RUPRECHT-KARLS-UNIVERSITÄT HEIDELBERG NEUPHILOLOGISCHE FAKULTÄT SPIRITUALISM AND THE LANGUAGE OF UNIVERSAL RELIGION IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY AMERICA PH.D DISSERTATION BY EVERETT MESSAMORE ADVISOR: PROF. DR. JAN STIEVERMANN SECOND READER: PROF. DR. MANFRED BERG SUBMITTED HEIDELBERG, 1 OCTOBER, 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION “RELIGION”: TRUE, HISTORICAL, AND UTOPIAN iv A MASS MOVEMENT ix SUMMARY xii CHAPTER ONE - HISTORIOGRAPHY THE CONCEPT OF RELIGION 1 “SPIDER UPON SPIDER”: SPIRITUALIST GENEALOGY 24 CHAPTER TWO - ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS THE SEER OF POUGHKEEPSIE 43 THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 51 HISTORICAL RELIGION 70 THE ROLE OF SCRIPTURES 86 RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS 100 UTOPIAN PROGRESS 112 CHAPTER THREE - THE HARMONIAL BROTHERHOOD “MISSIONARIES IN THE FIELD” 122 INTERIOR VERSUS EXTERNAL RELIGION 128 REVELATION 151 THE ROLE OF SCRIPTURES 171 THE CHURCH OF HUMANITY 183 !ii CHAPTER FOUR - MASS SPIRITUALISM “THE TRUTH AGAINST THE WORLD” 206 THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION 214 HISTORICAL RELIGION 238 THE ROLE OF SCRIPTURES 250 RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS 258 SPIRITUALIST UTOPIAS 269 CONCLUSION FRACTURES AND LEGACIES 279 REFLECTIONS 289 BIBLIOGRAPHY 292 !iii INTRODUCTION Religion: True, Historical, and Utopian The “term religion,” the young “Poughkeepsie Seer” Andrew Jackson Davis informed his listeners from deep within a magnetic trance, is quite inexpressive, and needs, in order to be understood, a brief definition. The term ligo is a Latin word, signifying to tie or bind. Re-ligo is to re-tie or bind over again, and make still stronger. The n being attached, forms the word religion, which means to bind and rebind, and make secure. It is well to say that, understood in this sense, it has performed its office most effectually. For the term “religion,” indeed, implies little more than being sacredly bound to sectarianism. The Christian Bible despite its occasional pieces of wisdom, such as the Golden Rule, was lacking such principles in Davis’ estimation. “It does not teach that pure morality which belongs to the nature of man, and which will result from a superior condition of the race,” he argued. “Again: it does not prove immortality…Nor does it present one proper conception of the constitution, character, greatness, omnipotence, and majesty of the Divine Mind.” The Bible neither contained “one substantial proof of an unvarying law upon which to found a hope of ever being regenerated…Nor does it teach that holy virtue, morality, and refinement, which should receive the name of religion.”1 In short, the Bible lacked the true essence of what religion ought to be. That is, it failed to foster moral self-culture and elucidate natural laws and the true attributes of the Divine. What had taken the place of “true” religion was instead the petty tribalism and bigotry of the different “historical” religions that had emerged over time. 1 Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind 10th ed. (New York: S. S. Lyon, and WM. Fishbough, 1852), 558. !iv Here Davis was picking up the strands of an ongoing discourse surrounding the nature of religion, which had typically been carried out by wealthy and educated eighteenth-century Deists searching for the fundamentals of the true and natural religion in contrast to the corruptions of historical religion that existed in actuality. This was a discourse continued in the nineteenth century by Transcendentalists and liberal Protestants more broadly. In so doing, they began to treat religion as an abstract category that possessed both an ideal essence, but which also described various systems of belief apart from Christianity. This implied that Christianity in all of its forms was merely another iteration of a universal human impulse, subject to historical forces like any other. Such a framing removed Christianity from its privileged position and made it theoretically equivalent to other religions, even if it retained its status as the religion that came closest to the ideal of what “true” religion was. As Ralph Waldo Emerson announced in his famous 1838 “Divinity School Address,” the historical “Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before.”2 The opening quotation nicely illustrates three important and distinct facets of Davis’ treatment of religion, an understanding that many other nineteenth-century Spiritualists championed in parallel to their more scholarly counterparts. In one sense of the word, religion had a true “interior” essence, which, for Davis, was the discovery and practical application of natural laws into a system of pure morality—religion was a normative ideal. In the second sense, religion was a universally applicable category, which—divorced from