Product Description

Americans have long had a fixation with the occult. Now well-known writer and expert on the occult Mitch Horowitz presents a meticulously researched, compulsively readable history of the mystical and spiritual experience in our country. Focusing on the tremendous impact that nineteenth-century movements such as Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and Transcendentalism have had on America, Horowitz explains the origins of the Ouija board, the political influence of Spiritualism on the Senate, and the source of the mysterious slogan on the back of the dollar bill. The colorful cast of characters extends from those on the margins of documented history to famous heroes like Abraham Lincoln. Occult America will appeal to history buffs, spirituality enthusiasts, and everyone who savors fascinating narrative nonfiction.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5997 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-08
• Released on: 2009-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780553806755
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
It touched lives as disparate as those of Frederick Douglass, Franklin Roosevelt, and Mary Todd Lincoln--who once convinced her husband, Abe, to host a séance in the White House. Americans all, they were among the famous figures whose paths intertwined with the mystical and esoteric movement broadly known as the occult. Brought over from the Old World and spread throughout the New by some of the most obscure but gifted men and women of early U.S. history, this “hidden wisdom” transformed the spiritual life of the still-young nation and, through it, much of the Western world.

Yet the story of the American occult has remained largely untold. Now a leading writer on the subject of alternative spirituality brings it out of the shadows. Here is a rich, fascinating, and colorful history of a religious revolution and an epic of offbeat history.

From the meaning of the symbols on the one-dollar bill to the origins of the Ouija board, Occult America briskly sweeps from the nation’s earliest days to the birth of the New Age era and traces many people and episodes, including:

• The spirit medium who became America’s first female religious leader in 1776
• The supernatural passions that marked the career of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith
• The rural Sunday-school teacher whose clairvoyant visions instigated the dawn of the New Age
• The prominence of mind-power mysticism in the black-nationalist politics of Marcus Garvey
• The Idaho druggist whose mail-order mystical religion ranked as the eighth-largest faith in the world during the Great Depression

Here, too, are America’s homegrown religious movements, from transcendentalism to spiritualism to Christian Science to the positive-thinking philosophy that continues to exert such a powerful pull on the public today. A feast for believers in alternative spirituality, an eye-opener for anyone curious about the unknown byroads of American history, Occult America is an engaging, long-overdue portrait of one nation, under many gods, whose revolutionary influence is still being felt in every corner of the globe.

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Amazon Exclusive: Mitch Horowitz on the Occult in American History

Scholars of American history have often dismissed occult traditions, such as Spiritualism, Mesmerism, divination, channeling, and mental-healing, as little more than oddball social trends to be analyzed, fretted over, and debunked. This is a mistake. To really grasp the religious development of our nation, its occult movements and believers must be understood for what they are: communities of belief, who left a profound impact on the culture of America and the modern world.

Early American history is entwined with esoteric spirituality. North America’s first intentional mystical community reached its shores in the summer of 1694. That year, the determined spiritual philosopher Johannes Kelpius led about forty pilgrims out of Central Germany--a region decimated by the Thirty Years’ War--and to the banks of the Wissahickon Creek, just beyond Philadelphia. The city then hosted only about 500 houses, but it represented a Mecca of freedom for the Kelpius circle, who longed for a new homeland where they could practice their brands of astrology, alchemy, numerology, and mystical Christianity without fear of harassment from church or government.

Soon more mystical thinkers from the Rhine Valley journeyed to America, building a larger commune at Ephrata, Pennsylvania. A young woman named Ann Lee fled persecution in her native Manchester, England and relocated her esoteric sect, the "Shaking Quakers"--or the Shakers--to upstate New York in 1776. That same year, a Rhode Island girl, Jemima Wilkinson, declared herself a spirit channeler, took the name Publick Universal Friend, and began to preach across the northeast. The trend was set: America became a destination for religious idealists, especially those of a supernatural bent.

By the 1830s and 40s, a region of central New York State called "the Burned-Over District" (so-named for its religious passions) became the magnetic center for the religious radicalism sweeping the young nation. Stretching from Albany to Buffalo, it was the Mt. Sinai of American mysticism, giving birth to new religions such as Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism, and also to Spiritualism, mediumship, table-rapping, séances, and other occult sensations--many of which mirrored, and aided, the rise of Suffragism and related progressive movements. The nation’s occult culture gave women their first opportunity to openly serve as religious leaders--in this case as spirit mediums, seers, and channlers. America’s social and spiritual radicals were becoming joined, and the partnership would never fade.

