Before we begin, a preliminary note is in order. Yes, I heard about what’s happening with the US election. I write my posts in advance, and this one was finished days before the votes started being counted. We’ll discuss the election over on my Dreamwidth journal once the rubble stops bouncing and the dust settles.…
Category: Not the Monthly Post
The Distant Glint of Glass Beads
In July of this year, when I revived the custom of asking my readers what they wanted to hear about on the fifth Wednesday of that month, I got plenty of suggestions, ranging from the future of industrial society to the metaphysics of sex. Still, of all the requested I fielded, I have to admit…
A Few Notes on Synchronicity
Back in July, when I realized there were five Wednesdays on that page of the calendar and I didn’t have anything lined up for the fifth, I asked my readers what they wanted to hear about. The resulting discussion saw quite a few possibilities bruited about, and so I decided to devote an upcoming post…
On the Metaphysics of Sex
Last month, when I realized there would be five Wednesdays and I didn’t have anything on the list for the fifth of those, I dusted off an old habit and asked my readers what they wanted to hear about. That gave rise to some extremely lively discussions. The largest number who expressed a preference wanted…
“Try!”
One of the things that makes the magical history of America so, well, magical is the number of astonishing individuals who have played a central role in it. Even among the extraordinary gallimaufry of figures who are part of our story, though, the subject of this week’s post stands out. His name was Paschal Beverly…
The Power of the Mind
While Andrew Jackson Davis was attracting huge crowds with his discourses in trance, and the Fox sisters were listening to tapping noises, another important 19th century American occultist was pursuing his researches in a small town in Maine. His name was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and his impact on the magical history of America would be…
In the Company of Angels
So far in our exploration of the hidden history of American magic, we’ve talked mostly about people whose place in this nation’s history has been forgotten—or, to be a little more frank, erased. The one exception, John Winthrop Jr., is tolerably well known by those who have some reason to recall the history of colonial…
The Arts of the Cunning Folk
Two weeks ago we talked about the way that Bakongo spirituality made its way to the American colonies along with enslaved Africans from the Congo basin. Once here, it adapted to the conditions of slavery and the radically different environment of temperate and subtropical North America to become the earliest form of hoodoo—one of the…
The Astrologer of Narragansett Bay
A month ago I recounted the story of Johannes Kelpius, the German occultist who crossed the Atlantic in 1694 with his fellow initiates of the Chapter of Perfection to make a new life for themselves in the woodlands of eastern Pennsylvania. That made a good starting point for the discussion I want to set in…
A Magic Republic
Have you ever noticed that in America, magic is always mixed up in the popular imagination with premodern Europe? That’s not just an affectation of the Neopagan movement, though it certainly shows up there in spades—consider the way that Neopagan traditions newly coined in America so reliably claim fake origins somewhere in Europe, or for…