Spiritualist Cults

Such popular movements crested during the 1850s with the rise of mesmerism, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, and Harmonialism. Collectively these movements emphasized interactions with the spirit world as sources of ongoing spiritual revelation and therefore authority. Mesmerism developed into a system of healing, popularized in terms of animal magnetism, with images of electricity and fluid energy. Spiritualism claimed to have contact with spirits. Swedenborgianism popularized notions of spiritual essences and sensuous mysticism. And Harmonialism, a broad umbrella term, drew many of these movements together to posit an external interchange between mind and matter. “All of these movements challenged boundaries of time and space.” ^25Ibid. GOP 240.1

Franz Anton Mesmer argued that “all physical and spiritual phenomena were linked by a magnetic, electrical ether or fluid, called by his followers the odic force.” Certain people, known as operators, had the ability to use their odic powers to magnetize, or place in a trance, other people. Such persons became “subjects” or “mediums.” By the 1830s mesmerism was popularized by Charles Poyen and Robert Collyer, with a host of imitators in their wake. Even Walt Whitman was eventually won over, declaring that “it reveals at once the existence of a whole new world of truth.” ^{26New York Sunday Times, Aug. 14, 1842, cited in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 260. For a broad survey of mesmerism, see Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).} GOP 240.2

By 1843 there were an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 mesmerists lecturing in the northeastern United States alone. Many used their odic force before large audiences to control the behavior and attitudes of their mesmerized subjects. Some were even able to put their subjects into the highest, or third, degree of trance in which their minds traveled to distant times and places. Some even used mesmerism to heal, which led, later on, to the mind-cure movement. As the operator put the subject into a trance, an operator could make his or her identity shift rapidly. ^{27Reynolds, Waking Giant, 231-235.} GOP 240.3

Mesmerism was joined in 1848 by the “Hydesville rappings” in New York. Two young girls, 14-year-old Margaret Fox and her 12-year-old sister, Katherine, heard with their family strange knockings in their home in Hydesville. They claimed the sounds came from a spirit they called Splitfoot. Eventually the case was sensationalized. During the 1850s they went on tour to demonstrate before audiences their ability to communicate with the dead. Many were won over to spiritualism, including Horace Greeley, the ex-slave Sojourner Truth, and the abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke and William Lloyd Garrison. ^{28Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 262.} Soon thousands of mediums held seances with rappings, chair movings, table liftings, flying objects, etc. Some mediums, such as Cora Hatch and Anna Henderson, gave well-attended lectures about the afterlife while in a trance state. In the 1850s “trance writing and trance lecturing were performed by hundreds who claimed to have spiritual gifts.” ^{29Ibid., 263.} The embrace of spiritualism effectually negated any boundaries of canon by making spirit revelations the litmus test for authority. One historian estimates that there were some 20,000 mediums along with 2 million adherents in a time when the United States population was 11 million. ^{30Reynolds, Waking Giant, 374.} Within this fertile milieu many other individuals claimed to have the prophetic gift. Perhaps the best-known are the revelations of Joseph Smith, Jr.GOP 240.4