Indeed, the robust growth of occult and mystical movements in nineteenth-century America--aided by the influence of Freemasonry and Transcendentalism--helped transform the young nation into a laboratory for religious experiment and a launching pad for the revolutions in alternative and New Age spirituality that eventually swept the globe. In the early twentieth century, the new spiritual therapies--from meditation to mind-body healing to motivational thinking--began revolutionizing how religion was understood in contemporary times: not only as a source of salvation but as a means of healing. In this sense, occult America had changed our world. --Mitch Horowitz

Review
Employing extensive research while writing with an authoritative tone, Horowitz succeeds in showing how a new spiritual culture developed in America. --Publishers Weekly

What a fascinating book. So it happens that another equally compelling take on our complicated national narrative lies just beneath the surface of things, not the grand procession of presidents, generals, and wars, but something more hidden, more mysterious, but often no less revealing. --Ken Burns, award-winning documentary filmmaker

Review
"What a fascinating book. So it happens that another equally compelling take on our complicated national narrative lies just beneath the surface of things; not the grand procession of presidents, generals, and wars, but something more hidden, more mysterious, but often no less revealing."—Ken Burns

“Invisible and mysterious forces have shaped and guided the destiny of individuals and nations throughout history. From Moses to Gandhi, Jesus to Muhammad, Lincoln to Obama, hidden dimensions, in both our personal and collective consciousness, were conceiving, constructing, and shaping the course of civilization. In his precise and often detailed history of mysticism in America, Mitch Horowitz, has, in a way, tracked the evolution of our consciousness over 300 years.” —Deepak Chopra

 "A sparkling, down-to-earth and often deeply touching account of a powerful, much misunderstood force in the formation of America's cultural and spiritual identity." —Jacob Needleman, author of The American Soul and The New Religions."

“Occult America is a truly remarkable achievement. Exhaustively researched, it takes the reader from the early concepts of the supernatural, personified by Mother Ann Lee, Joseph Smith, and Madame Blavatsky, through such modern-day figures as Henry A. Wallace and Norman Vincent Peale. It opens the eyes of the relatively uninitiated, in which I include myself, to the effect the occult has had, is having, and will have on the American experience.” —John S.D. Eisenhower, author of The Bitter Woods: The Battle of the Bulge and So Far From God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846-1848

"Religious people tend to be afraid of the word occult. Horowitz examines this aspect of life and religion in penetrating ways...and revealing its not unsubstantial influence on mainline Christianity. Truth seekers have always come from the edges. Religion itself should be glad they do." —Bishop John Shelby Sprong, author of Jesus for the Non-Religious

"This book is a delightfully original tour through American history, as seen through the lives of men and women devoted to all manner of mysticism. Across these pages troop spiritualists, prophets, seers, psychics, numerologists, transcendentalists, theosophists, and historical figures from Mary Todd Lincoln to Marcus Garvey to Henry Wallace. Their stories are part of the deep-seated American tradition of searching for the new—a tradition that Occult America both explains and enriches." — Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

“Employing extensive research while writing with an authoritative tone, Horowitz succeeds in showing how a ‘new spiritual culture’ developed in America.”—Publishers Weekly

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Customer Reviews

Not Comprehensive, But Quite Enjoyable
Occult America wasn't quite the book I expected, but I enjoyed it all the same.

In keeping with the book's title, Horowitz chronicles the history of the occult in America; consequently, he focuses more on popular spiritual movements and practices (from "spirit raps" to the ouija board) that are uniquely American than on, for example, freemasonry. Less obvious from the title is his focus on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. While this leaves the story of the occult in America incomplete, Horowitz does demonstrate in great detail that the American fascination with the occult began long before the 1960s and suggests some of ways that history relates to the larger American story.

I found Occult America fascinating largely because of the varied characters Horowitz introduces, from well-known religious and political leaders like Mary Baker Eddy and former US Vice President Wallace to the relatively obscure mail-order prophet Frank B. Robinson. Coverage of those characters, though, seems to be proportional to Horowitz's previous writing and work in publishing rather than their lasting impact. (Jospeh Smith, for example, gets less space than one might expect, given his legacy; and Lovecraft gets barely a mention.) Nor does Horowitz succeed at weaving these stories into a coherent history that develops larger themes. Occult America might have been more successful as a book if Horowitz had simply organized it as a series of short biographies.

