1. Albanese Ch 8
Homesteads of the Mind

2. Metaphysics
• Away from dominant Western conceptions of
deity/divine
• New Thought = mind-centered religions
• Occultism, spiritualism, theosophy
• In America:
– 1. Elite esoteric religion
– 2. Herbal & magic folk practices
– 3. Middle-class movement, educated
– 4. New Thought in late 19th c.
• Correspondence and Mental Magic

3. Sources in Western World
• Hermeticism - Hermes Trismegistus
• Neoplatonism
• Gnosticism
• Astrology
• Alchemy
• Kabbalah
• Rosicrucianism
• Freemasonry

4. Practices in the Colonies
• Natural Astrology
• Judicial Astrology
• Woman in the Wilderness - Johannes Kelpius
• “cunning folk”
• 19th c. Metaphysical Revival
– Transcenentalists
– Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)
– Spiritualism

5. Romanticism’s
Reaction to the
Enlightenment
• Metaphysics, Alchemy, Occult defeated by Christianity
- but is now defeated again by Enlightenment
(Science).
• New foundations for Metaphysics in America laid by
Transcendentalism.
• Idea of Correspondence (between physical and spiritual)
• Oversoul - analogous to World Soul of Neoplatonists.
• Harmony of self with universe
• Emanuel Swedenbourg (1688-1772) - mining engineer
turned spiritualist, visionary, prophet.
• Asian Philosophy - especially pantheism (everything
participates in one spiritual substance, beyond the
illusion of matter is the reality of spirit)
• Generally a movement against constricting patterns of
logic and legalistic rules of law.

6. Spiritualism
• Fox Sisters and “the Rochester rappings”
– Public seances started as childish prank in 1848
– By 1851, 7 Spiritualist periodicals
– By 1857, 67 Spiritualist periocicals
• Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)
• Mesmerism and “animal magnetism”
• Associations formed by the 1860’s
• Closely associated with Women’s rights
• 1888: Fox Sisters expose their hoax
• Movement grows after Civil War due to grief, despair

7. The Female Majority
• Ann Braude, historian: “American religious history is
founded on a paradox: its institutions have relied for their
existence on the very group they have disenfranchised.”
• Associations and societies are dominated by women
• Several seminaries for women are founded, but ministry is
still exclusively male.
• Nancy Towle, itinerant preacher in 1820’s and 30’s
• Abigail Roberts, Quaker and preacher in New York and
Jersey founds Christian Connection churches

8. • Antoinette Brown was first to be ordained into
Congregationalist Church in 1853
• Anna Howard Shaw, first Methodist woman
ordained in 1889.
• Mother Ann Lee, Shaker, inspired many
women with her visions and creativity.
• Strong impetus to participate in public life.
• Women compensated for lack of power with
gift of moral purity
• The Religion of the Republic gave women a
place in its development if not the
development of its male-dominated
Churches.

9. New Thought
• Loosely connected to spiritualism,
sometimes included as
Metaphysical Religion - difficult to
classify - but very influential;
foreshadowed “New Age Religion”
of the 1980’s.
• Mesmerism
• Quimby and the Church of
Religious Science
• Christian Science
• Unity

10. Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-
1815)
• German physician
• “animal magnetism” -
explains influence at a
distance.
• Beginnings of hypnosis
• Discovery of the
unconscious
• Hidden abilities including
ability to heal
• Mesmerism
• Charles Poyen brings it to
America in 1837

11. Phineas
Parkhurst Quimby
(1802-1866)
• Learns about Mesmerism
• Mental conflict (including
religious) is source of all
illness
• “The explanation is the
cure”
• Is teacher to Mary Baker
Eddy
• “The Poughkeepsie Seer”
Andrew Jackson Davis
(1826-1910) teacher to
Edward Cayce
• Ernest Holmes (1887-1960)
founds Church of Religious
Science

12. Mary Baker Eddy (1821-
1910)
Christian Science
Material reality an illusion
Disease caused by erroneous
thought (or Malicious Animal
Magnetism)
1875 Science and Health with Key to
the Scriptures
Knowledge of truth = healing
Eternal Mind is source of all being
No need for doctors
Church of Christ, Scientist had
100,000 members by 1910

