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Occult America
First published 2009 · 290 pages
A brisk, colorful sweep through the hidden, mystical undercurrents that shaped the spiritual life of a young nation.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping into the shadowy, esoteric corners of American history and watching them step into the light. The narrative moves at a brisk, engaging pace, sweeping from the nation's earliest days to the dawn of the New Age era. It maintains a tone that is both earnest and colorful, treating alternative spirituality and parapsychology with historical respect rather than mere novelty. The mood is deeply curious and mystical, wrapping the reader in an atmosphere of hidden wisdom and offbeat discovery. The prose is rich and informative, effortlessly connecting famous historical figures to obscure spiritual mediums and mind-power mystics. It is a perfect read for history buffs and seekers who delight in uncovering the weird, homegrown religious movements that secretly shaped the Western world.
- Mood
- mystical
- curious
- shadowy
- esoteric
- Tone
- informative
- fascinating
- earnest
- colorful
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- hidden history · alternative spirituality · esoteric movements · homegrown religion · mysticism and politics
- The writing
- Rich, colorful, and briskly informative, blending historical fact with engaging storytelling.
- The arc
- Moves from a sense of obscure mystery to a broad, illuminating understanding of America's hidden spiritual foundations.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love uncovering the weird, hidden, and esoteric undercurrents of mainstream history.
Content notes
- seances
- spiritualism
- occult practices
About the book
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 seance 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.From the Hardcover edition.
Description from Open Library.
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