Having said that, Occult America has much to recommend it. Horowitz nicely balances the demands of academic rigor and readability: his account has sparked my interest in a subject I knew only a little about, and his eighteen pages of Notes on Sources will surely lead me to explore the subject further. I recommend it to anyone interested in religion, American history, or both.

Limited but Entertaining
Years ago, a member of an upstate New York small-town historical society gave me a private tour of the apartment of a recently deceased nonagenarian. The deceased had lived as a hermit for sixty years since becoming a young widow and her apartment was as it had been for sixty years. She had a massive library of the occult, my first real introduction to the genre. To the casual recreational reader, esoterica and the occult are usually limited to "Angels and Demons" or the "Name of the Rose." Few know of the deep and obscure writings of occultists.

"Occult in America" is a brief glimpse into the occult. The author is an acolyte of the relatively unknown sage of Griffith Park, Manly Hall. Mr. Hall, whose biography is treated respectfully and without much criticism in the book with substantial space (although other subjects are the target of worthy criticism), purportedly authored a massive tome of the occult when in his twenties, relying principally upon the holdings of the New York Public Library. The author of "Occult in America" is affiliated with Hall's remaining organization and the author has published a Readers' Version of Hall's massive work.

Mr. Horowitz' work does not live up to its title. It does not really set forth an account of the influence of the occult in America. Almost no space is given to Thomas Jefferson and the design of the capitol premises. No space is given to the influence of the occult upon deism. Spiritualism, with table rapping and séances, swept the United States in the latter third of the nineteenth century, but relatively little discussion is had of the effect such Spiritualism had upon politics and business. (Notable exceptions include a discussion of Lincoln's family, as well as U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace.) Although the book, and correctly so, devotes substantial discussion to African-American occultic practices, there is nothing discussing Santeria.

Rather, the book focuses upon anecdotes of colorful figures from the last two centuries. Although the book needed a better editor, with its occasional grammatical lapses and frequent redundancies, it stands as a fascinating glimpse into the occult in America. Horowitz is a good writer, and the work will capture one's reading interest. The book won't adequately explain the occult's influence upon American culture and values, but it will explain the lives of the more significant practitioners of the dark art in America.

(As a result of this book, I did order Manly's and Cayce's best known works. What better book is there than one which stimulates the reader to look up and read references?)

A tour through the byways of American religious history
Mitch Horowitz rescues many colorful characters from obscurity in this entertaining tour through the byways of American religious history. My favorite sections of the book were those describing individuals whose teachings flourished in the early twentieth century but are almost forgotten today. Psychiana was a successful mail-order religion that did not long survive the death of its founder Frank Robinson. Baird Spaulding concocted tall tales about encounters with Oriental spiritual Masters in books that were widely read in the 1930s and 40s. The Moorish Science Temple is a fascinating amalgamation of occult doctrines with black nationalism, whose founder Noble Drew Ali has been little studied by historians. Manly P. Hall authored an occult classic, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, in his twenties and led an organization that epitomized southern California eclecticism through most of the twentieth century. Benjamin Williams popularized astrology and Tarot under his pen name C.C. Zain, but like Hall was famous mainly in the Los Angeles area. All these individuals are given their place in the American religious landscape as pioneers of a movement Horowitz calls occultism or "the occult" which he concludes "resulted in a vast reworking of arcane practices and beliefs from the Old World and the creation of a new spiritual culture." The obscure characters are placed into historical context with exploration of occult ideas in better known movements like Mormonism and New Thought, which contributed to a new spiritual culture. Familiar but little-understood topics like Hoodoo and the history of the Ouija board are illuminated in new ways by Horowitz's groundbreaking research.

While amusing and entertaining, Occult America is grounded in years of scholarship and depicts its subjects with a mixture of respect and detachment that might be called "sympathetic objectivity." The final chapter about Edgar Cayce is the most thoughtful, balanced account of the "sleeping prophet" seen in years, appreciative without being credulous. On Theosophy, Horowitz is well-informed and wise, recognizing its contribution to religious pluralism along with its penchant for fantastic claims and scandal. Andrew Jackson Davis was far more the founder of Spiritualism than the Fox sisters, and Horowitz gives him the attention he deserves as an American original. Having written on those subjects I can endorse the author's scholarship as thorough and his commentary as insightful; in areas less familiar to me the book gives every indication of consistent reliability. I have been reading books on what might be called "occult history" for thirty years, and cannot recall one that is more enjoyable to read, or more informative about a diverse cast of characters, than Occult America.