's The World and its Inhabitants (1856) also informed Americans of the existence of a “Hindoo Trinity”; however, its fundamental difference from the Christian Trinity was always at the fore. See Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, 58–59.
76 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 394–95, 399.
77 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 387–88.
78 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 390.
79 Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions, 103, 106–107, 131–38.
80 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 381.
81 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 724.
82 Peter Harrison, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries,” The Journal of Religion 86, no. 1 (2006): 93.
83 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011), 340–43, 350–51; Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth-Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 892–94, 900.
84 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 19.
85 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 711.
86 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 528–29.
87 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 409.
88 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 711–12.
89 See, for example, Davis, The Principles of Nature, 722–23.
90 Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions, 9–10, 19–28, 144–46.
91 Turner, Religion Enters the Academy, 24–33, 46; Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, 13–14, 91–95.
92 I follow Seth Perry in understanding the Bible as a discursive site of authority rather than as possessing authority in and of itself. Seth Perry, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
93 That is, a Shastra, which Davis understood to be a single work rather than a type of text.
94 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 408–409.
95 Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, 23.
96 See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
97 Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 61; Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 19, 179–80.
98 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 557.
99 For Spiritualist republicanism, see Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 35–59. See also, Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 178–80.
100 Andrew Jackson Davis, “Declaration of Independence,” The Spirit Messenger 1, no. 43 (May 31, 1851): 337. Perhaps this says as much about the semi-scriptural place of the Declaration in American culture as it does about Davis's attempt to unseat biblical exclusivism.
101 Davis, Free Thoughts Concerning Religion, 12, 27, 28, 38.
102 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 533.
103 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 581.
104 Andrew Jackson Davis, Arabula; or, the Divine Guest. Containing a New Collection of Gospels (Boston: William White and Co., 1868), 3; Andrew Jackson Davis, A Sacred Book, Containing Old and New Gospels: Derived and Translated from the Inspirations of Original Saints (Boston: William White and Co., 1873), v.
105 Davis, Arabula, 99, 303–12, 336, 326, 330, 317. Frothingham was president of the Free Religious Association.
106 See, for example, Davis, The Magic Staff, 272–73.
107 Stievermann, “Emersonian Transcendentalism and the Invention of Religion(s),” 552.
108 Davis, Arabula, 119–28; Andrew Jackson Davis, The Children's Progressive Lyceum (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1893).
109 See Schmidt, Restless Souls.
110 Davis, Arabula, 332–38, 345–53. On Eliza Farnham, see Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 243–78; Modern, Neuromatic, 299–310.
111 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 557–58.
112 See Kirsten Fischer, American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
113 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 1.
114 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 730.
115 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 1.
116 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations, vol. III (London: George Bell and Sons, 1886), 383.
117 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 734–82.
118 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 766.
119 For debates about secularism, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
120 See Cox, Body and Soul, on Spiritualist social harmony and sympathy. For a racially inflected articulation of these ideals, see Emily Suzanne Clark, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 115–49.
121 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 340.
122 Cathy Gutierrez, Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6.
123 Harrison, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’,” 86.
124 See Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions, 10–14.
125 Bergunder, “‘Religion’ and ‘Science’,” 118, 133.
126 Davis, Free Thoughts Concerning Religion, 27–28.
127 Gutierrez, Plato's Ghost, 4.
128 S. B. Brittan, “The Signs of the Times,” The Univercœlum and Spiritual Philosopher 1, no. 1 (December 4, 1847): 11.
129 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 565–66.
130 Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, ed., American Scriptures: An Anthology of Sacred Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 117.
131 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 561–63.
132 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 562.
133 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 580.
134 Davis, Arabula, 37–38. Elsewhere, Davis explained, “Christ is another name for Arabula.” Davis, Sacred Book, 70. The word Arabula purportedly came from the spirit land. Andrew Jackson Davis, The Great Harmonia: Being a Progressive Revelation of the Eternal Principles Which Inspire Mind and Govern Matter: Vol. V., The Thinker (New York: A. J. Davis and Co., 1861), 428. First published 1859.
135 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 573.
136 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 583–86, 590.
137 See Harrison, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’,” 94; Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 69; Stievermann, “Emersonian Transcendentalism and the Invention of Religion(s),” 535.
138 Davis, The Great Harmonia V, 81, 84, 79.
139 Thomas A. Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 118.
140 Davis, The Great Harmonia V, 278, 250, 253–54.
141 For the highly ambiguous place of race in Spiritualism, see Clark, A Luminous Brotherhood; Christine Ferguson, Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 233–53; Cox, Body and Soul, 145–232.