13. Emma Curtis Hopkins
(1853-1925)
• 1883 breaks away from Christian Science to be more
mystical and combinative than Mary Baker Eddy.
• Teaches a new generation of New Thought leaders:
– The Fillmores - Unity
– Malinda E. Cramer and Mona L. Brooks - Divine Science
– Ernest Holmes - Religious Science

14. Unity School of Practical
Christianity
• Charles Fillmore (1854-1948)
• 1886 the “truth” comes to Myrtle
Fillmore while listening to New
Thought lecture in Kansas City.
• Taught a practical philosophy, not
a new church
• Physical healing and economic
success
• Meditation
• Open dogma

15. Rationalism
• Deism lost momentum as a formal religious
option in the 1800’s.
• Science and Enlightenment theories about
nature, physics, and the heavens appear
regularly in newspapers and magazines.
• Engagement with science at the popular level
• Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, 1859
• “Transcendental Club” meets in Boston at the
home of Unitarian pastor George Ripley.

16. 7. Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is ordained
(Unitarian) minister of Boston’s Second
Church in 1829.
Resigns 3 years later to pursue what will become
called “Transcendentalism”.
Disappointed by sectarian religion, materialism,
and expansionism.
Places emphasis on intuition, self-reliance, and
inner self/soul.
“The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the
force of circumstances, and, the animal
wants of man; the idealist on the power of
Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle,
on individual culture.” - 1843

17. Utopian
communities.
Fruitlands lasted 7
months, Brook Farm
7 yrs. Hopedale 14
years.
Fruitlands and Brook Farm

18. James Freeman Clarke (1810-
1888)
• Harvard Divinity School graduate,
founded Church of the Disciples in 1841
• Fascinated with Oriental religions, wrote
Ten Great Religions
• Orestes Brownson (1803-1876),
Presbyterian, then Universalist, agnostic
for awhile, founds Society for Christian
Union and Progress in 1836 (abolishes
pew ownership, preaches to working
class), then ends up as Roman
Catholic.
• Beginnings of Liberal Protestant
tradition

19. Nature Religion /
Conservationism
Transcendentalists against slavery,
Cherokee forced evacuations,
Mexican War. This is early
Liberalism.
Nature seen as organic, spontaneous
and free, not as mechanical or
ruled by law.
Relationship between religion, nature
and healing
English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772-1834) contributes to
Christian Romanticism -> Horace
Bushnell (1802-1876) becomes
theologian of Liberal Christianity
(“progressive orthodoxy”).
John Muir (1838-1914)
Nature Religion (Catherine Albanese)

20. The Free Religionists
• Octavius Brooks Frothingham The
Religion of Humanity (1871)
• 1867, Free Religious Association
formed by disgruntled Unitarians.
• Inspired by Transcendentalism
• Fifty Affirmations (e.g. “Religion is the
effort of man to perfect himself.”)
• Universal element in ALL religions
• Lots of dissention, defunct by 1890
• Foreshadowed perennialist
philosophy (Aldous Huxley, 1945)

21. Into the Future…
• Ralph Waldo Trine In Tune With the
Infinite (1897) - 2 million copies
• Norman Vincent Peale The Power of
Positive Thinking (1952)
• William James The Varieties of
Religious Experience (1902)
• Pragmatism
• Psychical Research
• Perennial Philosophy

22. Asian Imports
• 1875 Helena P. Blavatsky forms
Theosophical Society
– Esoteric knowledge of the
“masters”
– Ojai, CA
• Swami Vivekananda forms
Vedanta Society after World
Parliament of Religions (1893)
• Self-Realization Fellowship
• Baha’I
• Some people look far abroad for
solutions to the crisis of faith,
alienation, anomie.

23. Summary:
Metaphysical Religion?
• The term “New Thought” was coined by William
Henry Holcombe, homeopathic doctor, in 1889.
• Divine Science Association met in San Francisco in
1894, but no national organization lasted.
• Inspirational books by New Thought writers widely
read.
• Influential for its insistence on evidence (spiritual
materialism?)
• Catherine Albanese sees Mind Cure or New
Thought as part of a broader current in Western
Religions that she calls Metaphysical Religion.

24. Overview
• All about handling the new life of modernity in
America
• Upheavals of traditional community
• Use the extraordinary to achieve pragmatic results
• Spiritual materialism? Or Protestant Ethic
repackaged?
• Combinationism
• Moving forward to embrace the new AND retreating
into traditional religious culture
• Next: Part 3 - Manyness: Patterns of Expansion and
Contractions