its exclusive identification with Christianity—could be used to conceptualize different outward manifestations of worship in history, all of which supposedly expressed—with varying degrees of perfection—the universal human impulse towards religion. Thus, germs of true religion could transcend apparent sectarian boundaries and find expression in all sorts of ways, from the prophets of the Bible to the Brahmins of India. Lastly, there was the project of sweeping aside the outdated forms, and actually realizing the essence of the eternal and true religion in history. This utopian goal was entertained not only by Davis and his followers, but by Spiritualists more generally. Thus, they believed, the progressive development of humanity, aided by the guidance of spiritual friends, would lead to the general acceptance of true natural principles and help inaugurate a new era of peace and harmony, forever ending 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” in The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, ed. Lawrence Buell (New York: The Modern Library, 2006), 135. !v sectarian bickering. These three distinct, but related, understandings of religion are the subject of this study. Universalized understandings of religion as a true essence existing within all humans increasingly occupied the minds of many nineteenth-century religious thinkers. Boston intellectuals in the Transcendentalist Club spoke of Christianity as another mythology among the mythologies of the world. They eagerly read newly available eastern texts like the Bhagavad Gita for pearls of ancient wisdom and poetic inspiration. Some, particularly the second generation of Transcendentalists and the Free Religious Association, hoped to practically and systematically distill the essence of all religions into a universal religion of the future. The scholarly divines of Harvard Divinity School began academic comparisons of Christianity and the other “great world religions,” analyzing their doctrines and “bibles” side by side. For religiously liberal Americans, the traditions of other nations began to be seen as the various expressions of an innate human propensity for religious belief and, for some, as possible building blocks for an overarching religion of mankind that promised to distil the manifold partial truths into a complete and unifying whole. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of this impulse came with the much-touted 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. This study is concerned with Spiritualist engagement with universalized understandings of religion—as a category and as an eternal essence—and their optimism that the fractured course of religious history could be righted and that the true essence of religion might be expressed in all its utopian grandeur. Both as inheritors of older intellectual traditions and as a quintessential outgrowth of the nineteenth-century American religious landscape, Spiritualists diffused such ideas into the American public. From a present-day perspective, the notion that religion represents a constant cross- cultural phenomenon seems so natural and self-evident as to be unquestioned by most. The equivalence with which contemporary Americans view different religions is evidenced by their readiness to combine them. A 2009 Pew survey found, for instance, that 24% of Americans at least occasionally attend “religious services of a faith different from their own.” !vi The survey also found that 22% of Christians and 24% of Americans more generally believe in reincarnation. 21% and 23%, respectively, also believe in “Yoga as a spiritual practice.”3 At the risk of stating the obvious, the poll suggests that a significant number of Americans go beyond a mere common acceptance of religion as an overarching category suitable for describing various spiritual traditions and, indeed, see them as interchangeable to some degree: various formal expressions of a greater underlying spirituality shared by all humans. The practice of combining religious traditions, including eastern ones, strongly suggests that they are valid conceptual equivalents and serve similar purposes. As such, they can be tailored to an individual’s personal preferences without undue concern for orthodoxy; timeless truth that has been expressed in different forms can be accessed in different ways. The impulse to treat religion in this manner is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than by those who consider themselves “spiritual” but not “religious”: the former signifies a concern with an individualistic pursuit of the true essence of the divine, whereas the latter is suggestive of the formal structures of organized religion.4 Nonetheless, though the historical roots of such thinking can be traced into the eighteenth century and earlier, the view that religion was a universal category for understanding the