142 Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 3–4, 212; Tomoko Masuzawa, “Troubles with Materiality: The Ghost of Fetishism in the Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (2000): 242–67, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500002462; Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
143 Stievermann, “Emersonian Transcendentalism and the Invention of Religion(s),” 613.
144 Turner, Religion Enters the Academy, 48. See also David Murray, Matter, Magic, and Spirit: Representing Indian and African American Belief (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 9–70. Incidentally, Clarke had an interest in Spiritualism. Cox, Body and Soul, 80, 83–85.
145 Richard Hughes Seager, The World's Parliament of Religions: the East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), xv, 21–23; Proceedings of the National Delegate Convention of Spiritualists of the United States of America. Held in Chicago, Illinois, September 27, 28, and 29, 1893 (Washington, DC: Stormont and Jackson, 1893), 42–46.
146 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 395–96.
147 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 366; see also, Andrew Jackson Davis, The Magic Staff: An Autobiography of Andrew Jackson Davis, 8th ed. (Boston: Bella Marsh, 1867), 376.
148 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 362.
149 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 396–97.
150 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 397–98.
151 See McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past, 66–93; Cox, Body and Soul, 189–211.
152 See Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 248–53, 471–72, 505; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Philip Jenkin, Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
153 See Delp, “A Spiritualist in Connecticut,” 357–59.
154 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 366–67.
155 Davis, The Magic Staff, 374.
156 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 319, 321.
157 Davis, The Principles of Nature, 172–209.
158 Andrew Jackson Davis, Death and the After-Life. Eight Evening Lecutres on the Summer-Land, 4th ed. (Boston: William White and Co., 1871), 182–86. First published 1865.
159 Davis, The Magic Staff, 377.
160 Frances H. Green, “The Ministry of Trees,” The Univercœlum and Spiritual Philosopher 1, no. 11 (February 12, 1848): 171; Frances H. Green, “The Ministry of Trees,” The Spirit Messenger 1, no. 45 (June 14, 1851): 357–58.
161 For a summary of this position, see Giovanni Maltese and Julian Strube, “Global Religious History,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 33 (2021): 229–57.
162 Turner, Religion Enters the Academy, 34–36; Stievermann, “Emersonian Transcendentalism and the Invention of Religion(s),” 541.
163 Stievermann, “Emersonian Transcendentalism and the Invention of Religion(s),” 560–62.
164 Bergunder, “Experiments with Theosophical Truth.”
165 Pope, A. B., “Hindoo Mysteries in California,” in The Spiritual Telegraph, vol. 1, ed. Brittan, S. B. (New York: Patridge and Brittan, 1853), 347Google Scholar.
166 Fishbough, William, “Psychological Mysteries of the Hindoos,” American Phrenological Journal 18, no. 2 (August 1, 1853): 33Google Scholar.
167 Ogden, Emily, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 77–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.
168 Fishbough, “Psychological Mysteries of the Hindoos,” 33.
169 See Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit.
170 Pope, “Hindoo Mysteries in California,” 347.
171 Dixon, Joy, “‘Thoughts Are Things’: Theosophy, Religion, and the History of the Real,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89, no. 4 (2021): 1172CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
172 See Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, 21.
173 Soodra, , “Gems of Hindooism—Extracts from the Vedas,” Religio-Philosophical Journal 2, no. 10 (June 2, 1866): 2Google Scholar.
174 Buchanan, Joseph R., “Hindoo Philosophy,” in The Spiritual Telegraph, vol. 2, ed. Brittan, S. B. (New York: Patridge and Brittan, 1853), 49Google Scholar.
175 Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 197–98.
176 Peebles, James M., Seers of the Ages: Embracing Spiritualism Past and Present. Doctrines Stated and Moral Tendencies Defined (Boston: William White and Co., 1869), 80, 28, 45Google Scholar.
177 Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 198; Johnson, K. Paul, The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 75–79Google Scholar.
178 Braude, Ann, “News from the Spirit World: A Checklist of American Spiritualist Periodicals, 1847–1900,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 99, no. 2 (1990): 399–462Google Scholar; Brown, Candy Gunther, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 41, 147Google Scholar.
179 Buescher, The Other Side of Salvation, 71–73; Clark, Spiritualist Register 1857, 32; Braude, “News from the Spirit World,” 403.