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…
Tag: new thought
Delusions of Omnipotence
I hope my readers won’t object at this point if our conversation takes an excursion into the outer reaches of American popular spirituality—yes, that’s been spelled “occultism” since about a week after Helena P. Blavatsky got off the boat in New York and translated the term out of French. Very often, the best way to…
A Conversation with the World
Over the last three and a half months, I’ve spent most of my writing time on this blog tracing a series of trajectories that all spiral in toward a common center. Each of those explorations started with some feature of contemporary culture and followed it back to its roots in a very odd set of…
A Few Notes on American Magic
Over the last week or so I’ve been spending a certain amount of time reviewing some of the things I studied and practiced and wrote about in years long gone. Partly that’s something I do from time to time, but I also had another excuse. Next year Aeon Books will be bringing out two volumes…